watched Bridie with a smile on his face, but his thoughts were churning. He’d never much bothered with girls before. In truth, maybe never allowed himself to be attracted to any. He knew all about girls though, hadn’t he got three sisters? But this girl he’d just met was affecting him strangely. It wasn’t her beauty alone, though that was startling enough, especially her enormous brown eyes with just a hint of sadness or worry behind them and her creamy skin. It was much more. She was small and fragile-looking for a start and had such an air of vulnerability.
Tom couldn’t understand how she’d affected him so. Just looking at her, he’d felt a stirring in his loins that was so pleasurable, it was bound to be sinful and his heart thudded against his chest. He wanted to hold her close and protect her against anything that might possibly hurt her or upset her.
Bridie, with no inkling of Tom’s thoughts about her, suddenly yawned in utter weariness. She’d had little sleep except for the bit she’d snatched in Strabane. Her smarting eyes felt very heavy and she closed them for a while to rest them.
But she swayed on the case as sleep almost overcame her and she jerked herself awake again. ‘Are you tired?’ Tom asked, and at Bridie’s brief nod, he went on, ‘Lean against me if you want, I won’t let you fall.’
Bridie knew there was no way she should lean against some strange man, and though she liked Tom Cassidy, she had only known him a matter of hours. But she couldn’t keep her eyes from closing; they seemed to have a mind of their own and for all she tried to force them open, it was no good.
Her drooping head fell on to Tom’s chest and to prevent her falling off the case, he tentatively put his arms about her.
By the time the boat was ready to dock, Tom had an ache in his back from supporting his own weight and Bridie’s. Yet it hardly mattered compared to the pleasure he had from holding Bridie in his arms that he’d wrapped so lovingly around her.
But, when Bridie awoke, she was overcome with humiliation for allowing herself to fall asleep leaning against a man in that compromising way. She remembered the last time she’d been held by a man – it had been her uncle Francis’s arms around her and she stiffened at the memory of it.
Tom sensed her withdrawal, but he put it down to embarrassment and decided to make no comment about it.
Bridie realised when they docked in Liverpool and Tom helped her find a post office to send the telegram from before the train left that she’d never have managed without him beside her. ‘I was lucky to have met you at Strabane,’ Bridie said to him as they settled in the carriage. ‘I’d have missed this train and would have had to have waited for the next one.’
‘You’d probably have had a long wait,’ Tom said. ‘The trains are here to meet the ferries and there won’t be one now for hours.’
‘And you, the seasoned traveller, would know all about it,’ Bridie said with a smile. ‘Why did you go home so often? Were you very homesick?’
‘In a way,’ Tom said. While Bridie had slept on the boat he’d decided to himself that he would tell her what he’d been doing in Liverpool. It was not a fact he readily advertised, because he found people often treated him differently, but if he wished to see Bridie again, he felt she ought to know. ‘I was a child just when I left the first time,’ he said. ‘I was in a seminary in Liverpool, training to be a priest.’
‘A priest!’ Bridie jumped away from Tom as if she’d been shot. The thought paramount in her head was to thank God she’d not poured out her sordid story to him as she’d longed to on the train. She’d have hated to see his lips curl in disgust and the scorn in his eyes had she given in to such a weakness. But if he was a priest, why had he held her that way in the boat? ‘So you’re a priest then?’ she said.
‘No, no, I’ve never been ordained,’ Tom said. ‘I was to be, but I began to have doubts. The Bishop sent me to Birmingham to work in the Mission with a Father Flynn, a good friend of his. He expects me to work off any reservations I have and go back for ordination.’
‘And will you?’
Tom shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not cut out to be a priest, I know that now. My vocation was one planted and fuelled by the visiting missionaries. Once I’d actually given voice to this possible vocation, which was probably little more than a childish fancy, things were taken out of my hands. My mother had me up before the priest faster than the speed of light. He was delighted, feather in his cap, and he informed the Bishop.
‘Events went so fast after that that I had no time to think. The priest told my mother she’d given up her only son to God, the ultimate sacrifice and one she’d be rewarded for in Heaven, and I was whisked away to a seminary in Liverpool.’
Bridie nodded, for she knew how it was. Catholic mothers were often told by the priests that their first son should belong to God. Mothers would often offer prayers and novenas that their eldest son, or failing that one of his male siblings, might have the vocation to become a priest.
Fathers usually didn’t have the same yearning at all. They looked to their sons to take over the farm or family business, to give them a hand and ease their load. But even they found that if a child admitted to having a vocation to enter the priesthood, their standing in the community was raised. They would be set apart, a holy and devout family, and people would be behave differently, more respectfully before them.
She knew too that to decide to leave the seminary, to decide the priesthood was not the line a boy wanted to follow, was worse than not going in the first place. It would be disgrace on the family and so she enquired gently, ‘Do your parents know about your doubts?’
‘Yes … Well, I didn’t tell them straightaway that I’d decided to leave, but I dropped broad hints. In the end I had to come out with it though; I thought it wasn’t fair for them to harbour false hopes.’
‘And?’ goaded Bridie.
‘They refuse to accept it,’ Tom told her. ‘My mother says she will have to hang her head in shame. She’ll not be able to face the neighbours. Of course she was allowed to run up tick in the shop and my father a big bill in the pub on the strength of my becoming a priest.’
‘I tried to explain it to them. I tried to say it had not ever been a true vocation, but an idea fostered by the parish priest and the Brothers that taught at the school and magnified by the visiting missionaries, until it was easier to go along with it than not. And then of course I was just a boy. Obedience had been drummed into me. I couldn’t defy a priest, a teaching Brother or a missionary Father.’
Bridie knew he could not, but she could also imagine Tom’s parents’ reaction, though she felt sorry for him and thought he was doing the right thing. ‘I’m glad you’re not going to be a priest if you feel that way.’
Tom smiled wryly. ‘You’re the only one then,’ he said. ‘I’m not flavour of the month at home. And then, after all the talk and explanation, my mother said to me this morning, “Don’t let’s be having any more of that sort of talk, so. Go on back now and do your duty, for it will break my heart now if you give it up.” How d’you counter that?
‘She can’t see that my work with the Mission is as worthwhile as that of a priest. The people I work with are the unsung heroes in our society, not those dashing off to save the souls of the heathens in Africa, but those who toil tirelessly and usually for little or no reward to alleviate suffering and abject poverty in their own towns and cities. I respect them so
