by Phil Rickman
Consider the implications of this situation. Try not to panic.
15
Only Me
‘Why don’t I ever listen?’ Merrily was driving too fast down the hill towards Ledbury, as if the Malverns were ramming the Volvo from behind. ‘Jesus, she might be a touch loopy, this Winnie Sparke, but she cut to the essence of it: am I going to be the mad priest who stands at the roadside and publicly prays for the soul of a musical genius, a national icon, a man with his face on twenty-pound notes, to be at peace and stop causing fatal bloody road accidents? Am I going to be the person who – for heaven’s sake – exorcizes Elgar?’
‘Just … slow down. Please?’
Lol thought she looked tiny and vulnerable, at the wheel of a car that was too big for her and grated out its age on every bend. She’d refused to let him drive. He held on to the sides of his seat.
‘There’ll be a way out. Spicer doesn’t want that.’
‘No, Laurence,’ Merrily said, ‘What he doesn’t want is to have to do it himself.’
And she was probably right. One thing you learned, being close to a vicar, was that other vicars could be scheming bastards.
‘Whatever happens, he’s going to want to keep it discreet. They’re very publicity-shy, the ex-SAS. And that’s likely to be the main reason he’s switched the meeting from Wednesday night to tomorrow. He doesn’t want TV crews from America.’
A single light up ahead was dim and bleary. Merrily braked.
‘If it gets out,’ Lol said.
‘You don’t really think … ?’
‘Big figure, Elgar, worldwide.’
They passed the vintage motor-scooter. It was on the correct side of the road. Merrily drove slowly in silence for a while. A lorry overtook the Volvo. Lol caught her glance.
‘We’ve never discussed this, Lol, but I got the feeling in there that you knew rather more about Elgar than I did.’
‘Depends how much you know.’
‘Well … bugger-all, really. That’s what makes this so much worse.’
Jane stumbled, panting, into the cobbled market square with its hanging aroma of apple-wood smoke from the fire the Black Swan kept lit for the tourists on all but the warmest summer nights.
She looked around. Nobody about. No lights in the vicarage. No lights in Lol’s cottage, which used to be Lucy’s. Maybe he and Mum had locked the dog collar in the glove compartment and stopped to do it on the back seat in a lay-by.
Jane grinned. God, what was she turning into?
Whatever, at least those guys from the council hadn’t found out her full name. All she had to do was keep clear of Lyndon Pierce for a while and she could ride this out.
Which of course would be the coward’s way out.
It was about 10.15 p.m., the deep red veins of evening yielding to the cooling blue of early night. Jane moved between the lumpen 4x4s of the Black Swan’s clientele and slipped under the eaves of the oak-pillared market hall.
Thinking about the winter after Lucy died, when she’d seriously embraced some kind of goddess-worship, lying about her age to join this women’s esoteric group, The Pod, in Hereford. Wondering now why she’d more or less abandoned paganism which, on nights like this, seemed a kind of healthy spiritual response to nature and the environment.
A better relationship developing between her and Mum probably had something to do with it. Mum becoming more liberal as she became more secure in her own job. And then there was Eirion. Meeting Eirion, falling in … love, probably.
Which was looking like a dead end.
Jane moved out of the shadow of the market hall and across the cobbled square, walking towards the church until the top of Cole Hill came into view, smoky and seductive in the dusk. The hill of the shamans.
Eirion. She badly wanted to see him, but it was pointless. Within three months he’d be at university. Emma Rees at school – not a particular mate, but you had to feel sorry for her – had been engaged to some bloke, and he’d gone to college in Gloucester (that close) and within about a month it was Dear Emma … a bloody text message!
Jane didn’t do texting any more. Texting was for kids and adults with emotional dyslexia.
She took out her mobile, switched it on and watched it lighting up. Brought up the Abergavenny number from the phone book. This would be a small test, right?
Jane drew in a long, ragged breath and pressed the little green-phone sign, listening to it ringing. Decided no and was about to hit the little red-phone button when…
‘Jane Watkins.’ Eirion said in her ear. ‘I know the name from somewhere. Hang on … Yes! Didn’t we used to go out together at one time?’
