The Smile of a Ghost mw-7

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The Smile of a Ghost mw-7 Page 3

by Phil Rickman


  ‘It makes sense,’ Martin Longbeach said. ‘We might not always be able to make a contribution, but it’s a question of sharing.’

  ‘I’ll… tell Sophie at the Bishop’s office,’ Merrily said.

  ‘And in my case,’ Nigel Saltash said, ‘in these formative days, I do think it might be rather a good idea for me to tag along and observe some of the people you’re dealing with, Merrily. I mean, purely from an educational point of view?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I want to learn. See how you operate. Had more time on my hands since we sold half the land. Always thought I could settle down, in retirement, as a farmer, but I’m afraid that once a shrink… Would that be in order? I want to understand how you see Deliverance.’

  Merrily took a big breath. ‘Nigel, how I see Deliverance… I’m supposed to be a priest, right? I have to operate on the basis of there being a spiritual element — that we’ve got used to calling God — in everything. So I actually believe that things can happen on more than one level.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Martin Longbeach said. ‘The holistic approach is essential. All aspects of life are interconnected.’

  ‘And the fact that there are certain things that I’m never going to be able to explain scientifically or psychologically… that doesn’t bother me one way or the other. And I think we should be there to say to the people affected: no, you’re not necessarily going mad—’

  ‘But if you are’ — Nigel Saltash smiled hugely — ‘we can also help you with that.’

  Merrily sighed. ‘As I tried to say, when I was having problems the Church looked at me sideways and raised its eyebrows pityingly. I don’t want anybody out there to feel I’m writing them off as disturbed or deluded.’

  ‘And I’d absolutely hate to cramp your style, Merrily,’ Saltash said.

  Merrily stood up. Her legs felt weak.

  ‘We’ll see what we can work out.’

  ‘Of course we will,’ Saltash said.

  Dear God.

  2

  Vice-rage

  Lol had a bunch of new-home cards. He’d put them in the deep sill of the window overlooking the bathroom-sized garden and the orchard beyond. Jane began to read them, holding the first one up to the hurricane lamp hanging from the central beam.

  ‘Alison, eh? Wooooh!’

  The card had a pencil sketch of horses on the front. Alison Kinnersley, who bred them, had lived with Lol for a while before taking up with James Bull-Davies, whose family had once run this village before they ran out of money. Two years ago, even a struggling squire with holes in his farmhouse roof had been a better bargain than Lol.

  But now Lol had Mum and a career back on course, and the village more than accepted him, and even Alison was being generous.

  It’s definitely the right thing to do, she’d written. You can’t hide it for ever. Even James thinks that now, and I don’t need to tell you how conservative James is.

  ‘Wow,’ Jane said, ‘if it goes on like this, they’ll be inviting you to run for the Parish Council.’

  Lol looked down from the stepladder, the overloaded paint-roller in his hand dribbling burnt orange onto the flagstones. Jane had chosen the ceiling colour; it looked wrong now, but she was never going to admit that. Lol just looked uncomfortable. He had orange smudges down the front of his Gomer Parry Plant Hire sweatshirt, tiny spots on his round, brass-rimmed glasses.

  ‘Then again,’ Jane said, ‘maybe not.’

  There was a card from the Prossers at the Eight till Late and one from Gomer Parry and Danny Thomas — Welcome back, boy — with a sheep on the front driving a JCB.

  Finally, one from Alice Meek. God bless you in your new home, Mr Robinson. Big letters full of stroke victim’s shake. Alice was only alive because of Lol, and the village knew it, and that was why he was so welcome here now.

  And, of course, it was making him wary. Lol didn’t wear medals. Finding the old girl half-frozen over a grave in the churchyard, carrying her into the vicarage, and all the heavy stuff that had happened afterwards… he didn’t even like to talk about any of that. It could easily have ended so differently.

  The verdict at the inquest on the guy who’d wanted Alice dead had been Accidental Death — totally correct — although most of what had happened had not come out, the villagers closing ranks around Lol. No longer an outsider, even if it wasn’t publicly acknowledged that he was Mum’s… whatever.

