Read Online The Copper Beech by Maeve Binchy - Free Book Online

children.
    ‘Children.’ She stroked his hand as she said the word.
    He pulled both hands away from her and stood up. This was something he was never going to think about. It was the sacrifice he had made for God, the one thing God wanted from his priests: to give up the happiness and love of a wife and family. Not that it had been hard to give up because he had never known it, and now he was heading for forty years of age so it wasn’t something he would be thinking of, even if he weren’t a priest.
    ‘A lot of men marry around forty,’ Maddy said.
    ‘Not priests.’
    ‘You can do anything. Anything.’
    ‘I won’t do this.’
    ‘But you love me, Brian. You’re not going to be frightened into some kind of cringing life for the rest of your days by a silly warning from Father Gunn, by Mrs Kennedy spying, by a promise made when you were a child … when you didn’t know what love was … or anything about it.’
    ‘I still don’t really know.’
    ‘You know.’
    He shook his head and Maddy could bear it no more. She reached out for him and kissed him directly on the lips. She moved herself into his arms and opened her mouth to his. She felt his arms tighten around her … He stroked her back and then because she pulled away from his clasp a little he stroked the outline of her breasts. She peeped through her closed eyes and saw that his eyes were closed too.
    They stood locked like this for a time. Eventually he pulled away.
    They looked at each other for moments before he spoke. ‘You’ve given me everything, Maddy Ross,’ he said.
    ‘I haven’t begun to give you anything,’ she said.
    ‘No but you have, believe me. You’ve given me such bravery, such faith. Without you I’d be nothing. You’ve given me the courage to go. Now you must give me one more thing … the freedom.’
    She looked at him with disbelief. ‘You could hold me like that and ask me never to be in your arms again?’
    ‘That is what I’m begging you.
Begging
you, Maddy. It was my only sure centre. The only thing I knew … that I was to be a priest of God. Don’t take that away from me or all the other things you have given will totter like a house of cards.’
    This man had been her best friend, her soul mate. Nowhe was asking her permission and her encouragement to leave her life entirely, to step out of it and away from Shancarrig to the village that they had both dreamed about and prayed for and saved for all these years.
    Such monstrous selfishness couldn’t be part of God’s plan. It couldn’t be part of any dream of taking your chance in life. Maddy looked at him, confused. It was all going wrong, very very wrong.
    He saw her shock, he didn’t run away from it. He spoke very gently.
    ‘Since I came to Shancarrig and even before it I’ve known that women are stronger than men. We could list them in this town. And I know more than you because I hear them in the Confessional. I’m there at their deathbeds when they worry not about their own pain but about how a husband will manage or whether a son will go to the bad. I’ve been there when their babies have died at birth, when they bury a man who was not only a husband but their means of living. Women are very strong. Can you be strong and let me go with your blessing?’
    She looked at him dumbly. The words would not come, the torrent of words welling up inside her. She must be able to explain that he could not be bound by these tired old rules, these empty vows made at another time by another person. Brian Barry was different now, he had come into his kingdom, he was a man who could love and give. But she said none of these things. Which was just as well because he looked at her and the dark blue of his eyes was hard.
    ‘You see, I want to go with your blessing, because I’m
going
to go anyway.’
    They didn’t meet again in Shancarrig without other people being present.
    There were no more walks in the woods, no visits to the classroom. The rehearsals had to do