Eirion’s phone had, of course, flashed up the caller’s number. So good to hear his stupid Welsh voice. Actually, not good at all.
‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry I haven’t rung. It’s been … it’s like…’
‘Thought I was being phased out, I did.’ Eirion exaggerating the accent. ‘In view of my imminent departure to some distant seat of learning. Strange how we become paranoid, isn’t it?’
‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘Would’ve slashed my wrists in the bath,’ Eirion said, ‘except I’ve only got an electric razor.’
‘You could always have plugged it in, dropped it in the bath and electrocuted yourself. Lateral thinking, Irene.’ Jane smiling, in spite of it all. ‘Look, what would it cost to set up a website?’
‘Shit,’ Eirion said. ‘Any thoughts of you still wanting me for my body…’
‘It was never about your body, fatso.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Anyway, how soon could you organize it?’ Jane said.
Feeling that sense of what have I got to lose? urgency. Thinking of the council pygmies trashing the reputation of the great Alfred Watkins: lot of nonsense … New Age cranks…
Jane Watkins standing on the market square in ancient Ledwardine feeling the lines of energy, the ancestral spirit, glowing and pulsing all around her, rippling through her in the numinous dusk.
‘It was when Simon St John was laying down the cello parts for Alien,’ Lol said, ‘and I said I’d like something pastoral but moody. So Simon starts playing this lovely, sorrowful tune. And there it was. Hills … real hills. Texture. Dull day. Low cloud. And some diffuse, underlying emotion. Elgar’s Cello Concerto.’
‘Wow,’ Merrily said.
No particular reason for Lol not to know about Elgar. His own dead muse, Nick Drake, had, after all, been inspired by the likes of Delius and Ravel.
But Elgar had always seemed so Establishment. Hadn’t he been made Master of the King’s Musick? Hadn’t he composed all these marches and patriotic anthems? Hadn’t he written Pomp and Circumstance, whose very title…
‘Misunderstood,’ Lol said. ‘Most of his life people were getting him wrong. Even his appearance … Looked like an army officer. Or a country squire. Misleading.’
‘You mean you like Elgar?’
‘Son of a piano tuner with a shop in Worcester. Self-taught. Lived for nine years in Hereford where he employed his daughter’s white rabbit as a consultant because his wife wouldn’t let him have a dog. Kept trying to invent things. Had a home laboratory. Seems to have blown it up, once. What’s not to like?’
Merrily drove a little faster. You slept with someone – albeit rarely for a whole night – and you thought you knew everything about him.
‘And even when he was famous,’ Lol said, ‘he was often mentally, emotionally and spiritually … totally messed up.’
She glanced at him, sitting there with his hands on his knees, watching the dark, burnished landscape. How much common ground was there in the creative landscapes of classical composers and guys who cobbled together, albeit sometimes brilliantly, four-minute songs on their guitars?
‘He smoke?’
Thinking about Hannah and the strong tobacco.
‘Lifelong,’ Lol said.
‘What about women? Did he … like women?�
��
‘A lot. His wife was nine years older and a lot higher up the social scale than him. Her dad was a general or something. She helped him and encouraged him. It seems to have been a good marriage.’
‘But?’
Some people suggest he had affairs with younger women. It’s more likely to have been just … crushes.’
‘Where’d you learn all this?’
‘Couple of biographies.’
‘It’s just … you’ve just never mentioned him. You’ve never once mentioned Elgar.’
‘Well, you don’t, do you?’ Lol said. ‘He’s just too … too there. Part of the tourist trail. Every few miles, another sign saying Elgar Route. Nobody notices any more. He’s official. He’s a thousand people waving Union Jacks at the last night of the Proms. Which is why it’s so interesting how ambivalent he was about all that.’
Lol looked out of the side window towards a round hop kiln spiking the sunset like the tower of a Disneyland castle.
