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me out. You won’t let me have
anything, ever.
It isn’t fair, it isn’t fair, it isn’t
fair.’
    People had come out of houses, and had torn Cassandra away – it had taken this – had applied lint to Julia’s cuts and scratches, and had asked her various questions, and then telephoned. And the Vicar – since, as so often, Father was away – had come. And they had gone home.
    ‘All children feel the need to run away from time to time,’ Julia said wisely to the Vicar. ‘From the happiest homes particularly. It’s just an assertion of premature independence. Desire for the unknown.’
    Cassandra remembered the Vicar, left alone with her in his sitting-room whilst Julia was questioned elsewhere, asking:
    ‘Well, why, Cassandra?’
    ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I want to lose myself. I can’t bear to be as I am.’
    ‘Does anything particular worry you?’
    ‘No, no,
everything.’
    ‘That’s fairly common. There are remedies. Try running to me, next time, will you? You can tell me as much as you like and no more.’ With the same abstract good-will, not personal, and therefore partly daunting, partly reassuring. It would have been nice if he cared, she had thought then; but there was something very safe about his god-like calm. Still, she had not run to him for another eight years, or so.
    ‘Fear of the unknown,’ she said, with unexpected harshness. ‘Or fear of the familiar. Maybe the same.’
    ‘Like suicide,’ said Thor. ‘A bid for attention, a reproach to those who have noticed nothing, usually intended not to succeed.’
    During the uneasy silence which followed Thor’s remark, the Vicar thought about Cassandra Corbett. She had made his lifedifficult at one stage – although this was an improper way to see it; the Corbetts were an old Quaker family and Cassandra’s violent conversion to Anglo-Catholicism at the age of eighteen had created the maximum discomfort for himself and his friends, her parents, who, however tolerant they were, felt her mood as a rejection of themselves. And in this they were right, he was sure, though he had never been able to understand precisely what Cassandra was rejecting. He reflected on the curious prevalence of women in the Anglican Church, and grimaced – all those years ago, when he had decided to become ordained, one of his less noble motives had been the glamour of a legitimately bachelor existence, no domestic details, no women, no claims. Well, he thought, we learn virtue by putting ourselves in a position where we cannot refuse to exercise it, for shame. There are always the faithful who knit and embroider and arrange flowers. But, in his experience, those who made intense religious demands were the young girls, wracked in the abstract by physiological changes he knew nothing about and was too nice to mention – or closed-in women, a little older than Cassandra was now. In his thirties he had sat, embarrassed, whilst she sat in his study, night after night, alternately weeping and making him passionate intellectual speeches about the nature of despair; he had read her letters and dutifully written replies a quarter of their length. He remembered, too, discussing St. Augustine with her and Simon Moffitt; the girl in a square, military-cut navy-blue suit, an expression of acute, elated anxiety on her clever face, doing most of the talking; and Simon’s eyes meeting his own across her, with amusement, embarrassment, a flicker of male complicity? He had never, in fact, made any direct effort to ascertain Simon’s feelings, and had never done so. Indeed, the regularity with which Cassandra had made a third at their meetings had made this unnecessary; her presence had created an automatic and easy silent bond between them and had inhibited this from becoming anything else. We learn virtue by putting ourselves in a position where we cannot refuse to exercise it. The Vicar tapped his fingers on the wheel, andsmiled to himself. He was sorry he had lost