The Commander stumbled into New Zealand in the dying days of the Malayan Emergency. It was generally felt that he had been in Malaya, though if he were Navy, what was he doing there? His accent was South African in tinge, but he claimed variously to come from British Guiana and Cornwall. He had been all over, and had a fund of jokes and stories, but he wasn’t a good man for an anecdote, not really. He was the life and soul of the party, but the death of it too. He’d start off on a story, sure enough, settled on a plaited plastic chair on the beach, brown bottle in hand, scent of carbonised sausage in the air, off he’d go into a story about cadets and a night raid, and a brothel keeper in Joburg, and something about the Lion of Judah. And just when you felt you were getting to the nub of him, as the brisk wind came in off the sea, and mum reached her cardy around her naked arms, the stories would peter out and the Commander would be certified pissed as a chook.

Nonetheless afterwards, when the others had started to crack out the jokes, the whiff of dangerous far-off places hung in the air. That scent had been common enough after the war, when the men came back heavy with sights seen and terrors endured, which might not be spoken of, but it faded, washed out after a thousand good plain meals and days fishing and the women determined on ordinariness. Don’t tell us and it will soon go away. Mad people go to the funny farm, Sunnyside, Cherry Farm, Porirua. You stay here by me and eat your beetroot, and you’ll be Jake.

The Commander didn’t eat his beetroot, though he drank his beer. He talked about the things they were trying to forget and he insisted that other places not only existed but had equal validity to the West Coast. He did all this without intending to blow his own trumpet or put people down, and he was such a pub character, so they forgave him, poor old codger, besides he was always shit-faced before tea-time.

What she saw in him was a mystery. But then she was a batty thing, even though she wasn’t old. Young thing, though she acted grand enough to be fifty. Always walking barefoot down the beach with her head in the air and her hair getting all rat-arsed in the wind. Fishing with a bloody great sea-rod she could hardly hold, pretentious bitch. Did she catch anything? Threw them back she claimed, because killing them was horrid – so why fish in the first place, specially when it was so bloody tough and windy out there? Skiting, they said, looks so grand. Gives her something to do while she’s waiting for the blokes to come by and chat her up.

Only the Commander obliged, old enough to be her grandfather if he’d started young, dyes his hair, must do, because he went through the war, fairly nobby, if he is to be believed, and there isn’t a grey hair to be seen. Unless he’s bull-shitting of course, all those tale of Gurkhas and the relief of Tobruk.

You’d see him set out, when he’d slept off his lunch, panama hat, creased white jacket, white sandshoes with tarred rope soles, every inch the empire. He’d stroll down the street as if he had just arrived in a foreign seaport and he was taking in the curious sights, sniffing the exotic air. Pity that the air of Westport was unburdened by garlic or decay, the odd fishy smell, the scent of newly-mown lawns, the wind of the sea smelt of nothing except far-off icebergs, which is about as indeterminate a smell as you can find.

He’d end up on walking along the beach, every day, without fail and with the same air of happening along. She’d be there plying her man-sized fibre-glass rod, if the tide were right, and singing fit to burst, arias, folksongs, any old thing, who knew and who cared? Or she might be discovered sitting cross legged on the sand, with a spiral bound notebook, sucking her pencil or tapping it against her teeth, and gazing creatively out to sea. Or on special occasions, with a little stool and a paint-dripped easel and a few exploratory daubs, not being sure about her talent in this line.

Not that the Commander was concerned with her talents. He circled about, walking past and doffing his hat, as if she were a casual acquaintance of his generation and class, and sauntering on. Rosalia affected to pay no attention. He would walk to a specific point on the beach, stop, look around vaguely as if he’d forgotten something and swivel back as if he was on tramlines and had to go back the way he’d come, and Rosalia’s present position was terminus through which he must pass. Each time he came alongside her he would raise his hat and engage her in conversation, each circuit a little longer, until finally he was stationery and she was ready to pack up her paints and go with him, one arm resting on his, while he carried her gear in his other. For tea, if she was contrary, a cup of tea that is, or a jug, if his desires were allowed to prevail.

No-one was privy to these skirmishing conversations, but enough of the Commander’s conversational technique was known to suggest that each time he walked on he would leave a tantalising reference trailing behind him, which he would fail to pick up on his next round, introducing some new observation on the colouration of the paua shell, the difference in cloud structure in the Southern hemisphere, the peculiar customs of Trinidadian harbour pilots, or the wonderful dirty remark that Margot Asquith made to Lady Otteline Morrell, both of whom it was assumed you had heard of. Little Rosalia, with her watercolours and her Mozart arias and her arty-farty aspirations didn’t stand a chance.

Things started to heat up. He was observed one morning, heading for the house she where she stayed on her visits to the coast. It belonged to some friends of her parents whom the blanketing decline of the Coast had forced away. The little house, with its scrubby front lawn and linoleum floors stood empty most of the year, there was no market for houses, and who, in those days, much cared to holiday in Westport? Rosalia came over by herself, on the train and walked to the house lugging s week’s clothes in a duffel bag. She took them home dirty at the end of her stay, no washing was seen to flutter on the rotary line out the back. And what about the sheets? You may well ask, and some did, but no-one ever answered.

