by Phil Rickman
‘I, erm… I have to call and see Mr Hall. Sam Hall? I was told his house is somewhere near here.’
‘Aye, carry on up the track and you’ll see his windmill. It’s a bit mucky up there, but you’ll get through. Friend of yours, Mr Hall?’
‘I’ve not really met him. As such.’
‘Nice enough man,’ said Mr Lodge. ‘Used to be local, then he emigrated to America and come back a bit cranky.’
‘Oh?’
‘Takes my dogs for a run. Loves dogs, he says, but he won’t have one himself ’cause he reckons there’s too many dogs around for no particular reason. That kind of cranky.’
‘Ah. Right. Look, I…’ Feeling, if anything, more hopelessly inadequate than was usual on these occasions. ‘I just want to say I’m very, very sorry for what’s happened.’
‘Thank you. But you don’t know what’s happened, do you?’ Tony Lodge presented her with his summary of Roddy’s life, scribbled in felt pen on half a sheet of lined notepaper. ‘None of us do. And likely that’s best for everyone.’
Spectral in the fog, the windmill rose like a huge, petrified sunflower out of a clearing on a small escarpment, a plateau on the edge of the hill. It looked alien and probably always would, Merrily thought. The house was about thirty yards away, behind a wall around four feet high and the winter remains of vegetable patches.
Pulling on woollen gloves, she left the Volvo at the top of the track, before it narrowed into a footpath and curved past the house towards what she guessed would be the summit of the hill – could only guess because it was smothered by the fog, whitish here like a blank stage backcloth.
Despite the murk, she could see no lights in the house. But then, from what Lol had said, this place would never be well lit. It was a brick-built bungalow, square and compact, with small windows, dense as Gomer’s glasses, and a solar panel like a blister in the roof. There was no smoke from the chimney.
The wooden front gate was unlocked, and Merrily went through, along a path between veg beds, to the front door inside its wooden porch. She couldn’t see a bell or a knocker and ending up banging on the panels with a gloved fist. No answer. She went back outside.
Electricity and radiation, Lol had listed. Pylons, power lines, TV and mobile-phone transmitters. The twenty-first-century plague. Hot spots and the death road. And something else it was clear he wasn’t going to tell me or Moira.
Me or Moira. Moira and me. Why did this nag? They were all supposed to be adults. But it had got into her dreams last night. In the last dream, she’d suddenly realized – with the dramatic intensity that only dreams could bestow – that Lol Robinson was in the music business… where everybody slept with everybody else. Awakening anxious and cold – again. Of course, she knew he wasn’t like that – quite the opposite in some ways, after what had happened to him all those years ago. But he was insecure about his abilities and perhaps this mature, experienced Moira Cairns was giving him the reassurance that only another musician could.
Oh God. The fog swirled around her like hostile floss.
Merrily heard footsteps on the track, then a slurring in the mud, the sounds somewhere inside the white fog. She stayed inside the garden wall, hands cold inside her coat pockets and the gloves.
The engine was running to support the heater, doing its best, but this was an old car and the heater took a while to get going, the car warming up very gradually like an old man rubbing his hands and massaging his joints.
The Volvo was backed onto the grass beside the footpath, out of sight, if not earshot, of Sam Hall’s eco-house. On the passenger side, Mrs Lodge was bulked out by a US Army parka, far too big for her. She’d started talking outside on the track, her voice high and querulous and revealing the remains of a South Wales accent. He’s not heartless, she’d cried. I didn’t want you to leave thinking he’s heartless.
Merrily said, ‘Mrs Lodge, this is one of the hardest situations anyone has to go through. When it’s not of your making but you’re dragged into it and you don’t know where your loyalties are supposed to lie.’
‘Cherry,’ Mrs Lodge said. ‘My name’s Cherry. Like the fruit, not Mrs Blair.’
The run up the track had reddened her cheeks, as if to underline the point. She told Merrily she’d known Sam Hall wasn’t at home, had seen him walk past, towards the village, over an hour ago, and when her husband had climbed back on his quad bike and gone back to finish his fencing in the top field, she’d grabbed her chance to say what she couldn’t say in front of him.
