The Wine of Angels

by Phil Rickman

  Walked her up and down the garden in the rain.

  I called her name.

  She didn’t know it ...

  ‘Turn it down, huh, Jane.’

  ‘Isn’t it great? It’s like really moving. His girlfriend’s a junkie and he doesn’t—’

  ‘It’s OK. Sounds like, what’s his name? He killed himself – Nick Drake?’

  ‘Nick Drake killed himself?’

  ‘We had all his albums when I was a kid, courtesy of your Uncle Jonathan in his morose phase. Listen, I said we wouldn’t be back tonight, but we’d get the rooms cleaned out by tomorrow night, so that Roland can charge twice as much for them. So don’t make any other arrangements, all right?’

  ‘Would I?’

  ‘No, flower,’ Merrily said. ‘You wouldn’t. You’re my very best friend.’

  ‘Oh please!’ Jane made a vomiting sound. ‘You can’t be that sad!’

  Merrily turned on the engine for the first time in days. All she had to do was drive out of the yard, across the square and about thirty yards down Church Street to where the vicarage drive was overhung by a weeping birch. Although she didn’t even get out of second gear, it felt like driving across some distant frontier into another country. A foreign country where no one could be trusted.

  ‘Oh, I can, flower,’ Merrily said.

  Through the eight speakers – on the dashboard, the rear parcel shelf and all four doors – the same voice sang another song, its muted chorus concluding,

  ... and it’s always on the sunny days

  you feel you can’t go on.

  Jane picked up the CD box from the dash, running her finger down the track list as the Volvo wobbled over the cobbles. The track was called Sunny Days, and it was followed by one called Song for Nick.

  By nightfall, they must have walked all over the vicarage about four times, trying to make it seem smaller. And failing, as Merrily always knew they would.

  Yeah, sure, it was a big mistake, coming to camp here – a futile gesture of defiance from Merrily, a silly adventure for Jane.

  They were both overwhelmed. Even small houses looked enormous without furniture. Even small, new houses. This place – without a TV set, a microwave, even a bookcase full of paperbacks – was oppressive with age. In the light of naked bulbs, the walls looked grey and damp. Upstairs, where wardrobes had stood, there were great meshes of cobwebs, big as fishermen’s nets.

  ‘Before ...’ Jane said. ‘Before ... it just looked big. You know what I mean?’

  Merrily nodded. Freshly vacated, the house was huge and naked and dead, its skeleton of woodwormed oak exposed – the shrunken remains of trees, killed half a millennium ago, embalmed and mummified in the walls. How, with their minimal furniture, their token pots and pans, could they possibly get its blood flowing again?

  ‘I wonder if I’m allowed to take in lodgers,’ Merrily said gloomily. ‘Maybe one of those guys who sit in the middle of Hereford with a penny whistle and a dog.’

  ‘Or four of them,’ Jane said. ‘All with dogs. Barking.’

  Because it was so quiet. Whether it was the trees all around or whatever, you wouldn’t know you were near the centre of the village.

  After Sean’s death, before she’d gone to college, she’d sold all the fancy new furniture, the rich-lawyer toys. This is tragic, her mother had said, all these nice things ...you may find you regret it one day when you have a big house again.

  I’m never going to have a big house again, Merrily had said very calmly.

  ‘Still,’ Jane said. ‘We’re seeing it at its very worst. It can only get better and better, can’t it?’

  ‘It can, flower. And it will. Look, let’s forget this idea. Mrs Peat’s coming tomorrow, the cleaner. Why don’t we let her have a go at it first? Come on, let’s go back to the pub.’

  Jane hesitated. She was standing by the window in the drawing room made mauve by dull twilight through the surrounding trees. Across the room the inglenook yawned like an open tomb, its lintel two feet thick. There’d been an archaic, coal-effect electric fire in there when the Haydens were here; now it was just blackened stone, and you couldn’t light a fire because the wide chimney had been sealed off for insulation.

  ‘Buy you dinner, OK?’ Merrily said. ‘We could extend to that. Not in the bar. I mean in the restaurant. Those chips’ll be all stuck together by now, anyway.’

