Midwinter of the Spirit mw-2

by Phil Rickman

  ‘No, I…’ Oh, what the hell! ‘Off the record, Alan, the Bishop’s asked me to succeed Dobbs when he… retires.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ Silence, then a nervous laugh. ‘Well… rather you than me.’

  ‘I realize I may have to buy a black bag and a big hat.’

  ‘God, you don’t want to go in for that kind of thing,’ Alan had said with another nervous laugh. ‘Have all kinds of perverts following you home.’

  Merrily walked along King Street, the Cathedral up ahead filling her vision. She had no idea what Dobbs looked like and saw no men in big hats with black bags.

  Although it didn’t look much from the front, the Bishop’s Palace was perhaps the most desirable dwelling in Hereford: next door to the Cathedral but closer to the River Wye, and dreamily visible from the public footpath on the opposite bank, with its big white windows on mellow red brick, tree-fringed lawns sloping to the water.

  Inside, she’d never been further than the vastly refurbished twelfth-century Great Hall where receptions were held. Today she didn’t even make it across the courtyard. Sophie Hill, the Bishop’s elegant white-haired lay-secretary, met her at the entrance, steering her through a door under the gatehouse and up winding stone stairs, about twenty of them.

  ‘It’s not very big, but Michael thought you’d like it better that way.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Merrily pulled off her scarf.

  ‘It could be quite charming’ – Sophie reached beyond her to push open the door at the top of the steps – ‘with a few pictures and things. To the left, please, Mrs Watkins.’

  There were two offices in the gatehouse: a bigger one with a vista of Broad Street… and this.

  Sloping ceiling, timbered and whitewashed walls, a desk with a phone. A scuffed repro captain’s chair that swivelled, two filing cabinets, a small bookcase with a Bible and some local reference books, including Jane’s one-time bible, The Folklore of Herefordshire by Ella Mary Leather.

  Merrily walked uncertainly over to the window overlooking the courtyard and the former stables, a few parked cars and great stacks of split logs for the Bishop’s fires.

  ‘Welcome to Deliverance Tower,’ said Sophie deadpan. ‘The computer’s on order.’

  Walking dazed into the blustery sunshine on Broad Street, Merrily felt the hand of fate so heavily on her shoulder that she nearly threw up an arm to shake it off.

  It had felt good up in the gatehouse, almost cosy. On top of the city and yet remote from it – a refuge, an eyrie. It had felt right.

  Careful. Don’t be seduced on the first date.

  Sophie had said the Bishop had planned to see her himself, but Mrs Hunter had an important appointment and her own car was being serviced. This appeared to be true; through the window, Merrily had watched Mick, in clerical shirt under what was almost certainly an Armani jacket, accompany his wife to a dusty BMW in British racing green. She saw that Val Hunter was very tall, nearly as tall as the Bishop. Angular, heronlike, tawny hair thrown back, a beauty with breeding. They had two sons at boarding school; although Mick had confessed, in an interview with the Observer, to having very mixed feelings about private education. Merrily suspected his wife didn’t share them.

  ‘He’s still rather feeling his way,’ Sophie had confided, ‘but he does want change, and I’m afraid he’ll be terribly disappointed if you walk away from this, Mrs Watkins. He regards it as a very meaningful step for the female ministry.’

  At the top of Broad Street now, Merrily stared at the rings in a jeweller’s window, and saw her reflection and all the people passing behind her – one man with a briefcase looking over his shoulder at her legs while her back was turned.

  She began to tremble. She needed a cigarette.

  Actually, even stronger than that, came the realization that she needed to pray.

  Like now.

  Abruptly, as though obeying some hypnotic command, she turned back towards the Cathedral, rapidly crossing the green and once again guiltily winding the scarf about her throat to cover the collar. She wanted no one to see her, no one to approach.

  Within yards of the north door, she thought of going around the back to the cloisters, asking the first person she didn’t recognize where Canon Dobbs lived, but by now the compulsion to pray was too strong, a racing in the blood.

  She breathed out. Jesus!

  It happened only rarely like this. Like the day she drove into the country with a blinding headache, and ended up following a track to a cell-like church dedicated to some forgotten Celtic saint where – when she’d most needed it; when she was just finding out the sordid truth about Sean’s business – there’d been this sudden blissful sense of blue and gold, and a lamplit path opening in front of her.

