by Phil Rickman
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 manifestation 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 Go
d, 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 Merrily, 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?’
‘So what happened to you?’
‘I don’t talk about it much. I reckon if you try to analyse this stuff it just evaporates.’
‘Not around me, kitten.’
‘OK, well, I just feel this intense connection to some places. Like you were talking about hugging beams, I feel I want to hug hills and fields and—Hey, this is really, really stupid. It’s just hyper-imagination.’
‘Oh, Jane! Don’t stop now.’
‘Sorry. OK, well, like time passes and you’re not aware of it. It’s like you’re here but you’re not here, and then you’re here again – some kind of shift in reality. Maybe it happens to everybody but most people disregard it. There was an old woman in the village I used to be able to talk to about this stuff, but she’s dead now.’
‘I think there’s another side to all of us we need to discover,’ Rowenna said. ‘Especially us… I mean our generation. We’re growing up into this awesome millennial situation where all the old stuff’s breaking down… like political divisions and organized religion. That’s not knocking your mum or anything.’
‘It’s OK,’ Jane said. ‘She knows it’s all coming to pieces. She got these quite sizeable congregations at first on account of being a woman, but the novelty’s wearing off already. When the Church is just surviving on gimmicks you know it’s the slippery slope. Go on.’
‘All I was saying is that we shouldn’t pass up on the opportunity to expand our consciousness wherever possible.’
‘I’ll go along with that. What sort of stuff have you done?’
‘Oh, I’ve just kind of messed around the edges.’ Rowenna
flicked the pages of a paperback about interpreting dreams. ‘Like, when we were in Salisbury I had this friend whose sister did tarot readings, and she showed me two layouts. I was doing it at school for a few weeks. It was really incredible how accurate it was. Then I did this reading for a girl who was getting to be quite a good friend, and it came out really horrible and she got meningitis soon afterwards and nearly died, and she never came back to school – which kind of spooked me.’
Jane shrugged. ‘That doesn’t mean it was the cards gave her meningitis. Can you still remember how? Would you be able to do a reading for me?’
‘Mmm… don’t think so. Rather not.’
‘Wimp.’
‘Maybe. Tell you what, though, I saw this poster down the health-food shop, right? There’s a psychic fair on in Leominster next weekend.’
‘Cool. What is it?’
‘You’ve never been to one? There are loads about.’
‘Rowenna, my mother’s a vicar. I lead this dead sheltered life.’
Rowenna smiled. ‘Well, actually I’ve just been to one and it was seriously tacky and full of freaky old dames in gypsy clobber, but good fun if you didn’t take it too seriously. We could check it out.’
‘OK,’ Jane said. ‘I suspect I’d better not tell Mum.’
‘I suppose she wouldn’t be cool about that stuff. Alternative spirituality – subversive.’
‘Actually, she’s pretty liberal. Well, to a point. Things could be just a tiny bit dicey at the moment, though. So I wouldn’t want to, you know…’
Jane thought about the soul police. Then she looked at Rowenna and saw that this was someone intelligent and worldly and kind of unfettered. Someone she could actually share stuff with.
‘I mean, I guess Mum feels that any kind of spirituality is better than none at all,’ Jane grinned, ‘which I suppose is how I feel about the Church of England.’
That night, Merrily and Jane made sandwiches and ate them in front of a repeat of an early episode of King of the Hill. And then Jane said she’d go to her apartment and have a read and an early night. So Merrily returned, as she usually did, to the kitchen.