‘Not that we’re not close.’ She stared through the windscreen into the fog. ‘Not that we haven’t been close, I should say. The bad things that happen on a farm – even the money problems – are things you can discuss. This—’ She sniffed and dragged out a clutch of tissues to wipe her nose. ‘This is beyond everything.’
Merrily said, ‘Do you mind if I smoke… if I were to open the window an inch or two?’
‘Of course.’ Cherry almost smiled, seeming grateful for this sign of human weakness. Merrily lit a Silk Cut.
‘He’s changed, of course,’ Cherry said. ‘He doesn’t think he’s turning into his father, because the old man was always so religious, but he is.’ She put away the tissue and turned in her seat to face Merrily. ‘Still, there are worse things. Lord knows what Roddy was turning into. All in all, I can’t help thinking, God help us, that it’s as well it ended the way it did. If we could say it had ended. If we’re ever going to be able to say that.’
‘Were you there?’
‘No. Neither of us was there. I remember I went out to fill the coal scuttle about teatime and I thought I could hear something from down the hill, but I thought it was just kids. It was about ten o’clock before the police even came and told us he was dead. We didn’t know what to do. Nobody else came. We didn’t know everybody had seen him… electrocuted. We just… Tony and me, we just sat there and talked about it until the early hours. But then the next day he didn’t want to know, and that’s how it’s been since. That’s how the old man would’ve been. And then it was in the papers and on the telly – the videos people’d taken. Our neighbours, so-called.’
‘How long’ve you been married?’
Wanting to take her away from those images. The car, swaddled in fog, was warming up inside now and Cherry was talking freely. It emerged that she and Tony had met through a dating agency for farmers. Born in Newport, where her parents had a shoe shop, she’d always dreamed of life on a farm. They’d been married twenty years, since she was twenty-seven, and had two sons, both now working in Cardiff and loving it. If Tony Lodge left them the farm, it would only be sold off. He had a decision to make and fairly soon. He didn’t need this on top of it all, his wife said.
And when they’d turned up at the door last night, the villagers, the new villagers, telling him he ought to do the decent community thing and have Roddy tidily cremated…
‘I don’t think I’m quite understanding this,’ Merrily said. ‘All this talk of the “new” Underhowle. Would this be something to do with the Development Committee?’
‘They don’t even like to call it Underhowle any more. “Oh, it’s a nowhere sort of name,” one of them said once, when they had a public meeting about it. “A neither here-nor-there name”.’
‘Meeting about what?’
‘Ariconium. That’s what they call the project. Ariconium was an old Roman town that was supposed to be further down the valley towards Weston, but Mr Crewe, who bought the Old Rectory, he reckons it was more this way, and he found a little statue of a Roman god and they all got excited, and that’s how it started, really. I can’t see it myself – I mean, there’s nothing there. It’s not like as if there were walls and ruins, things you can walk round. It’s just marks in the ground.’
‘I saw a stone plaque thing in the village hall, with the word Ariconium carved into it.’
‘They wanted to put it on the signs at the entrance to the village, but some historical organization objected be
cause they said it wasn’t proved, but they’re fighting that. They’re setting up a museum of things people’ve found and maps and audiovisual stuff – in the old chapel. They’ve had a grant from the Lottery, lots of things like that.’
‘ “They”?’
‘Well, Mr Crewe and Mr Young at the school and the chap who has the computer factory. People like that. Seem to be more of them every day. But they’ve done a lot for the village, kind of thing, put a lot of people in work, so everybody’s going along with it. And they make it all sound so exciting for the future – more tourism, more jobs. They’re planning this big launch next Easter, with leaflets and articles in the papers and television and that. The last thing they want is for the village to be associated with a mass murderer. Oh, dear God, no, not now.’
‘Pretty tactless, however, coming to your husband, so soon afterwards.’
