The Wine of Angels

by Phil Rickman

  Lol began to shake. Out of the speakers, from slightly happier days, Nick sang ‘Way to Blue’.

  What kind of omen was this? He looked up at the curtained window facing the orchard. Suddenly had the overpowering feeling that posh, languid Nick was standing out there among the trees, waiting for him. A bass player he’d once met said he’d been to this party at someone’s flat and Nick Drake, six months before he died, had been there and had stood leaning in a corner next to a candle for two and a half hours, spoken to nobody and then slipped silently away, like a ghost.

  There was a letter with the album. Neat and official and word-processed and signed ...

  ... Dennis Clarke.

  Oh. Lol sat down. Oh, yeah. It was, in fact, his own album, the one he’d left with Dennis when he went into the hospital.

  Dear Lol,

  I found this record when Gill and I were sorting everything out for the move. Sorry, I’ve been meaning to send it for months. To be honest, Gill kept putting me off, saying it might make you depressed again. But now we know you’re over it and settled with a nice lady, well, here it is.

  As you can see, we’re in Chippenham now, where I am a partner in a new accountancy firm. A couple of us decided to break away from the old outfit and set up on our own, and I think it’s paying off.

  Gill and I have got three kids now, and we live in a four-bedroomed, neo-Georgian villa, extremely suburban. I do think about the old days quite a lot, how things might have been. Disastrous, probably. On reflection I’m always glad it ended when it did. We still get our royalties, don’t we?

  Anyway, the real reason I’m writing is that I had a visit yesterday evening. From Karl.

  Lol let the letter fall to the table. He didn’t want to read any more, and he didn’t need to, did he? Karl was over. Karl was gone. Karl was in ...

  If you remember, he was in Seattle, managing a band and doing very well. However, it seems they split quite suddenly (musical differences, of course!!) and Karl was left with quite a few pieces to pick up. Anyway, he’s back in this country now because this is now Where the Future Is. He says.

  I was a bit thrown when he went on to say he was convinced WE were part of that future. I never read the music papers these days, don’t have the time or, to be quite honest, the interest. However, according to Karl, the first two albums are now considered Seminal. That is, they have been discovered by a couple of the major bands – one of them might have been The Verve, no less – who list them among their influences, and sales are picking up again (expect to see this reflected in the next royalties, or I’ll want to know why!!).

  Needless to say, I’d be happy to see those albums get the recognition they never really had in their day (with whatever resulting remuneration might be forthcoming!!) but I’ve been out of the business for a considerable time now and that’s what I told Karl when he said we should be thinking seriously about re-forming the band. Look, I said, I shall be forty-five next year, I have lost most of my hair, I have got three kids to support and I am very happy to be a chartered accountant in a nice part of the country. Also I have had a periodic problem with my elbow and have not lifted a drumstick in about three years.

  Well, he didn’t push too hard, because, let’s face it, he can manage without me. I never wrote a song. I wasn’t even a very good drummer. It’s you he needs – not only the major talent in the band but nearly ten years younger than the rest of us and so less likely to seem like an old fart.

  I don’t know how you feel about this. I did wonder, with you being in a stable relationship now and perhaps better able to hold your own with Karl, whether you might not be ready for something like this. However, when he asked me where you were living now, I decided on caution. I said, Look, Lol’s had his problems, you had better go easy. I think he got the message. Naturally, I said I didn’t know where you were living now, and I rang that guy Chris in A and R at TMM and warned them not to give your address to him either, but somebody’s bound to leak it, and that’s why I’m writing. I would have phoned, but I find you are ex-directory.

  Anyway, I thought I had better let you know. Karl has changed ... well, a little. All the same, Gill didn’t take to him and was not at all happy when he took out what I would swear is the SAME TIN and rolled himself a joint, which, as you can imagine, is not exactly the drug of choice in our part of Chippenham.

  Let me know if you hear anything. Give my best wishes to – Alison, is it? We were both so delighted to hear things are working out for you at last on a personal level and once again, sorry for keeping the album so long.

  With very best wishes,

  Dennis Clark.

  Dear old Dennis Clarke.

