Midwinter of the Spirit

by Phil Rickman

  ‘It’s possible,’ Lol said.

  ‘And the blood… she actually… That’s extraordinary.’ Dick rubbed his hands together, looking up at a plaster cornice above Lol’s head. ‘And yet, you know, while it might seem horrible to the likes of us, she’s spent quite a few years scrabbling about in the earth, ferreting out old skulls with worms in their eyes.’

  ‘This was a bit different, though.’

  Yes, it was, Dick conceded. In fact, yes, what they were looking at here was really quite an elaborate fantasy structure, on the lines of one of those impossibly complicated computer games his son James used to play before he discovered rock music. Except this wasn’t dragons and demons; this was built on layers of actual history.

  ‘Let’s examine it. Let’s pull it apart.’ Dick dragged a foolscap pad towards him, began to draw circles and link them with lines.

  ‘What’ve we got? An extremely intelligent girl with a degree in archaeology, some years’ experience in the field… and this absorbing, fanatical interest in the Iron Age civilization, which became an obsession – the Celtic jewellery, the strange woollens. She still wear that awful sheepskin waistcoat thing?’

  ‘Not recently.’

  ‘That’s one good thing. Anyway… suddenly she’s aware she can explain this obsession in the context of her own family history. She’s been told the family roots in that particular spot go back to the Dark Ages and before – which is probably complete nonsense, but that’s irrelevant. She forms the idea that this is what she was born to do, because of the place she was born – on the side of this Iron Age fort or whatever it is.’

  Dick drew a crude hill with battlements.

  ‘Perhaps believing… that there’s some great secret here… that only she can recover. Some Holy Grail. But of course… what she really wants to find is a key… to her father’s suicide.’

  Dick smiled happily at Lol. He loved finding cross-references.

  ‘Who knows, Laurence? Who knows what horrors lodged in the mind of a two-year-old child in circumstances like that? And Dinedor Hill never talked about, Denny going dark with anger if the subject of their father arises. So much mystery. Well, she doesn’t want to believe her old man topped himself because he messed up his finances. It’s got to be more profound than that.’

  ‘It’s profound enough,’ Lol said. ‘By losing the farm, he let down his family, and his ancestors. Scores of farmers have killed themselves in the past few years for similar reasons. And we’re talking about a very historic family.’

  ‘Absolutely. She’s bunched all that together into an epic personal quest, with all the pseudo-mystical and supernatural overtones of James’s trashy computer games.’

  ‘Is that a good thing, though, Dick? Moon living at the centre of a fantasy?’

  ‘I don’t see that it’s necessarily bad. And if it’s all going to be providing material for her book… Do we know what kind of book she has in mind?’

  ‘A history of Dinedor Hill seen through the eyes of the people who live there now—’

  ‘Splendid,’ Dick interrupted.

  ‘—and the people who lived there over two thousand years ago.’

  ‘Constructed from archaeological evidence and what she feels is her own instinctive knowledge of her ancestors? Well, that could be a very valid book, couldn’t it? One can certainly imagine a publisher going for that. I could talk to some people myself.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Lol had been doubtful about this book from the start. A book wasn’t like a song; you couldn’t knock it out in a couple of hours when the inspiration was there. ‘She doesn’t seem organized enough for anything like that. For instance, Denny’s managing the shop for a few days while she gets the barn sorted – supposedly. But this morning virtually nothing had changed: everything still in boxes. Which was what Denny said it’d be like: chaos – and Moon living inside herself.’

  Dick shrugged. ‘So after the excitement of the move, there’s a period of emotional exhaustion. Then she dusts herself off, starts to pick up the pieces. Then the rehab begins. I’ll give her a couple of days and then I’ll go and have a chat myself. Or we can both go, yes?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘You don’t seem too sure. Is there something else?’

  Dick’s hopeless, isn’t he? Dick’s a dead loss. He doesn’t believe in anything outside of textbook psychology.

  Moon had predicted that Dick would come up with a beautiful theory, and he had – without Lol even mentioning her story about seeing her father at the window.

  You have to report back to Dick? You’ll tell him about this?

  Dick tore off the top sheet of the pad and crumpled it up. ‘I think you’d better spit it out, Lol.’

