Midwinter of the Spirit mw-2

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Lol, I’ve never heard anything so… There is something deeply, deeply wrong here, don’t you think?’

  ‘But what can you do about it? We can’t bring her back. And we can’t find out what was in her mind.’

  ‘What about this book she was supposed to be writing?’

  ‘Supposed to be, but I don’t think she’d written a word. But if there is anything lying around, Denny will find it. And if it says anything he doesn’t like, he’ll destroy it without telling anyone.’

  ‘Will you be called as a witness at the inquest?’

  ‘I expect so. I was the first to… the first to enter the bathroom.’

  ‘And what will you say?’

  ‘I’ll just answer their questions. That should cover about half of the truth.’

  ‘And the rest of it can’t be the truth, because it has no rationality.’ She looked down into her cup as if there might be a message for her in the tea-leaves. ‘I’m so sorry, Lol.’

  The point at which people say, Ah well, one of those things. Except this wasn’t.

  After a while, she said, ‘What if all your working life is concerned with things that three-quarters of the civilized world now consider irrational?’

  ‘That could be stressful,’ he said. There were lights on in the café now, but they didn’t seem to reach Merrily. What was she not telling him?

  She said, ‘You know why some vicars busy themselves constantly with youth work and stuff like that? It’s so that if, at any point, they realize there’s no God, they can think: Well, at least I haven’t been wasting my time.’

  ‘Cynical.’

  ‘Rational. For the same reasons, some Deliverance ministers prefer to think of themselves as Christian psychologists.’

  ‘Psychology is wonderful,’ Lol said grimly. ‘Look how much it helped Moon.’

  ‘Perhaps she had the wrong therapist.’

  ‘We must get her a better one next time. I think you could have helped Moon. I wish to God I’d told you about her earlier. And I think… I think there must be a lot of other people you could help.’

  ‘Thanks, but you’re being kind.’ She dropped the cigarettes and lighter into her bag, then folded up the anonymous letter very tightly.

  This was not good: nothing had been resolved. He sensed that when she returned to her flock she would be different: a sad shepherd exiled, unfulfilled, into a community that wasn’t a community any more. None of them were; village life, like he’d said in his song, was no more than a sweet watercolour memory. She’d grow old and lined, and end up hating God.

  ‘Listen.’ Lol lowered his voice to an urgent whisper. ‘My life is pathetic. I’m a failed performer, a mediocre songwriter, an ex-mental patient who can’t keep a woman. My sole function on this earth at the present time appears to be producing an album for a semi-talented, obnoxious little git who’s blackmailing his father. Three days ago, a woman I couldn’t love but needed to help just… shut me out in the snow. And then slashed both her wrists. Now somebody who I care about is holding out on me in exactly the same way. What does this tell me?’

  Mega self-pity, he thought as she sat down again. Occasionally it works.

  Merrily said, looking down at the table, ‘Sometimes I think you’re the only friend I have left.’

  ‘Friend,’ he repeated sadly.

  She met his eyes. ‘It’s a big word, Lol.’

  He nodded, although he knew there were bigger ones.

  Outside, it was already going dark, and the fog had never really lifted.

  31

  Old Tiger

  JANE STOOD ON the vicarage lawn, Ethel the cat watching her from inside the kitchen window. There was fog still around, but a paler patch almost directly overhead; the moon was probably just there, behind layer upon layer of steamy cloud.

  Right, then.

  She’d been told that it was OK to do this from the inside of the house, but she didn’t feel quite right about that. Not with the moon, somehow. And it was a vicarage. Whereas the garden bordered the old and sinister orchard which, though it belonged to the Church, had been here, in essence, far longer. Pre-Christian almost certainly.

  The night was young but silent around Jane. You could usually hear some sounds from the marketplace or the Black Swan, but not many people seemed to have ventured out tonight. Also, the fog itself created this lovely padded hush. It lined the hills and blocked in the spaces between the trees in the dense woods above Ledwardine, as if the whole valley had acquired these deep, resonant walls like a vast auditorium.

