Trude reached over again and trailed her fingers on his lips. ‘Do you like me to touch you?’

Light and soft. Enough to break Joe from his thoughts. He should push her fingers away, get up and leave. This could cost him his immortal soul. But Trude understood him, shared his secret now, carried his pain too. She must love him, and wasn’t that what it was all about? Could a priest not love?

She leaned close. Sitting in the dell, smothered by the emptiness of the sky, Joe didn’t know how it happened, but there was her tongue, and his. She was on top of him now, her cotton dress up around her waist as she opened the buttons on his trousers with clumsy hands and sticky fingers.

He was shaking, soft as jelly. Had never experienced such a grand sensation before. Had they made love? It didn’t seem like such a sin. It had all happened so fast. She lay on him, and he coupled his arms around her, held her close. Grafted together.

‘Are you happy, Joe?’ She had never called him Joe before. It was a new step, a new era.

‘Troubled.’ His vows lay in tatters. ‘This can’t go on.’ He wanted to say, Will you marry me, Trude? Were they not as one now, in holy union? Forever.

‘Troubled?’

He’d have to leave the priesthood. Muster the courage. Get a job. Give her a home.

‘I have made you whole again,’ she said. ‘A proper man.’ She rolled away, lay on her side, one arm over his waist. ‘That must be good.’

A proper man? Was that a dreadful thing? Was that what he needed, to drive it all out?

‘What if you are pregnant?’ Joe hadn’t thought of that, not when it was happening.

‘Don’t worry.’

‘No?’ Joe said.

‘Oh Father O’Cleary,’ she was laughing. ‘You know nothing.’

She pushed herself away from him, stood and held out her hands to pull him up. ‘I have to go. Thank you, Joe.’

She kissed him on the lips. Bent down, picked up the blanket, shook it free of earth and grass and folded it with the deft movements of a practised nurse.

‘Can’t you stay?’ She was the only person he had ever told his secret to and he wanted her to be with him until it settled down and was back in its place. She was the only person he had ever truly loved, been close to. The only woman he had kissed, caressed, done this with, had intimacy with.

But she was shaking her head. ‘I have to get back,’ she said. ‘It’s best we aren’t seen together.’

‘Why?’ he said. ‘Why now?’ They’d cycled freely together before.

Trude hesitated. ‘I found a note, in my basket,’ she said. ‘It made fun of Hitler. It was signed “the soldier with no name”.’ She pulled a face. ‘Don’t you see?’