by Phil Rickman
Natalie walked over and put an arm around Amber. The worldly big sister, taller and leaner and more together. ‘We can still do something. We can rescue something.’
‘We need more time, and we haven’t got it. Antony’s booked in for tonight, Ben can’t reach him on his mobile. He could turn up any time.’ Amber lowered the oven gloves; her eyes were dry. ‘Look at this place. It’s like some old workhouse.’
‘No, it’s cool,’ Jane said. ‘Really.’
‘It’s bloody freezing, Jane. I keep on at Ben to check out this damp patch under the stairs, and he avoids it. He thinks burst pipes mystically seal themselves. This makes it four leaks we’ve had since the autumn. Does that augur well?’
Jane looked up through the window, moving to her right so that one of the ridges of Stanner Rocks came into view. It was a proven scientific fact that Stanner Rocks were strange, because of the Standing Wave that altered the climate, the comparative darkness of the rock itself, holding the heat, and the thin soil where plants grew that you couldn’t find anywhere else in Britain. Jane felt that, in ancient times, Stanner Rocks would have been sacred, like some gloomy, miniature form of Ayer’s Rock in Australia.
‘I mean, until you live in a place like this you never realize what plumbing’s about,’ Amber wailed. ‘There’s miles of pipe – miles.’
‘I mean there’s an energy here,’ Jane said. ‘And it’s right on the Border. On the edge.’
‘We’re all on the edge,’ Amber said bitterly.
Ben, however, when he strode into the kitchen, seemed to have recovered – now apparently relishing the adversity, refocused.
‘I think... we’ll put Antony in the tower room.’
‘You couldn’t stop him?’ Amber said in dismay.
‘I stopped trying.’ Ben, in tight black jeans and a white shirt, was swaying like a tightrope walker re-establishing his balance. ‘The more I think about it, we don’t need the bloody Baker Street League. What we have is strong enough.’
‘Oh God,’ Amber said.
‘You don’t mind going back to your old room for a couple of nights, do you, Jane?’
‘She already has,’ Amber said. ‘Why do you want to put Antony Largo in the tower room?’
‘More of an atmosphere.’ Ben smiled at Jane. ‘Don’t you think?’
Jane must have blushed or something, because Ben smirked and said, ‘Nip up and open the windows, Jane, would you, and give the bedding a shake.’
‘Right.’
Oh well... Up the steps into the lobby, which now merged with the hall. Up the baronial stairs...
And when you got to the top of the first flight and turned right, through the fire doors, into the ill-lit passage towards the west, it was clear why this part of the house – although it probably had the best rooms – had been set aside by the Foleys as staff quarters.
The problem was, it had been dragged into the 1960s or 1970s and left there. The walls were lined with woodchip, probably to hide the damp, and it was dim and dusty, a languid light drifting from a tall, narrow window at the bottom of the passage. This area of the house needed a lot of money spending on it. Money they probably thought they’d have to spare, but now it had gone, on the basics: keeping the damp out and the heat in. Or trying to.
The first room, convenient for the stairs, was Ben and Amber’s own. What must it have been like when they first arrived here, and they were the only people sleeping in this huge house? This was Mum’s problem with Ledwardine Vicarage magnified about four times. A lot of the time, even now, Ben and Amber would be alone here during the week. Most of the part-time staff – cleaners and waiters – came in daily during the summer, or when there were guests.
‘Jane!’ The fire doors clicking together. It was Ben. ‘Forgot to give you the key.’
He strode ahead of her down the passage, near to the end, unlocking the last door on the right. Actually, she was quite glad to have him here with her. Stupid, huh?
Inside the door, there were steps up into the actual tower, and then another door. When Jane had first started work here, she’d been flattered and excited to be given the room under the witch’s-hat tower. OK, it was big, cold, needed redecorating, but it was, like, you know... the room under the witch’s-hat tower.
Ben put on the light. The room had gloomy maroon flock wallpaper, pretty old, and less than half as much furniture as a space this size needed to look vaguely comfortable – the three-quarter divan, the wooden stool serving as a bedside table, the mahogany wardrobe with the cracked mirror.