  Methodical, play-it-safe Dennis. If you work it out for yourselves, lads, you’ll see that if we do these two gigs in Banbury, we’ll be twenty-seven pounds better off than if we go up to Sheffield, taking into consideration at least three Little Chef meals, eleven gallons of petrol and tyre-wear ...

  Dear old stupid, bloody Dennis. Put it behind you, Lol, it’s not the end of the world. Make a new start. In a couple of years you’ll be laughing about it.

  Lol slumped into the old blue armchair.

  Nick Drake sang ‘Cello Song’. Calm, upper-class English accent. And yet the black-eyed dog had been at Nick Drake’s door, as sure as the Hellhound had pursued Robert Johnson, the poor bluesman, over half a century ago. Both of them dead before the age of twenty-seven.

  The thought of the hellhound who was Karl Windling back on his trail made Lol’s mouth go dry.

  He thought, Where will I go?

  The days were growing longer. Living in the country, you could really feel the earth turning, and it made you dizzy.

  He would do it. He’d go. Now. In the springtime, when the sun was beginning to linger over the village with its ancient black and white cottages and inns, its old and mellowed church, its narrow, brown river.

  In a similar village, not two hours’ drive from here, sometime in the night, Nick Drake had opened his door to the black-eyed dog.

  Now, out there in the orchard, Nick was waiting for Lol.

  3

  Local History

  ACTUALLY, JANE THOUGHT, it was excellent living at the pub.

  Even though they had to share a bedroom: her at one end knocking off her homework, Mum at the other agonizing over a sermon. Even though you had to be up and into the bathroom pretty early to avoid having to watch Mum saying – oh my God – her morning prayers.

  You tried not to be embarrassed, you really did try. But a grown woman, who actually wasn’t bad-looking for her age, down on her knees under the window, whispering sweet nothings to some invisible old bloke in the sky ...

  What a psychologist would have said, how a counsellor would have put it, was that Jane was actually jealous of God. This single-parent only child, OK, a semi-orphan, and here’s her widowed mother taking up with Another Guy and this time it’s much more intense, this time it’s the Big Guy, the Real Thing.

  This was what a psychologist would say. And was, in fact, more or less what a counsellor had said. The counsellor forced on her by Mum’s bloody theological college the time she ran away, as they insisted on putting it. Or took a night off, as she tried to explain it to them.

  Anyway, the night off had involved putting on some serious make-up and going to a pub and getting chatted up by a computer salesman from Edgbaston before being spotted by one of the prissy bloody trainee vicars who fancied Mum and took great pleasure in grassing up the delinquent daughter. Jesus, how ironic.

  ‘All right, what’s on your mind, flower?’

  Mum plonked two Diet Cokes on the pub table, the one near the toilets that was always the last to be taken – except, of course, when good old humble Mum was around.

  ‘Oh,’ Jane said. ‘You know. I mean, nothing really. As such.’

  ‘As such.’ Mum nodded solemnly.

  ‘Just wondering if I can put up with that bloody school for another two years before I
wind up doing drugs and self-mutilation.’

  Third new school in as many years. Though, frankly, when you’d done it once, it got easier. The kids were always more curious about you than you were about them, everybody wanted to hang out with the new girl, and the teachers would give you the benefit of the doubt for months before proclaiming you Public Enemy Number One.

  ‘Mmm,’ Mum said. ‘Is it that particular school or just any school desperate enough to take you?’

  Jane wrinkled her nose. ‘I just sometimes think I’m too old for it.’

  ‘Too old for school?’

  ‘Older than everybody else my age, anyway. Do you really have to wear that thing in here?’

  Saturday lunchtime. With the post-Easter tourist season starting up, the bar was pretty full. Being seen lunching with your mother was one thing, sharing a table with the Vicar was something else.

  ‘Yes, I really think I do.’ Mum patted her ridiculous collar with something Jane was horribly afraid could be pride.

