Therapy

stood there in all weathers. If it was raining, Maureen would hold her umbrella over both of us as we embraced. In cold weather I would undo the toggles of my duffelcoat (a proud new acquisition for weekend wear) and open the front of her raincoat to create a kind of tent in which to draw her close. One night I found the rose-patterned dress had a button missing at the back and slid my hand through the gap and felt her bare skin between her shoulder-blades. She shuddered and opened her lips a little more as she pressed them against mine. Weeks later I found my way through the front of her blouse, and caressed her stomach over a slippery satin slip. So it went on. Inch by inch I extended my exploration of her body, virgin territory in every sense of the word. Maureen was tender and yielding in my arms, wanting to be loved, loving to be caressed, but quite without sexual self-consciousness. She must have often felt my erect penis through our clothing as we embraced, but she never remarked on it, nor gave any sign of being embarrassed by it. Perhaps she thought mature widdlers were permanently hard as bones. Erections were more of a problem for me. When we had to part (it was dangerous to linger in the area for more than ten or fifteen minutes, for Mr Kavanagh knew when the youth-club socials ended and would sometimes come out on to the front porch to look down the road, while we cowered, half-frightened, half-amused, just underneath him) I would wait till Maureen had run up the steps and let herself into the house before walking off stiffly and bent slightly forward, like a man on stilts.
    I suppose Maureen must have experienced her own symptoms of sexual arousal, but I doubt whether she recognized them as such. She had a naturally pure mind, pure without being prudish. Dirty jokes left her looking genuinely blank. She talked about wanting to get married and have children when she grew up, but she didn’t seem to connect this with sexuality. Yet she loved to be kissed and cuddled. She purred in my arms like a kitten. Such sensuality and innocence could hardly co-exist nowadays, I believe, when teenagers are exposed to so much sexual information and imagery. Never mind the soft-porn videos and magazines available from any High Street video store or newsagent — your average 15-certificate movie contains scenes and language that would have had half the audience ejaculating into their trousers forty years ago, and have sent the makers and distributors to gaol. No wonder kids today want to have sex as soon as they’re able. I wonder if they even bother with kissing at all, now, before they get their kit off and jump into bed.
    I was less pure-minded than Maureen, but not much more knowing. Though I indulged in vague fantasies of having sex with her, especially just before falling asleep, and had frequent wet dreams in consequence, I had no intention of seducing her, and would certainly have made a terrible hash of it if I had tried. I set my sights no higher than getting to feel her naked breasts. But that was a kind of seduction when I accomplished it.
    I had got as far as cupping one breast gently, inside her blouse, as we kissed, feeling the stitching of her brassière like Braille on my fingertips, when her Catholic conscience kicked in. In retrospect, it’s surprising that it hadn’t done so before. The trigger was a “retreat” at her school — a funny name, it seemed for me, for the event as she described it, three days of sermons, devotions and periods of compulsory silence, though the military associations were appropriate enough to its immediate effect on our relationship. It was a Dunkirk of the flesh. The visiting priest running the retreat (Maureen described him as big and grey-bearded, like pictures of God the Father, with piercing eyes that seemed to look right into your soul) had addressed the Fifth-Form girls in the presence of a grimly nodding Mother Superior on the subject of Holy Purity, and frightened them all silly with the awful consequences of desecrating their Temples of the Holy Ghost, as he designated their bodies. “If any girl here,” he thundered, and Maureen claimed that he looked especially at her as he spoke, “should cause a boy to commit a sin of impurity in thought, word or deed, by the way she dresses or behaves, she is as guilty of that sin as he. More guilty, because the male of our species is less able to control licentious desires than the female.” Afterwards the girls