by Phil Rickman
‘This is Mrs Barlow?’
‘Good-lookin’ woman, mind. But it en’t everythin’, is it?’
‘Erm … no. I suppose not.’
‘Barlow goes around helpin’ too many poor widows, where’s the next BMW comin’ from?’
‘You met the woman he’s with now?’
‘The hippie? Never met her, no, vicar.’ Gomer waved his ciggy. ‘Feller’s a bit alternative hisself, mind. Builder as en’t into cheating his clients, that’s alternative for a start, ennit?’
Merrily laughed.
‘Knows the job, too. Could be in an office, collar and tie, directin’ operations. But he knows that money en’t everythin’, no more’n a goodlookin’ woman is.’
‘She is a good-looking woman, as it happens.’
‘The hippie?’
‘And not much more than half his age.’
‘Oh well.’ Gomer shrugged, teeth crushing the ciggy. ‘Just cause a feller spends all his time shorin’ up ole buildings, don’t mean all his tools is obsolete.’
Merrily blinked.
Merrily didn’t know what M. R. James had looked like. The only face she could see in her mind was Huw’s, framed by hair like dried-out straw, mounted on an age-dulled dog-collar and settling into a complacent conjuror’s smile.
We must have offended somebody or something at Garway, I think.
‘I wondered why you were so anxious,’ Jane said, ‘to borrow the M. R. James.’
Always a danger with emails. She’d been on the computer in the scullery, researching some aspect of stone rows, when Huw’s mail had come through. She’d read it, looked up the references, been into the Ghosts and Scholars website.
‘You couldn’t make it up,’ Jane said, still sitting at the desk.
Impressed, excited. Merrily walked to the window. Oh hell.
‘Mr James could make it up, though, couldn’t he? I mean, that was what he did.’
‘Oh, Mum. It was a letter to his friend. Someone who obviously knew exactly what he was on about. He doesn’t spell it out, does he? He knows she understands his point of reference.’
‘Mmm. Possibly.’
Merrily read the rest of it.
Probably we took it too much for granted, in speaking of it, that we should be able to do exactly as we pleased. Next time we shall know better. There is no doubt it is a very rum place and needs careful handling.
No, the kid was right. You couldn’t make it up. She could see why Huw had insisted on emailing the whole page from the Ghosts and Scholars website. Something had happened to M. R. James at Garway. Either something faintly curious which James’s serpentine imagination had inflated into something disturbing. Or something seriously disturbing which James, in this otherwise routine letter to a female friend, was deliberately making light of.
The editor of the website had made a kind of pilgrimage to the area to track down the settings for the main Herefordshire story ‘A View from a Hill’. Although the story seemed to be set in the general area of Garway, the village itself didn’t appear to feature, even under a different name.
‘I love this guy.’ Jane was glowing. ‘Greatest ghost-story writer ever. Because he just … well, basically, he just … he didn’t do ghosts.’
‘What did he do, then?’
‘Entities. He did entities. Creeping things. Indefinable things, exuding … malevolence. In traditional settings, like old churches and deserted shores and places with burial mounds. According to the website, he once said there was no point at all in writing about the supernatural if it wasn’t evil.’
‘Doesn’t that kind of invalidate the Bible?’
‘He meant fiction, Mum.’
‘Wow,’ Merrily said, ‘there’s a step forward for you.’
‘I mean complete fiction. Anyway, he wasn’t exactly anti-religious. His old man was a vicar, in Suffolk. He was brought up in the Church. He might even have gone that way himself if he hadn’t got into academic research and teaching and stuff.’
‘And did you know he came to this area?’
‘Well, no! I just didn’t! It’s incredible.’
‘But you’ve read all the stories.’
‘Erm …’ Jane fiddled with the mouse. ‘Not all of them, to be completely honest.’
‘You totally love him, but you haven’t read all his stories.’
‘OK … mainly, I’ve just seen the TV versions.’
‘I don’t remember us watching them.’
