evangelical church that met in an old warehouse in Penzance, a man Barnaby would have assumed would despise him as comparatively establishment and traditional, had started a Facebook Group called We Love Father Barnaby’s Power of Prayer.
‘I checked before I came up here,’ the server said, ‘And you’ve already got over four thousand likes. Four thousand!’ Barnaby had no idea what she meant.
The congregation was the biggest of his career. When he finished his sermon, to which the size of crowd had inspired him to add an improvised sentence or two, there was applause which completely drowned out his request for God’s blessing on it. The sign of peace lasted a good ten minutes. The collection plate was so full that notes drifted off it onto the altar as he held it aloft. They almost ran out of communion wafers, and had to break them into halves and then quarters to eke them out.
In any other circumstances it would have been an answer to prayers: a country-parish equivalent to the feeding of the five thousand. By the time he had shaken the last worshipper’s hand, however, his face ached.
He was resolved to call the archdeacon’s office the next morning and apply to leave his post and retire as soon as was conveniently possible.
MODEST CARLSSON AT 39
Modest Carlsson had his life, if not his soul, saved in Portsmouth. He had come there on a bleak sort of whim and stayed there through despair. Modest Carlsson was not his real name, naturally. He was raised as Maurice Carver, but the name change had become necessary. And he used to be an English teacher, not a second-hand-book dealer. His life had been balanced, law abiding and uneventful: youth, university, teacher-training college, marriage, daughter.
But then into his sixth-form class had sauntered a girl, whose name he could no longer even bring his mind to shape. Blue-eyed, tawny-haired, extravagantly flirtatious, she had led him on. Even the judge, a woman, suggested as much in her summing-up. The girl had slowly unbuttoned her shirt as he talked to the class, stroked her cleavage with a pencil as he approached her desk, the same pencil she slowly chewed, staring at him, when lost for what to write during a test. She stood so close to him that he could smell the spearmint on her breath, catch the sugary, fruit bowl wafts of shampoo from her hair. It was often said in the common room that if this girl spent even half the attention on her studies that she lavished on that tumble of hair of hers, she would have made Oxbridge material. She was clever but fatally lazy. Something in her background had sapped her self-confidence too, which was perhaps why she set about ensnaring a teacher when she could have taken her pick from the boy-men of the school who followed her every slouching move and hung on her every mumbled word.
Up to this point her behaviour towards him was nothing out of the ordinary. Adolescence was about discovering and flexing one’s power over others, or learning to compensate for the lack of it and, as the only adults in range, teachers were natural targets against which that strength could be pitted. Plenty of boys and girls in every class in her year were clumsily flirting with teachers or, usually with more finesse, seeking out their weaknesses and mocking them. Unbeknownst to the pupils, the teachers held regular meetings at which such attacks were aired, even laughed over, and their dangerous potential disarmed by exposure. But then she went further than her peers by starting to write him notes, which she slipped in with her homework. Notes and occasionally photographs. And instead of showing his unsuspecting wife or battle-weary colleagues so as to maintain the moral high ground, he foolishly kept them to himself then, more foolishly still, responded in kind.
Before long they had an assignation. She slipped into his car outside a supermarket several blocks from the school and he drove her out to a notorious beauty spot car park
‘I checked before I came up here,’ the server said, ‘And you’ve already got over four thousand likes. Four thousand!’ Barnaby had no idea what she meant.
The congregation was the biggest of his career. When he finished his sermon, to which the size of crowd had inspired him to add an improvised sentence or two, there was applause which completely drowned out his request for God’s blessing on it. The sign of peace lasted a good ten minutes. The collection plate was so full that notes drifted off it onto the altar as he held it aloft. They almost ran out of communion wafers, and had to break them into halves and then quarters to eke them out.
In any other circumstances it would have been an answer to prayers: a country-parish equivalent to the feeding of the five thousand. By the time he had shaken the last worshipper’s hand, however, his face ached.
He was resolved to call the archdeacon’s office the next morning and apply to leave his post and retire as soon as was conveniently possible.
MODEST CARLSSON AT 39
Modest Carlsson had his life, if not his soul, saved in Portsmouth. He had come there on a bleak sort of whim and stayed there through despair. Modest Carlsson was not his real name, naturally. He was raised as Maurice Carver, but the name change had become necessary. And he used to be an English teacher, not a second-hand-book dealer. His life had been balanced, law abiding and uneventful: youth, university, teacher-training college, marriage, daughter.
But then into his sixth-form class had sauntered a girl, whose name he could no longer even bring his mind to shape. Blue-eyed, tawny-haired, extravagantly flirtatious, she had led him on. Even the judge, a woman, suggested as much in her summing-up. The girl had slowly unbuttoned her shirt as he talked to the class, stroked her cleavage with a pencil as he approached her desk, the same pencil she slowly chewed, staring at him, when lost for what to write during a test. She stood so close to him that he could smell the spearmint on her breath, catch the sugary, fruit bowl wafts of shampoo from her hair. It was often said in the common room that if this girl spent even half the attention on her studies that she lavished on that tumble of hair of hers, she would have made Oxbridge material. She was clever but fatally lazy. Something in her background had sapped her self-confidence too, which was perhaps why she set about ensnaring a teacher when she could have taken her pick from the boy-men of the school who followed her every slouching move and hung on her every mumbled word.
Up to this point her behaviour towards him was nothing out of the ordinary. Adolescence was about discovering and flexing one’s power over others, or learning to compensate for the lack of it and, as the only adults in range, teachers were natural targets against which that strength could be pitted. Plenty of boys and girls in every class in her year were clumsily flirting with teachers or, usually with more finesse, seeking out their weaknesses and mocking them. Unbeknownst to the pupils, the teachers held regular meetings at which such attacks were aired, even laughed over, and their dangerous potential disarmed by exposure. But then she went further than her peers by starting to write him notes, which she slipped in with her homework. Notes and occasionally photographs. And instead of showing his unsuspecting wife or battle-weary colleagues so as to maintain the moral high ground, he foolishly kept them to himself then, more foolishly still, responded in kind.
Before long they had an assignation. She slipped into his car outside a supermarket several blocks from the school and he drove her out to a notorious beauty spot car park
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