The Wine of Angels mw-1

by Phil Rickman

  ‘That’s Mrs Goddard. Priscilla. Lives in the Stables House at the end of Old Barn Lane.’

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’

  ‘Osteoporosis, quite advanced.’

  ‘Brittle bones, yes? I wonder what they called it in the seventeenth century. Is she in much pain?’

  ‘Much of it emotional. She used to be an enthusiastic horsewoman. Ran a riding school from her home. Now the stables are empty, she’s looking out on an empty field and she feels her life’s effectively over. Needs to be handled with great care.’

  ‘I understand.’ Stefan made a note in the stiff-backed book he’d brought with him. He asked about any other people who were chronically ill, or who’d been recently bereaved, or had sick and disabled children or grandchildren ... or conspicuous money worries, marital problems, difficulty conceiving a child.

  All a little disturbing. Audience participation was one thing, meddling with a congregation something else. And what good would it do him if he made a mistake and insulted someone?

  ‘Stefan, you can’t hope to absorb all that information. Even I still have problems remembering everybody’s name.’

  ‘Not a problem for me, Merrily. Indeed, my notes are a formality. I don’t forget faces. I have a photographic memory. I’m not boasting, it’s a simple fact, I can learn a fifty-minute television script in a night. And today’ – he leaned over the pulpit – ‘today, I am concentrating.’

  He was certainly a presence in the church. Although he wore tight black trousers and a billowy white shirt out of one of those old Douglas Fairbanks Jr movies, there was nothing effete about his movements or his speech today. He had, Merrily thought, stepped out of Richard Coffey’s shadow oozing intensity of purpose. No more toyboy.

  ‘You’re taking this very seriously, aren’t you?’ she said, without thinking, the echo emphasizing the stupidity of the question.

  ‘It will be the performance of my life.’ He said it simply, quite quietly, no histrionics, no camp melodrama. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘there won’t be another.’

  ‘Oh, I think there will. I think, somehow, you’re going to win a lot of support. It’s already quite a talking point. I suspect everyone’s going to rather enjoy it.’

  ‘Enjoy?’

  ‘Wrong word?’

  He came down the pulpit’s wooden steps, stood behind the carved-oak eagle lectern. Oh my God, Merrily thought, he’s going for the full Messianic bit.

  ‘I should like one spotlight, if I may. Just ... here.’ He stood at the foot of the pulpit. ‘One of the high, rear ones, so that it’s quite wide. Is there someone who could operate that? Merely a question of switching it on shortly before dusk, say half an hour into the performance, so that everyone will have become accustomed to it by the time it takes effect.’

  ‘Jane could do that. As you can see, we’ve actually got several spots up there, which we could vary without too much difficulty. I mean, I don’t know much about theatrical lighting, but—’

  ‘Just the one will be sufficient. In the pulpit and elsewhere, I shall be using candles. Do you have candles?’

  ‘Few dozen.’

  ‘I’ll bring more. I want these people to believe totally that they are in the seventeenth century and that Wil Williams is their minister. If that doesn’t offend you.’

  ‘No, that’s ... that’s fine. In fact that may be easier than you think. You know the pageant thing the Women’s Institute are organizing for the festival – the working life of Ledwardine through the ages?’

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve paid scant attention to the other aspects of the festival’ Even his speech pattern had altered, become more formal, a touch archaic.

  ‘They’ve been making costumes,’ Merrily told him. ‘Authentic stuff. It’s not all seventeenth century, obviously, there’ll be Victorian and medieval ...’

  Stefan said warily, ‘There won’t be Roman soldiers or anything, will there?’

  ‘No Roman soldiers. No Tudor doublets and ruffs. No Second World War fighter pilots. I’m not saying there won’t be anachronisms, but they’re unlikely to be glaring. Besides, working country clothes have always been very muted and they haven’t changed much – look at the Barbour.’

  ‘Yes.’ He considered. ‘Yes. That would be wonderful. It would add to that sense of otherness. Do you understand what I mean?’