Remembered them being on. Usually around Christmas, and mostly before Jane had been born.
‘Erm … I didn’t mean us.’ Jane’s face had clouded. ‘I saw them at Irene … Eirion’s. His dad had a complete set of the videos, and we watched most of them one night, one after the other. It was … it was pretty good. We were on our own and we scared ourselves silly.’
‘That must’ve been a long night. Watching them all.’
‘Not that long.’ Jane looked away. ‘They only lasted half an hour each. Or a bit longer.’
Oh, Jane, Jane …
Merrily guessing they’d watched them tucked up together in Eirion’s bed, when his parents were out.
‘Anyway,’ Jane said. ‘The TV versions were obviously set in East Anglia or somewhere. To be honest, I bought the book but I only got round to reading a couple. And I didn’t read the foreword, otherwise I’d’ve known about him coming here. Obviously, I’m now going to read everything. I’m going to find a biography. It’s amazing.’
‘Mmm.’
It was certainly a complication. Did Fuchsia know M. R. James had been to Garway? It was not unlikely.
‘So …’ Jane sat back, hands behind her head. ‘What’s your angle on this, Mum?’
‘Oh, it … it’s just somebody else who scared themselves silly.’
‘In a house belonging to Prince Charles?’
‘Did I tell you that?’
‘Not directly, but I just happened to click on history …’
‘And found the Duchy of Cornwall website.’ Merrily nodded, resigned. ‘Right.’
‘Didn’t mean to snoop, but this one was interesting. And you know it never goes any further, with me. Not any more.’
‘I’d’ve told you all about it, if you’d asked.’
‘I know, but … Anyway. Sorry. So, like, the house is at Garway, then. With the Knights Templar church. How did you get on to M. R. James?’
‘Because … there’s a mention of a Templar preceptory in one of his stories — “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”.’
‘That one is really scary. In the TV version, this professor, he’s not what you’d call sociable and he just goes around kind of mumbling to himself on this grey beach, and then he—’
‘Do you know of any more? Any more stories mentioning the Knights Templar?’
‘No, but I could email this website and ask this Rosemary Pardoe, who obviously knows, like, everything about M. R.’
‘OK,’ Merrily said. ‘Why not?
Whatever had happened to M. R. James at Garway, he didn’t appear to have used it in a story, but perhaps he had, in some less obvious way. If he’d been at Garway in 1917, it would have to be one of the later ones.
And Fuchsia … whatever Fuchsia had seen or imagined or invented at Garway, she’d linked it to a story set in East Anglia, albeit with a Templar connection.
James had talked of next time. Next time we shall know better.
You sensed a residual fascination.
‘Holy shit …’
‘Jane—’
‘Look at this …’
Jane had read further down, to where Rosemary Pardoe was passing on her own observations about Garway Church and its environs. Merrily leaned across.
‘The dovecote?’
‘Mum, did you know about this?’
‘Sophie mentioned it. It’s apparently the finest of its period in the country.’
‘Oh, yeah, that too … Now, read the rest. Go on.’
‘It was
built by the Knights Templar?’
‘Probably. And then rebuilt by the Hospitallers who took over at Garway. Go on … read it.’
Jane stood up. Merrily sat down.
As well as the ancient Garway church itself with its (semi) detached thirteenth-century tower, there is a huge dovecote on private property on the adjoining farm …
Its doveholes number a worrying 666.
‘Oh.’
‘When are you going back?’ Jane said. ‘And can I come?’
When she went upstairs to change into jeans and sweatshirt, Merrily took the mobile with her and called Felix again from the bedroom.
Unsure, now, of how best to approach this. It was all subtly turning around, M. R. James himself becoming a player, seventy or so years after his death.
As for the dovecote … if it had been there for the best part of eight centuries, it was a bit late now to start worrying about the implications of 666 dove-chambers.
