by Phil Rickman
‘How awful.’
‘That was when I decided to get out. I doubt my father even noticed I was gone. Had another mouth to feed by then. A girl again, unfortunately.’
‘Menna?’
‘She would be... ten months old when I left. It was a long time before I began to feel guilty about abandoning her – fifteen years or more. And by then it was too late. They’d probably forgotten I’d ever existed. I expect he was even grateful I’d gone – another opportunity to try for a son, at no extra cost. A farmer with no son is felt to be lacking in something.’
‘Any luck?’
‘My mother miscarried, apparently,’ Mrs Buckingham said brusquely. ‘There was a hysterectomy.’ She shrugged. ‘I never saw them again.’
‘Where did you go?’
‘Found a job in Hereford, in a furniture shop. The people there were very good to me. They gave me a room above the shop, next to the storeroom. Rather frightening at night. All those empty chairs: I would imagine people sitting there, silently, waiting for me when I came back from night classes. Character-building, though, I suppose. I got two A levels and a grant for teacher-training college.’
It all sounded faintly Dickensian to Merrily, though it could have been no earlier than the 1970s.
‘So you never went back?’ The phone was ringing.
‘After college, I went to work in Hampshire, near Portsmouth. Then a husband, kids – grown up now. No, I never went back, until quite recently. A neighbour’s daughter – Judith – kept me informed, through occasional letters. She was another farmer’s daughter, from a rather less primitive farm. Please get that phone call, if you want.’
Merrily nodded, went through to the office.
‘As it happens’ – closing the scullery door – ‘she’s here now.’
‘Listen, I’m sorry,’ Eileen Cullen said. ‘I couldn’t think what else to tell her. Showed up last night, still unhappy about the sister’s death and getting no co-operation from the doctor. I didn’t have much time to bother with her either. I just thought somebody ought to persuade her to forget about Mr Weal, and go home, get on with her life. And I thought she’d take it better coming from a person of the cloth such as your wee self.’
‘Forgive me, but that doesn’t sound like you.’
‘No. Well...’
‘So she didn’t say anything about holding a special service in church then?’
‘Merrily, the problem is I’m on the ward in one minute.’
‘Bloody hell, Eileen—’
‘Aw, Jesus, all the woman wants is her sister laid to rest in a decent, holy fashion. She’s one of your fellow Christians. Tell her you’ll say a few prayers for the poor soul, and leave it at that.’
There was an unexpected undercurrent here.
‘What happened with Mr Weal after I left the other night?’
‘Well, he came out. Eventually.’
‘Eventually?’
‘He came out when she did. And he chose to accompany her down to the mortuary.’
‘Is that normal?’
‘Well, of course it isn’t fockin’ normal. We’re not talking about a normal feller here! It was a special concession. Merrily, I really have to go. If the sister’s tardy, how can you expect the nurses—’
‘Eileen!’
‘That’s all I can tell you. Just persuade her to go home. She’ll do no good for herself.’
‘What’s that supposed to—’
Cullen hung up.
It was dark outside now, and the thorns were ticking against the scullery window.
When Merrily returned to the kitchen, Barbara Buckingham was standing under a wall lamp, her silk scarf dangling from one hand as if she was wondering whether or not to leave.
‘Mrs Watkins, I don’t want to be a pain...’
‘Merrily. Don’t be silly. Sit down. There’s no—’
‘I try to be direct, you see. In my childhood, no one was direct. They’d never meet your eyes. Keep your head down, avoid direct conflict, run neither with the English nor the Welsh. Keep your head down and move quietly, in darkness.’
The woman had been too long out of it, Merrily thought, as the kettle boiled. She’d turned her spartan childhood into something Gothic. ‘Tell me about the... possession.’
‘In essence, I believe, your job is to liberate them. The possessed, I mean.’
Merrily carefully took down two mugs from the crockery shelf. ‘Milk?’ Through the open door, she could still hear that damned rosebush scratching at the scullery window.
‘A little. No sugar.’
Merrily brought milk from the fridge. She left her own tea black, and carried both mugs to the table.