  ‘Take them out of themselves.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘I also thought ... Well, the seating pattern. It was different then. I mean, the arrangement of the pews, facing the chancel, facing the pulpit ... that was roughly the same. But in those days pews were allocated according to your social standing. Areas were set aside for the gentry and other areas, well away, for the servants, and the servants were packed in like sardines, while the nobs had room to lounge about. Now, obviously we can’t attempt to segregate people in that way. But ... well, men and women were also separated.’

  ‘Were they really?’

  ‘Women were generally relegated to the north side.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Because women were naturally considered less important, and the north side of the church – any church – was supposed to be more exposed to the influence of the devil, I don’t quite know why. Certainly people didn’t want to be buried at the north end of the churchyard. Look at any church around here and you’ll find the more recent graves to the north, and not many of them.’

  ‘And would they do that? Will the men sit separately?’

  ‘They will if their wives tell them to. Times seem to have changed in that respect, at least.’

  ‘And the women will go to the north?’

  ‘I’ll organize it. What about the Bull-Davies pew? If he doesn’t come, which he probably won’t, it’s going to stand out as conspicuously vacant. Do you want—’

  ‘No. It must remain empty. I can use that.’

  ‘It’s your show,’ Merrily said.

  ‘Thank you. You’re a good person, Merrily. I ... Yes. I’ve studied the parish records and various histories. There are certain old families who I know have descendants in the village: the Monks, the Prossers, the Woods, the Cadwalladers ... Will you stand with me this evening, somewhere discreet – the Bull chapel, perhaps – and point out the various people as they come in?’

  ‘All right. And then disappear, huh?’

  He smiled. ‘Once they enter the church, I want it to be my church again.’

  ‘You going to spend the afternoon here, rehearsing?’

  ‘I don’t need to rehearse. I shall walk among the apple trees. I want to meditate. Open myself to him.’

  ‘Right. I’ll leave you then.’ Merrily stood up, not entirely comfortable with this. ‘Good luck ... Wil.’

  ‘Merrily!’ She stopped. ‘Don’t ... don’t joke about this,’ Stefan said. ‘I beg you. The performance of my life, remember?’

  ‘Yes.’

  43

  Meant

  GOMER’S LUNCH WAS on the table, Minnie’s potato pie, when the phone rang. ‘Tell them to call back,’ Minnie shouted through from the kitchen. ‘And if it’s that man about the septic tank, don’t forget – you’re retired.’

  ‘Ar,’ said Gomer non-committally.

  ‘If you can’t bring yourself to tell him, you put him on to me,’ Minnie went on. ‘I’ll give him septic tank!’

  Gomer groped for the phone.

  ‘Jeff Harris, Gomer. You were right, boy. Wouldn’t use this stuff to unblock my sink.’

  Gomer sat up.

  ‘Shirley was coming through Ledwardine this morning, so I asked her to call for a bottle. You had me worried, see. Got to protect the image of the product or we’re all done for. Uncorked it – not so much a pop as a fizzle. Poured half a glass, took it to the window, held it up to the light ...’

  And?’ Gomer was on the edge of his seat now. If you couldn’t trust the word of a man who’d worked for Bulmer’s, Weston’s, Dunkerton’s and God knew who else during a forty-year car
eer, you couldn’t trust nobody when it came to cider, but he did like to make a performance of it, did Jeff Harris.

  ‘Well, that about the sink ... exaggerated a bit there, I confess. It’s not absolute piss, but if that’s the original old Pharisees Red, I’ll drink six pints of Australian lager out of my old farm boots.’

  ‘Gomer!’ Minnie came in from the kitchen, all pink and homely and steaming angry. ‘If you don’t get back to that pie in thirty seconds, it’s going back in the oven. D’you realize how much I’ve got to do before tonight?’

  Gomer raised a finger, pleading for one minute.

  ‘It’s bottle-fermented, all right,’ Jeff said, ‘but there’s a difference between fine champagne and two-quid fizz. All right, if the Powells want to take these daft Londoners for a ride, they might think that’s all right, and at six pound fifty a bottle they can be pretty sure none of us is ever going to taste it, but in my book you don’t misrepresent cider. The Wine of Angels, indeed. What you gonner do about it, Gomer?’