  Yes, he had to. There was a professional arrangement here. Dick had insisted Lol should be paid a retainer to keep an eye on Moon and report back once a week. It was complicated: at first Lol had been paying Dick for analysis; now Dick was paying Lol.

  In his kindly way, Dick was devious. Lol was still not sure whether observing Moon was not supposed to be part of his own therapy.

  Women had been Lol’s problem. Women and religion.

  He’d wound up first consulting Dick Lyden during the summer, while still trying to sell his roses-round-the-door cottage on the edge of an orchard out at Ledwardine. To which he’d moved with a woman called Alison who he thought had rescued him from the past and the shadow of the psychiatric hospital. But Alison had her own reasons for coming to Ledwardine, and they didn’t include Lol.

  The people who actually had tried to rescue him had come from the village itself. They included a brusque old biddy called Lucy Devenish, now dead. And also the parish priest-in-charge.

  At this stage in Lol’s life, priests of any kind were to be avoided. His parents had been drawn into this awful evangelical-fundamentalist Christian church and had decided that Lol, with his strange songs and his dubious lifestyle, was no longer their son. At his mother’s graveside, Lol’s father had turned his back on him. Lol had henceforth been suspicious of everything in a dog-collar that was not a dog.

  Until the Vicar of Ledwardine.

  Who in the end had been the reason for him leaving the village. The Vicar was, after all, a very busy and respected person, and Lol was this pathetic little sometimes-songwriter living on hackwork and royalties from before the fall. He wasn’t sure she realized how he felt. He was sure she didn’t need this.

  So he left her his black cat and moved to Hereford, putting his bits of furniture in store and lodging for a while in a pub just down the street from Dick Lyden. Dick’s local, as it happened – also Denny Moon’s. Which had led to several sessions in Denny’s recording studio and a few consultation sessions with Dick, because Lol still couldn’t rely on his own mental equilibrium.

  Christ, Dick had said one afternoon, you know more about this bloody trade than I do. Fascinated by Lol’s extensive knowledge of psychiatry – absorbed over hours, then weeks and months spent in the medical library at a lax and decaying loony-bin in Oxfordshire. Apart from a general self-esteem deficit, this is probably your principal problem – you’re a kind of mental hypochondriac. Perhaps you need to help diagnose other people for a while, to take your mind off it.

  Loonies taking over the practice. The idea had really appealed to Dick: the idea of Lol keeping an experienced eye on another of his clients – twenty-something, gorgeous, weird. Dick loved it when clients could help each other, his practice becoming a big family. It was still small, this city; he liked the way relationships and associations developed an organic life, spread like creeper on a wall, and therefore strengthened his own latent roots in Hereford.

  Thus, Lol had been introduced to Katherine Moon – and perhaps also because Dick couldn’t quite get a handle on Moon.

  ‘Her father’s ghost,’ Dick said calmly.

  ‘Twice.’

  ‘Right.’ Dick hunched intently forward. ‘Now, think carefully about this, Lol. What effect did this alleged manif
estation have on her? What kind of an experience was it? Soothing? Frightening? Cathartic?’

  ‘Not frightening.’

  ‘So, a man’s face at the window at dead of night. A young woman all alone in a still-strange dwelling… and she’s not frightened. What does that tell us?’

  ‘She said she had the impression he was more scared than she was. Disturbed and confused. She thought he didn’t recognize her. Didn’t know who she was.’

  ‘Interesting.’

  ‘She said she wanted to tell him it was OK.’

  Dick spread his hands. ‘Moon as healer.’

  ‘She wants him to find peace.’

  ‘And when he does, she will too,’ Dick said. ‘I really don’t see a problem there. Seems to be all bubbling away quite satisfactorily in Moon’s subconscious. She finds a dead crow and inflicts upon the poor bird all of her not inconsiderable knowledge of Celtic crow-lore. The crow’s been sent by the ancestors to give her the sight. So what’s she going to see first?’

  ‘That’s very good, Dick.’

  ‘It makes sense, my boy. It’s about belonging, isn’t it? Look at me. I do feel I’ve found my spiritual home here in this city – so tiny after London, and knowable. Ruth tells me I’m continually pulling this town to my bosom. But a hill… a hill’s much more embraceable, isn’t it?’ Dick leaned over to the window to scan the horizon. ‘You know, I’m not even sure I know which one it is.’