  Couldn’t have worked out better, really. His first album in many years was out, he had respectable gigs scheduled. And he was about to abandon his temporary flat at Prof Levin’s recording studio at Knight’s Frome — like, thirty miles away — for this little terraced house a one-minute stroll from the vicarage. So, like, if his star, for once, was accelerating towards the high point of the heavens… well, nobody could say it had been easy.

  Jane looked up at him. It was getting too dark to paint, and the electricity was still disconnected, but he was going at it like, if he stopped, somebody would come and take the house away and maybe take Mum, too… and then the tour would be cancelled and the album would be savaged in the Guardian or Time Out, and…

  ‘Come on down, Lol. Tomorrow is another day.’

  ‘Need to finish this corner.’

  ‘You can’t even see the corner. Let’s go and get some chips, otherwise I won’t get to eat till breakfast. If Mum gets through with the po-faced gits on the Deliverance Committee before eleven, it’ll be a certifiable miracle.’

  ‘Hate going in the chippie now,’ Lol said. ‘They won’t let me pay.’

  Jane laughed.

  ‘It’s not funny, Jane.’

  ‘Lol, they like you. That’s—’

  ‘Unsettling.’

  Jane sighed. ‘When’s the next gig?’

  ‘Next Thursday. Bristol.’

  ‘Wooh, bigger and bigger. Glastonbury next year?’

  ‘Jane, you trying to make me fall off?’

  Oh God, Nick Drake Syndrome; it never really goes away.

  ‘Bad enough that there’s this guy from Q magazine coming to interview me on Saturday,’ Lol said. ‘I mean, if I’d thought—’

  ‘What?’ Jane went to the foot of the ladder, shouting up like he was on a mountain. ‘Did you actually say… Q magazine? Like, did I hear that correctly? And did you say, “That’s bad enough”? And are you insane?’

  ‘Just there are things I don’t necessarily want people to read about.’

  ‘So like’ — Jane spread her hands wide in frustration — ‘don’t talk about them! Talk about any old crap. Lie. They won’t care, they’re a music mag. When will it be in?’

  ‘Dunno. It’s a monthly. Guy said they work weeks in advance. Maybe it won’t be in at all. They probably do a lot of interviews that get overtaken by better stuff.’

  ‘This diffidence is worrying.’ Jane shook her head. ‘I think I preferred the paranoia.’ She went to put Alice’s card back on the window sill, and found another one lying face down. ‘What’s this, Lol?’

  Actually, this one wasn’t a card, as such: it was a folded paper, lined, like from a writing pad. She opened it out and held it up to the lamp, saw crude line drawings done in thick fibre-tip, of a big house and a little house with two parallel lines between them, suggesting a road. Across the big house was scrawled:

  VICERAGE

  Jane looked up at Lol. ‘Vice-rage?’

  ‘Vicarage.’ Lol started rolling hard at the ceiling. ‘Could be a double meaning there, I suppose, but I wouldn’t think whoever sent it was that smart.’

  There was a double-pointed arrow connecting the two houses across the road. Underneath the drawing was written:

  RECKON YOU CAN FIND YOUR WAY IN THE DARK?

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Jane said. ‘It’s a poison-pen letter.’

  She looked up the ladder. Lol went on painting.

  Jane smiled thinly. So this was the problem.

  Well, there was always going to be one spiteful bastard, somewhere. Mum got alo
ng with most people in Ledwardine, but not everybody approved yet of women priests. And it was a safe bet that not everybody who did approve would accept the idea of the female clergy having intimate relationships unsanctified by marriage — like the clergy was supposed to stay in the Victorian era, Mum and Lol walking out together, with a chaperone.

  This would be one of the areas of his life that Lol would prefer to be kept out of Q magazine.

  ‘Who sent it?’

  ‘I don’t think that’s supposed to be obvious, Jane. That’s possibly why it isn’t signed.’