  ‘Well ... not my place, is it? Just wanted to know, like. Talkin’ to young Lloyd, I was, see, yesterday, and he reckoned they had to buy some apples in, not havin’ enough of the ole Pharisees to produce the kind o’ quantity Cassidy was after. That account for it?’

  ‘Bought the damn lot in, if you ask me. And got somebody to produce it for them.’

  ‘But why’d they wanner do that?’ Gomer asked, watching Minnie ceremoniously carrying his pie-dish through to the kitchen.

  ‘Didn’t want to lose face, I suppose,’ said Jeff Harris. ‘Hadn’t made cider in more than a generation, except perhaps a drop or two for themselves; now here’s Cassidy saying they must have the traditional stuff and talking about grants from the tourist board and all this. They came to an arrangement with Jeremy Selby or one of those boys, that’s my guess. Save a lot of work, make a few hundred quid each and that idiot Cassidy and his cronies, never having tasted cider in their lives, are none the wiser.’

  ‘Wouldn’t’ve thought it of Rod. His ole man, mabbe.’

  ‘Like father like son, my boy. Man’s a councillor, isn’t he? Most councillors are in it for what they can shovel into their back pockets. Fact of rural life. Let me know of any further developments.’

  ‘Sure to,’ Gomer said and hung up, puzzling hard.

  Of course, Minnie brought his lunch back, and while he was eating it, she paraded before him in a long, dull-brown woollen dress with a wheaty-coloured shawl round her shoulders. Gomer didn’t think much to it.

  ‘We en’t short of a bob or two, Min. You don’t have to go as a peasant woman.’

  ‘This isn’t peasant’s clothes. Sunday best, this is, for an eighteenth-century farmer’s wife. Still pass for seventeenth century, though wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Give up trying to look nice once they got married, did they?’

  Minnie snorted. ‘I only wish I had a veil, too, to hide my blushes. We all know what kind of play that Coffey’s likely to’ve written.’

  ‘Aye, well, that’s why we’re all gettin’ a chance to see it first, innit? You don’t like it, you think it treads on too many ole corns, you get your chance to say so out loud. Not that you will, you women, you’ll all just sit there all po-faced and then pull it to bits outside, and ‘ave another go at the vicar for good measure.’

  ‘I never said a word against that young woman.’

  ‘Aye, but you done your share of noddin’ and frownin’ and glancin’ sideways.’

  ‘You would say that – you’re a man. If she was fat and fifty, you’d be having second thoughts just like the rest of us. Especially when she’s letting something like this go on in the church.’

  ‘That don’t stop you goin’, though, do it?’

  ‘I like to make up my own mind.’

  ‘Oh aye. And you’ll all be gatherin’ round like them women round the ole guillotine, hopin’ she’s put both feet in the slurry again.’

  ‘That’s not fair. Anyway, when you’ve finished your pie, we’ll sort something out for you, my duck.’

  ‘Gerroff, woman. I en’t goin’. I done my bit. Me bein’ there en’t gonner help the vicar. Anyway, they didn’t ‘ave no plant hire in the seventeenth century.’

  ‘Never mind plant hire, you’re a retired businessman!’

  Gomer closed his eyes in anguish.

  It was simple really. Or so Jane said. Lucy’s house, like most of those on the vicarage side of Church Street, backed on to the old bowling green, which in turn was accessible from the orchard, which you could access from the bottom of the vicarage garden.

  So if Jane were to let herself into Lucy’s by the front door and go round and leave the back door open for Lol ... geddit?

  ‘And while you’re in there, maybe you find out whatever Lucy was trying to tell us.’

  ‘If she was trying to tell us anything.’

  ‘I know she was,’ Jane said.

  Soon after she’d gone, with Merrily still organizing Stefan Alder, the phone rang, the answering machine kicking in.

  ‘Merrily, it’s Ted. What the hell d’you think you’re doing? Don’t you think there should have been a meeting of the church council before you let these people take over the place at short notice, especially for something so politically and morally sensitive? I cannot believe you went over all our heads in this deplorable fashion, and I have to say that if this is an example of the kind of behaviour we can expect from you in the future, then I’m afraid you can no longer count on my support and I wish, herewith, to dissociate myself entirely from tonight’s outrage.’