The aim, apparently, was to create an en-suite bathroom at one end, and this was actually essential before you could legitimately charge anyone for spending a night here and experiencing those incredible views across Hergest Ridge into Wales.
With the light on, all you could see through the triple windows now was a thin slash of electric mauve low in the sky, like the light under a door. Ben stood in the middle of the room, rubbing his hands.
‘Couldn’t take it, then, Jane?’
‘Sorry?’
‘You wanted out.’
‘Well, you know... look at it. It’s like sleeping in... in somewhere too big.’
‘That’s all?’
‘All?’
‘No other reason?’
‘Should there be?’ Sod this; she was giving nothing away – she was going to make him say it.
Ben leaned over his folded arms, rocking slightly. ‘So you had a perfectly untroubled night’s sleep.’
‘Don’t people usually?’
‘One of the builders – when we were having the partition wall taken down, between the hall and lobby – he stayed in here, and he didn’t want to spend a second night.’
‘Oh?’
‘He thought it was haunted.’
‘What happened?’
‘Oh... noises, he reckoned. Breathing. And he said he thought he saw a woman’s shape outlined against the window. Next morning, he was not a happy man. Said he thought we’d set him up.’
Jane struggled to bring up a smile. ‘Did you set me up?’
‘I thought... well, you’re quite interested in this sort of thing, aren’t you? Weird stuff.’
‘So-so. Ghosts are a bit... I mean, they’re usually just imprints, aren’t they? Emotional responses trapped in the atmosphere. Nothing to worry about.’ She was furious – the bastard. ‘I mean, I wish you’d told me...’
‘You’d have been expecting something then. Pointless exercise. So you wouldn’t mind moving back sometime, if necessary?’
‘Look, Ben, I wouldn’t mind spending a night in a sleeping bag on a station platform, but I’d rather have an ordinary-sized room, thanks.’
Ben grinned. ‘Ah, Jane.’
‘What?’
‘I should’ve realized the most important thing for you would be retaining your cool.’
‘Look, my mother’s—’
He lifted an eyebrow. Did he know? She thought not.
‘My mother’s a vicar. They’re not bothered by this sort of... you know.’
‘Right,’ Ben said.
That was close. She didn’t want Mum involved in anything here. This was her separate thing.
‘So you’re going to try this guy, erm... in here.’
‘Antony Largo. If you think you’re cool...’
‘I don’t!’ Jane said, smarting, going to turn down the bed clothes.
Ben smiled and shook his head and wandered out.
Left alone, Jane shook out the duvet, remembering how, when she’d come up here to dump her case that first night last weekend, and then gone down to get something to eat, she’d returned at bedtime to find the duvet had been roughly thrown back, as if someone had started to make the bed and then abandoned it.
That could’ve been Ben, couldn’t it? Setting her up.
Otherwise, just an imprint. Just an emotional response trapped in the atmosphere.
Jane sorted the bed and didn’t hang around.
5
Drink Problem
THEY’D MOVED THE bed so that it faced the window and the lights of West Malvern. From this position, on a dark night, it looked as though the lights were away in the sky, big stars. And you could feel safe, for a while.
Lol said thoughtfully, ‘Does this mean you get your own cult?’
Merrily sat up. The lights of West Malvern were now quite clearly just tall, narrow buildings on a hill.
‘All the lanes around Ledwardine full of crutches and sticks abandoned by the roadsides,’ Lol said.
‘You think this is funny, don’t you?’
And then she started to laugh, and it was one of those laughs that you could feel in your toes and the tips of your fingers and the pit of your stomach. Therapeutic, probably – a healing laugh. Oh God. Not two hours ago, she’d fed Ethel, the cat, left a second cat-meal in the timer bowl for the morning and then driven quietly away. Driven over to the granary at Prof Levin’s recording studio in the Frome Valley, for the healing – Van Morrison sang that. Such an easy, guiltless word.
The granary was a two-room tower house reached by exterior stone steps. Lol’s temporary home. Romantic. The trysting place.
He was watching Merrily, an elbow propped on the pillow to lean on. He had his little round brass-rimmed glasses on.