  ‘But there’s an element of threat. I mean, I realize it’s probably just some semi-literate tosser…’

  Lol came down from the stepladder, ducking under the beam that divided the room. The beam was dark brown oak, well woodwormed — a big chocolate flake. The hurricane lamp swayed, shadows rolled. Jane wanted to crumple up the paper, but on the other hand…

  ‘Can I keep it?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Might be an opportunity to compare the writing. Like with the parish noticeboard? The cards in the shop window? Or even the prayer board in the church. I mean, it’s always useful to know who your friends aren’t. Anyway’ — she folded the paper — ‘nothing really to worry about. I don’t think Mum’s worried. I mean, the Bishop knows.’

  Jane picked up a paint rag and dabbed up some blotches from the flagged floor, recalling the first time she’d seen Lol, when he was looking after Lucy Devenish’s old shop, Ledwardine Lore. Lol peering out between racks of apple-shaped candles in the orchard-scented air. Like a mouse. He’d been really messed up back then.

  Jane had been fifteen, just a kid. Now she was facing A levels and a driving test, and she wasn’t a virgin, and Lol and Mum were some kind of tentative, nervous item.

  And Lucy Devenish was dead.

  Hard to accept that, even now. No matter what colours the crooked walls and sloping ceilings were repainted, this was Lucy’s house and always would be. When you stood in the hall you could imagine you still saw her old poncho hanging over the post at the foot of the stairs. If it was really dark when you came in, you could imagine Lucy herself there, wearing the poncho, her arms lifting it like batwings.

  The people from London who’d agreed to buy the house when it first came on the market last year had given back word after their five-year-old asthmatic kid had asked who the old woman was on the landing.

  Scary. Lucy hadn’t been scary, not really. Formidable, certainly. Maybe a little witchy, in the best, most traditional sense, and…

  … OK, she had been a little scary. But she’d liked Lol and supported him when he needed it, and she’d been some kind of mentor to Jane, and…

  … And this was OK. Lol finally getting the house — this was meant. Everything finally was going to be OK for Lol and for Mum, who’d been a widow for long enough. Yeah, in one way it was ridiculous, Lol living in this little house and Mum across the road in the huge vicarage, with seven bedrooms, but it was an arrangement that would work, for the time being.

  And it would have Lucy’s blessing. Lucy who, though dead, still somehow spoke for Ledwardine.

  Jane allowed herself a shiver. Lol carried the roller and paint tray into the kitchen and put them in the sink.

  ‘How about you get the chips?’

  ‘Lol, you wimp.’

  ‘Wallet’s on the mantelpiece.’

  Jane found it and took out a tenner.

  ‘Mushy peas?’

  ‘Why not? Just don’t say they’re for me.’

  Jane shoved the tenner down a back pocket of her jeans, along with the vice-rage note, and shrugged on her fleece.

  ‘You’ll be all right on your own for a few minutes, then? You and Lucy?’

  Lol said, ‘Sometimes — did I tell you? — sometimes I try out a new song on her. If she likes it, she joins in. A bit croaky and out of tune, of course, but you can’t—’

  Jane threw the paint rag at him.

  3

  Pebbles

  Next morning, when Jane had left for school, Merrily phoned Huw Owen. She hadn’t slept well, was feeling frayed and edgy, sitting in the scullery in the kid’s old pink fleece. Outside the window, the day was crazed with April chemistry: white sunlight soaking through holes in the foaming cloud.

  ‘So when did this happen, lass?’

  Huw had been up north on what he liked to call a retreat, working with a gang of hard-nosed clerics in the badlands of south Manchester. She wasn’t yet ready to hear his horror stories.

  ‘Think it happened when I wasn’t looking. Can’t say you didn’t warn me — if you don’t pick a team, somebody picks one for you. Just that my guys didn’t want to be picked.’

  He was silent. She could hear the kindling detonating his living-room fire. Pictured his feet in peeling trainers on the hearth, the volatile sunlight in his old hippy’s shaggy hair. She was getting the feeling that his Manchester time had left him energized rather than wearied.

  Precarious psychiatric state. Bitch.

  ‘I feel pathetic,’ she said, ‘ringing you with this stuff. I just wondered if you’d — you know — heard anything.’

  Huw had been born in rural Wales but brought up in Yorkshire, returning to the Beacons in middle age as a parish priest and a personal trainer in the practice of exorcism. Where nobody can hear you scream. Merrily heard the creak of his chair as he stretched, thinking.

