'Esther?' said Farther.

'Yes, alright,' said Mummer sharply and she leant forward to light the candles set out on the table.

Mrs Belderboss sighed and looked out of the window.

'I do hope it improves for when we go to the shrine on Monday,' she said. 'It won't be the same if it's raining, will it Reg?'

'No,' said Mr Belderboss. 'Not like last time, do you remember?'

Mrs Belderboss turned to Father Bernard. 'It was a glorious day,' she said. 'The sun came out just as we arrived. And the flowers were just beautiful. All the magnolias and the azaleas.'

Father Bernard smiled.

'Everyone was so happy, weren't they, Reg?' she went on. 'Wilfred, especially.'

'It must be nice to have that memory of your brother, Mr Belderboss,' said Father Bernard.

Mr Belderboss nodded. 'I suppose so. They do say that you ought to remember people at their happiest don't they?'

'Aye,' said Father Bernard. 'I can't see that there's much to be gained by doing anything else.'

Mr Belderboss looked at his hands. 'It's the last time I remember him being so-certain-about everything. After that, I don't know. He just sort of seemed to ...'

'Seemed to what?' Father Bernard asked.

Mr Belderboss looked around the room at everyone. Mummer narrowed her eyes at him, very slightly, but enough for him to notice and stop talking. There was a moment of silence. Mrs Belderboss touched her husband on the arm and he put his hand over hers. Mummer blew out the match she was holding.

'I thought we were going to begin?' she said.

Father Bernard looked at her and then at Mr Belderboss.

'Sorry, Reg,' he said. 'I didn't mean to upset you.'

'Oh, don't worry about me,' said Mr Belderboss, wiping his eyes with a handkerchief. 'I'm alright. You carry on, Father.'

Father Bernard opened his Bible and handed it to me.

'Would you read for us Tonto?' he said.

I set the Bible on my knees and read Jesus' instructions to his disciples to prepare for the persecution that would most certainly be coming their way.

'"Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child; children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death. You will be hated by everyone because of me, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved."'

Mummer looked at Father Bernard and nodded her approval. The pa.s.sage was her manifesto. Back at home, it was up in a frame in the kitchen, scribed in ornate calligraphy like the page of an illuminated Bible. Duty, or rather the active show of duty, was everything and to ignore the call to service was, in Mummer's eyes, possibly the most heinous sin of all. She was of the opinion that men should at least consider the priesthood and that all boys should serve on the altar. In some ways, she said, she was envious of me because I had the opportunity to be closer to G.o.d, to a.s.sist in the miracle of the transubstantiation, whereas she had to make do with organising fetes and jumble sales.

It had been mooted a number of times since my Confirmation, but when we returned from Moorings the last time, it became Mummer's mission to get me into a ca.s.sock. It was time, she said, and it was obvious that Father Wilfred needed help.

'You ought to do it for your brother's sake, if anything,' she said. 'He'll never get the chance.'

I think it came as something of a surprise to her when I agreed so readily. I wanted to be an altar boy. I wanted to be a servant to the Lord. I wanted, more than anything, to see the parts of the church that no one else did.

And so I see myself aged thirteen walking up the path to the presbytery one wet Sat.u.r.day morning in an ill-fitting beige suit with Mummer's instructions on the etiquette of speaking to a priest fixed firmly in my head. Yes, Father Wilfred. No, Father Wilfred. Speak when you're spoken to. But look interested. Answer his questions like a boy who's been going to church since the day he was born. Don't drop your aitches.

Miss Bunce answered the door and I told her what I'd come for. She let me in and pointed at the row of chairs in the hallway. There was another boy there, suffering from the first fierce a.s.sault of acne and breathing loudly. He had been stuffed into an even worse suit than I had, the lapels of which were sprinkled with dandruff and stray hairs. He looked at me and smiled nervously as he put out his hand.

'Did your mother send you too?'

Plump, freckled, a little older than me, poor Henry McCullough with egg breath and spots was to become my opposite number on the altar, performing the parts that required little or no wit. He was a towel holder and a candle straightener. He opened the lid of the organ before Ma.s.s and brought out the stool for Miss Bunce to sit on.