‘The person you are calling is not available. If you would like to leave a message …’
‘Felix, it’s Merrily. Could you or Fuchsia please call me. I need to talk about the …’ She hesitated. ‘The face of crumpled linen.’
Crumpling her cassock for the wash basket, she put on jeans and the Gomer Parry sweatshirt. The alarm clock said one-forty. Meditation was seven-thirty. She swallowed two paracetamol in the bathroom, came back downstairs to find Jane still hanging around in their chilly kitchen.
‘Not got a meeting with, erm … Coops today?’
Jane shook her head. She looked less happy, her face a little flushed.
There were crossroads in her life.
‘Do you want to drive, then?’ Merrily said.
PART TWO
This is wild frontier country with
an aura of barbarians roaming over
the adjacent border …
Simon Jenkins, on Garway England’s Thousand Best Churches
14
As Above …
What Jane knew about the Templars came, of course, out of paganism.
Those difficult months when she’d been a teenage goddess-worshipper, slipping out into the vicarage garden at night to make her devotions to the Lady Moon. Partly a rebellion thing — OK, understandable in an intelligent, imaginative kid who’d been dragged away to the unknown village where her mother had become a low-paid, low-level employee of the boring, set-in-its-ways, male-dominated, hierarchical Church of England.
Jane’s paganism: partly about giving Christianity a good kicking.
Merrily watched her driving, back straight, hands textbook on the wheel, eyes unblinking. Remembering the all-time-low, a couple of years ago, with the heat of the old Aga at her back, a white-faced Jane rigid in the kitchen doorway, and their relationship trampled into the flagstones.
Nobody gives a shit for your Church. Your congregations are like laughable. In twenty years you’ll be preaching to each other. You don’t matter any more, you haven’t mattered for years. I’m embarrassed to tell anybody what you do.
The rage had evaporated, tensions long since eased, but Jane’s pagan instincts remained — tamer now, certainly, but still feeding something inside her that was hungry for experience; up in her attic apartment she was still reading books about old gods.
‘Like, for centuries it’s been accepted that the Templars were the guardians of arcane secrets — including the Holy Grail. I mean, who better? They were spiritual warriors. They put their lives on the line to protect sacred truths. They were like … the SAS with soul?’
‘Who says the SAS have no soul?’
‘Unlike the Templars, however, they’re not known for their monastic celibacy,’ Jane said.
They’d driven in from the east, less of a back door to Garway and better roads for Jane, who was hoping to take her driving test before Christmas. The sun was low and intense, a searchlight spraying the yellowing leaves on the turning trees. When you weren’t driving, you got a more spectacular overview … or underview, maybe; all you could see of Garway Hill itself was the top of the radio mast on its summit.
Changing down for a sudden incline, Jane let the clutch slip.
‘Sorry …’
‘It’s OK. Take your time.’
Jane, red-faced, pulled the car out of its shudder, the Volvo wheezing and protesting like an old dog being dragged out for a walk by a child who didn’t understand.
‘So if The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail concept is that the Grail is actually the suppressed feminine principle as, like, enshrined by Mary Magdalene, who was Jesus Christ’s other half … and don’t look at me like that, Mum.’
‘You don’t know how I’m looking at you, your eyes are firmly on the road.’
‘I can feel the self-righteous hostility.’
‘It’s not self-righteous and it’s not hostility. It’s just that all that’s been discredited. Even the authors are now saying they were just testing a theory.’
‘It doesn’t change the fact that Mary Magdalene, whether or not she was Mrs Christ, represents the goddess figure which male-dominated Christianity suppressed.’
Jane’s debating skills had become formidable, but how many times had they been here?
‘Look … I accept that there may be a hidden feminine principle. What I don’t accept is Jesus and Mary Magdalene being an item, starting a bloodline. For which, when you look into it, there’s no real evidence at all.’
‘Aw, Mum, why do you have to deny the poor guy a sex life?’