‘Had to come in good time for the funeral. They were nice enough about it, I suppose. Said they’d help keep it discreet. Keep the press away. How it was in everybody’s interests to develop an upmarket tourist economy kind of thing and until that was established we had to be conscious of our public profile.’
Merrily shook her head at the crassness of it. ‘Not, even in normal circumstances, the best thing to say to a traditional farmer.’
Cherry Lodge managed a smile. ‘That’s true.’ She was actually quite pretty; there had probably been a time, before the reality of it all started to wear her down, when Tony Lodge hadn’t been able to believe his luck. ‘All tourism means to my husband is people tramping across his land, leaving gates open. That’s what he’s doing up there now – repairing fences, tightening the barbed wire. Battening down the hatches.’
‘That’s not good, is it?’ Merrily said carefully, and collected another grateful look.
‘Like he’s accepted that we’re supposed to be hermits now, for the rest of our lives. Not show our faces down there ’cause we’re going to be tarred with it for ever.’ A glimmering of tears. ‘And this family’s been here longer than any of them. Longer than any of them.’ She leaned forward in the seat. ‘You know what I’d like to do – sell our story to the papers. We had the reporters here, loads of them, and Tony was ready to get his gun out to them. But I’d like to get them back, tell everybody what he was really like, how weird he really was – that’d teach—’ She blinked. ‘I keep forgetting you’re a vicar. I don’t get to talk to many women. You must think—’
‘No. Not at all.’ Merrily focused rapidly, glad that Jane’s duffel was still toggled over the dog collar. ‘What would you tell them, Cherry? What would you tell them about Roddy? Weird how?’
‘Oh…’ Cherry looked uncomfortable again. Too eager. Blown it. ‘All sorts of things. Tony used to talk about him a lot at one time – all the things he couldn’t understand. There’s always somebody in a family you talk about, isn’t there? Somebody you always despair of. Always, “Oh what’s he gone and done now?” Black sheep kind of thing.’
‘What kind of things did he do?’
Cherry’s hazel eyes flickered. ‘You’ve put me on the spot now. I’m not sure I should—’
‘It’s OK.’ Merrily nodded quickly, pushing her cigarette into the ashtray. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t’ve asked.’
‘Anyway, I’ve taken up too much of your time already. I’ve got the lunch to make and everything. Not that he’ll eat much.’
‘I’ll take you back down.’ Merrily let out the clutch, biting her lip. How to play this… ‘Look, you can take up as much of my time as you want, whenever you want. Any time you feel this is getting on top of you and you want to talk.’
She backed into some bushes in the fog – more scratches – before managing a clumsy three-point turn, dragging the Volvo back onto the track, crawling down the hill in second gear, foot on the brake, headlights on, until the farmhouse imprinted itself drably on the clogged air. Cherry was silent the whole way, and when Merrily pulled up, she made no move to open the door.
‘You’re not an ordinary priest, are you?’
‘Well, most of them are bigger…’
‘Mr Banks, it was, who told Tony. About what you do.’
‘Well, whatever Mr Banks said, I don’t think it’s anything to do with why I was asked to take over the funeral.’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘If it is, nobody’s told me.’
Cherry stared out of the window. ‘You on e-mail, are you?’
‘Yes. Well, no… actually the computer’s crashed at home, but you can reach me at the office in Hereford.’
‘Write down the address for me, can you? Don’t look so surprised, I’m not a peasant, I’ve been doing the accounts on an IBM computer for four years now. Listen, if I write all this out for you and send it, no one will see it? You promise me that?’
‘Except possibly my secretary. Who’s also the Bishop’s secretary. Who you could trust like your mother. But—’
‘I don’t know what good it’s going to do – except I think we should’ve told the police and Tony wouldn’t do that. It was when the police told us about all these pictures on his wall, and they asked could we throw any light on it, and Tony said no, we couldn’t. And afterwards he was going, “What difference is it going to make now, anyway – except everybody thinking, Oh they’re all like that, all the Lodges. Mental. Sick.” ’
Merrily’s throat was dry. The fog seemed, if anything, thicker now; it felt like when you were a kid burrowing under the bedclothes with a pencil flashlight. Cherry opened the car door, got out and then leaned back in.