‘It’s a big word, Barbara.’
‘Yes.’
‘And often abused – I have to say that.’
‘We should both be direct.’
‘And I should tell you I’ve yet to encounter a valid case of possession. But then I’ve not been doing this very long.’
‘It may be the wrong word. Perhaps I only used it to get your attention.’ Looking frustrated, Barbara tossed her scarf onto the table. ‘I’ve attended church most of my life. Much of the time out of habit, I admit; occasionally out of need. I have no time for... mysticism, that’s what I’m trying to say. I’m not fey.’
Merrily smiled. ‘No.’
‘But Menna has been possessed for years. Do you know what I mean? Weal suffocated her in life; now he won’t let her go after death.’
Cullen: He asks for a bowl and a cloth and he washes her. Very tenderly, reverently you might say. And then he’ll wash himself: his face, his hands, in the same water.
And followed her down to the mortuary. Did Barbara know about that?
Merrily heard a key in the side door, beyond the scullery, and then footsteps on the back stairs: Jane coming in, going up to her apartment.
‘They were our family solicitors,’ Barbara said. ‘Everybody’s solicitors, in those days, it seemed. Weal and Son... the first Weal was Jeffery’s grandfather, the “and son” was Jeffery’s father R.T. Weal. Weal and Son, of Kington, and their gloomy old offices with the roll-top desks and a Victorian chair like a great dark throne. I first remember Jeffery when he was fifteen going on fifty. A lumbering, sullen boy, slow-moving, slow-thinking, single-minded, his future written in stone – Weal and Son and Son, even unto the ends of the earth. I hated them, the complete unchangingness of them – same chair, same desk, same dark tweed suits, same dark car creeping up the track.’
‘Eileen Cullen told me she thought he probably became a father figure,’ Merrily said. ‘After Menna had spent some years looking after her own father. Your dad was widowed, presumably.’
‘Sixteen or seventeen years ago. I had a letter from Judith – my friend in Old Hindwell. My father wouldn’t have told me; I no longer existed for him. And he was ailing, too. Later I learned that Menna never had a boyfriend or any social life, so she lost the best years of her life to her bloody father, and the rest of it to Weal. Who, of course, became the proverbial tower of strength when the old man died.’
‘He looked after her then?’
‘Seized his chance with a weak, unworldly girl. I... came to find her about two years ago. I’d recently taken early retirement. My daughter had just got married, my husband was away – I was at a very loose end. One morning, I simply got in my car and drove up here, and knocked on their door...’ She stared into space. ‘Menna seemed... unsurprised, unmoved, entirely incurious. I’d forgotten what these people can be like. She just stood there in the doorway – didn’t even ask me in. Talked in an offhand way, as though I was a neighbour whom she saw occasionally but didn’t particularly care for.’
‘And you actually hadn’t seen each other since she was a baby?’
The woman shook her head. There was distance now in her voice. ‘She... wore no make-up. She was pale, in an unnatural, etiolated kind of way, like grass that’s been covered up. And quite beautiful. But she di
dn’t seem to either know or care who I was. She might as well already have been dead.’
Jane nicked the cordless from Mum’s bedroom and took it upstairs to the trio of attic rooms that now made up her apartment: bedroom, sitting room–study and a half-finished bathroom. She put on the lights, took off her jacket, sat on the bed. Thinking about poor Gomer going home on his own to a house full of Minnie’s things. It made her cry.
Fucking death!
Jane dried her eyes on a corner of the pillowcase. Gomer wouldn’t cry. Gomer would get on with it. But how much in life was really worth getting on with? Where was it leading? Was Minnie any closer now to knowing the answer? Oh God.
Jane picked up the phone and looked at it and shrugged. If this didn’t work, it didn’t work. She rolled up her sleeve. The Livenight number was written in fibre-tip on the inside of her left arm. Jane pushed in the numbers, asked for Tania Beauman. The switchboard put her on hold and made her listen to Dire Straits – which could have been worse, though Jane would never admit it.