‘There you go. The guy. If he was just a guy, just another prophet who didn’t rise again, didn’t ascend into heaven … if you want to deny his divinity…’
‘I don’t want to deny anybody’s divinity, I’m into divinity big time. But I don’t see why women shouldn’t have a share of it, whether it’s Mary Magdalene or the Virgin Mary.’
‘We won’t argue now,’ Merrily said. ‘Take this bit slowly.’
Maybe she ought to be driving instead. The lanes were proving unpredictable, and there were more of them than she’d figured. More to Garway, too, than you imagined; flushed by the low sun, it seemed like a remote and separate realm. Like Cornwall was to England. Maybe the Duchy had recognized that aspect.
Jane glanced at a signpost which seemed to have been twisted round, so that Garway was pointing into a field.
‘So Garway and Garway Hill are like separated, right?’
‘Looks like it. I thought the church and a few cottages nearby were the centre of the community, but apparently not. You get these separate clusters … kind of disorienting.’
After half a mile or so, the landscape broadened out and they were into a random scatter of modern housing and an open stretch of common with a children’s play area. Across the lane from the common was a pub of whitewashed stone with a swinging sign: a full moon in a deepening twilight sky.
THE GARWAY MOON.
‘Cool sign,’ Jane said. ‘Artistic. Kind of pagan.’
‘Why does the moon always have to be pagan?’
‘You tell me. Does the Bible have much to say about it?’ Jane relaxed into the driver’s seat. ‘This is very much my kind of place, Mum. It’s like frontier country. On the edge.’
‘It is frontier country. Those hills are Wales.’
‘I actually meant frontier in the deeper sense. The Knights Templar move in, monks with horses and swords, and they stamp their presence on the whole area. Infuse it with mystery. I mean like, why out here? Unless … maybe it was considered a really good, obscure place to conceal secrets, practise arcane … practices.’
‘Or they were just given the land. Maybe no better reason than that.’
‘There’s always a better reason,’ Jane said.
‘For you, flower, there always has to be.’
‘Don’t call me “flower”. And don’t tell me you’re not curious, too.’
‘I can be curious without having to subscribe to the whole fashionable Gnosticism thing.’
Jane slow
ed, as the road sloped past a modern-ish primary school on one side and a run-down village hall on the other.
‘I don’t see what’s so wrong with Gnosticism. It’s just saying that faith is not enough. The Gnostics wanted to know. They wanted direct experience of the reality of … something out there. God. Whatever. I don’t see why you have a problem with that.’
‘Anyway …’ Not now, huh? Too weighty. ‘… I’d’ve thought you’d lived in the sticks long enough to know it’s absolutely the worst place to keep a secret.’
‘Yeah, now. But in medieval times, when almost nobody could read.’
‘Including the Templars. Most of the Knights Templar seem to have been illiterate.’
‘Mum, they were international bankers! People could stash money at one preceptory and withdraw from another.’
‘Since when did banking demand literacy?’
‘OK, then, maybe this was just where they came to carry on their own form of Gnostic worship, which the straight Church would see as heresy.’ Jane pulled the Volvo over to the grass verge to let a tractor get past. ‘Was that all right?’
‘Except you should’ve signalled first, to let him know what you were doing. And why are we going up here?’
Inexplicably, Jane had taken an uphill right.
‘Sorry. I thought …’
‘I think the church was straight on down the hill. Never mind, carry on.’
It didn’t matter. Merrily suddenly wanted to hug Jane. If the worst you had to deal with was theological debate …
‘You OK, Mum?’
‘Mmm.’
She felt the pressure of tears, deciding that when Jane wasn’t around she was going to ring Eirion on the quiet, find out what had gone wrong between them. Just wanting the kid to be happy.
‘This sort of location is actually more suited to the Cistercians,’ Jane said. ‘They liked to be way out on their own. But, see, that fits, too, because the Knights Templar were connected with the Cistercians. Through Bernard of Clairvaux? The top Cistercian fixer, smartest operator in the medieval Catholic Church?’