by Phil Rickman
He stood at the bigger window, by day overlooking the Frome Valley where they grew hops for beer. An hour from Ledwardine which traditionally had produced apples for cider – the Village in the Orchard, home of the muddy field.
Prof sighed.
‘And the vicar – still a street between you?’
‘Close neighbours,’ Lol said.
At night, he could look from his cottage windows across the street to the lights of the vicarage. Some nights, while Jane was away on her gap-year archaeological dig and he had a day off from touring, they would both look across from his bedroom, at no lights.
‘She still doing that stuff like at Stock’s kiln?’ Prof said.
‘With no encouragement at all from the new Bishop of Hereford.’
‘They have a new one?’
‘Craig Innes. Modernizer. Doesn’t like spooky.’
‘Pfft!’ Prof said. ‘Religion. All of it’s spooky. Nature of the beast. Don’t even ask me about Judaism.’
No way round this. Lol told Prof about Innes’s links to a senior faction inside the C of E committed to wiping out what they considered to be medieval practices in the Church. All in the cause of survival in an increasingly secular age. A tougher job in Herefordshire, where the old ways died hard, but he was a determined bastard.
‘If he drops her from deliverance – and he will, soon as he can justify it – she can hardly stay in the diocese. That’s how she sees it anyway, and she might be right.’
Prof sat down on the side of the bed.
‘If she goes… you would have to follow, yes?’
‘I try to think it could be the best thing for both of us.’
Prof’s chuckle was arid.
‘Farewell to the place that gave you sanctuary when you were a lost boy? The place where you didn’t realize you could ever be so happy? Oh yes, I can see the logic in that.’
Lol said nothing. He rubbed at the condensation on the glass. Nothing to see, and no sounds apart from the fizzing of the stove and a slow dripping from the eaves.
‘So, essentially, Laurence, things are coming to a head, and you don’t want to come back from some distant gig to find cases packed.’ Prof’s eyes were sad in the mauve light. ‘Ah, the irony of it. A boy once disowned by his fundamentalist Christian parents for embracing the devil’s music—’
‘Prof, please, let’s not—’
‘—emerging from the darkest period in his life – this is pertinent – with an entirely understandable antipathy to organized religion, only to fall in love with a vicar? Don’t tell me there isn’t a part of you that secretly hopes this business with the Bishop will drive her out of the damn Church once and for all.’
Lol couldn’t find the words to refute this. His hands were cold and wet from the condensation on the window, and he went to warm them at the paraffin stove. Prof stood up.
‘You should’ve told me this earlier, you tosser, instead of going on about your chickenshit folk festival.’
‘What’s worst about this, Prof, is that they’re never what you expect, the clergy. Especially now, with everything collapsing around them. Spirituality’s the first casualty – especially at his level.’
‘Knives out?’
‘Croziers sharpened like hedging hooks.’
‘I would like to suggest that you’re probably exaggerating, but I fear you’re not.’ Prof felt a bedsheet. ‘Not too damp. Listen, you need to decide if you want to marry this woman, you know that?’
‘Known it for a long time.’
‘Or work out what’s important. And, who knows, hey, perhaps it’s music. Perhaps you might even see that, one day. When it’s too late.’
3
Trespass
VILLAGE FOG, RIVER fog, wasn’t like the city fog she’d known as a kid, acrid with diesel fumes, but it wasn’t like candyfloss either. You could get lost in your backyard on a night like this
She felt moisture like cold sweat on her cheeks. Her hands felt damp, as if the vapours had seeped inside her gloves. The year was too old to be autumnal, the lights of Christmas still unplugged. Just dark and damp enough to absorb sadness, so maybe a good month to be buried.
Merrily followed Jane out of the vicarage drive under trees bagged in fog.
Jane said, ‘If this is nothing you’re going to kill me in the morning, aren’t you?’
‘Flower, this is the morning.’
‘Be something to tell the Legion at the Swan tomorrow, at least,’ Jane said.