  She wondered if Rowenna was outside in her garden, too. The problem was that there were doubtless other houses overlooking that one, and Rowenna had younger brothers who would just take the piss, so she was probably now in her room – searching for the same moon.

  Jane looked up, cleared her throat almost nervously. Probably Mum felt like this in the pulpit. Don’t think about Mum. This is nothing to do with her.

  She drew in a long, chilled breath, imagining moonbeams – unfortunately there weren’t any – also being drawn down, filling her with silken, silvery light. And then she called out – not too loud, as villages had ears.

  ‘Hail to Thee, Lady Moon,

  ‘Whose light reflects our most secret hopes.

  ‘Hail to Thee from the abodes of darkness.’

  Something about that abodes of darkness making it more thrilling than the sun thing in the morning. Especially in this fog.

  And it did work, this cycle of spiritual salutation. It put the whole day into a natural sequence. It deepened your awareness of the connectedness of everything, and your role as part of the great perceiving mechanism that was humanity.

  Jane felt seriously calm by now and not at all cold – like she was generating her own inner heat. Or something was. She looked up into the sky again, just as this really miraculous thing began to happen.

  The moon appeared.

  First as just a grey imprint on the cloud-tapestry. Then as this kind of smoke-wreathed silver figurine: the goddess gathering the folds of her cloud-robes around her.

  And finally… as a core of brilliant white fire at the heart of the fog.

  Winter glory.

  Oh, wow! She heard me.

  Jane just stood there and shivered in amazement and delight, like totally transported.

  Cool!

  Like really, really, really cool.

  * * *

  ‘Visiting time’s not for another hour,’ Sister Miller said. ‘It’s teatime and the patients have to eat. You’ll need to come back.’

  Sister Miller was all nurse: tough and ageless. Merrily concentrated on her seasoned face, because the view along Watkins Ward was dizzying and oppressive. It would have been hard to come up here alone tonight, any night.

  She told Sister Miller that Sister Cullen had said visiting hours were less strict if the patient was in a side ward.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Canon Dobbs.’

  ‘That old man?’ said Sister Miller. ‘Are you relatives?’

  ‘I’m a… colleague.’

  ‘Because my view is that he doesn’t need to be here now, no matter what Dr Bradley says. Why can’t someone look after him at home? He’s just taking up a bed.’

  ‘You mean he’s recovering?’

  ‘Of course he’s recovering. I’ve been in nursing for nearly forty years. Mr Dobbs was walking perfectly well this morning. He can also feed himself. I believe he could also talk, if he wanted to.’ Sister Miller turned on Lol. ‘Have you any idea why he’s refusing to talk?’

  Lol thought about it. ‘Perhaps he’s just impatient with routine questions like “How are we today?”.’

  ‘You have ten minutes and no longer,’ said Sister Miller.

  It was like praying over a tomb. He lay on his back, as still as an effigy. Eyes shut. You were not aware of him breathing. He looked dead.

  Just a short prayer, then. Nothing clever. Someone else having seen to all the smart stuff.
Afterwards, Merrily brushed her knees and sat in the bedside chair.

  ‘Hello, Mr Dobbs.’

  He didn’t move. He was like stone. Could he possibly be awake?

  ‘We haven’t spoken before, as such. I’m Merrily Watkins.’ Keeping her voice low and even. ‘I’ve come to say goodbye.’

  On the other side of the door’s glass square, Lol smiled. OK, that was not the most tactful thing to say in a hospital.

  ‘By which I mean that I’ve now decided not to accept the Deliverance… role. I just wanted you to know that. We never met formally, and now there’s no reason we ever should.’

  The side ward enclosing Dobbs was like a drab chapel. A faintly mouldy smell came from him – not organic, more like the miasma of old books in a damp warehouse.

  ‘I’m sorry that you’re in here. I’m sorry we didn’t get to you sooner in the Cathedral.’ She half-rose to pull the bedside chair a little closer and lowered her voice to below prayer level. ‘I’m even sorrier you didn’t feel able to tell any of us what you were doing there.’