She leaned back against the headboard and contemplated the Mondrian walls, wondering if anyone else had ever had the idea of painting the squares and rectangles between sixteenth-century beams in different colours. She wondered what Eirion would think of it.
If she was ever to bring him up here.
If? Time was running out if she was going to fit in two serious lovers before she hit twenty. Serious could mean six months. Longer.
‘Tania Beauman.’
‘Oh, hi.’ Jane sat up. ‘You know who this is?’
‘Oh,’ said Tania.
‘Hey, don’t be like that. I may have cracked it for you.’
‘Cracked... what?’
Jane swung her feet to the floor. ‘I’m telling you, Tania, it wasn’t easy. She really didn’t want to know. Livenight? Pff! But I’m, like, “Look, Merrily, being elitist is what put the Church of England in the hole it’s in today. You can’t just turn a blind eye to paganism and pretend it isn’t happening all over again. Or before you know it there’ll be more of them around than you...” ’
‘That’s a very cogent argument,’ Tania said, ‘but why aren’t I talking to your mother?’
‘Because I’ve, like, nearly got her convinced – but I’m not quite there yet.’
‘Well, I have to tell you, you don’t have much time.’
‘But do I have the incentive, Tania? That’s the point.’
‘I wondered if there’d be a point.’
‘To be blunt,’ Jane said, ‘I need a very, very small favour.’
Home burial. It was becoming, if not exactly commonplace, then less of an upper-class phenomenon than it used to be. Merrily tried to explain this to Barbara Buckingham: that it was a secular thing, or sometimes a green issue; that you often didn’t even need official permission.
‘The main drawback for most people is the risk of taking value off their house if and when it’s sold. No one wants a grave in the garden.’
‘He’s not...’ Barbara had picked up her scarf again; she began to wind it around her hands. ‘He is not going to bury Menna; that’s the worst of it. She’s going into a... tomb.’ She pulled the scarf tight. ‘A mausoleum.’
‘Oh.’ To be loved like that.
‘He has a Victorian house at Old Hindwell,’ Barbara said. ‘The former rectory. Do you know Old Hindwell?’
‘Not really. Is it in this diocese, I can’t remember?’
‘Possibly. It’s very close to the border, about three miles from Kington, on the edge of the Forest. Radnor Forest. Weal’s house isn’t remote, but it has no immediate neighbours. In the garden there’s a... structure – wine store, ice house, air-raid shelter, I don’t know precisely what it is, but that’s where she’s going to be.’
‘Like a family vault?’
‘It’s sick. I went to see a solicitor in Hereford this morning. He told me there was nothing I could do. A man has a perfect legal right to keep his dead wife in a private museum.’
‘And as a solicitor himself, your brother-in-law is going to be fully aware of his rights.’
‘Don’t call him that!’ Barbara turned away. ‘Whole thing’s obscene.’
‘He loved her,’ Merrily said uncertainly. ‘He doesn’t want to be parted from her. He wants to feel that she’s near him. That’s the usual reason.’
‘No! It’s a statement of ownership. Possession is – what is it? – nine points of the law?’
‘That word again. Do you mind if I smoke?’
‘Go ahead.’
Merrily lit a Silk Cut, pulled over an ashtray.
‘What about the funeral itself? Is it strictly private? I mean, are you kind of barred?’
‘My dear!’ Barbara dropped the scarf. ‘It’s going to be a highly public affair. A service in the village hall.’
‘Not the church?’
‘They don’t have a church any more. The minister holds his services in the village hall.’
‘Ah. And the minister is...?’
‘Father Ellis.’
‘Nick Ellis.’ Merrily nodded. This explained a lot.
‘I don’t know why so many Anglicans are choosing to call themselves “Father” now, as if they’re courting Catholicism. You know this man?’
‘I know of him. He’s a charismatic minister, which means—’
‘Not happy-clappy?’ Barbara’s eyes narrowed in distaste. ‘Everybody hugging one another?’
‘That’s one aspect of it. Nick Ellis is also a member of a group known as the Sea of Light. It’s a movement inside the Anglican Church, which maintains that the Church has become too obsessed with property. Keepers of buildings rather than souls. They claim the Holy Spirit flows through people, not stones. So a Sea of Light minister is more than happy to hold services in village halls, community centres – and private homes, of course.’