  She lowered her eyes. Hell, even a real dog collar would look better, one of those with coloured-glass jewels or brass spikes. People of Mum’s generation apparently used to wear them quite a lot during the punk era. She remembered Dad telling her once that Mum, as a teenager, had been a sort of punk. Not exactly the full safety-pin-through-the-nose bit, but certainly cropped hair and black lipstick. Dad talking in a way that suggested he’d been quite turned on by it. Pretty revolting, really. And the music was embarrassingly awful.

  ‘Going undercover was never a good idea,’ Mum said. ‘Not in the parish. It only leads to embarrassment later.’

  Possibly meaning the guy who’d tried to pick her up in this very bar and had turned out to be head of English at Jane’s new school, the smarmball who could be teaching her A-level next year. Which – him being married to the girls’ PE teacher – Jane would not hesitate to use to stitch him up if the oily git should give her any hassle.

  It was OK staying at the pub, because you learned things about people. Things you might not find out for ages if you were banged up in the vicarage. Like that TV-playwright guy, Richard Coffey, moving this youngish actor into his house on a fairly permanent basis. The actor was called Stefan Alder and was really succulent totty. Apart from being gay, of course. Or maybe he just hadn’t met the right woman.

  So, yeah, it was good at the Black Swan. Swinging off the school bus and strolling coolly into the bar. On the other hand, there was the question of her apartment. Mustn’t let that one slide.

  ‘So, how long before they finish de-Alfing the rectory?’

  ‘That’s what I was about to tell you.’

  Mum was taking delivery of a couple of ploughmans-wifh-cheddar from the waitress. Don’t do it, Jane pleaded silently. Please don’t say fucking grace ...

  ‘I meant to say last night.’ Mum speared a piece of celery. (Thank Christ for that.) ‘The rewiring’s complete, they’ve nearly finished work on the kitchen. And yesterday, apparently, they took out that huge electric fire which is so old it breaks every known regulation. According to Uncle Ted, Alf Hayden must have been getting divine protection to have avoided being fried. Anyway the bottom line is, we could be in by next weekend. Good?’

  ‘Yeah. Could be OK.’

  Give her the whole of the summer holidays to get things together, apartment-wise. She had in mind this kind of Mondrian effect for the main room; you could paint the squares inside the timbers in different colours. Ingenious, huh?

  It was Uncle Ted, of course, who’d fixed it for them to stay on at the Black Swan, persuading the diocese to fork out for the Woolhope Suite, a bedroom, bathroom and small sitting room with a decent-sized TV. It was still off-season, so Roland, the proprietor, had been amenable to the kind of deal that people like Uncle Ted prided themselves on making.

  Uncle Ted was widowed and seemed to have an arrangement with a widowed lady in Church Street. Ledwardine was really quite liberal and sophisticated. Perhaps the country had always been like that.

  To Jane’s horror, the local paper had been along, to get a picture of her and Mum outside the pub. Mum had insisted on wearing the clerical clobber, and the photographer had made them both sit on the pub steps, smiling like idiots. B and B Vicar Holds the Fort, it said. Yuk!

  Mum’s only objection was to the word vicar. Priest-in-charge was the correct term. It was a temporary thing; apparently there was going to be this big reorganization and Mum could wind up with about four extra churches, making her a kind of flying minister. That was when they’d give her the official title; meantime it was just the one church, which should have been a piece of cake. Would have been to anyone but Mum, who seemed determined to become some kind of spiritual doormat: people cornering her in the pub all the time, emergency meetings of the Church Council, articles to write for the parish magazine (Dear Friends ... yuk!), four trips to Hereford to see parishioners in hospital.

  And three funerals inside a fortnight: mega-depressing, or what?

  Well, obviously you’d get used to that – be like planting bulbs after a while. Except, if you were Mum, you felt obliged to spend most of a day and a night quizzing relatives and neighbours about what kind of person the prospective interee was prior to being dead. It’s a life, Jane. You can’t just dismiss a life with a handful of cliches and a couple of jam scones in the village hall. She wasn’t even getting bloody overtime. And she was starting to look seriously knackered.

  ‘Ah. Merrily. Might one perhaps have a word?’

  Jane looked up from her lunch. Yeah, she thought. The word is tosser.

