by Phil Rickman
‘Hail to thee, old apple tree!’
‘Hail to thee, old apple tree,’ the shooters chanted, gruffly self-conscious.
‘And let thy branches fruitful be ...’
‘And let thy branches ...’
‘Going to cause offence.’ Miss Devenish had a prominent hooked nose; it twitched. ‘Can’t anyone see that? Deep offence.’
Merrily shook her head, tired of all this. It wasn’t as if they were going to shoot any animals; just blast a few pounds of shot into the air through branches that were probably mostly already dead.
‘Why did he have to break off that branch? Showing his contempt, you see. For the tree and all that dwells there.’
‘Well,’ said Merrily, ‘there’s nothing dwelling in there now, is there?’
Miss Devenish pulled the wide brim of her hat down over her ears as the gunmen chanted.
‘... armsful, hatsful, cartsful of apples ...
Huzzah!
Huzzah!
Huzzah!’
And shouldered their shotguns. Merrily thought, unnerved for a second, of a firing squad, as Miss Devenish turned away and the night went whump, whump, whump, whump-ump-ump, and the air was full of cordite farts.
Merrily was aware of a fine spray on her face. Probably particles of ice from the shocked branches, but it felt warm, like the poor old Apple Tree Man was weeping.
When the shooting stopped, there was a touch of anticlimax. Obviously the book didn’t say what you did afterwards.
‘Er ... well done, chaps,’ James Bull-Davies said halfheartedly.
A few villagers clapped in a desultory sort of way. Caroline Cassidy came out from behind a tree and sniffed.
‘We haven’t got a single picture of this, have we? As for the BBC ... I shall write and complain.’
Merrily was aware of a silence growing in the clearing, the sort of silence that was like a balloon being blown up, and up and up, until ...
The half-scream, half-retch from only yards away was more penetrating than any bang, and it came as Caroline Cassidy’s features went as flaccid as a rubber clown-mask, lips sagging, eyes staring, and she cried, ‘What’s that on your face?’
In the middle of the scream – it had come from Alison Kinnersley – Merrily had put a hand to her face and felt wetness, and now she held up her hand to the light and it was smeared dark red.
‘I say, look, get ... get back ...’ The voice of James Bull-Davies pitched schoolboy-high.
‘Bloody Nora,’ Gomer Parry said hoarsely.
Merrily saw black drips on Garrod Powell’s cap-shaded cheeks. A smear around Lloyd’s mouth like badly applied lipstick. Spots on Gomer’s glasses. Blotches on his wife’s earmuffs, hanging around her neck like headphones.
Caroline Cassidy teetered back in her thigh-boots, making an ugly snuffling noise, and Merrily saw the worst and went stiff with the shock.
Between the Powells, at the foot of the stricken old tree, what looked like a milk churn in an overcoat was pumping out dark fluid, black milk.
A scarf of cold tightened around Merrily’s throat.
‘What’s the matter?’ Terrence Cassidy’s cultured tones rising ludicrously out of the clearing, like something out of Noel Coward. ‘What’s happened? I don’t understand. For heaven’s sake, all we wanted to ...’
Gomer Parry looked up at Cassidy through his red glasses and spat out his cigarette. ‘Somebody better call the police, I reckon.’
Merrily had found a handkerchief and was numbly wiping the blood from her face. Unable to pull her gaze away from the horror inside the collar of Edgar’s overcoat, knowing that most of his head would be in the tree, hanging like some garish leftover Christmas bauble amid tinselly, frosted twigs.
She crumpled the handkerchief. Her face was still wet. It felt like some horrific baptism.
And, hearing Miss Devenish whispering, ‘I knew it, I knew it,’ she knew she would have to look up into the tree.
Part One
Can closed eyes even in the darkest night
See through their lids and be inform’d
with sight?
Thomas Traherne, Poems of Felicity
1
Third Floor
MERRILY HAD A recurring dream. She’d read somewhere that it was really quite a common dream, with obvious symbolism.
By recurring ... well, she’d have it maybe once every few months, or the gaps might be even longer nowadays.