  She leaned her face forward to within six inches of his. They’d kept him shaved, but stubble had sprouted under his chin like a patch of sparse grass on a rockface.

  ‘It doesn’t matter to me now – not professionally. I’m out of it, feeling a little humiliated, rather slighted. I know Jesus Christ was the first exorcist, but also that half the world’s population is female, and rather more than half the people with problems of psychic disturbance – or so it seems to me – are female too. I believe that one day there will be a female exorcist in this diocese, without the fires of hell burning in High Town. I just wanted you to know that too.’

  No reaction. Yet he could apparently walk and feed himself. She felt angry.

  ‘I probably felt less insulted, but more puzzled, when I heard you’d been avoiding all women. Dumping your housekeeper – that wasn’t a terribly kind thing to do. Why are you scared of women?’

  Her hand went instinctively to her throat. She still wasn’t wearing the dog-collar.

  ‘I don’t know what makes you tick, Canon Dobbs. I’ve been trying to forgive you for setting me up for that final session with Denzil Joy.’

  She felt tainted just uttering the name, particularly here. Too much like an invocation?

  ‘If you wanted to scare me off, show me how unpleasant it could be, you very nearly succeeded. But that wasn’t, in the end, why I decided to quit.’

  She stood up. On his bedside table she placed two pounds of seedless grapes and two bottles of Malvern water.

  ‘Maybe you could share these with Huw Owen – next time he comes with his candles, and his holy water, and his magic chalk.’

  She waited. Not a movement. She took a last look at him, but he remained like a fossil.

  When she reached the door, she stopped, noticing that Lol’s eyes had widened. She resisted the urge to spin around.

  Once out of the door, she turned left towards the ward entrance, refusing even to glance back along Watkins to the top side ward where Denzil Joy’s spirit had left his body.

  And gone where?

  The sudden shudder ripped up her spine like a razor-blade.

  ‘OK, he opened his eyes,’ Lol informed her, outside the hospital. ‘As soon as you turned your back and walked away, his eyes snapped open. Then closed again when he saw me standing on the other side of the glass.’

  Merrily’s Volvo was parked in a small bay near a little park. By the path to the Victoria footbridge over the Wye. They leaned against it.

  ‘He heard it all, then?’ she said.

  ‘Every word. His eyes were very bright, fully aware – and mad as hell when he saw me.’

  ‘Good. My God!’

  ‘Mmm.’ Those eyes had spooked Lol. They were burning with the hard, wary intelligence of an old tiger. But the effect of this news on Merrily he found exciting.

  The cold had lost its bite and the fog had thinned. He could see the three-quarter moon as through a lace curtain.

  Merrily said, ‘Could we go for a short walk? I need to clear my head.’

  It was very short. He followed her through the patch of parkland to a kind of viewing platform overlooking the still dark Wye and the suspension footbridge.

  ‘Last time I stood here, Inspector Annie Howe was showing me where a body had been found.’

  ‘What exciting times you have, Merrily. Such drama.’

  ‘Too much drama.’ She stood with her back to the river, beside an ornate lamp standard. ‘Well, this suggests Dobbs was an active participant in Huw’s ritual, doesn’t it? Or maybe even directing it?’

  ‘You’re the expert.’

  ‘Obviously not, or I’d know what this was about.’

  ‘And this Huw going behind your back, that’s the reason you resigned?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘I still don’t see it.’

  ‘Lol, he was my course tutor: the Deliverance man. He’s the nearest I’ve had or wanted to have to a spiritual adviser. I rated the guy. I really liked him.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘No, you don’t. A father-figure, just about. But, more important, the person you trust to guide you through the… through the hinterland of Hell, if you like. But what if there’s something iffy about what they were both doing?’

  ‘Iffy?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘And you want to?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Her dark hair shone in the lamplight.

  ‘More than a professional interest?’

