Midwinter of the Spirit

by Phil Rickman

  Mum? Does she mean Mum? Jane found herself holding her breath.

  ‘Do you know what I’m talking about?’

  ‘Well… maybe.’ Mum had sometimes talked of experiences she’d had in churches, visions of a cosmic benevolence in blue and gold, the feeling that she really had to—

  Don’t tell her what Mum is!

  Astonishingly, Angela held up a hand. ‘No, you don’t have to explain – as long as you understand.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Jane breathed out. Jesus Christ.

  Angela was gazing intently at the cards, her attention locked on the layout. She was absolutely still, as though she and the cards were encased in glass. Eventually, without looking up, she said, ‘It’s a big, big responsibility.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It needs to be nurtured.’ Angela turned over two more cards which seemed to be in conjunction. ‘Ah, now… there’s been a gap in your life, I think. Someone missing. Would you…? Do you perhaps have just the one parent?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jane said awed. ‘How did you…?’

  ‘I don’t think that’s been such a big handicap for you as it might have been for others. You have reserves of emotional and psychic energy which have been sustaining you. But now that reservoir of psychic energy ought to be plumbed, or it may overflow. That can cause problems.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Jane felt a slow excitement burning somewhere down in her abdomen. She looked at Angela’s halfshadowed face and saw intelligence there. And beauty too – fine bones. Angela must be over fifty but Jane thought men would find her awfully sexy.

  ‘Jane, I don’t want to alarm you, but if one is given a talent and one fails to develop it, or allows powerful energy to go its own way, it can become misdirected and cause all sorts of problems, physical and mental – chronic ailments, nervous trouble. Quite a lot of people in hospitals and mental institutions are simply people who have failed to recognize and channel certain energies.’

  Angela looked up suddenly. Jane saw her eyes clearly for the first time; they were like chips of flint. She was serious about this. She was dead serious.

  She said faintly, ‘What does that mean?’

  Angela reached over and touched her fingers. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Please don’t worry. Sometimes I’m concentrating so hard I say the first things that come into my head. It’s just so rare that I get anything as clear and specific as this… I’m probably getting carried away.’

  ‘No, please go on.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Angela swept all the cards together. ‘I’ve been overloading you with my own impressions, and that’s not a good thing to do. Let’s relax a moment and I’ll tell you about some less far-reaching aspects of your life.’

  She asked Jane to shuffle and cut the pack again, then did a couple of smaller layouts and told Jane a few things about herself and her future which were more in line with the stuff you expected to hear. Well, a bit more intimate perhaps… like that she was a virgin but wouldn’t be for long. That she would have more than one serious lover before she was twenty.

  Jane smiled. At one time she’d have been fairly excited about that, not to say relieved, but right now it didn’t seem as vital.

  Angela told her that she was extremely intelligent and could have her pick of careers, but she might feel herself drawn towards communications or even performance art.

  Cool.

  But her main choices – Angela sighed, like she’d tried to get away from this but couldn’t – would be in the spiritual realm. Other levels of existence were already becoming accessible to her.

  ‘Other planes,’ Angela said, ‘other spheres. Someone who has gone before has opened the way. Does that make any sense to you?’

  Jane thought at once of her old friend, the late Miss Lucy Devenish, writer of children’s stories and proprietor of the magical giftshop called Ledwardine Lore, who had introduced her to rural mysteries and the mystical poetry of Thomas Traherne. And showed her that spirituality was a shining crystal, of which Christianity was only one face.

  ‘What…?’ Jane found it hard to speak, her mouth was so dry. ‘What do you think I should do?’

  ‘Don’t know. It’s not for me to say. This is a very personal issue.’

  ‘You can’t just leave it like that. I mean, I could buy books and things, but I already do that.’

  Angela gathered up the cards. ‘Have you had any personal experiences which have mystified you?’

  ‘Maybe. Like, there was this time I kind of fell asleep in a field, and when I awoke I felt as though I’d been someone else. It’s like really hard to explain, but—’

  ‘Don’t tell me. These are messages for you alone. Look, Jane, what I’m going to do is give you a telephone number. Not mine, because I don’t think you should be entirely influenced by one person or feel that you’re being pressed from one direction.’