  It was just stone flags underfoot, like the ones in the church but without the memorials and carved-out skulls. You could spend a year’s stipend just carpeting the downstairs.

  ‘What do you say, flower?’

  ‘No.’ Jane stamped a foot on the stone. ‘We should stay. It’s stupid to be scared of your house. Are we grown women, or what?’

  In the end, they slept in the bedroom Merrily had used that first night. At least it had a wooden floor. They spread out the red and blue sleeping bags bought for a camping holiday in the Lake District, a holiday which never happened, the summer after Sean died.

  It was still cold at night, especially in here. The sleeping bags were a couple of feet apart, up against the wall with the door in it. Two kids in a haunted house.

  ‘Isn’t it funny,’ Jane said into the darkness, ‘how, when you finally get to bed on a cold night, you always want to go to the loo?’

  ‘All in the mind. Which means I’m not going with you.’

  ‘Did I ask you to?’

  ‘Think of something else,’ Merrily said. ‘It’ll go away.’

  ‘OK.’

  Silence. Odd, really; a place this old, you expected creaks and groans. Didn’t timber-frame houses kind of settle down for the night?

  ‘Mum ...’

  ‘Mm-mm.’

  ‘You ever know anybody who committed suicide?’

  The kid had always been good at choosing her moments.

  ‘I can’t think,’ Merrily said. ‘Nobody close, anyway.’

  There was Edgar Powell, of course, whose inquest was to be concluded tomorrow. But she hadn’t really known him, only seen him. In the last hour of the last night of his life. Go to sleep, Jane.

  ‘What happened to Nick Drake?’

  Merrily sighed. ‘I don’t know if that was suicide or not.’

  ‘You said he killed himself.’

  ‘Well, he died of an overdose of antidepressants, so he must have taken them himself. Whether he actually intended to take an overdose seems to be questionable. He was just a sad, withdrawn young guy whose career wasn’t taking off, that’s all. It was before you were born, anyway.’

  Before you were born. Another lifetime. Before Jane was born, Merrily had been almost a child. In a few years’ time, Jane would be older than Merrily had been then. Was probably already, in some ways, more mature. Over the congealed chips, she’d explained how James Bull-Davies had made her so angry, and Jane had said, If he’s so sensitive to the best interests of the village, what’s he doing shacking up with that woman?

  What indeed? Merrily rolled on to her side.

  ‘Mum.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If Dad hadn’t been killed, would he have gone to jail?’

  God almighty. Dark Night of the Soul, or what?

  ‘I don’t know. It’s possible. He might just have been struck off. Wasn’t a criminal. As such. He was just frustrated and he could see people around him making lots of money in unorthodox ways. And they became his clients. You know all this.’

  ‘When did you find out?’

  ‘When it was too late to stop him.’

  ‘Why didn’t you leave him then?’

  ‘I expect I would have.’

  ‘And would you have still got into theological college?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘But would you still have been acceptable as a vicar?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Did you feel sort of ... soiled? Because we’d benefited from dirty money.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Did that make you all the keener to get into the
Church? To throw yourself into it?’

  ‘You make it sound like a canal.’

  ‘Did you love him? Even when you found out he was bent?’

  ‘You don’t stop loving people just like ...’

  ‘What about when you found out about his affair?’

  ‘I don’t know. I hated him then, I suppose. I thought I hated him. I mean, I’m not Jesus, am I?’

  ‘You forgiven him now?’

  ‘I like to think so.’

  ‘If he hadn’t been killed, would you have?’

  ‘I don’t know. Would have depended on what he did next.’

  ‘If he was sorry.’

  ‘Yeah. If he was sorry. Jane, what’s all this about?’

  Jane’s thin, white arm came out of the sleeping bag. ‘I just keep going back over things. Everything seems ... not real. Like a dream. I have to keep working out how we got here. Just in case this is a dream. I don’t really like it.’

  Merrily didn’t know how to respond.