Just after ten o’clock in the morning, he was seen to approach the front door of the house, an oddity in itself for in New Zealand no-one ever uses the front door; it is there for show and to clearly distinguish unwelcome visitors – the police, charity collectors, Jehovah’s Witnesses – from everyone else, who goes round to the back. The Commander was either unaware of this social nicety, or wished to introduce an element of formality into the encounter. He stood by the front door, looking in vain for a bell, while from the front room came the usual morning sounds of Rosalia’s singing practice.

She was pretty darned good, even then, which was one reason why she was treated with amused tolerance in Westport, for a woman who can sing can always silence her critics. She practised every morning, assiduously, squeezing out runlets of notes from the old harmonium which had sat in the front room since its eviction from the Methodist Hall. Vissi d’arte, she insisted, vissi d’amore that morning as many other mornings, punching the morning air with her passion.

The Commander stood by the front door as she tried and retried a phrase, perche, Signore, perche me ne rimuneri cosi? He swayed as he listened, perhaps he’d had one to steady his nerves, or two, perhaps. His head was bowed, as if he were examining his shoes for their suitability to enter the parlour of a young lady, and finding them wanting, but bemused by what he should do. Eventually, after Tosca had pleaded and pleaded for mercy Vedi, le man giunte io stendo a te! in various permutations the Commander gave up the struggle with himself and went away without disturbing her.

That afternoon they were to be observed sitting on the sea wall, her bare legs dangling next to his long linen limbs. He only possessed one suit, and it was a miracle how he kept it so clean, with all his falling against walls on the way home from the pub. His belly settled comfortably on his knees. He was smoking his pipe, or rather sucking it, because he appeared to have no tobacco and no-one to cadge off; Rosalia was gesturing out to sea and talking animatedly. She was a good-looking girl, if you could be bothered to look. She had long light-ginger curls which blew everywhere like the most becoming of scarves, and eyes the colour of newly-peeled chestnuts. It is possible that the Commander told her this, sitting on the sea wall. It is certainly true that she tore a page from her notebook and wrote down her address in Christchurch, because she was going back home the next day. It must have been that simple act, that indication that she wanted the relationship, such as it was, to continue, that proved her undoing.

It is hard to ascribe much significance to the writing down of an address, but it is quite possible if she had not done so, none of this story would need telling. She was the instigator, however innocent, of her own tragi-comedy.

That night the Commander was not to be found in the pub. His absence occasioned a considerable amount of crude speculation; was, for example, Rosalia under age? It generally thought that she was legal, not to drink, of course, though she had been in the pub with the Commander on several occasions, refilling her lemonade glass ostentatiously from his jug. The local cop, sternly enforcing the licensing laws, six o’clock closing and all, from the vantage point of a bar seat, was of the opinion that she was asking for it anyway, living alone like that, and she knew where to find him if she needed him, but it would never stand up in a court of law. Nor, thought the publican’s wife, could the Commander, after so many years of dedicated drinking. She reckoned he’d have trouble getting it to piss even. Crude jokes from women were really not the thing, so the blokes shambled away into the corner to consider their bets for the next day with the pub bookie, leaving the cop at the bar bemoaning today’s youth with the priest and the publican’s wife.

Rosalia left the next morning, on the one and only train across the mountains, humping her duffel bag and her fishing rod. The publican’s wife wondered about the sheets. The Commander was seen walking up and down the beach distractedly, like a dog who has forgotten where he buried his bone. He was back to his drinking ways that night, cheerful because he had received his pension, his pittance, hush or blood money as he variously called it. He was able to shout for the whole pub at last, having been at the mercy of their generosity for weeks, and make a small inroad into his tab. The publican’s wife intimated that he might like to pay it all off now, since he might be leaving them soon. He affected to look surprised, and then let the penny drop, and smiled his yellow smile and bought some tobacco with the comment that if he were going away he’d need his money the more sorely for his train fare. After that he disappeared inside a cloud of tobacco.

The next day he went to early Mass as was his wont. He sat so far back in the church, that he could have made out nothing but a vague muttering, but his responses rung out clear and true in public-school Latin. The priest never knew whether to be grateful for this, or irritated because it confused the altar boys. Long after the last black-hatted worthy had stumped off, the Commander sat in his pew staring at the sacred heart of Mary in the alcove near the back. The priest spied him from the sacristy; there was just enough time to slip down a coffee between masses, if you took a liberal view of the ecclesiastical licensing laws, but duty, and perhaps, curiosity called. He had heard the Commander’s confession only yesterday, but nonetheless, or perhaps consequently – we shall never know – the priest felt he must go and sit down next to the Commander.

‘Are you Ok, my son?’ he asked, although the Commander had thirty years on him, but it was tricky counselling someone whose name no-one recalls.