'Yes,' I said, to make him feel better. 'She did.'

Father Wilfred came out of the dining room, wiping away the remains of his breakfast from his lips with the corner of a handkerchief. He looked at us both sitting there and weighed us up from our polished shoes to our parted hair.

'Miss Bunce,' he said, nodding to the door. 'Would you be so kind?'

'Yes, Father.'

Miss Bunce withdrew a black umbrella from the stand and handed it to Father Wilfred once he had b.u.t.toned his long raincoat. He gave her a rare smile and then clicked his fingers at us to follow him down the gravel path to the church, keeping the umbrella to himself.

It's gone now, demolished to make way for flats, and much lamented by those who remember it, but I always thought Saint Jude's was a monstrosity.

It was a large brown brick place, built towards the end of the nineteenth century when Catholicism became fashionable again with a people that didn't do things by halves. From the outside it was imposing and gloomy and the thick, hexagonal spire gave it the look of a mill or factory. Indeed, it seemed purpose built in the same sort of way, with each architectural component carefully designed to churn out obedience, faith or hope in units per week according to demand. Even the way Miss Bunce played the organ made it seem as though she was operating a complicated loom.

As a token bit of mysticism, the mason had fixed an Eye of G.o.d way up on the steeple, above the clock-an oval shape carved into a block of stone that I'd noticed on the old country churches Farther dragged us round at weekends. Yet at Saint Jude's, it seemed more like a sharp-eyed overseer of the factory floor, looking out for the workshy and the seditious.

Inside, a bigger than life-sized crucified Christ was carefully suspended in front of a vast window so that when the sun shone his shadow fell among the congregation and touched them all. The pulpit was high up like a watchtower. Even the air felt as though it had been specially commissioned to be church-like; to be soup-thick with sound when Miss Bunce touched the organ keys, and when the nave was empty to be thin enough to let the slightest whisper flutter round the stonework.

'So,' said Father Wilfred, indicating for us to sit on the front pew. 'Let's start at the beginning. McCullough, tell me something about the Penitential Rite.'

Father Wilfred put his hands behind his back and began a slow pacing alongside the altar rail, looking up into the vault like a teacher awaiting the answer to an impenetrable maths question.

Actually, I often thought he had missed his calling on that score and in the photograph Mummer had cut out of the paper the time he'd protested about a new horror film they were showing at The Curzon, he indeed looked every inch the Edwardian schoolmaster -thin and pale behind the round-rimmed gla.s.ses, the hair raked into a severe parting.

Henry looked down at his sweaty hands and shifted uncomfortably as though something unpleasant was pa.s.sing through his gut. Father Wilfred suddenly stopped and turned to face him.

'Problem?'

'I don't know,' said Henry.

'I don't know, Father.'

'Eh?'

'You'll address me as Father.'

'Yes, Father.'

'Well?'

'I still don't know, Father.'

'You don't know if there's a problem or you don't know what the Penitential Rite is?'

'Eh?' said Henry.

'Well at least tell me when it comes in the Introductory Rites, McCullough.'

'I don't know, Father.'

'You wish to be a servant of G.o.d and you can't even tell me the order of the Ma.s.s?'

Father Wilfred's raised voice echoed briefly around the church. Henry looked at his fingers again.

'You do want to become an altar boy don't you, McCullough?' Father Wilfred said, more quietly this time.

'Yes, Father.'

He looked at him and then resumed his pacing.

'The Penitential Rite comes at the start of the Ma.s.s, McCullough, once the priest has come to the altar. It enables us to confess our sins before G.o.d and to cleanse our souls ready for the reception of His holy word.'

'Now, Smith,' he said, stopping to buff the golden eagle lectern where Mr Belderboss struggled with the Old Testament names when it was his turn to read, 'what comes after the Penitential Rite?'

'The Kyrie, Father.'

'And then?'

'The Gloria, Father.'

'And then?'

'The Liturgy, Father.'

Suspecting I was being facetious, his eyes narrowed for a second, but he turned and walked back the way he had come.