  ‘The one with all the trees.’

  In the afternoon sunshine, the woods were a golden crust on the long, shallow loaf.

  ‘Hmm,’ Dick turned away, ‘not particularly imposing, is it? And this was where the first settled community was? This hill is what you might call the mother of Hereford, I suppose.’

  ‘The holy hill.’

  ‘Super,’ Dick said with firm satisfaction. ‘One must feel a weight of responsibility to one’s ancestors if one was born on a holy hill. And her father’s suicide… a ready-made open wound for her to heal?’

  Lol felt unhappy. He didn’t like the way Dick seemed to assume that once you’d made a neat psychological package out of something, that was it. Sorted. In Lol’s experience, real life was endlessly messy.

  Dick leaned back in his leather swivel-rocker, hands comfortably enfolded over his lightbulb gut. ‘The way we create our destiny on an epic, computer-game scale – would that it was as simple for all of us. Do you know, I rather suspect there’s a paper in this. Let’s go and see her. What are you doing tomorrow morning?’

  ‘So you think it was a dream?’ Lol said.

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Her father – a dream? Or an invention?’

  ‘Well, good God, man,’ Dick threw up his arms, ‘what the hell else could it have been?’

  9

  Clerical Chic

  DRIVING HOME, MERRILY hardly noticed the countryside: the shambling black and white farms and cottages, the emptied orchards. Over it all, as though bevelled in the windscreen glass, hovered the unchanging, weathered face of the archaic monument that was Canon T. H. B. Dobbs.

  That silent confrontation in the Cathedral had erased time. She could no longer remember praying in Bishop Stanbury’s beautiful chantry – only the stumbling in and the creeping out. The interim was like an alcoholic haze.

  But she had her answer.

  Didn’t she just?

  In the late afternoon the wind had died, leaving the sky lumpy and congealed like a cold, fried breakfast. Beneath it the historic village of Ledwardine looked sapped and brittle, the black and white buildings lifeless, as indeed several now were. Nothing remained, for instance, of Cassidy’s Country Kitchen except a sign and some peeling apple-transfers on the dark glass; and five For Sale signs had sprouted between Church Street and Old Barn Lane.

  The village looked like it needed care and love and a shot of something – an injection of spirit. Of God, perhaps? Introduced by a conscientious, caring priest without selfish ambitions she wasn’t equipped to fulfil?

  Confess: you were stimulated. You’d had a meaningful brush with the paranormal and you wanted to know more. In fact – admit it – it was you that Huw Owen was addressing when he said prospective Deliverance ministers should analyse their motives, consider if they needed evidence of life after death to sustain their faith, proof of the existence of supernatural evil to convince them of a power for good.

  Huw had been full of foreboding. Jane had been dismissive. Only Mick Hunter was enthusiastic, and Mick Hunter was a politician.

  And now God had arbitrated, signalling – in the silence of Canon T. H. B. Dobbs – His unequivocal negative.

  Of course, that could have been pure coincidence – if we’re being rational about this.

  But the compulsion to rush into the Cathedral, the waiting chantry, Dobbs being right there when she emerged? She’d wanted a sign, she’d received a sign. End of story. Later this evening she would phone the Bishop and tell him what wasn’t, after all, going to happen.

  Mature trees seemed to push the old vicarage back from the village centre. Beneath them was parked a lurid luminous-green Fiesta.

  Which had to be something to do with Jane. If it was a boyfriend, Merrily only hoped he was under twenty.

  Because of the size of the house, Jane had taken over the entire top floor, formerly attics, as her private apartment, and had finally re-emulsioned her sitting-room/study as the Dutch painter Mondrian might have envisaged it – the squares and rectangles between the timbers in different primary colours. If the Inspector of Listed Buildings ever turned up, the kid was on her own.

  She wasn’t on her own up there now, though, was she? Merrily edged the Volvo around the little car and parked in the driveway. Although she talked a lot about ‘totty’, Jane’s relations with boys had been curiously restrained. You waited with a certain trepidation for The Big One, because the kid didn’t do things by halves, and the first stirring of real love would probably send her virginity spinning straight out of the window.