  Angela reached down to a handbag on the floor and pulled out a notepad and a pen. Jane felt a welling excitement and also a small, fizzing trepidation as Angela wrote.

  ‘This is the number of a young woman called Sorrel, not far from here. You’ll like her. She’s very down-to-earth.’

  ‘Who… is she?’

  ‘Just another person with a questing spirit. She runs a healthfood restaurant in Hereford and holds meetings there for people of a like mind: to share experiences and consider methods of developing their skills.’

  ‘Sounds a bit… I mean, I’d feel a bit…’

  ‘If you did decide to go, you could always take your friend… Rosemary, was it?’

  ‘Rowenna.’ Jane felt much better. ‘Yeah, that’d be cool. Er… develop skills? What sort of skills do you think I might have?’

  ‘Healing? Clairvoyance? It’s not for me to say. Perhaps you can find out.’ Angela tore the top page out of her notebook and placed it in front of Jane. ‘It’s entirely up to you now.’

  ‘Right,’ Jane said. ‘Right.’

  When she stood up, her legs felt cold and trembly.

  Moon was pulling down the old-fashioned rollerblind over the CLOSED sign on the door.

  All the lights were out except for a brown-shaded one on the counter, so that the air in the shop had a deep-shadowed sepia density. The unsaleable balalaika hung forlornly on the wall behind the till. The low-level music from the speakers each end of the single seventeenth-century beam was by Radiohead at their most suicidal: the one about escaping lest you choked.

  Lol swallowed. Moon said to him, as though he’d been here for some time, ‘I asked Denny to come over for supper. He said he’d really love to but he was too busy. I knew he’d say that.’

  ‘Well, he probably is. Work’s piling up in the studio.’

  Moon shook her head. ‘It’s his wife. Maggie thinks I’m still doing dope – and I’m poison in all sorts of other ways. Plus, he just doesn’t want to come to the barn.’

  She came to stand next to him. She was wearing a long brown cardigan over a too-much-unbuttoned white cotton blouse and jeans. Something dull and metallic hung from a leather thong around her neck.

  ‘Moon, you can’t go home on your bike, in the dark, up that hill. It’s snowing hard.’

  ‘I’ve got good lights – and nothing will touch me on Dinedor.’

  ‘I could try and get it in the back of the car. Or I could take you back in the car now, and pick you up again tomorrow.’

  He felt tense – the missing element here, as usual, was lightness. In any situation, Moon was a solemn person: no humour, no banter. As if all the family’s irony genes had been been used up on Denny sixteen years before she was born.

  ‘Silly making two trips,’ Moon argued.

  ‘I don’t mind, really.’

  ‘Or you could stay,’ Moon said. ‘Why not stay over?’

  She was very close to him. ‘What exactly did Denny say to you?’

  ‘He said… that he was glad you weren’t on your own.’

  Moon laughed lightly.

  ‘What did you tell him, Mo
on?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Poor Denny.’ Moon took Lol’s left hand and held it between both of hers. They were slim hands but strong, hardened by delving in the earth. ‘And stupid Dick. I can’t believe how timid and stupid people can be. Dick and his feeble psychology; Denny hiding behind a wall against the past. And you?’ She looked closely at his hand. ‘Are you timid too?’

  ‘Oh, I’m more timid than any of them,’ Lol said.

  ‘What of? What are you frightened of, Lol?’

  She was standing close enough now for him to see that there was dust on her blouse. She seemed to attract dust. Dust of ages, Lol thought. The past had become attracted to her.

  A long way away, Radiohead were playing Karma Police, about what you got if you messed with Us; he could hardly hear it for the drumming in his head.

  ‘I think I’m frightened of you,’ Lol whispered in shame, ‘and I don’t know why.’

  The movements were so minimal that he’d hardly noticed her creeping into his arms, until they were kissing and his hands were in the long, long hair and something flared inside him like when you finally put a match to a long-prepared fire of brittle paper and dry kindling.