‘Sorry. The last time we talked about this, you were a bit nervous, but it didn’t seem like anything you couldn’t handle.’ He sat up beside her. ‘What happened?’
Where to start? She told him about Alice Meek and her nephew. And about a letter this morning from a woman in Hereford whose grandchild had cerebral palsy. Nobody she knew. The letter concluding: I said to my husband that the doctors were hopeless, so we ought to give the Church a last chance.
‘Last chance?’ Lol said. ‘Save my child or else?’
‘Show us some action, or you’re finished. And the point is, they can finish us. It’s like if you do a gig and only two people turn up... no more gigs. And gigs are what the Church is about. Hence Alpha, all the dynamic, youth-oriented stuff. A good gig. You gotta do a good gig.’
‘But isn’t that what you’re doing on Sunday nights?’
‘Well, I thought so. Only it wasn’t meant to be a healing gig. It was about, I dunno, helping people develop an inner life? But you discover that most people don’t want an inner life. They just want a good outer life, and you need to be fit and healthy for that, and if the Church can take away your ailments, hey, that’s cool. Magic. Like, if you look at the medieval Church, all those pilgrimages to the holy shrines with sick relatives on stretchers, hundreds of amazing cures attributed to St Thomas of Hereford. The Church works magic, so the Church becomes rich and influential.’
‘You’re still identifying more with Celtic hermits in caves?’
‘Maybe they were even worse. Nothing to be responsible for.’ Merrily’s head sank down into the pillow. ‘Healing’s about taking responsibility. How can you take responsibility for something that—?’
‘That you can’t totally believe is going to happen?’
‘God help me.’
‘What about this bloke?’
‘It can happen.’ She rolled away. ‘I mean, it can.’ She was sweating. ‘Jesus, am I ever going to be big enough for this job?’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Canon Jeavons. Llewellyn Jeavons. Llewellyn with two Ls, Canon with two Ns.’
‘As in loose?’
‘That’s what he said on the phone. He jokes around a lot.’
‘He doesn’t have a problem with it, then.’
‘Evidently not.’ She turned back to face Lol. ‘But then he’s a bloke.’
‘Crass and insensitive?’
‘Confident of his tradition.’
Lol said, ‘What’s basically wrong with this idea of a healing group? Responsibility shared with Catholics and Methodists and... whoever.’
‘Pentecostalists?’
Lol sighed. ‘If you must.’ His parents had been out on that fevered frontier, accusing him of amplifying the Devil’s music, then swapping his picture on the mantelpiece for one of Jesus Christ. This had been one of the principal milestones on the road to Victoria Ward and the syringe-wielding Dr Gascoigne, immortalized in the creepy, cathartic ‘Heavy Medication Day’, on the new album.
‘It’s probably the best solution,’ Merrily said. ‘But it’s got to be more than healing. I don’t want to run an all-singing, all-dancing medicine show.’
‘Sometimes healing’s a by-product. Like when you’re in love, you feel healthier.’
‘That’s a good point. Holistic.’
She felt better. More complete. It should always be like this. Yesterday, she’d thought it could be; she hadn’t told him why, and there didn’t seem much point now.
However, later, lying spooned on the rim of sleep, she heard Lol’s voice: hesitant, feeling his breath warm on her ear in the darkness.
‘There’s a house. In Ledwardine.’
A hollow moment.
‘For sale.’ Lol said.
‘Oh.’
‘A small, terraced house in Church Street. Did you know?’
‘Lucy’s house,’ she said. ‘No, I didn’t know, not until... it was in yesterday’s Hereford Times.’
‘And the week before’s. I found it while I was making a fire with the paper. It kind of leapt up at me.’
‘I only saw it yesterday. You’d think someone would have...’
But why should anyone have told her about it? For the past year, it had just been a weekend cottage for two solicitors from Luton. They never came to church; she’d met them, once, briefly. It was a small investment; they didn’t care whose house it had been, and because they weren’t there during the week no estate agent’s sign had gone up.
‘I’m never going to be a star,’ Lol said, ‘but it looks like I might make a living out of it for a while. Enough to cobble together a deposit. If I do the tour and the album sells a few. Can’t stay here indefinitely, Prof needs the space. Every time somebody comes in to record, I’m back in the loft over the studio. It’s not really convenient for anybody.’