  ‘I don’t have a professional interest any more. I am just so angry. That shit.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘I’m happy you’re mad. When I first saw you in Church Street you were about as animated as Mr Dobbs back there. I worry easily.’

  She smiled, shaking her head. ‘Lol…’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘I said some stupid things, all right? Things that weren’t necessarily true.’

  ‘Which in particular?’

  ‘You choose,’ Merrily said. Her face seemed flushed.

  He thought for a moment. ‘OK, I’ve chosen.’

  ‘Don’t tell me.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because…’

  ‘Because little Jane doesn’t know where you are?’

  ‘Little Jane doesn’t bloody care.’

  ‘I think she does, Merrily. And it’s not my place to say so to a professional good person, but if you take this out on her before you’ve gone into it properly, you might regret it.’

  ‘You mean I should take steps to find out what she’s doing – and who with?’

  ‘I can… help maybe, if you want.’

  ‘Why are you doing this, Lol?’

  ‘A number of possible reasons.’ Lol stood close to her but looked across the river to the haze of misted lights on the fringe of the city. ‘You choose.’

  Merrily sighed. ‘I can’t go to bed with you, you know.’ And, naturally, she looked soft-focus beautiful under the lamp. ‘Not the way things are.’

  ‘God,’ Lol said sadly. ‘He has a lot to answer for.’

  ‘It isn’t God,’ Merrily said.

  ‘Oh.’ He wanted to roll over the rail into the black river. ‘That means somebody else.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She turned away from him and from the light. In the moment before she did, he saw her eyes and he thought he saw a flash of fear there, and he thought there was a shudder of revulsion.

  But he was paranoid. Official!

  ‘I’ll take you back now,’ Merrily said.

  32

  Fantasy World

  JANE THREW OPEN the bedroom window, and the damned fog came in and she started to cough. It was like being with Mum in the scullery-office on a heavy Silk Cut night.

  Down on the lawn the last rags of snow had gone. Snow was clean, bright, refreshing. Fog was misery. It was December today, so only three weeks to Midwinter, the great solstice when th
e year had the first gleam of spring in its eye.

  Always darkest before the dawn. This, Jane thought, was like a midwinter of the spirit. She cleared her throat.

  ‘Hail to Thee, Eternal Spiritual Sun.

  ‘Whose visible symbol now rises from the Heavens.’

  That was a bloody laugh.

  ‘Hail unto Thee from the Abodes of Morning.’

  It had been so brilliant last night out in the garden. Maybe she was a night person. Maybe a moon person. And yet the bedtime exercise had not gone too well, the great rewinding of the day.

  Before you go to sleep, make a journey back through the day. Starting with the very last thing you did or said or thought, then going back through every small event, every action, every perception, as though you were rewinding a sensory videotape of your day. Consider each occurrence impartially, as though it were happening to someone else, and notice how one thing led to another. Thus will you learn about cause and effect. This reverse procedure also de-conditions your mind from thinking sequentially – past, present and future – and demolishes the web of falsehood you habitually weave to excuse your wrong behaviour.

  It was impossible to stay with it. You got sidetracked. You thought of something interesting and followed it through. Or something bad, like Mum being ill, which could plunge you without warning into some awful Stalinist scenario at Gran’s in Cheltenham: As long as your mother is in hospital, Jane, you are under my roof, and a young lady does not go out looking like THAT. Or you remembered seeing some cool male person and, despite what Angela had foretold, you were into the old dyinga-virgin angst. Rowenna never seemed prey to these fears; had she no hormones?

  Gratefully, Jane closed the window. Mum had not looked too bad last night. Quiet, though: pensive.

  ‘You’re not OK! You’re not! You look like sh—’

  ‘Don’t say it, all right?’

  ‘It’s true.’

  And, Jesus, it was true. That ratty old dressing-gown, the cig drooping from the corner of her mouth. A vicar? Standing on the stairs, she looked like some ageing hooker.

  ‘It’s the weather,’ Mum said.