‘In fact, he was a romantic, a dreamer. And the landscape was everything. This landscape. When he was dying, he—’
He broke off, pretending to correct a twist in his seat belt, Merrily slipping him a glance.
‘Lol?’
‘Sorry?’
‘When he was dying what?’
‘Bit of whimsy, that’s all. Maybe not a good time.’
Merrily sighed.
‘OK,’ Lol said. ‘He’s lying there. He knows this is it. Coming up to the big moment he famously orchestrated in The Dream of Gerontius.’
‘That’s the one about the guy who’s dying and what happens afterwards? I’m sorry, I ought to know. I feel so…’
‘Heavenly choirs, conversations with angels, stodgy theology, heavy-duty dark night of the soul.’
‘Right.’
‘Anyway, inches from death, Elgar – I suspect – is trying hard not to think about the implications of all that. And Gerontius goes on for ever, while the Cello Concerto comes in at less than half an hour.’
‘Your kind of music.’
‘Look, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I was checking out Elgar—’
‘No, you’ve every right— Just … carry on.’
‘So there’s a friend at the bedside. And Elgar beckons him over and feebly whistles the main theme from the Cello Concerto.’
Lol began to whistle softly, this rolling tune that rose and fell and rose and then fell steeply … and the road swooped down among long fields and hop yards under a sheet-metal sky warmed by bars of electric crimson.
‘This isn’t going to be a joke, is it?’ Merrily said.
‘No, but it has a punchline. Elgar says to the guy, “If ever you’re walking on the Malvern Hills and hear that, don’t be frightened … it’s only me.”’
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it.’
‘Only me, huh?’
‘For what it’s worth,’ Lol said, ‘he didn’t mention the bike.’
16
Animation
Just when you very much needed to talk to your daughter…
MUM. EIRION’S COMING THROUGH EARLY. WILL PICK ME UP. WE NEEDED TO TALK. E. WILL GIVE ME LIFT TO SCHOOL. SEE U TONITE. LOVE, J.
Seven-thirty, Merrily had come stumbling downstairs in her towelling robe and the note was on the kitchen table, suspiciously close to where she’d left her own message yesterday for Jane.
Eirion and Jane needed to talk? We need to talk. Do you want to talk about this? What an ominous cliché talk had become, thanks to TV soaps. It meant cracks, it meant falling apart.
Not that Merrily hadn’t been conscious of a reduced intensity in the Jane/Eirion department. Not so long ago, one of them would phone every night, maybe in the morning, too – on the landline from home, Jane having gone off mobiles because they fried your brain and texting was for little kids.
That was something else: of late, Jane had become kind of Luddite about certain aspects of modern life. A year before leaving school, feeling threatened by change and destruction – was Lol right about that?
And the biggest change was the one affecting her relationship with Eirion – a year ahead of her and about to become a student. Big gap between a university student and a schoolkid. The gap between a child and an adult.
Nearly a year ago, Eirion had been sitting at this very kitchen table, on a summer morning like this, humbly confessing to Merrily that he and her daughter had had sex the night before. Both of them virgins. It had been almost touching.
Merrily put the kettle on, made some toast. Hard not to like Eirion, but liking your daughter’s boyfriend was a sure sign, everybody said, that it wouldn’t last. In an ideal world, Jane would have met Eirion in a few years’ time, when she’d been around a little. But society wasn’t programmed to construct happy endings. Relationships were assembled like furniture kits, and everybody knew how long they lasted.
The sun was swelling in the weepy mist over Cole Hill, evaporating the dew on the meadow. The mystical ley recharging. But Jane was stepping off it, moving safely out of shot.
‘Oh, come on, Jane!’
Eirion lowering the digital camera. A Nikon, naturally. He’d shot the view from the top of Cole Hill and the low mound on the way to the church, the hummock that Jane was convinced was an unexcavated Bronze Age round barrow. And then they’d walked another half-mile and crossed a couple of fields to find the prehistoric standing stone, half-hidden by a hedge and only three feet high but that was as good as you got in this part of the county. Fair play, he’d taken pictures of them all and he hadn’t moaned. Until now.