Merrily drew her woollen scarf over her lower face. Unless this involved illegal activity, she wouldn’t be telling anybody. And you could say too much sometimes, to the clergy.
She’d brought the heavyweight Maglite torch they kept close to the front door. The beam wasn’t brilliant but it was, as Frannie Bliss had said once, better than a baseball bat and less likely to come back on you in court if you wound up using it on somebody. She left it switched off. If they stayed close to the church wall they’d be OK.
‘Mum, why don’t you just call Lol?’
‘Because he’s not at home. His truck’s not there. He’s at Prof Levin’s. Probably decided to stay the night. I wouldn’t like to drive in this. So let’s just, you know, go in there very quietly, just to see. That’s all. We do our best not to be seen, we don’t speak, we definitely don’t challenge anybody until we know what’s happening.’
On the village square, the fake gaslamps had been switched off since midnight. The few buildings you could make out were vague and shapeless like museum exhibits under dust sheets.
‘They say he did a lot of dope,’ Jane whispered, ‘did you hear that?’
‘Who?’
‘Aidan Lloyd?’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Heard it in the shop. You know how people are: if he’d been doing drugs he probably deserved to die. Especially being rich as well.’
‘Yeah, OK, I heard whispers.’
Though obviously not something the family had wanted to discuss. She hadn’t known the Lloyds, only seen their oilseed rape from afar. Aidan’s father, Iestyn, was the man who’d painted Ledwardine yellow. In the process some old woodland had vanished, it was said. Old but not protected, so he’d got away with it.
She turned and found the church wall and held on to it until they reached the lychgate. To their right the tarmac path to the church, to the left the stony old path to the churchyard, the burial ground. The Lloyd family weren’t churchgoers, except for other farmers’ funerals.
‘Someone said his old man found his stash after his death,’ Jane said. ‘He hadn’t known. He would’ve gone ballistic.’
‘You heard that in the shop, too?’
‘Hairdresser’s.’
No big deal these days, cannabis, even in the sticks, but could this partly explain the atmosphere at the funeral? Even worse after they wheeled the coffin out of the church. That pervading mood of restrained hostility, as the day had congealed around them in the churchyard. Aidan’s mother had been half turned away from the open grave. Short hair, white, no hat. Her face compacted into what looked like permanent anger.
But the most persistent image of that funeral had been Iestyn Lloyd standing on the grave’s edge, looking down – Merrily, bent to her open prayer book, the only person who would have heard what he’d whispered.
She was remembering the slightly wary attitude of Aidan’s step brother when he’d arrived at the vicarage with an envelope containing some personal details for the service. Not all that personal, as it turned out. He came through persistent childhood asthma attacks to emerge as a proficient and dedicated farmer.
She’d tried for anecdotes, but the step brother didn’t seem to understand what she was after. Warmth? Humanity? The sense of a valued life? Even trying to picture Aidan, she saw only the hollow eyes and the smudge of a half-grown beard from the photo in the Hereford Times.
‘And then the woman from the gallery in Lucy’s old shop,’ Jane said, ‘she apparently said he wa
s out of his skull when he rode his quad bike out of the field gate. I’m bloody glad they’re going.’
‘The gallery people?’
Aware that Jane was talking to keep it casual, like this was routine.
‘Always felt totally wrong, people like that in Lucy’s shop.’
‘Time to stop talking, I think, flower.’
Moving cautiously into the churchyard, finding the stony path thought to have been the end of an old coffin trail across the fields from outlying farms.
The churchyard was an alien place tonight, isolated in its own dimension, and all you could hear were heavy drips. Headstones were emerging from the fog like tree stumps in a marsh. Like a cartoon haunted graveyard. If there was one thing you learned from working in deliverance it was that the haunted graveyard was mainly for the cartoons but you still caught your breath when the first monolithic Victorian monument emerged like an industrial ghost from the fog.