There was a period, not long before Sean died, when it came almost nightly. Or even, in that intense and suffocating period, twice or three times the same night – she’d close her eyes and the dream would be waiting there like an empty train by a deserted platform. Sometimes it was merely puzzling, sometimes it seemed to open up exciting possibilities. Occasionally, it was very frightening and she awoke shredded with dread.
What happened ... she was in a house. Not always the same house, but it was her own house, and she’d lived there quite some time without realizing. Or sometimes she’d just forgotten, she’d gone on living there, possibly for years, without registering that the house had ... a third floor.
It was clear that she’d lived quite comfortably in this house, which was often bright and pleasant, and that she must have passed the extra staircase thousands of times, either unaware of it or because there was simply no reason to go up there.
In the dream, however, she had to go up. With varying amounts of anticipation or cold dread. Because something up there had made its presence known to her.
She’d nearly always awaken before she made it to the top of the stairs. Either disappointed or trembling with relief. Just occasionally, before her eyes opened, she would glimpse a gloomy, airless landing with a row of grey doors.
In reality, if you excluded flats, she had never lived in a three-storey house.
Now, however ...
‘Jesus,’ Merrily said. ‘We can’t live in this.’
‘Yes, I suppose it is big,’ Uncle Ted conceded. ‘Didn’t think about that. Never a problem for Alf Hayden. Six kids, endless grandchildren ...’
It was big, all right. Seventeenth century, timber-framed, black and white. Seven bedrooms. Absolutely bloody huge if there was just the two of you. Very quaint, but also unexpectedly, depressingly grotty; nothing seemed to have altered since about the 1950s.
‘Of course, it’s church policy these days to flog off these draughty old vicarages,’ Uncle Ted said. ‘Replace them with nice, modern boxes. Worth a lot of money, your old black and whites. Well ... not this one, at present, not in the state it’s in after thirty-odd years of Alf and Betty.’
There was quaint, Merrily thought, and there was horribly old-fashioned. Like the steel-grey four-bar electric fire blocking up the inglenook. Like a kitchen the size of a small abattoir with no real cupboards but endless open shelves and all the pipes coiled under the sink like a nest of cobras.
‘Besides,’ Ted said, ‘we haven’t got any nice, modern boxes to spare. Three applications for housing estates’ve been turned down in as many years. Not in keeping.’ He frowned. ‘Conservation’s a fine idea, but not when it turns a nice, old village into an enclave of the elite.’
In his habitual cardigan and slippers, Ted Clowes, two years retired, didn’t look at all like a lawyer any more. His face had gone ruddy, like a farmer’s, and his body had thickened. He looked as seasoned and solid as one of the oak pillars holding up the vicarage walls.
As senior church warden, Ted had made himself responsible for getting the vicarage into some kind of shape. Negotiating with builders and plumbers and decorators. But, well into April, the work had hardly begun; it looked as though Merrily was going to have to spend the first month of her ministry in a bed-and-breakfast.
She was relieved, in a way. A place this size – it was ridiculous. And an unoccupied third floor, full of dust and echoes.
She stood on the first-floor landing, miserably looking up. ‘All these staircases.’
‘Yeah,’ J
ane said thoughtfully. ‘This puts a whole new perspective on the entire scenario.’
‘It does?’
Merrily watched warily as the kid took off up the stairs to the third storey. She’d been sulking, on and off, for three days. She’d quite enjoyed the two years in Birmingham while Merrily was at college, loved the time in Liverpool when Merrily was a curate. Big-city woman now. On the way here, she’d said that if Cheltenham was an old people’s home, rural Herefordshire looked like premature burial.
‘Yes.’ Jane paused halfway up, looking around.
‘You like this?’
‘At least we’ve cleared all those rooms now,’ Ted said. ‘Alf and Betty were generous enough to leave us a quarter of a century’s worth of junk. Yellowing newspapers with pictures of the first moon-landing.’
Jane had a forefinger placed pensively on her chin. ‘Far more rooms than you’d need, Mum, right?’
‘Mmm ... yes.’
‘Even for all your Bible classes and parish meetings and visiting evangelists from Nigeria.’
‘Ye ... es. Unless, of course, they’re travelling with their extended families.’
‘So this whole storey is, in effect, going spare.’