  That was the first.

  The second one, just under ten minutes later, said sternly, ‘Councillor Powell, Mrs Watkins. I should be glad if you would telephone me immediately upon your return.’

  Within two minutes, the third.

  ‘Ah, Merrily, my love. No wonder you don’t need a man. You’re obviously quite capable of fucking yourself. My condolences.’

  Firmly and decisively, Jane shut the door of the house in Church Street and then was stopped, very scared, by the sight of the winter poncho draped over the post at the bottom of the stairs.

  The poncho hung there, dark and sombre like a kid’s idea of a ghost. It was both frightening and awfully moving. It made her wish she hadn’t come because it brought home to her – more even than the sight of the body in the road – the cruel reality of Lucy’s death.

  To banish the fright, she threw her arms around the poncho, buried her face in its folds. Burst at once into sobs, hugging the woollen thing tight, but the hardness, the deadness of the oaken post beneath only made it worse, its rigid, knurled point imprinting on her forehead the message that the wonderful Lucy Devenish really was never coming back.

  When she pulled away, the poncho fell in a heap to the floor, as if the spirit had drifted away from under it. She gathered it up quickly and carried it up the narrow stairs, finding Lucy’s bedroom, putting the poncho on the bed and walking out without looking at anything because a bedroom was private.

  She went into the bathroom and looked at her face in the mirror. She looked like a child, and the tear stains didn’t help. She washed her face, dried it on an Aztec-patterned bathtowel that reminded her of the summer poncho and was just so Lucy she nearly wept again.

  Wipe your eyes, you little snot! Pull yourself together!

  She tried to hear Lucy’s voice saying it, but it wasn’t there, was it?

  She wasn’t here, and there was nobody else who knew the real truth about Ledwardine. The place was all tarted up and polished like the archaic tools and farm implements on the walls in the Swan that nobody quite knew the original purpose of anymore.

  Downstairs, in the low-ceilinged living room, she felt a bit better. There were photos on the walls to look at, which was different to photos in some dusty album at the bottom of a wardrobe. And, of course, the bookshelves beckoned.

  But first, Jane went into the little kitchen, which faced north – always the bleakest li
ght – and overlooked the old bowling green, a few morose sheep nibbling out there now. Under the window was a Belfast sink beside a sturdy-looking cast-iron cooker, and there was a small fridge and a kind of sawn-off Welsh dresser with a cardboard box on it. A note was tucked into one of the box’s flaps.

  Compliments of the Ledwardine Festival.

  Thanks for your help,

  Barry Bloom

  The box contained six champagne bottles. She lifted one out. Its ornate label featured the familiar black line-drawing of the parish church, and, in archaic lettering,

  The Wine of Angels.

  Oh, Lucy. Oh, wow.

  Jane went quickly to the back door, unbolted it, turned the key and then removed two bottles from the box.

  It was like they’d been waiting for her.

  She looked out of the window, giving Lucy’s hook-nosed ghost a chance to manifest among the sheep, its arms rising angrily from the dark poncho’s folds. Put those back at once, you tripehound!

  But nothing appeared. The Wine of Angels lay heavy in her arms. Jane carried the bottles out of the back door and over the fence on to the path bordering the bowling green.

  It was meant.

  ‘You duplicitous woman. Your hypocrisy defies belief. You lied to my face!

  The machine, as Merrily came in, recording a message. Distorting badly.

  ‘To my face, Mrs Watkins.’

  ‘And good afternoon to you too, James.’ Merrily dumped her bag on the hallstand. When the shit hit the fan, an answering machine was mercifully absorbent. She saw Lol in the kitchen doorway and smiled weakly. ‘I get more popular all the time.’

  ‘It is clear to me now that you were, from the beginning, conspiring with certain subversive elements to undermine the stability of my village. I am a soldier. I cannot tolerate that!

  Lol said, ‘Is he real?’

  ‘My information is that tonight you propose to allow this man to lay out his foul smears in public. I am giving you this opportunity to call it off. You may consider this an ultimatum.’