The Commander didn’t answer, nor did he remove his gaze from the blessed virgin, who smiled on him with her saccharine smile, knowing nothing of drunkenness, murder, buggery or even, god help her, sex. The priest thought to repeat his question and thought of his coffee.

‘I have done a terrible thing, Father,’ he said, staring hard at the Virgin, ‘so terrible, I wonder if I can be forgiven.’

‘Everything is forgiven, my son, if honestly confessed and truly repented. Except of course the Sin against the Holy Ghost.’

‘You have a definition of that?’

‘No,’ said the priest sadly, ‘if I did, I’d know where I stood. If you know what I mean.’

‘But you see,’ said the Commander, whose given name was Niall, ‘it is definitions and labels that makes it all impossible. I cannot go into the confessional with you and make a true confession, because to talk about the things that I have done in there I have to attach the proper labels to them, according to the correct definitions. But as soon as I have done that, and you have suppressed that sharp intake of breath, we are no further towards my absolution, because I have confessed to X without any possibility of explaining how it was, and what occasioned it, and why I am not the sinner in God’s eyes that I must seem in the eyes of the Church. And without the circumstances the sin cannot be forgiven.’

‘You could talk to me outside the confessional, a chat, that kind of thing.’

‘But then I have not the protection of the confessional. Who knows what you might feel it your Christian duty to do with me? I deserve punishment. I crave punishment. But I am too pathetic to give myself up for it.’

‘God loves you,’ said the priest, young Kevin O’Malley, straight from Ireland to the West Cost of New Zealand and loving it.

The words hung on the air between them, hovering a moment before they disintegrated.

‘I’m sure he does,’ said Niall, ‘but I am not at all sure I know what that means.’

‘Well-’ began young Fr O’Malley.

‘I have heard it all before,’ said the Commander, ‘from the mouths of priests in countries stretching from Salisbury to Saigon.’

‘The moment of grace will come,’ said brave Fr O’Malley.

‘It’s all a matter of definition, you see. Sin, evil, love, honour, courage, probity – all words we have invested with symbolic meaning. The great warriors of the Old Testament did things that would have them strung up at Nuremburg. Got a Bible handy, Father?’

‘I’m sure to hell to have one somewhere,’ said poor Fr O’Malley, half rising from his seat, his coffee faintly calling to him, a dying wail.

‘It’s all right old chap,’ said the Commander. ‘Pick it up at your leisure, and you’ll find them at it, slaughter, rape, pillage, enslavement. Not the baddies, the good guys. Take the sack of Jericho – everyone was sacrificed to the Lord, the original holocaust, don’t you think? The only person spared was Rahab. Do you now who Rahab was?’

‘Lot’s daughter, wasn’t it?’

‘A prostitute. Now there’s an arbitrary system for you – why spare one prostitute? She’ll hardly do for the whole army after all. They spared her on the grounds that she’d done a good deed towards the righteous. Now tell me, Father, is that an arbitrary moral scheme or is that an arbitrary moral scheme?’

‘Yes, I’m sure you’re right, ‘sighed Fr O’Malley.’ I don’t know the Old Testament that well myself., but you won’t find any of that stuff in the New Testament, that I know.’

‘That’s not my point – words, deeds, in between them definitions – and all of them arbitrary, even the deeds become arbitrary when you don’t know how to describe them –‘

‘You’ve lost me, Commander.’

‘Go and have your breakfast, son; God and I will wrestle for a while.’

The priest, to do him justice, was seriously concerned with the state of the Commander’s soul; he was a cheerful, clubbable fellow, who liked to please, so much so in fact that he had joined the priesthood to please his family and massy array of uncles and aunts and his village. It seemed such a simple way to make them all smile, and here he was in the most cheerful of towns, where every mining disaster became the source of terrific black jokes, and every miscarriage had a scurrilous afterbirth.

He recalled occasionally, when he wasn’t laughing and tripping over himself, that his job was to save lost souls, items that seemed in short supply in Westport. But here was one, and it would be both worthy and splendid to do something about him.

‘Why don’t I come for a chat, this afternoon? We’ll see if we can sort it out a bit.’

The priest rose hopefully from the pew, scenting the air like a dog being conveyed homewards. O yes, yes yes!

‘This afternoon may be too late,’ said the Commander with lugubrious enjoyment. ‘You go on now.’

The Commander sat on in the church until the sacristan arrived to dress the altar for the next mass. He was resolutely ignored, as if he had become himself a plaster statue, although not easily identifiable as any common piece of iconography. The sacristan had no time for the understated drama of the Commander’s appearance and had never joined his audience at the pub. He would have liked to cover him with one of the purple crepe veils used in Passiontide to remove distractions from the eyes of the pious.

He slipped out of the church as the next batch were arriving, head lowered, jamming on his hat as soon as he hit the open air. That was the last that was seen of the Commander in Westport, though one or two observed him lurking by the train station trying to ignore his obligations.