  So Merrily was half-relieved when she opened the front door to find Jane in the hall with a girl in the same school uniform.

  An older girl, though not as vividly sophisticated as Jane’s last – ill-fated – friend, Colette Cassidy. This one was ethereal, with long, red, soft-spun hair which floated behind her as she gazed around.

  ‘Oh, hi. I was just going to show Rowenna the apartment.’ Jane gestured vaguely at Merrily. ‘That’s the Reverend Mum.’

  The girl came over and actually shook hands.

  Jane sat down on the stairs. ‘Rowenna’s dad’s with the SAS.’

  ‘With the Army,’ Rowenna said discreetly. ‘This is a really amazing house, Mrs Watkins. Wonderfully atmospheric. You can feel its memories kind of vibrating in the oak beams. I was just saying to Jane, if I lived here I think I’d just keep going round hugging beams and things. Our place is really new and boring, with fitted cupboards and wardrobes and things.’

  ‘I bet it’s a lot easier to heat and keep clean, though,’ Merrily said ruefully. ‘You live locally, Rowenna?’

  ‘Well, you know, up towards Credenhill, where the base is.’ Rowenna wrinkled her nose. ‘I wish we were down here. It’s on a completely different plane. The past is real here. You feel you could just slip into it.’

  ‘Right,’ Merrily said. ‘If that’s what you want.’

  ‘Yes.’ Rowenna didn’t blink. ‘Most of the time, yes.’

  Merrily thought it was a sad indictment of society when young people wanted not so much to change the world as to change it back – to some golden age which almost certainly never was.

  ‘Oh, hey, listen to this!’ Jane sprang up. ‘Rowenna’s dad goes running – right? – with Mick Hunter.’

  ‘Well, not exactly.’ Rowenna looked a bit uncomfortable. ‘The Bishop has this arrangement to go along with the guys on some of their routine cross-country runs. It’s kind of irregular, apparently. I’m not really supposed to talk about it.’

  God, thought Merril
y, he’d just have to go training with the SAS, wouldn’t he?

  ‘Isn’t that just so cool?’ Jane drawled cynically.

  Merrily smiled.

  ‘She’s not what I expected at all.’ Rowenna went to sit on Jane’s old sofa, staring up at the Mondrian walls. ‘Most of the women priests you see around look kind of bedraggled. But with that suit and the black stockings and everything, she makes the dogcollar seem like… I don’t know, a fashion accessory.’

  ‘Clerical chic,’ Jane said. ‘Don’t tell her, for God’s sake. She only stopped wearing that awful ankle-length cassock because this guy was turned on by all those buttons to undo.’

  ‘Which guy?’

  ‘Her former organist, creepy little git.’

  ‘No special person in her life?’

  ‘Only the Big Guy with the long beard – and the Bishop.’

  Rowenna shot her a look.

  ‘Hey, just professionally,’ said Jane, ‘I hope. Sure, the first time I saw him, I thought, wow, yeah, this is the goods. But then I couldn’t believe I’d been that shallow. Besides, he’s got a wife and kids.’

  ‘Whatever that counts for these days.’

  ‘Yeah, he’d probably quite like to get his leg over Mum. If you can keep it inside the priesthood, it probably saves a lot of hassle. I just hope she’s more sensible. You want a coffee?’

  ‘No thanks, I have to be off in a minute.’ Rowenna stood up and moved across to Jane’s bookcase. ‘You’ve got it all here, haven’t you? Personal transformation, past-life regression, communicating with Nature spirits…’

  ‘Yeah, I’m a sad New Age weirdo. Don’t spread it around.’

  ‘It’s not weird to be interested in what’s going to happen to us. Do you do anything like, you know, meditation or anything like that?’

  ‘I’ve thought about it after… when I once had a couple of odd things happen to me.’

  Rowenna sat down again. ‘Go on.’

  ‘It was probably just imagination. I mean, you can make something out of everything, can’t you? Like, Mum, she reckons she sometimes gets these images of blue and gold when she’s saying her prayers, and so she connects it with God because that’s like the container she’s in. But it could be anything, couldn’t it?’