'Right, McCullough,' he said. 'Let's see if you've been listening. Tell me the order of the Introductory Rites.'

And so it went on until Henry could recite the structure of the Ma.s.s down to where people stood, sat or knelt.

While they spoke, I stared at the altar, wondering when we would be allowed up there, if it would feel holier beyond the invisible screen that only the privileged directors of the Ma.s.s were allowed to penetrate. If the air was different. Sweeter. If I might be allowed to open the tabernacle in the reredos, and look upon the very resting place of G.o.d. Whether there was some evidence of Him inside that golden box.

Having pa.s.sed one test, I was sent away to complete another. I was to go into the office next to the vestry and bring back a pyx, a censer and a chaplet of the Divine Mercy. Father Wilfred handed me a key and then looked at me sternly.

'You are to go to the vestry office and nowhere else,' he said. 'Do you understand?'

'Yes, Father.'

'You are to touch nothing other than the things I have asked for.'

'Yes, Father.'

'Good. On you go.'

The office was cramped and smelled of old books and snuffed wicks. There was a desk and several book shelves and locked cupboards. In the corner was a sink with a grimy mirror above it. A candle in a red jar guttered in the draft coming through the window frame. But the things which interested me the most, as they would any boy of thirteen, I suppose, were the two crossed swords fastened to the wall-long and slender and curving gently towards their tips-the kind Hanny's Napoleonic soldiers wore. I longed more than anything to hold one of them. To feel my chest tighten like it always did when we sang O G.o.d of Earth and Altar.

I searched for the things Father Wilfred had asked me to fetch and found them easily, setting them down on the desk where a few books had been left open.

One had a painting of Jesus standing on the edge of a mountain in the desert being tempted by Satan, who flitted about him like a giant red bat. I didn't like that one at all. It was the Devil of my nightmares, all cloven hooves and horns, with a snake for a tail.

I turned the page and found Simeon Stylites standing on his tower. He was a popular figure in Father Wilfred's sermons. Along with The Rich Fool and The Prodigal Son, he was an example to us all of how we could change, how we could rid ourselves of temporal desire.

Surviving only on the Eucharist, he had lived on top of a stone pillar in the desert so that he could meditate on the Word untouched by the world of sin below him. His devotion was absolute. He had stripped his life to the quick for G.o.d. And his reward was that he needed to look no further than heaven for all the things that the sinners beneath him pursued through selfish, l.u.s.tful means and suffered for in the chase. Food, love, fulfilment, peace. They were all his.

In the painting he had his face turned to the sky and his arms outstretched as though he was letting something go or waiting for something to fall.

Next to it was a photograph alb.u.m full of pictures of a place that I recognised. It was The Loney. Shots of the beach, our pillbox, the dunes, the marshes. Dozens of them. These were the photographs he had taken that last morning of the pilgrimage.

He had left a magnifying gla.s.s on top of a photograph of the mudflats at low tide, the sea far out, the way over to Coldbarrow clear and Coldbarrow itself a grey mound in the distance. I picked it up and moved it back and forth but couldn't find that there was anything much to see apart from the black sludge and the sea and the low sky. What he had been looking for, I couldn't tell.

'Smith,' Father Wilfred was at the door, with Henry behind him.

'Yes, Father?'

'What are you doing?'

'Nothing, Father,' I said and stood up.

'I trust that you've found what I asked you to find?'

'Yes, Father,' I said and showed him the stuff on the table.

He looked at me and came over and picked up each object, turning them in his hands as though he'd never seen them before. After a moment or two he realised that we were waiting for him to dismiss us and he turned sharply.

'On Sunday morning,' he said. 'I shall expect to see you both standing outside the vestry door at nine o'clock on the dot.'

'Yes, Father Wilfred.'

'Let me be absolutely clear,' he said. 'Lateness is not only a discourtesy to me, it is a discourtesy to G.o.d, and I will not tolerate it.'

'Yes, Father Wilfred.'

He said no more but drew back the chair I'd been sitting on and wedged himself under the desk to look at the books. He licked his finger and turned the page in the photograph alb.u.m and squinted into the magnifying gla.s.s.