  A group was entering the Cathedral; it looked like a Women’s Institute party. ‘Isn’t there a café?’ someone said grumpily.

  Merrily felt like pushing past, but waited at the end of the line as the women moved singly through the porch. When she was inside, she saw them fanning into the aisles, heard echoes of footsteps and birdlike voices spiralling through sacred stone caverns.

  And she was just standing there on her own and tingling with need.

  ‘Welcome to Hereford Cathedral.’ An amplified voice from the distant pulpit, the duty chaplain. ‘If you’d all please be seated, we’ll begin the tour with a short prayer. Thank you.’

  Sweating now, almost panicking, Merrily stumbled through the first available doorway and slithered to her knees in the merciful gloom of the fifteenth-century chantry chapel of Bishop John Stanbury, with its gilded triptych and its luxuriously carved and moulded walls and ceilings merging almost organically, it seemed, in a rush of rippling honeyed stone.

  When she put her hands together she could feel the tiny hairs on the backs of them standing electrically on end.

  ‘God,’ she was whispering. ‘What is it? What is it?’

  That sensation of incredible potential: all the answers to all the questions no more than an instant away, an atom of time, a membrane of space.

  ‘There’s this picture of her,’ Jane said, ‘that she once threw away, only I rescued it from the bin for purposes of future leverage and blackmail and stuff. I think she knows I’ve got it, but she never says anything.’

  They walked past the school tennis courts, their nets removed for the winter, and across to the sixth-form car park where Rowenna’s Fiesta stood, six years old and lime-green but otherwise brilliant.

  ‘She’s wearing this frock like a heavy-duty binliner, right? And her hair’s kind of bunched up with these like plastic spikes sticking out. She’s got on this luminous white lipstick. And her eyes are like under about three economy packs of cheap mascara.’

  Rowenna shook her head sadly.

  ‘Her favourite band,’ Jane said, ‘was Siouxsie and the Banshees.’

  ‘Don’t,’ said Rowenna, pained.

  ‘Well, actually they weren’t bad.’

  Rowenna unlocked the Fiesta. ‘You could always sell the picture to the tabloids.’

  ‘Yeah, but she’d have to do something controversial first, to get them interested. Just another woman priest who used to be a punk, that isn’t enough, is it? I suppose I could take it to the Hereford Times.’

  ‘Who’d pay you about enough to buy a couple of CDs.’

  ‘Yeah, mid-price ones.’ Jane climbed into the passenger seat. ‘No, the point I was trying to make: you look at that picture and you can somehow see the future priest there. You know what I mean, all dark and ritualistic?’

  ‘What, she’s some kind of vestment fetishist?’

  ‘No! It’s just… oh shit.’

  Dean Wall and Danny Gittoes, famous sad Ledwardine louts, were leaning over the car, Dean’s big face up against the passenger window. Jane wound it down. Dean fumbled out his ingratiating leer.

  ‘All right for a lift home, ladies?’

  ‘Not today, OK?’ Rowenna said.

  ‘In fact, not ever.’ Jane cranked up th
e window. ‘Like, no offence, but we’d rather not wind up raped and the car burned out, if that’s OK with you.’

  Dean was saying, ‘You f—’ as Jane wound the window the last inch.

  ‘Foot down, Ro.’

  Rowenna drove off, smiling.

  ‘Nicely handled, kitten. Thanks.’

  Rowenna was new at the school, but nearly two years older than Jane. On account of her family moving around a lot and a long spell of illness, she’d got way behind, so she’d needed to re-start her A-level course. She was a cool person – in a way a kind of older sister, a role she seemed to like.

  ‘You don’t mean,’ said Jane, astounded, ‘that you have actually given those two hairballs a lift? Like, how did you get the slime off the upholstery?’

  Rowenna laughed. ‘I see now it was a grave mistake, and I won’t do it again. What were you saying about your mother? I didn’t quite grasp the nature of the problem.’

  ‘Oh, it’s just…’ Jane cupped her hands over her nose and mouth and sighed into them, ‘… just she’s worth more than this, that’s all. Like, OK, maybe she was drawn into it by this spiritual need and the need to bring it out in other people, you know what I mean?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Rowenna drove with easy confidence. Within only a couple of hundred yards of the school, they were out into countryside with wooded hills and orchards.

  ‘But I mean, the Church of England? Like, what can you really expect of an outfit that was only set up so Henry VIII could dump his wife? Spiritually they’re just a bunch of nohope tossers, and I can’t see that the ordination of women will change a thing.’