  ‘Callaghan-Clarke. Wasn’t she one of the bints who did a circle-dance round the tombs of the old bishops in Hereford Cathedral to celebrate the ordination of women?’

  ‘If she was, she’s calmed down now.’

  ‘The calming power of naked ambition. Get their feet under the table, next thing they want’s a bigger table. Where exactly does she stand in your… Deliverance circle?’

  ‘Given herself a title: Diocesan Deliverance Coordinator. We voted on it. Every case we get from now on has to be submitted to the group before any action’s taken. We voted on that, too. Three in favour, one bemused abstention.’

  ‘Bugger,’ Huw said.

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘A little focus group. It’s just what you need, isn’t it?’

  ‘We light candles and concentrate. I’m not kidding.’

  She told him about Martin Longbeach, and Huw laughed — the noise milk would make if you could hear it curdling.

  Merrily looked up at the wall clock: nearly nine a.m., and a difficult funeral to organize — an elderly woman who’d moved to the village no more than a fortnight ago to live with her daughter and son-in-law, themselves comparative newcomers. And Andy Mumford was due here around ten. It was looking like another day when she wouldn’t see much of Lol.

  ‘Back-up’s one thing,’ Huw said. ‘You need a witness sometimes, no question, and somebody to watch your back. But an ill-matched committee operating in an area where nothing, at the best of times, is ever a bloody certainty…’

  ‘We all accept the need for a psychiatrist…’

  ‘There are good shrinks,’ Huw said, ‘and there are dangerous shrinks.’

  ‘You come across Nigel Saltash before?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Me neither.’ Merrily gazed out of the window at the unmown lawn, vividly green against the grey sky with its seeping sun. ‘He’s a regular churchgoer, however.’

  Huw laughed again. ‘You know your problem, lass? Had your picture in the papers once too often, and you take a very nice picture. They don’t like that. And they weren’t happy at all when you were cosying up to the pagans against Ellis.’

  ‘Oh, Huw, Ellis was the kind of humourless, dangerous, fundamentalist bigot who brings the Church into—’

  ‘Ellis was part of the Church,’ Huw said. ‘Whereas pagans are pagans. Any road, I’m just planting the thought.’

  ‘Who doesn’t like it? Not the Bishop?’

  ‘Dunmore’s a time-server. He wouldn’t even be consulted. Think higher.’

  ‘Huh?’ She was thrown.<
br />
  ‘You want a list of all the embittered, back-stabbing bastards who hate the whole concept of Deliverance? Hey, God forbid that priests should meddle in metaphysics. Somebody’s happen saying, we need to keep an eye on that little Watkins in Hereford… could be getting carried away… too much, too soon. Needs a steadying hand…’

  ‘Hang on. Let me get this right. You think Callaghan-Clarke may have been nudged into place as a… an instrument of restraint?’

  Merrily heard Huw sniff. She was thinking of what Siân had said about his precarious psychiatric state. Would it help to tell him about that? She stared out into the garden, at the pale buds on the apple trees.

  ‘And the bottom line,’ she said, ‘is that nothing much gets done, right?’

  ‘ “But how can we be certain?” ’ Huw doing this delicate, disapproving, posh voice. ‘ “We could so easily look ridiculous, couldn’t we?” And this lad with the candles sounds like window dressing. Bumbling New Ager. Whimsical, but essentially nice and harmless.’

  ‘Making us seem a little woolly?’

  ‘That’s a good word, aye.’

  ‘Let me get this right. You actually think—?’

  ‘Leave it with me,’ Huw said. ‘I’ll ask around, see what I can find out.’

  Merrily made a call about the funeral. Hereford Crem: two p.m., Monday. She’d go and see the family over the weekend. It was always a problem when you didn’t know either the dead person or the bereaved: gently quizzing them about their mum, looking for the one little jewelled detail that would make it meaningful before you slid her through the curtains and the next one came through — another priest, another set of mourners. A line of sad trains on the last platform.

  Andy Mumford turned up ten minutes early.

  On the phone last night he’d sounded agitated. When he walked in, she was shocked.

 

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