  ‘Sure,’ Mum said. ‘Take a pew.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Mr Cassidy, of Cassidy’s Country Kitchen – naff, twee, or what? – parked his tight arse, in pristine stonewashed jeans, on the edge of a stool. He held a glass of white wine. He smiled indulgently down.

  ‘And how are you, Jane?’

  ‘Getting by.’

  ‘We really must arrange for you to meet Colette.’

  His snotty daughter, who went to the Cathedral School in Hereford. You saw her posing around the square in the evenings. Sixteen (nearly) and sultry. Jane kept her distance.

  ‘Super,’ she said.

  ‘Got a problem, Terrence?’ Mum said briskly.

  Mrs Fixit. Why didn’t she just tell him to sod off until she’d finished her lunch?

  ‘No ... No ...’ Cassidy said airily. ‘It’s simply ... Are you doing anything special tonight?’

  Is she ever?

  ‘Depends which part of the night, really, Terrence.’

  ‘Mum hates to miss Homicide, Life on the Street.’

  The vicar frowned at her daughter. Mr Cassidy smiled thinly. Everything about him was thin, which told you all you needed to know about his bloody awful restaurant.

  ‘This would be about eight,’ he said. ‘It’s an impromptu meeting of the Festival Committee.’

  ‘Am I on the Festival Committee?’ Mum wondered.

  ‘Well, Alf Hayden wasn’t. But we rather thought you should have a say. Especially as we were hoping this year to make more use of the church itself in other than musical areas. To be specific: drama.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure it’s seen plenty of that in its time.’

  ‘Quite. In fact, it’s about that ... You see, Richard’s over from London for the weekend ... Richard Coffey.’

  ‘With his boyfriend?’

  ‘Shut up, Jane,’ Mum said.

  ‘As you may have heard,’ Cassidy said, ‘Richard has agreed to write a short play especially for the festival, to illustrate a lesser known aspect of local history.’

  ‘Gosh,’ Mum said. ‘There’s prestigious.’

  ‘We originally had in mind something social. Perhaps showing how the trade in high-quality cider was almost irrevocably damaged in the eighteenth century by the growing fashion for French wines.’

  ‘Yeah, you could invite the Euro-MP—’

  ‘Jane ...’

  Jane retired behind
a smirk.

  ‘However,’ said Cassidy, ‘Richard’s apparently become fascinated by the story of Wil Williams. Which I suppose also has a social aspect, in its way.’

  ‘Mmm,’ Mum said.

  ‘Obviously, it’s not something the village nowadays is particularly proud of.’

  ‘No,’ Mum said. ‘Quite.’

  ‘Although I suppose it has its tourist possibilities, in a lurid sort of way. Point is, Richard’s drawn certain conclusions which appear to have quite excited him. The case itself is not well documented, as you know – probably some sort of kangaroo court. But this, of course, gives Richard considerable artistic licence.’

  ‘Right.’ Mum nodded.

  ‘And as he’s even talking about bringing in some professional actors, which would be wonderful, especially if the play went on to London. Be rather super, wouldn’t it? Premiered in Ledwardine Church, and then conquers the capital.’

  Mum nodded again. Her eyes had acquired a guarded look.

  ‘I’d have to talk to the bishop.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And, er, Richard’s going to be revealing his plans at tonight’s meeting, is he?’

  ‘We hope so.’

  ‘Eight o’clock, you said.’

  ‘At the village hall. We normally meet in the restaurant, but Saturday is our busy night. You’ll be there?’

  ‘Well ... all right.’

  ‘You haven’t met Richard, have you?’

  ‘We’ve seen him in the bar, though,’ Jane said. ‘With his b—’

  ‘Look forward to it, Terrence.’

  Mum laid her knife and fork neatly down the middle of her half-full plate. Another aborted lunch. You could get quite worried about Mum sometimes. She wasn’t getting any younger. Past the age when you should be eating like a supermodel.

  ‘Splendid.’ Cassidy wove off through the crush, holding up his wine like some sort of sacrament.

  Jane grinned.

  ‘I thought you didn’t.’

  Mum tossed her bag on her bed.