  ‘So what are you going to do?’ Rowenna asked, as they drove into Ledwardine marketplace, which had a lacing of snow.

  ‘Stop just here for a while,’ Jane said. ‘You haven’t even told me what she said to you.’

  The cobbled square, with its little timbered market-hall, was lit by electric gaslamps on wrought-iron poles and brackets. Rowenna parked under one of these, and its light turned her hair into shivering spirals of rose-gold.

  ‘She told me my spiritual progression would be very much bound up with a friend’s.’

  ‘Oh, gosh.’

  There were only two cars on the square, both in front of the Black Swan. There was a light visible between the trees which screened the vicarage, and Jane thought she could see a cluster of early stars around the tip of the church steeple, but that might just have been snow. She just so much wanted this to be a magical night.

  ‘So, are you going to phone this other woman, kitten?’

  ‘It’s a big step.’

  ‘No, it isn’t. You can check it out first, and if it sounds iffy you don’t get involved.’

  ‘I don’t get involved?’

  ‘All right, we don’t.’

  ‘What about Mum?’

  ‘We don’t have to invite her, do we?’

  ‘You know what I mean. Right now, she would not be cool about this. She’s insecure enough as it is.’

  ‘Of course she’s insecure. She’s a Christian.’

  ‘I don’t think I can do it to her.’

  ‘You’re not doing anything to her!’

  ‘I’d be lying.’

  ‘They expect us to lie,’ Rowenna said.

  The snow made spangles in the fake gaslight.

  ‘I need to think about this.’

  ‘Well, don’t think too long. Like Angela said, repressing it may seriously damage your health.’

  Jane sighed. The village seemed deserted. Through the snowflakes, the light in the vicarage looked very far away.

  18

  Overhead Cables Cut

  ‘WHERE DID YOU get to, flower?’

  ‘Oh, Hereford and places. Shopping and stuff.’

  ‘What did you buy?’

  ‘Nothing much. Rowenna got… some things.’

  ‘She seems to have a lot of money,’ Merrily said, heating soup at the stove. ‘I suppose she’s indulged quite a bit, having to be dragged around the country with her father stationed at different bases.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Jane said noncommittally. She’d arrived home about seven – looking a bit pale, Merrily thought. Outside, it was snowing quite hard and sticking impressively to the ground and the trees. November snow; it couldn’t last, surely.

  ‘Where did Rowenna live before?’

  ‘What’s this about?’ said Jane.

  ‘Just interest. You seem to be spending a lot of time with her, that’s all.’

  ‘That,’ said Jane, ‘is because she’s interesting. They were at Malmesbury in Wiltshire. Her dad was with the Army at Salisbury or somewhere. They don’t like to talk about it, the SAS, so I don’t ask. Satisfied?’

  Later, she said, ‘I’m sorry, Mum. I’m being a pig. Tired, that’s all. I think I’ll have an early night.’

  Merrily didn’t argue; she wanted to be up early herself. She suspected there’d be a bigger congregation tomorrow than usual; people always liked going to church in the snow.

  She was in bed by eleven, with a hot-water bottle. Less than ten minutes later, the phone bleeped.

  ‘Ledwardine Vic—’

  ‘Merrily, it’s Sophie at the Bishop’s office. I’m terribly sorry to bother you, but we’re having a problem – at the Cathedral. I wonder, could you perhaps come over?’

  Big grey snowflakes tumbled against the window. Merrily sat up in bed. It had never felt so cold in here before.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘I… it involves Canon Dobbs. I don’t like to say too much on the phone.’

  Merrily switched on the bedside lamp. ‘Give me half an hour. Maybe forty-five minutes if the roads are bad.’

  ‘Oh God, yes, I didn’t realize. Do be careful.’

  ‘I’ll see you soon.’

  When she came out of the bedroom, buttoning her jeans, she found Jane on the landing. ‘I heard the phone.’ She was in her dressing-gown, and mustn’t have been asleep.

