Adam looked after her wordlessly while Sebastian stood, arms folded, waiting for him to make his move.
‘She’s our star actress,’ he mentioned once it seemed probable that Adam had suffered some kind of upright stroke. ‘Evie Witts. Fancy her, do you?’
Adam’s wits made a slow return to his head.
‘What? Don’t be – facetious.’
‘You’re probably the only man this side of Hamframpton that hasn’t had her.’
‘Don’t speak of her that way.’
Why was he defending her, well, her virtue, when he knew she had none? She was the whore of Babylon, transplanted to Saxonhurst. Objectively he knew it.
But his crotch seemed to treat the knowledge with blithe disregard.
‘You’re right,’ said Sebastian, holding open the door. ‘I shouldn’t belittle her. She’s Kasia’s heroine. A woman who likes sex and refuses to feel guilty or constrained by society. I admire her. Don’t you?’
‘You … It isn’t too late. Repent, Mr Hurley. You can be saved.’
‘I’ll pass if you don’t mind. Enjoy your evening.’
Adam swept through the door and down the porch steps without looking back. He hadn’t achieved anything that would impress Julia Shields. But he had a mission now. A concrete and irresistible mission. He was going to save Evie Witts.
Chapter Two
WHERE WERE THE flowers? At his last church, there had been fresh flowers every Sunday, organised by a committee of keen amateur florists.
St Jude’s, Saxonhurst, was bare of such natural ornamentation. There was something else it was bare of too, that Sunday morning. A congregation.
No organist sat in the loft playing the introduction to the first hymn – they had last had one in 1962. Entering from the vestry, Adam launched into the opening verse of O Worship The King, his solo baritone echoing along the nave and up to the vaulted ceiling.
What a magnificent place this could be, if only the pews were full, the choir stalls peopled.
But his work lay before him, and he was hopeful.
So hopeful that he did not abandon the service, but continued doggedly, singing all the verses of the hymn, then moving on to the liturgy proper, leaving spaces for the responses that never came.
The neglected air was chill and damp on his skin, but he read the lesson regardless of its musty odour, enjoying the way his voice rang out across the empty benches.
The sermon he had prepared the night before, working at his desk until past midnight, would be wasted, but it would not be abandoned.
He closed the book on the lectern and struck his usual pose, a finger beneath his chin to signify curiosity, his crooked elbow resting on the ledge to suggest accessibility and modernity, his brow furrowed to bring the weight of profound thought to the ensemble.
‘I wonder, brothers and sisters,’ he opened, ‘if we have lost sight of a simple thing, a thing so important to our forebears in this village, a quality that has suffered over the years from a kind of weathering, resulting in its erosion to something hardly resembling what our ancestors knew.’
He paused for effect. Leave the congregation some time to guess what he might be talking about, that was the advice he’d been given by his mentors.
‘That thing,’ he resumed after counting the requisite half a minute’s beat, ‘is decency.’
He looked up, all the way to the font, catching imaginary eyes with his frank and commanding gaze. Now they would be questioning themselves. Am I decent? Does he mean me?
He caught his breath when a figure moved at the back of the church, behind a stand containing unlit votive candles. It looked like her. Was it her?
‘Decency,’ he continued, in a lower tone than he intended, wavering slightly, ‘used to mean something quite different. It has become a catch-all phrase that encompasses all behaviour of a generally moral nature … Hello? Don’t go.’
She had left through the optimistically open back door, a slight figure in a bright red dress, hair streaming gloriously down her back.
Adam looked about him, torn briefly between determination to see the service through and the urgent need to catch Evie.