  ‘Is it because I got drunk? Is it the cider? Does it go on affecting you for days?’

  Merrily had to smile. ‘No.’ She reached out and took the small, cold hand. ‘And I’m afraid this is not a dream. Janey, love, is all this anything to do with that record? The CD you had in the car. Where’d it come from?’

  ‘Oh. A friend gave it to me.’

  ‘Right.’

  Merrily closed her eyes. She was determined they weren’t going to do this again tomorrow. She’d make a deal with Roland for another couple of nights, until they had their own beds in here.

  ‘I told you about Lol,’ Jane said. ‘It’s his old band. He was apparently very influenced by Nick Drake.’

  ‘Only musically, one hopes.’

  Jane didn’t reply. Merrily opened her eyes and lay on her back, gazing through the long window, pondering on this Lol, about whom Jane seemed to know a little too much. A small, yellow light, as from a candle or a child’s nightlight, shone between the thickening trees from a window across the street.

  Later, much later, when she awoke to a tugging on her hand, the only light through the window was from a misty quarter moon, which turned the room grey.

  Damn. Why can’t she hold out till morning?

  Merrily squirmed, not half-awake, out of the warm sleeping bag into the damp air. The bedroom door was already ajar and she slid cautiously through the gap. She didn’t need to do this, of course; but she knew that Jane, for all her bravado, would not like wandering alone around the not even half-known rooms of the big, empty house.

  Outside, there was the passage with doors and doors and doors, and one must be the bathroom, she couldn’t remember which, only that it was a stark, sixties bathroom with a black, plastic lavatory seat and cracked tiles everywhere.

  She’d left her dressing gown at the Black Swan, and it was pre-dawn cold out here in just a short nightdress, bare feet on oak boards. Across the stairs, the landing window was an oblong of flat aluminium.

  ‘Jane?’

  The house was absolutely still. Why can’t you creak? Have you no personality?

  ‘Ja-ane?’

  Which one was the bathroom? She opened a door; space and silence sucked at her and she shut it quickly.

  A pace along the passage and she lost the moonlight. Now, there was only the faint, green spot of a smoke-alarm on a ceiling beam and the deeper darkness of doorways. She put a hand into a recess, found a cold doorknob and then drew back.

  ‘Jane!’

  Shouting this time, but the passage swallowed it; she could almost see the short, bright name narrowing like a light down a tunnel, vanishing in no time. She was aware of a slow panic, like a dark train coming, and she grabbed the handle and turned it and the door didn’t open; perhaps this was the bathroom and the kid had locked it. ‘Jane ...’

  A sudden yielding, and she stumbled, the oak door rolling away into the vastness of a long, long bedroom, empty as an open field, and Merrily grabbed at the handle and hauled the door closed, turning away and finding herself facing another door and she opened that, and there was the lavatory with its seat up and caught in a frail moonbeam, making an apologetic O.

  As in NO. No Jane ...

  No, no, no, no, no ... She fled along the passage, all the doors closed and blank. She felt she’d been out here for hours, trying door after door, and in that time Jane must have finished in the bathroom and gone back to bed, so which one was the bedroom?

  Which one was the bloody bedroom?

  All the doors were closed, and she’d surely left the bedroom door open, hadn’t she? But maybe Jane had closed it, shut her out. Jane had shut her out. ‘Jane!!!’ she screamed, and ran wildly from door to door, all the same, all black oak and all shut.

  And spun round and round and found herself facing stairs. Where was she now? Had she gone downstairs? Had she gone down to the dreadful kitchen or the drawing room with its chimney blocked; she couldn’t have.

  No. These were the other stairs. The next stairs. Oh, Jesus, there were more stairs.

  The extra floor. A third and empty floor of doors and doors and doors.

  She stood at the bottom of the stairs and couldn’t look up. She hugged herself, and felt sweat cold on her shoulders.

  She knew, of course, that she would have to go up there.