  ‘Some kind of problem at the Cathedral.’

  ‘Why should that concern you?’

  ‘I don’t really know.’

  ‘Shall I come? It looks a bit rough out there.’

  ‘God, no. You get back to bed.’

  ‘What if you get stuck? These roads can be really nasty and the council’s mega-slow off the mark – like about three days, apparently.’

  ‘It’s a big car. I’ll be fine.’

  ‘This is like Deliverance business again, isn’t it?’

  ‘To be honest, I just don’t know.’

  ‘Talk about secrecy,’ Jane said, strangely wide awake. ‘You Deliverance guys make the SAS seem like double-glazing salesmen.’

  * * *

  Why had she imagined the Cathedral would be all lit up? Maybe because that was how she’d been hoping to find it: a beacon of Old Christian warmth and strength.

  But in the snow and the night, she was more than ever aware of how set-apart it had become. Once it had stood almost next to the medieval castle, two powerhouses together; now the city was growing away from the river, and the castle had vanished. The Cathedral crouched, black on white, like the Church at bay.

  Merrily parked on Broad Street, near the central library. The dashboard clock, always five to ten minutes fast, indicated near-midnight. It had been a grindingly slow journey, with her window wound down to let the cigarette smoke out and the arctic air in, just to keep her awake. She’d taken the longer, wider route east of the Wye, where there was always some traffic, even the chance of snowploughing if anyone in the highways department had happened to notice a change in the weather. The road-surface was white and brown and treacherous, snow-lagged trees slumped over it like gross cauliflowers.

  It all still seemed so unlikely – what would Hunter want with her at this time of night? Was he trying to turn Deliverance into the Fourth Emergency Service?

  Merrily locked the Volvo, put on her gloves, pulled up her hood and set out across the snow-quilted silence of Broad Street.

  No one about, not even a drunk in view. No traffic at all. The city centre as you rarely saw it: luminous and Christmas-card serene, snowflakes like big stars against the blue-black. Merrily’s booted steps were muted on the padded pavement. Behind her only the Green Dragon had lights on. She felt conspicuous. There was no sign of the Bishop or the Bishop’s men. Hadn’t a woman once been raped in the Cathedral’s shadow? Hadn’t the last time she’d been called
out at night…?

  Christ be with me, Christ within me.

  The Cathedral was towered and turreted, the paths and the green lawns submerged together in snow, a white moat around God’s fortress. But no other night defences; its guardians – the canons and the vergers – were sleeping in the warren of cloisters behind. Nobody about except…

  ‘Merrily!’

  Sophie came hurrying around the building, towards the North Porch, following the bouncing beam of a torch attached to a large shadow beside her.

  Merrily breathed normally again.

  ‘Thank heavens you made it.’ The Bishop’s secretary lived not five minutes’ walk away, in a quiet Victorian villa near the Castle Green. She wore a long sheepskin coat, her white hair coming apart under a woollen scarf. ‘We were just wondering whether to call Michael, after all.’

  ‘But I thought the Bishop—’

  ‘He doesn’t know anything about this,’ Sophie said quickly.

  ‘Do you know George Curtiss?’

  ‘Good evening, Mrs Watkins. I, ah, think we have met.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Hello.’ He was one of the Cathedral canons: a big, overcoated man with a beard of Greek Orthodox proportions and a surprisingly hesitant reedy voice.

  ‘George called me to ask if we should tell Michael about this,’ Sophie said. ‘But I suggested we consult you. This is all very difficult.’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry… Am I supposed to know what’s happening?’

  ‘You tell her, George.’

  ‘Yes, it’s… Oh dear.’ George Curtiss glanced behind him to make sure they were alone, bringing down his voice. ‘It’s about old, ah, Tom Dobbs, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Merrily,’ Sophie was hugging herself, ‘he’s virtually barricaded himself in. We think he’s…’

  ‘Drunk, I rather fear,’ George said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s behind that partition,’ Sophie said. ‘You know, where they’re repairing the Cantilupe tomb?’