  ‘I suppose even the Catholics kind of look like they’ve got something together.’ Rowenna’s father was an Army officer, possibly SAS, and the family had spent some time in Northern Ireland.

  ‘But you know what I mean?’ Jane hunched forward, clasping her hands together. ‘I imagine her in about forty years’ time, sitting by the gas fire in some old clergyperson’s home, full of arthritis from kneeling on cold stone floors, and thinking: What the hell was that all about?’

  Rowenna laughed, a sound like ice in a cocktail glass. She looked innocent and kind of wispy, but she was pretty shrewd.

  ‘And this Deliverance trip, right?’ Jane knew she wasn’t supposed to discuss this, but Rowenna’s military background – high-security clearance, all that stuff – meant she could be trusted not to spread things around. ‘It’s obvious she thinks this is a kind of cutting-edge thing to do, and will maybe take her closer. You know what I mean?’

  ‘To the spiritual world?’

  ‘But it’s actually quite the opposite. From what I can see, the job is actually to stop people getting close. She has to actively discourage all contact with the occult or anything mystical – anything interesting. I think that’s kind of immoral, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s kind of fascist,’ Rowenna said.

  ‘Let’s face it, almost any kind of spiritual activity is more fun than going to church.’

  ‘I wouldn’t argue with that.’

  And then, as usual, it was suddenly gone.

  Sometimes you were left floating on a cushion of peace; occasionally there was an aching void. This time only silence coloured by the placid images of the Cathedral and the Wye Bridge in the small stained-glass window just above her head.

  Merrily stood up shakily in the intimacy of Bishop Stanbury’s exquisite chantry. She stood with her arms by her sides, breathing slowly. It was like sex: sublime at the time but what, if anything, had it altered? What progression was there?

  Outside, in the main body of the Cathedral, the prayer was over and there was a communal rising and clattering. She stood quietly in the doorway of the chantry, her grey silk scarf dangling from her fingers.

  ‘Go away. Go away.’ A few yards away, a man’s voice rose impatiently. ‘I can’t possibly discuss this here.’

  ‘I don’t understand…’ A woman now, agitated. ‘What have I been doing wrong?’

  ‘Hush!’

  A stuttering of footsteps. Merrily stepped out of the chantry, saw a woman, about sixty, who drew breath, stifled a cry, turned sharply and walked quickly away – across to the exit which led to the Cathedral giftshop. She wore a tweed coat and boots and a puffy velvet hat. She never looked back.

  From the aisle to the left of the chantry, the man watched her go.

  Merrily said, ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to—’

  He wore a long overcoat. He glanced at her. ‘I think your party is over in the Lady Chapel.’

  Then he saw her collar and she saw his, and the skirt of the cassock below his overcoat. And although she’d never seen him before, as soon as she discerned cold recognition in the pale eyes in that stone face – the face of some ancient, eroded graveyard archangel – she knew who he was.

  And before she was aware of them the words were out. Possibly, under the circumstances, the stupidest words she could have uttered.

  ‘Is there anything I can do, Canon Dobbs?’

  He looked at her for a long time. She couldn’t move.

  Eventually, without any change of expression, he walked past her and left the Cathedral.

  8

  Beautiful Theory

  FOR MANY YEARS, Dick Lyden had been something stressful in the City of London. Now he and his wife were private psychotherapists in Hereford. Dick was about thirty pounds heavier, pink-cheeked, income decidedly reduced, a much happier man.

  ‘And Moon – in her spiritual home at last?’ He beamed, feet on his desk. ‘How is Moon?’

  ‘Moon is…’ Lol hesitated. ‘Moon is what I wanted to see you about.’

  Dick and Ruth lived and practised in half of a steep Edwardian terrace on the western side, not far from the old water-tower. Dick’s attic office had a view across the city to Dinedor Hill, to which Lol’s gaze was now inevitably being pulled. When Dick expansively opened up his hands, allowing him the floor, Lol turned his chair away from the window and told Dick about the crow which Moon claimed had mystically fallen dead at her feet.

  Dick swivelled his feet from the desk, rubbed his forehead, pushing back slabs of battleship-grey hair. ‘And do you think it really did?’

  ‘I didn’t see it happen.’

  ‘So she may just have found it in the hedge and made the rest up.’

  ‘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.’