Midwinter of the Spirit

by Phil Rickman

  She stood at the barrier preventing cars turning into Church Street. She was panting, thoughts racing again. Wasn’t it true that having women in the priesthood was creating a new divide between the sexes – because men could love both God and their wives, but no truly heterosexual woman could love both God and a man with sufficient intensity to make both relationships potent? Was it all a sham? Was it true that all she was searching for in God were those qualities lacking in ordinary men? Or, at least, in Sean.

  Oh Christ. Merrily flattened herself against a brick wall facing the side of the Cathedral. The headache had gone; she wished it was back, she wanted pain. Fumbling at her dogcollar, she took it off and put it in her bag. A cold breeze seemed to leap immediately to her throat, like a stab of admonishment.

  She zipped up her coat, holding its collar together, turned her back on the Cathedral and walked quickly into Church Street.

  Lol saw Merrily from his window, through the drifting fog: gliding almost drunkenly along the street, peering unseeingly into shop windows newly edged with Christmas glitter.

  He ran downstairs, past the bike, past Nico’s sepulchral drone and the very interested gaze of Big Viv.

  ‘Merrily?’ Close up, she seemed limp, drained.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Hi.’ And he was shocked because she looked as vague as Moon had often been, but that was just him, wasn’t it – his paranoia?

  But paranoia hadn’t created the shadows and creases, the dark hair all mussed, dark eyes moist, make-up escaping.

  He looked around. Not the flat now – it had been too awkward there the other night, as if foreshadowed by the death of Moon.

  She let him steer her into the corner café where he and Jane had eaten chocolate fudge cake.

  There was no one else in the back room. A brown pot of tea between them. On the wall above them was a framed Cézanne poster – baked furrowed earth under a heat haze.

  The letter lay folded on the table, held down by the sugar bowl, revealing only the words ‘known that such events attract members of Occult Groups in search of converts’.

  ‘But surely,’ he said, ‘they mainly just attract ordinary people who read their daily horoscopes. It doesn’t mean she’s sacrificing babies.’

  But he thought of seeing Jane and the other girl coming out of Pod’s last night, long after it was closed. And Jane pretending, for the first time ever, not to have seen him.

  ‘If this was London,’ she said, ‘I could get away with it. Or if Jane was grown-up and living somewhere else. If she’d even been up-front about it, I could have—’

  ‘Merrily, it means nothing. I can’t believe you’ve just quit because of this. It’s the Bishop, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘He made another move on you, right?’

  ‘No.’ She smiled. ‘He’s been… fine. And anyway I might have taken that the wrong way: late at night, very tired. No, I’m just… paranoid.’ She held up her half-smoked cigarette as though using it as a measure of something. ‘Also I have filthy habits and a deep reservoir of self-pity.’

  He nodded at the cigarette. ‘What are the others, then?’

  Merrily tipped it into the ashtray. He saw she was blushing. She had no filthy habits.

  ‘Just… tell me to pull myself together, OK?’

  ‘I like you being untogether. It makes me feel responsible and kind of protective – sort of like a real bloke.’

  She smiled.

  ‘So what are you going to do now?’

  ‘Go back to my flock and try to be a good little shepherd. The Deliverance ministry was a wrong move. I thought it was something you could pick up as you went along. I didn’t realize… I’m a fraud, Lol. I don’t know what I’m doing, let too many people down. I even let you down. I said I’d go and see your friend, Moon…’ She looked vague. ‘Was that yesterday?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘I mean, I could still see her. I’m still a minister, of sorts.’

  ‘She’s not there now,’ he said too quietly.

  ‘Lol?’ She looked directly at him for the first time since sitting down at the table.

  ‘She died.’

  Her face froze up behind the smoke.

  ‘No!’ He put up his hands. ‘She was dead long before you could’ve got there. There was nothing you could have done.’

  And he told her about it: about the Iron Age sword… about the old newspaper report… why Denny had concealed the truth – why Denny said he’d concealed the truth… why Dick thought they should let it lie.

  She kept shaking her head, lips parted. He was relieved at the way outrage had lifted her again.

  ‘Lol, I’ve never heard anything so… There is something deeply, deeply wrong here, don’t you think?’

  ‘But what can you do about it? We can’t bring her back. And we can’t find out what was in her mind.’

  ‘What about this book she was supposed to be writing?’

  ‘Supposed to be, but I don’t think she’d written a word. But if there is anything lying around, Denny will find it. And if it says anything he doesn’t like, he’ll destroy it without telling anyone.’

  ‘Will you be called as a witness at the inquest?’

  ‘I expect so. I was the first to… the first to enter the bathroom.’

  ‘And what will you say?’

  ‘I’ll just answer their questions. That should cover about half of the truth.’