‘It torments me. I keep thinking, maybe we should have tried to get him to see a psychiatrist, we might’ve saved those girls. I mean, he went to his doctor, with the headaches, and he didn’t spot anything.’
‘Whatever it was, I think a lot of people failed to react to it,’ Merrily said. She was thinking of the Rev. Jerome Banks. She was thinking of her own wimpish relief at being denied access to Roddy Lodge at Hereford police headquarters.
Cherry said, ‘This is going to sound stupid, but what it comes down to is Roddy and dead people. From an early age, this thing about the dead.’ She leaned on the door frame, looking around, listening perhaps for the putter of the quad bike. ‘Maybe I’m making too much of it.’
27
Lamp
THE SCHOOL BUS was actually starting up when Jane looked out of the window and saw Eirion standing there by his car, in his school uniform, in the fog. And her heart pulsed the way it used to when he drove all the way from the Cathedral School in Hereford because he just like had to see her. Serious turn-on.
And today he’d come all this way in terrible driving conditions.
But when she scrambled down from the bus, dragging her flight bag full of books, she saw that he wasn’t smiling. From the beginning, the most amazing thing about Eirion had been his smile, and when it wasn’t there he looked pasty, a bit jowly, even. These days, anyway. Especially through the fog.
In the old days – March, April – arriving at her school, he’d say, I was just passing. Both of them knowing that this wasn’t a place anyone in their right mind ‘just passed’. So it was a catchphrase nowadays, and they’d be touching one another before the car’s doors were properly shut. But tonight…
‘I just needed to see you.’ Eirion making it obvious by his tone that today it wasn’t that kind of need. ‘You want a lift home?’
When she got into the new old car, the sky was going dark. It always seemed to be going dark, Jane thought. Life was one long dusk. Eirion just started the engine and when they were through the gates, he said, ‘Jane, do you think we need to talk?’
Like how many crappy soaps did you hear that line in, in the course of an average week? Or you would if you watched them. Jane tried to think of a corresponding cliché, couldn’t come up with one.
‘What about?’ she said finally.
‘Well… you.’
He took the back lanes to Ledwardine, prolonging the jo
urney like he used to when they weren’t quite going out together but he was hoping. It could take for ever today, with these conditions. The fog had never really cleared from this morning; they’d had the lights on in the school all day. And what a long and tedious day it had been. In Eng Lit, she’d collected a couple of dagger-glances from Mrs Costello whom she liked really but, come on, wasn’t life just a little too short for flatulent prats like Salman Rushdie?
‘I, er, checked out the insurance,’ Eirion said. ‘It’s probably OK for you to drive this car, after all. I mean… when it’s a better day than this.’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘A better day.’
A better day. A bright new beginning. You’re so young, people said. What I wouldn’t do if I was your age again. When what they really meant was that when they were young the idea of a bright new beginning for the world didn’t seem quite so laughable.
In the summer, after she and Eirion had made love for the first time (the first time for both of them, with anybody, it later emerged) it was incredible, like climbing a mountain, and it was all there at your feet: the whole of life a glowing patchwork of endless, glistening greenery.
Jane scowled. Didn’t ‘make love’. Had sex.
And that was it. Done it now. Done it a bunch of times and, sure, sometimes – before and during and after – it felt as though she was very much in love and didn’t want there to be anyone else ever…
In which case, this was really it? Seventeen now, an adult. Now what?
And why? Why bother? It was all going to end in tears, anyway.
‘I’ve been wondering what’s made you so negative lately,’ Eirion said.
‘Oh, really.’
‘And whether there was any way I could help.’
The car heater panted. The dipped headlights excavated shallow trenches in the grey-brownness. It was a situation that, at one time, might have seemed cosily mysterious. As distinct from totally dismal.
‘Because if I can’t,’ Eirion said. ‘You know…’
‘What?’