‘No.’ Jane flung an arm across her face. ‘For the last time, this is not about me, it’s about—’
‘Yeah, yeah, the balance and harmony of the village and the perpetuation of the legacy of the greatest man ever to come out of Hereford. But I have to tell you, Jane – speaking as a person only a few short years away from a glittering career in the media – that a shot of you, with your firm young breasts straining that flimsy summer-weight school blouse, will be worth at least a thousand extra hits.’
‘You disgust me, Lewis.’
Jane stepped behind a beech tree beside the bottom gate. A mature beech tree, full of fresh, light green life. One of several that would soon be slaughtered in the course of an efficient chainsaw massacre to accommodate twenty-four luxury executive homes.
Eirion tramped towards the tree, along the ley. Stocky, dependable Irene, his Cathedral-school jacket undone, the strap of his camera bag sliding down his arm.
‘Jane, listen, I’m serious. A view means nothing, basically. Just a field with a church steeple in the background? It needs a figure to suggest the line of sight. I’m not kidding. We have to persuade the various earth-mysteries organizations to run this on their sites.’
Eirion had reasoned that, if it was speed she was after, a website was probably not the answer at this stage. What they needed – a whole lot cheaper – was an initial explanatory document which could be emailed to interested parties and influential on-line journals.
Made sense. On that basis, if he shot the pictures this morning, he could have it laid out by late tonight, email her a copy for approval and by this time tomorrow they’d be up and running: the full horror of Coleman’s Meadow disclosed to the world before the weekend. Scores of people – possibly hundreds of people – lodging complaints with Hereford Council. Hundreds of New Age cranks and old hippies telling them exactly where they could put their acceptable infill.
Eirion stood watching her, keeping his distance.
‘What?’ Jane said
‘You clenched your fists. You looked positively homicidal. What have I said now?’
‘Irene, it’s not—’
Jane shook herself. Oh hell. To fit in this shoot, he must’ve been up at five, driving over from Abergavenny about ninety minutes earlier than usual. Face it: how many other guys would do that for you? She felt totally messed up again, her emotions all over the place, hormones in fl
ood. For a moment she felt she just wanted to take him into a corner of the still-dewy meadow and…
… What would it be like making love on a ley? What kind of extra buzz would that produce?
What it would produce would be a golden memory.
‘Jane, are you all right? I mean you’re not ill … ?’
‘Sure. I mean, I’m fine.’
Jane clasped her hands together, driving back the tears. It was no use, she had a battle to fight, against slimy Lyndon Pierce and the chino guys and lofty, patronizing Cliff and the thin woman from Education. The mindless, philistine Establishment.
She sniffed and stepped out from behind the tree and walked back on to the ley, her head lowered.
‘How do you want me to stand?’
‘You’re perfect the way you are.’ Eirion smiled his glowingly honest, unstaged Eirion smile. ‘Just don’t look at me.’
Sophie displaying emotion was a rare phenomenon. When it happened it tended to be minimal: slender smiles, never a belly laugh. Disapproval, rather than…
‘Merrily, that is quite disgusting. It dishonours him.’
Sophie was looking out of the gatehouse window, towards the Cathedral green. There might even have been tears in her eyes.
‘It dishonours all of us.’
It was like you’d vandalized a grave. Spray-painted the headstone, trampled the flowers.
‘He lived in this city for nine years, at the height of his fame. Even after he’d left, he’d come back for the Three Choirs Festival, when it was held here … as it is this year.’
Sophie swung round, her soft white hair close to disarrangement.
‘Do you really want to besmirch that, Merrily?’
‘Me?’
‘I’m sorry, but this is giving credibility to something very sordid.’
She meant the road accidents. Merrily hadn’t even mentioned Hannah Bradley. Just as well, really.
‘Involving the Church in a campaign which might be laudable in itself but is extremely questionable in its execution is … I realize it’s not your fault, but you can stop it going any further.’
‘I didn’t expect you to be quite so … protective?’