Jane swung back, choking on a laugh, shrill relief overcoming caution before sliding back against a gravestone.
And then sinking, as if dissolving into the fog.
‘Oh for—!’
‘What’ve you—?’
Merrily went down next to her, a hand on Jane’s arm.
‘Mum, I can’t get up.’ Jane’s voice splintered with shock and then penetrated by agony. ‘Ankle. I’ve turned my bloody ankle on this… something grabbed my foot.’
‘OK. Don’t try to move, just…’ She’d found it. She could feel the thorns through her gloves. Even dead brambles could snare a foot in the dark. ‘Stay… just stay calm, while I…’
‘Look… look…’
And, oh God, there it was in the middle distance, all the distance there was tonight. Like a pale, grounded moon, quick shadows passing across it like old windblown leaves. But there was no wind.
Jane inhaling sharply.
‘You didn’t believe me, did you?’
‘I did believe you, I just…’
Neither of them moving now, dampness wrapping around them, about twenty paces, she was guessing, from where Aidan Lloyd lay amid a compression of noises: grunts, the weight of breathing.
A painful throb in Merrily’s chest as she crouched next to Jane up against the stone. It should be anger. She was responsible for this place. She should stand on the lid of a stone tomb and turn on the Maglite, blast them.
‘Jane…’ Head down close. ‘Phone?’
‘I can’t… get to my pocket.’
Merrily gripped the gravestone, watching the off-white light, going in and out as if it was signalling. It was like Jane had said, shadows moving across it at irregular intervals. When the light broke through again, she saw shadows coalescing and heard a dull but solid and complex impact-noise before the shadows were breaking apart again. A slow blur of shifting humanity and not a word said.
‘What are they doing?’
She was gripping Jane’s arm, pulling her close, Jane’s rapid breaths in her face. They were huddled tight to their grave which, she realized now, by the softness of rampant moss on the stone, was where Lucy Devenish lay, the old soul of the village, whose will had decreed that no growth should be removed from her stone.
Merrily pinched a loop of bramble between finger and thumb, pulling it steadily until she could fit the whole glove inside and wrench it away from Jane’s foot.
‘You’re going to have to try and stand up, flower. Can you do that?’
‘Not sure.’
‘Try.’
Merrily wedged herself against Lucy’s furry stone with its lines from Traherne: No more shall clouds eclipse my treasures/Nor viler shades obscure my highest pleasures. Running the lines through her mind like a mantra, but Lucy couldn’t help them now. At the end of a tunnel in the fog, the lamplight flared and then went out and stayed out, but the shifting sounds continued, and then there was a metallic chuckle.
Jane, incredibly, was trembling. Merrily switched on the torch, shading it with a gloved hand, though there was no need; its light was bleary, lukewarm, batteries so expensive now that you eked them out. The torch licked feebly at Lucy’s stone like it didn’t want to go any further.
Merrily froze. Really froze, as if her heart had stopped.
It was not a shiver. Nothing so pleasurable. It was like becoming aware that you were wearing a cold coat which was not yours and carried its history in every frigid fold.
In a moment of separation, she knew that another step would be trespass, and she was switching off the torch just as the fog shredded momentarily like rotting muslin, exposing the bony old apple trees and men like dark hawks under tall hats, moving like the figures on a Victorian automaton, closing sluggishly together and then parting to expose in grey light the suggestion of a face that she didn’t want to believe was a face. Trespass. That urgent sense of being so close to trespass. The unquestionable need to flee.
4
No visible light
SHE’D AWOKEN THE kitchen woodstove, feeding it brittle twigs before pushing the Victorian sofa in from the scullery for Jane, helping her on to it, between plumped-up cushions. Jane scowling, the stove glass flaring yellow as the twigs caught.
‘I can walk. I got back OK.’
She’d got back, but not OK. Hobbling together, arms around one another like the three-legged race at some old school sports-day.
Merrily added a little brandy to Jane’s tea.