‘Conceivably.’
Her daughter was starting to operate like a slick barrister. (The barrister Merrily might have become had it not been for God’s unexpected little blessing. Would she still eventually have wound up in the Church if Jane hadn’t come along?)
‘Don’t look at me like that, Mum. All I’m saying is I could have a kind of group of rooms up here. Like a suite. Because ... because ... if you think about it, those back stairs come off a separate entrance ... a third door, right?’
Ted chuckled. He knew all about daughters.
‘Right,’ Merrily said. ‘And?’
‘So it would be kind of my own entrance. It would be ... in fact ... like my own flat.’
‘Oh. I see.’
The third door with its own illuminated bell and a card under perspex: Flat One. Ms Jane Watkins. She was fifteen.
‘And you’d pay the heating bills for this, er, suite, would you?’
‘Oh God.’ Jane glared down over the oak banister. ‘Here we go. Mrs bloody Negative.’
‘Or maybe you could sub-let a couple of rooms.’
Jane scowled and flounced off along the short passage. Oak floorboards creaked, a door rattled open. That empty sound.
‘Could be a double-bluff,’ Merrily said, her daughter pacing bare boards overhead, probably working out where to put her stereo speakers for optimum sound. ‘The picture she’s feeding me is that she’s going to be so bored here she’ll have to invite half the young farmers’ club over for wild parties. All these rural Romeos popping pills on the back stairs.’
Ted laughed. ‘Young farmers aren’t pill-popping yet. Well ... none that I know of. Pressure job, now, though. Diminishing returns, EC on your back, quotas for this, quotas for that, a hundred forms to fill in, mad cow disease. Suicide figures are already ... Sorry. Bad memories.’
‘What? Oh.’
‘I seem to remember saying, “If you want an informal picture of village life, why not pop along to this wassailing thing?” Not quite what I had in mind. Awfully sorry, Merrily.’
She looked through the landing window, down into a small, square rose garden, where the pink and orange of the soil seemed more exotic than the flowers. Over a hedge lay the churchyard with its cosy, sandstone graves.
Oddly, that awful, public death hadn’t given her a single nightmare. In her memory it was all too surreal. As though violent death had been an optional climax to the wassailing and, as the oldest shooter in the pack, Edgar Powell had felt obliged to take it.
‘You know, standing in that orchard, covered with that poor old bloke’s blood, that was when I decided to go for it. I clearly remember thinking that nothing so immediate and so utterly shocking ever happened quite that close to me in Liverpool. That maybe, in some ways, this village could actually be the sharp end. I thought, am I going to wash off his blood and walk away?’
‘It always affects you more in the country.’ Ted came to stand beside her at the window. ‘Everything that happens. Because you know everybody. Everybody. And you’ll find, as minister, that you’re regarded as more of a ... a key person. Births and deaths, you really have to be there. Even if nobody from the family’s been to a church service since the war.’
‘That’s fair enough. Far as I’m concerned, belonging to the Church doesn’t have to involve coming to services.’
‘And you’ll find that hills and meadows are far more claustrophobic than housing estates. You see somebody coming across a twelve-acre field towards you, you can’t dodge into a bus shelter.’
‘Fine.’
Ted raised a dubious eyebrow. ‘And everybody gossips,’ he said. ‘For instance, they’ll all tell you Edgar Powell’d been handling that shotgun since for ever.’
‘Making it suicide?’
‘What it looks like, but they haven’t got a motive. Money worries? No more than the average farmer. Isolation? Hardly – not living on the edge of the village. Depression? Hard to say. Perhaps he’d just had enough. Or perhaps he simply wanted to ruin the Cassidys’ olde English soiree. Been a spiteful old bugger in his time.’
‘You are kidding, aren’t you?’
‘Anyway, Garrod Powell’s insisting it was an accident. Came to consult me about it. He’ll be telling the coroner the old chap was simply going soft in the head. Can’t blame him. Who wants a family suicide? I suggested he have a word with young Asprey, get something medical. But it could even be an open verdict.’
‘What’s that mean exactly, Uncle Ted?’
Merrily turned to find Jane sitting on the top stair, elbows on knees, chin cupped in her hands.