‘And the same goes for burial.’
‘I would guess so.’
‘So Jeffery has an accomplice in the clergy.’ Barbara Buckingham stood up. ‘He would have, wouldn’t he? It’s such a tight little world.’
‘Look,’ Merrily said, ‘I know how you feel, but I really don’t think there’s anything you can do about it. And if Nick Ellis is conducting a funeral service at the village hall and a ceremony in J.W. Weal’s back garden, I’m not sure I can hold another one in a church. However—’
‘Mrs Watkins... Merrily...’ She’d failed with the solicitor, now she was trying the Church.
Merrily said awkwardly, ‘I’m really not sure this is a spiritual problem.’
‘Oh, but it is.’ Barbara splayed her fingers on the table, leaned towards Merrily. ‘She comes to me, you see...’
The bereavement ghost: the visitor. Maybe sitting in a familiar chair or walking in the garden, or commonly – like Menna – in dreams. Barbara Buckingham, staying at a hotel near Kington, had dreamt of her sister every night since her death.
Menna was wearing a white shift or shroud, with darkness around her.
‘You’d prefer, no doubt, to think the whole thing is a projection of my guilt,’ Barbara said.
‘Perhaps of your loss, even though you didn’t know her. Perhaps an even greater loss, because of all those years you might have known her, and now you realize you never will. Is your husband...?’
‘In France on a buying trip. He has an antiques business.’
‘How do you feel when you wake up?’
‘Anxious.’ Barbara drank some tea very quickly. ‘And drained. Exhausted and debilitated.’
‘Have you seen a doctor?’
‘Yes. As it happens’ – a mild snort – ‘I’ve seen Menna’s doctor, Collard Banks-Morgan. We were at the same primary school. “Dr Coll”, they all call him now. But if you were suggesting that a little Valium might help to relax me, I didn’t go to consult him about myself.’
‘You wanted to know why she’d suffered a stroke.’
‘I gatecrashed his surgery at the school in Old Hindwel
l. Made a nuisance of myself, not that it made any difference. Bloody man told me I was asking him to be unethical, preempting the post-mortem. He was like that as a child, terribly proper. If they’d had a head boy at the primary school, it would’ve been Collard Banks-Morgan.’
‘Did you find out if there was a long-term blood pressure problem?’
‘No.’ Barbara Buckingham put on her scarf at last. ‘But I will.’
‘Look,’ Merrily said, ‘why don’t we say a prayer for Menna before you go? For her spirit. Why don’t we pop over to the church?’
‘I’ve taken too much of your time.’
‘I think it might help.’ Fifth rule of Deliverance: whether you believe the story or not, never leave things without at least a prayer. ‘I would like to help, if I can.’
And there was more to this. Merrily was curious now. Everything suggested there was more. Why should this woman feel robbed of a sister she’d never really known?
‘Then come to the funeral,’ Barbara said.
‘Me?’
‘Is that too much of an imposition?’
‘Well, no but—’
‘You were at the hospital with her.’
Merrily agonized then about whether she should tell Barbara Buckingham what she’d witnessed in the side ward. It was clear Cullen hadn’t or Barbara would have mentioned that. She remembered the feeling she’d had then of something ritualistic about the way Weal was putting dabs of water on Menna’s corpse and then himself. Refusing to let the nurses try to feed her. Refusing to let Merrily pray for her. Wanting to do everything himself. It was, she supposed, a kind of possession.
But she decided to say nothing. It might only inflame an already fraught situation.
‘OK. I’ll try to come. What day?’
‘Saturday. Three-thirty. Old Hindwell village hall.’
‘That should be OK. If something comes up, where can I get a message to you?’
‘Doesn’t matter. If you aren’t there, you aren’t there.’
‘I’ll do my best. Have you... spoken to Mr Weal?’
‘I’m not ready for that yet,’ Barbara said. ‘But I shall do. Thank you, Merrily.’