‘I think you can stay there for a bit.’
‘You going to call the cops?’
‘I’ve not decided.’
They’d stumbled into the house, door banged, locked, bolts thrown. And all this meant nothing.
‘If you’re thinking of going back…’ Jane lowering a foot to the floor. ‘… then we’re both—’ The foot had touched a stone flag. ‘Oh sh—’
Bravado. It didn’t need spelling out: Jane did not want to go back. Merrily helped her back on to the sofa then went across to the Welsh dresser and found some squat batteries in a top drawer. Dropped them one by one into the torch.
‘Your hand’s shaking,’ Jane said.
Merrily tried the torch. Strong white light. She did up the poppers on her jacket.
‘Mum, listen, I really hate to sound like… like your mother, or something. But you can’t go back there on your own.’
‘I’m not going all the way back. Just close enough to—’
‘Call the bloody cops. When even I’m saying that…’
‘I can’t…’ She couldn’t say that she was only not going back to the churchyard because she was afraid. ‘I can’t even begin to think what I’d say to the police when I can’t explain it to myself.’
Jane’s eyes were clouded with uncertainty.
‘We’re not kids. We’re not from some primitive society. We don’t run away from things.’
‘We couldn’t run, could we?’
Merrily went down on her knees next to the stove, opening it up and feeding it a flaky, dry log.
‘All my fault,’ Jane said.
‘Could’ve happened to either of us in those conditions. We did what you do when you’re incapable of challenging anybody.’
‘And that’s all it was?’
No, of course it wasn’t.
Ethel pattered in and jumped on the sofa next to Jane, who sat up, defiantly, hugging the cat.
‘It’s not a broken ankle, it’s not even a proper sprain. Just give me a few more minutes…’
She reached her spare hand down to the twisted ankle, as if she was about to prove something, then stifled a sob, lay back, defeated, Ethel scrambling free.
Jane looked up, her smile a little crooked.
‘Obvious why you won’t call the police.’
Merrily stood up.
‘Oh?’
‘Because you can’t have anything getting back to the Bishop. Anything he could use as evidence of your… precarious mental state.’
‘Jane, that’s—’
‘He’s turning your whole life into
some narrow little path through a minefield. And in your job, you aren’t even allowed to secretly hope he dies or something.’
‘You’d be surprised.’
Jane tried to laugh, didn’t get there.
‘Can we at least talk about this? Like, what if… How did you know it was real?’
‘Jane—’
‘It didn’t look real, did it? They did not look real. At the very least, it was like we’d walked into a play. Street theatre. Graveyard theatre. Or something that… wasn’t there.’
‘They were real. You know that or you wouldn’t be suggesting I call the police.’
She didn’t want to talk about this. Not now. Not the withdrawal of protection, the moment of isolation, the impossibility of prayer. It was not Jane’s fault, it was her fault for not responding to the signals. For coming so close to trespass, her hand almost extended to grasp something… fibrous. She’d been here before.
She went to the kitchen window, stared at her own dull reflection, hair all over the place, eyes retracted into shadows. She didn’t want to ask Jane what she’d seen. Or what she’d felt – especially that. But then the little voice was back, the how old will you be when you die? voice.
‘Then why was I so frightened?’
‘Because you were helpless.’ She turned away from the window, went to kneel down by the Victoria sofa. ‘And in pain.’
Jane looked down into clasped hands.
‘I am… not like you.’
‘No. Of course not.’
‘Still a bit of a pagan.’
‘It’s your choice.’
‘Because… because it’s interesting. It’s exciting. It brings the world alive for me – the fact that there are things out there, in nature, that we don’t understand. It’s bigger than the sad little politicians. Bigger than getting rich and having lots of clothes.’
‘Maybe.’
‘So why…’ Jane looked up, tears in shocking dark, parallel lines down her cheeks. ‘So why was I afraid? In my own village?’
Merrily sighed, gripping Jane’s hand.