  In all her dreams of being in a house and suddenly discovering it had a third storey, she had accepted that, sooner or later, she was going to have to climb those final stairs. Because of the presence. Because there was someone up there waiting for her. In the best dreams, it was herself; if she climbed the stairs, she would find her true self, discover her hidden potential. This, said the analysts she had read over the years, was the true meaning of this dream. It was about reaching for the higher dimension. Or, in a spiritual sense, carrying the lantern of faith along the dark corridors to the foot of the last stairs, at the top of which was the greater light.

  But in the worst dreams, the presence at the top of the stairs, along the final passage, behind the final doors, was neither her higher self nor the light of lights. For a while, after his death, it had been Sean, still greedily grinning through the torn metal, through his blood.

  So, which one was this: the good dream or the bad dream?

  No.

  It wasn’t a dream. This was the promised reality, the culmination. She had obeyed her calling, given herself up to the Holy Spirit. And moved at last into the house with three floors. Oh God, the tugging on the hand ...

  Jane?

  No.

  All right. So be it. Merrily relaxed the grip on her cold shoulders, let her arms fall to her side.

  She looked up.

  Couldn’t breathe.

  ‘Mum?’

  Oh my God, my God, my God, my God, my God, I can’t breathe.

  ‘Mum!’

  Her chest was rigid, as though there was a tourniquet around it, winding tighter and tighter, squashing her breasts. She rolled over, gasping.

  ‘Mummy!’ Her eyes blinked open and the breath gushed into her, and she sat up, coughing. Jane had hold of her shoulders. Big, frightened eyes, dark hair fluffed up and haloed by the pinky-orange light of dawn.

  ‘You’re back,’ Merrily croaked.

  ‘Mum, I haven’t been anywhere.’

  ‘You went to the bathroom.’

  ‘No ...’

  Merrily turned to the door. It was closed.

  ‘You were having a dream,’ Jane said.

  ‘It couldn’t have been a dream. I followed you out.’

  Jane shook her head wryly and skipped to the window. ‘Oh, look, you can see the hills. You can see right over the houses across the road. I bet it’s brilliant from upstairs, on the top floor. In my apartment.’

  She turned back to Merrily and grinned.

  ‘I’ll go and make some tea.’

  Merrily closed her eyes. When she opened them, Jane was gone, the door slamming behind her. Merrily’s hair felt cold and damp around the numbness o
f her face, and her chest felt like it had been sat on. She was exhausted.

  15

  Hazey Jane

  OF COURSE, SHE’D had this kind of nightmare before. Everybody had. The point about dreams was that your reactions were often intensified because you were so helpless. Apprehension, mild fear, turned very quickly into terror; small, disquieting things were sometimes loaded with a bloated menace, which gradually deflated when you awoke.

  Well. Usually.

  Very occasionally, the essence of it remained draped over you like dusty, moth-eaten rags, for most of the day. Merrily knelt under the pink-washed window, hoping to rinse her spirits with prayer. But it was mechanical, she couldn’t find the level. It was as though the nightmare had blocked her spiritual pores.

  And something else was blocked. What did I see? she kept asking herself. What did I see when I looked up those stairs? And something cold crept up her vertebrae and left behind it a formless, drifting dread.

  She stood up and shook herself. Found a towel and some shampoo in the overnight bag, went for a bath but nearly chickened out: the sight of the cold, tiled bathroom made clammy skin and sweat-stiffened hair seem rather less offensive, and she had to dismiss sinful images of the warm, creamy comforts of the en-suite at the Black Swan, the urge to slip back there for one last, glorious soak.

  Anyway, it was only about five-thirty. Too early even to get into the Swan. Oh, come on. Are we grown women, or what? She helped a big spider to freedom and turned on the flaking, chromium taps, noticing that the oak floorboards had been concealed, probably for the past thirty years, under well-worn, well-cracked black and white lino tiles.

  During Alf Hayden’s lengthy tenure, the nouveau riche village of Ledwardine had managed to leave its vicarage a long way behind.

  ‘You,’ her daughter said, looking thoughtful, ‘are looking pretty rough.’

  They’d bought a loaf last night from the Late store, and Jane was trying to make the Aga make toast.