‘Means they can’t be entirely sure what happened, Jane,’ Ted said.
‘Wish I’d been there.’
Merrily rolled her eyes. Having made a point of leaving Jane at her mother’s when she’d come to do her bit of undercover surveillance prior to applying – or not – for the post. The kid would’ve given them away in no time.
‘Do you get many suicides in the village?’ Jane asked.
‘Not with audience-participation,’ Ted said dryly.
Merrily was thinking, half-guiltily, how she’d scrubbed and scrubbed at her face that night and had to throw away the old fake Barbour.
They stayed the night at the Black Swan, sharing a room. On the third floor, as it happened, but it was different in a hotel. The Black Swan, like all the major buildings in Ledwardine – with the obvious exception of the vicarage – had been sensitively modernized; the room was ancient but luxurious.
Jane was asleep about thirty seconds after sliding into her bed. Jane could slip into untroubled sleep anywhere. She’d accepted her father’s death with an equanimity that was almost worrying. A blip. Sean had lived in the fast lane and that was precisely where he died. Bang. Gone.
Sadder about the girl in the car with him. She could have been Jane in a few years’ time. Or Merrily herself, ten years or so earlier.
Too many thoughts crowding in, Merrily upended the pillow behind her, leaned into it and lit the last cigarette of the day. Through the deep, oak-sunk window, the crooked, picture-book roofs of the village snuggled into a soft and woolly pale night sky.
Perfect. Too perfect, perhaps. If you actually lived here, with roses round the door, what was there left to dream of?
‘How are things financially, now?’ Ted had asked in the lounge bar, after dinner.
Jane had mooched off into the untypically warm April evening to check out the village. And the local totty, she’d added provocatively.
‘Oh’ – Merrily drank some lager – ‘we get by. Sean’s debts weren’t as awesome as we’d been led to believe. And a few of the debtors seem less eager to collect than they were at first. I think it was meeting me. In the dog collar. It was like ... you know ... dangling a s
prig of garlic in front of Dracula. I’m glad I met them. I don’t feel so bad about it now I know what kind of semi-criminal creeps they are. Jesus, what am I saying, semi?’
‘I won’t ask. But I did think he was being a little overambitious setting up on his own. Why didn’t you both come to me for some advice?’
‘You know Sean. Knew. Anyway, I blame myself. If I hadn’t got pregnant instead of a degree, it was going to be Super-lawyer and Lois-thing, defending the poor, serving the cause of real justice. Zap. Pow. But ... there you go. He was on his own, and with the responsibility of a kid and everything, he was floundering, and he got a little careless about the clients he took on. It’s a slippery slope. I wasn’t aware of the way things were going. Too busy being Mummy.’
‘You blame yourself for letting him get you pregnant?’ Ted raised helpless eyes to the ceiling. ‘Blame yourself for anything, won’t you, Merrily? Dangerous that, in a vicar.’
‘Priest-in-charge.’
‘Only a matter of time. Now Alf Hayden ... he never accepted the blame for anything. Act of God. Providence. His favourite words. Had us tearing our hair. But you can’t get rid of a vicar, can you? Once they’re in, they’re in and that’s that.’
‘Not any more. My contract’s for five years.’
‘Red tape,’ Ted said. ‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘Please, Uncle Ted. Don’t do anything ... anything else.’
‘You’re not feeling manipulated, are you?’
‘Of course not. Well ... maybe. A little.’
As if having a woman priest in the family wasn’t enough, her mother, from the safety of suburban Cheltenham, had been out of her mind when Merrily had gone as a curate to inner-city Liverpool, all concrete and drugs and domestic violence. Running youth clubs and refuges for prozzies and rent boys. Terrific, Jane had thought. Cathartic, Merrily had found.
While her mother was putting out feelers.
Good old Ted had come up with the goods inside a year. The vicar of Ledwardine was retiring. Beautiful Ledwardine, only an hour or so’s drive from Cheltenham. And Ted was not only senior church warden but used to be the bishop’s solicitor. No string-pulling, of course; she’d only get the job if she was considered up to it and the other candidates were weak ... which, at less than fifteen grand a year, they almost certainly would be.