‘Did you ring them up about it – the agents?’
‘I thought I’d better talk to you first.’
Lol was rebuilding foundations. He’d faced an audience again after many years, some of them spent on psychiatric wards. Circumstances had meant she hadn’t been there for him when the unforgiving lights came up; she never again wanted him to feel alone.
‘Lol...’ Her throat was dry. ‘It’s gone. It’s sold.’
‘The house?’
‘I’m so sorry. I rang the agents this morning.’
A cloudy silence. Across the room, the lights of Malvern blurred, and she realized that her eyes had filled with tears.
Lol said, ‘You rang the agents?’
‘Well, I... It just seemed like the answer to the problem. Separate houses, just two minutes’ walk away. I thought it must be meant. I thought how delighted Lucy Devenish would have been to have you living there. And I thought that if you couldn’t raise the deposit, maybe we could somehow do it jointly.’
‘You’d do that?’
‘Of course.’
Lol expelled a long breath and put both his arms around her.
Christ. She closed her eyes; the last thing she wanted was for him to feel grateful.
‘But it’s gone,’ she said.
Gone. In the paper for a whole week, and we never saw it. And then we both did, too late. Like it wasn’t meant to happen at all, and the point was being underlined for us.
‘It’s become a very desirable place, Ledwardine,’ Merrily said. She shivered slightly, unaccountably, in his arms. A goose walking over her grave.
For a time – just around the time he was realizing he wasn’t never going to make it as a rock star, or even out of farming – Danny Thomas had been into some serious drinking. Never quite an alky, mind, but his name was written in big, dripping letters on the
walls of half a dozen pubs in Kington and the Radnor Valley.
It ended when he got banned for a year. Greta wasn’t up for ferrying him to and from the half-dozen pubs, so that was it: Danny stayed home. Cheaper than the Betty Ford clinic, and the music was better.
And it was during this period of near-abstinence that he’d come to realize that what he needed more than the booze was crowds sometimes – loud, mindless crowds. So when he’d got his licence back he’d rationed himself to two nights a week and made sure he didn’t go out until half an hour before closing time, when the pubs was packed and so many folks was pissed it was almost contagious.
Which was how come Danny missed all the action tonight, down at the Eagle in New Radnor, when Sebbie Three Farms had to be escorted to his Range Rover.
They was all still talking about it when Danny arrived at twenty past ten. All familiar faces in here tonight, from Gwilym Bufton, the feed dealer, ole Joe Cadwallader, from Harpton, young Robin Thorogood, the American from Old Hindwell, with his missus and his walking stick.
‘Moves like lightning, has him up against the wall, both hands round his neck, knee in his crotch,’ Gwilym said. ‘Never seen Sebbie move as fast – not after seven Scotches, anyway.’
‘So who was this?’ Danny asked, fetching his beer over. ‘Who was Sebbie having a go at?’
‘Tommy Francis, Felinfawr.’ Gwilym shaking his head in disbelief. ‘Tommy Francis! Been mates since Tommy had the hunt kennels. Only feller yereabouts dares take the piss out of Sebbie. Went too far tonight, mind. Oh hell, aye.’
‘Thought he was gonner kill him,’ Jed Begley said. Jed, who built scrambling bikes the other side of Evenjobb, did a fair impression of Sebbie. ‘ “Whadja mean by that, hey? Whadja mean?” ’
‘But what did he say?’ Danny asked him. ‘What did Tommy say?’
‘All he said—’ Gwilym looked round for support. ‘All he said was, “Must be frustratin’ for you, seein’ that boy comin’ home to this tasty piece, thinkin’ what’s he got that I en’t?” That right?’
‘Close,’ Robin Thorogood said. ‘Surprised the hell out of me, way the guy reacted.’
‘It’s about ground, it is,’ Gwilym said. ‘Always comes back to ground round yere. Sebbie won’t never be happy till he’s lord of all he surveys, and he can’t survey all his ground from any direction without he closes one eye to block out The Nant.’