Secrets

Secrets

July 1966

Saint Thomas Catholic Church, Edgbaston

H E IS A

prurient man. That is truly the best that can be said about him. Perhaps these words will not be written in his obituary or uttered at his funeral, but that is really the only remarkable quality about this priest, Bridie thinks as she hears the chair creak on the other side.

It’s a charade, this grille that divides the holy from the lay. She can see straight through it, if she really wants to. And God is on both sides, listening. So what is its purpose? The priest has arranged his chair so that he cannot be seen, has his back right up against the confessional door. Perhaps it is the illusion of isolation that is important to prompt the secrets of her soul. As a child, she would ask her mother, ‘If God saw me sin, why does He want to hear about it a second time?’

The chair creaks. ‘You were saying?’ Father Owen prompts. Bridie reaches out a gloved finger and touches the grille that divides them. The wire that has filtered the secrets of the sinners to the ears of the blessed for hundreds of years.

The residue of six hundred years of transgressions caught up in it like fish in a net. What secrets had those first few confessors? Were they like hers? she wonders. Has the tapestry of all that is

now come about from the fall-out of the very sins whispered in these cloister walls?

The priest coughs.

What was she saying? She can hardly remember.

‘I …’

It has never been difficult for Bridie to believe. She feels lucky in that way. ‘She has a rich imagination,’ her school teacher told her mother, and if the other children didn’t seem to devour every second of literature and drama and creative writing like she did, she didn’t notice. Her mother thought ‘rich imagination’ was a euphemism for ‘badly behaved’ and asked Bridie to please try harder to be good. But it was never difficult for Bridie, sitting in the cold pews of St Michael’s in East Acton, to imagine the stained glass of Adam and Eve to move, to twitch slightly, for Eve to crane her neck to look at the sky, for the snake to slither further around the tree, for Angel Gabriel’s wings to unfurl even wider, their silk feathers making sounds like boots on snow. For Jesus, hanging tortured up on the huge crucifix above the altar, to twist, the nail in his side piercing his appendix, and look down on the church congregation of 1953, at his disciples, gathered in clothing he might not have recognized, in a cold country he had never seen, singing hymns in a language he never spoke, and smile that something of what he said must have got through.

She truly thought she was being ministered to by St Paul himself during a night spent with a fever following a

particularly bad case of bronchitis. And when she woke, she wondered if perhaps it was possible that he really had

knelt beside her bed, all green like a statue made of jade, and, palms touching in prayer, stared out across her bed as though looking at something very far away. He was too low down, as though he wasn’t kneeling on the floor but kneeling some way beneath it, his knees floating just below the living-room ceiling. She spent the next day looking for signs that she might be blessed.

Now, Bridie wishes it were a little harder to believe. That it was easier to see the cracks, the flaws in the logic, the omissions and the errors that Alistair was always talking about during their first years together, until he abandoned his mission to have her see sense

. If she didn’t know God like she knows Him, she could run to Eddie. Or she could run backwards, go all the way back to the day that she waited outside her own wedding for St Expeditus to give her a sign and have him turn to her, raise his foot up off the swearing crow and tell her to wait.

The problem with having such a rich imagination, however, is that it enables Bridie to imagine hell. On a school trip to a cathedral, she once saw a huge painting of sinners in hell being spiked and burned and tortured, but it wasn’t the spiking or burning or torturing that she stared at but their faces of agony. Bridie did not fear the spiking or burning. She feared their eternal anguish.

‘I …’ She stops.

The priest sighs. Get on with it

, she presumes he is thinking. Get to the good bit

. ‘You were saying’ – he adds a ‘my child’ here in an attempt to soften his otherwise fractious

tone – ‘that you fear you are developing romantic feelings for a person who is not your husband.’

Said out loud, read back to her like that, it sounds awful. But not untrue.

This person

, she wants to say, isn’t just some average person. Some random man. He is light. He is unusual. He is hers, she is quite sure of it, just come to her too late

.

‘I won’t act on it,’ she says quickly, and wonders if Father Owen recognizes her voice from Sundays at Mass. She comes alone to Mass because Alistair, who was raised by lapsed Methodists, has declared it all spooky

and unfounded

. Could she sit on the opposite side of the confessional booth and identify the voices of the other congregants with any accuracy? Probably. Father Owen most likely knows exactly who she is.

‘That you have brought your feelings to confession suggests that you fear you might

act upon them without God’s guidance,’ Father Owen says.

‘No, I …’

Eddie’s closeness to her under the clock tower, for the briefest of moments, a steadying, the way he looked at her, shoulders draped in her coat, how her stomach flew on seeing his name on the list for the Sardinia conference. It comes to her quickly, but she says, ‘I don’t believe I will.’

‘Hm,’ the priest replies. He does not believe her.

‘I don’t believe I will,’ she says again, ‘but that is why I am here.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘Because I already regret it. I know I will regret it for the rest of my life.’

‘We never regret obeying God’s law,’ Father Owen says,

and she wonders if perhaps he has that embroidered on a tea towel in the parochial house.

‘Is it a sin for me to love him?’ she asks. ‘Simply to love him from afar?’

‘The commandment is quite clear: thou shalt not covet

.’

‘But what if I do not covet? What if I only love? And never act upon my feelings?’

The priest is quiet for a moment, thinking. He does not know.

‘If you love him, you must also covet him.’

‘What if I can teach myself not to?’

‘Only God can teach. And He has taught us that it is a sin to break the holy vow, the sacrament of marriage.’

To be counselled on love by an unmarried virgin is one of God’s more amusing tricks, Bridie thinks.

They stop there when there’s a knock at the door by some impatient sinner. Bridie is given ten Our Fathers, ten Hail Marys and told to read all of Genesis chapter 11 as penance. When she does, she can’t find anything in it that relates to marriage or love or finding yourself married to the wrong person. It is interminably boring to read, so perhaps that was the point of the penance. It tells of how God scattered the people across the earth and had them speak in different tongues as an additional challenge. So perhaps that is the message, that God scattered Eddie and Bridie across the earth and wanted to watch them come back to each other. Or perhaps she is looking for meaning where there is none and, as she has often suspected, Father Owen selects the chapters and verses he doles out as penance entirely at random off the top of his head.

Just before she exits the confessional, Father Owen asks, ‘What does this young man say about your feelings?’

‘He seemed to want to prevent anything happening,’ she tells him.

‘He sounds like a good man,’ Father Owen says.

And Bridie will always wonder if Father Owen told her that Eddie sounded like a good man to encourage her to follow his example, or because he was trying to encourage her to indulge, so that he might hear, next week, what happened when she did. Because this priest is, more than anything, and above all else, a prurient man.