watching figure on the wall, it was nothing like the leaden despair she had felt in the shrines of Walsingham.
Maureen came late each night, summer or winter, long after anyone else, priest or parishioner, had left. She liked the solitude and silence when she worked. She came to Mass alone and sat in the back pew, neither making eye contact with her fellow worshippers nor engaging in conversation after the service. She had barely spoken fifty words to the priest, Father Carson Brown, since she had first volunteered her services five years before. She was so used to being wrapped up in her own quiet world of silent prayer and penance that she didn’t really register the sound that night of the door opening behind her as she knelt rubbing an old yellow duster over the brass of the communicants’ rail. She didn’t hear the soft steps as the visitor approached behind. What brought the presence to her attention was the dark figure and pale face distorted and reflected in the mellow curve of the rail. She turned around and looked up. The lights overhead seemed brighter now, shining on the stained-glass windows and somehow putting a nimbus around the visitor’s face like a vision of a latter-day saint. Only the glow in the eyes that looked down on her, with no mercy or seeming humanity, didn’t seem to come from the church lights alone. Maureen Gallagher put up a hand to shield her eyes from their glare and brought the face into focus. It took a moment or two and then the breath leaked from her body as the realisation dawned on her. The weight she had been carrying for so very long seemed to rise from her for the briefest of moments.
‘It’s you,’ she said.
Then a thunderbolt hit her in the heart. And the weight was gone for ever.
SUNDAY
Not for the first time in his life Father Carson Brown was feeling guilty. It was a very Catholic emotion, surely enough, he realised, and he was a Catholic priest after all, but it wasn’t a strong enough emotion to stop him from returning to the scene of the crime. Or to the woman to be more precise.
Sarah Jane Keeley. She had dark honey-coloured hair that tumbled around white shoulders that were sprinkled with the lightest of freckles, and wide blue eyes that were regarding the priest with the sort of lustful playfulness that Rome would certainly never have approved of.
Father Brown tucked his shirt into his trousers and buttoned them up. ‘You are a bad woman, Sarah Jane,’ he said.
The woman in question was lying on the bed and smiling languidly up at him, a sheet held to her chest, the tip of her tongue licking the ruby moistness of her top lip in a slow, sensual curve.
‘Do you have to go?’ she asked, with a coy smile playing now on her perfectly formed cupid’s-bow lips.
‘I do,’ he replied. ‘And there’s no point pouting like Marilyn Monroe! There’s a Union of Catholic Mothers’ meeting this morning and I have to make sure everything is set up for them.’
Sarah Jane grinned. ‘John won’t be back until tonight, you know?’
‘I know.’ Father Carson Brown smiled back at her. John Keeley was the reason he was feeling guilty. They had grown up together, best friends through primary school and then secondary school, the Salvatorian College Catholic school, not a hundred miles from the street in Harrow where John Keeley now lived and where he himself would visit whenever his old friend was away on business.
At eighteen John Keeley had gone to university to study law and Carson Brown had gone first to seminary college and then on to the priesthood. The truth of the matter was that the two boys had both been in love with Sarah Jane Keeley since they had met her in infant school. Not that they knew it at the time, of course. Sarah Jane had been a complete tomboy, but the three of them had been inseparable and as they grew into teenagers it was clear that the friendship between them had also grown into something else. But it was John that she clearly fancied, so Carson had kept his distance, never revealing his true feelings for her. In fact, he fell so hopelessly in love with her at age sixteen that he decided if he couldn’t have her then he wouldn’t have any other woman. He threw himself into his studies and volunteer work at his church, Our Lady and Saint Thomas of Canterbury, and delighted his surprised parents when he announced that he wished to train for the priesthood. It took him many years until he finally made his way back to a position in Harrow and six months after that before he made his way into a position with Sarah Jane. And it wasn’t the missionary one.
‘What are you smiling at?’ the object of his affectionate recollections asked.
‘Life,’ he said. ‘And all of its rich tapestry.’
‘Seems to me you look like the cat that got the cream.’
‘If I was a cat I would be purring.’
‘
The priest laughed. ‘Like I say, you’re a wicked, wicked woman, Sarah Jane.’
‘You’re quite right, and I should be spanked for it.’
He laughed again. ‘I’d give it a try but I imagine I’d end up with a couple of missing teeth.’
‘Yes. You probably would.’
Sarah Jane let the sheet drop, revealing her large breasts, the nipples clearly aroused and as pink as her lips against the creamy white magnificence of her skin. She put her hands behind her neck, arching her back slightly. ‘Are you really sure you wouldn’t like to linger?’ she asked again, breathlessly.
Carson swallowed and shook his head, a look of something like regret passing through his eyes. ‘I really can’t – sorry.’
Her smile faded. ‘You’ll have to go and tell a few Hail Marys, I suppose?’
The priest sighed. ‘Don’t, Sarah Jane.’
‘It’s not our fault I chose the wrong man.’
‘I know.’
‘It’s your precious God who made him gay. Made him that way but didn’t give him the balls to admit it until he had been married to me for fifteen years.’
‘Let’s not discuss this again.’
‘Seems to me your religion can be pretty flexible when it comes to your own moral code but not to others.’