  ‘And the rest of it can’t be the truth, because it has no rationality.’ She looked down into her cup as if there might be a message for her in the tea-leaves. ‘I’m so sorry, Lol.’

  The point at which people say, Ah well, one of those things. Except this wasn’t.

  After a while, she said, ‘What if all your working life is concerned with things that three-quarters of the civilized world now consider irrational?’

  ‘That could be stressful,’ he said. There were lights on in the café now, but they didn’t seem to reach Merrily. What was she not telling him?

  She said, ‘You know why some vicars busy themselves constantly with youth work and stuff like that? It’s so that if, at any point, they realize there’s no God, they can think: Well, at least I haven’t been wasting my time.’

  ‘Cynical.’

  ‘Rational. For the same reasons, some Deliverance ministers prefer to think of themselves as Christian psychologists.’

  ‘Psychology is wonderful,’ Lol said grimly. ‘Look how much it helped Moon.’

  ‘Perhaps she had the wrong therapist.’

  ‘We must get her a better one next time. I think you could have helped Moon. I wish to God I’d told you about her earlier. And I think… I think there must be a lot of other people you could help.’

  ‘Thanks, but you’re being kind.’ She dropped the cigarettes and lighter into her bag, then folded up the anonymous letter very tightly.

  This was not good: nothing had been resolved. He sensed that when she returned to her flock she would be different: a sad shepherd exiled, unfulfilled, into a community that wasn’t a community any more. None of them were; village life, like he’d said in his song, was no more than a sweet watercolour memory. She’d grow old and lined, and end up hating God.

  ‘Listen.’ Lol lowered his voice to an urgent whisper. ‘My life is pathetic. I’m a failed performer, a mediocre songwriter, an ex-mental patient who can’t keep a woman. My sole function on this earth at the present time appears to be producing an album for a semi-talented, obnoxious little git who’s blackmailing his father. Three days ago, a woman I couldn’t love but needed to help just… shut me out in the snow. And then slashed both her wrists. Now somebody who I care about is holding out on me in exactly the same way. What does this tell me?’

  Mega self-pity, he thought as she sat down again. Occasionally it works.

  Merrily said, looking down at the table, ‘Sometimes I think you’re the only friend I have left.’

  ‘Friend,’ he repeated sadly.

 
She met his eyes. ‘It’s a big word, Lol.’

  He nodded, although he knew there were bigger ones.

  Outside, it was already going dark, and the fog had never really lifted.

  31

  Old Tiger

  JANE STOOD ON the vicarage lawn, Ethel the cat watching her from inside the kitchen window. There was fog still around, but a paler patch almost directly overhead; the moon was probably just there, behind layer upon layer of steamy cloud.

  Right, then.

  She’d been told that it was OK to do this from the inside of the house, but she didn’t feel quite right about that. Not with the moon, somehow. And it was a vicarage. Whereas the garden bordered the old and sinister orchard which, though it belonged to the Church, had been here, in essence, far longer. Pre-Christian almost certainly.

  The night was young but silent around Jane. You could usually hear some sounds from the marketplace or the Black Swan, but not many people seemed to have ventured out tonight. Also, the fog itself created this lovely padded hush. It lined the hills and blocked in the spaces between the trees in the dense woods above Ledwardine, as if the whole valley had acquired these deep, resonant walls like a vast auditorium.

  She wondered if Rowenna was outside in her garden, too. The problem was that there were doubtless other houses overlooking that one, and Rowenna had younger brothers who would just take the piss, so she was probably now in her room – searching for the same moon.

  Jane looked up, cleared her throat almost nervously. Probably Mum felt like this in the pulpit. Don’t think about Mum. This is nothing to do with her.

  She drew in a long, chilled breath, imagining moonbeams – unfortunately there weren’t any – also being drawn down, filling her with silken, silvery light. And then she called out – not too loud, as villages had ears.

  ‘Hail to Thee, Lady Moon,

  ‘Whose light reflects our most secret hopes.

  ‘Hail to Thee from the abodes of darkness.’

  Something about that abodes of darkness making it more thrilling than the sun thing in the morning. Especially in this fog.

  And it did work, this cycle of spiritual salutation. It put the whole day into a natural sequence. It deepened your awareness of the connectedness of everything, and your role as part of the great perceiving mechanism that was humanity.

  Jane felt seriously calm by now and not at all cold – like she was generating her own inner heat. Or something was. She looked up into the sky again, just as this really miraculous thing began to happen.

  The moon appeared.

  First as just a grey imprint on the cloud-tapestry. Then as this kind of smoke-wreathed silver figurine: the goddess gathering the folds of her cloud-robes around her.

  And finally… as a core of brilliant white fire at the heart of the fog.

  Winter glory.

  Oh, wow! She heard me.

  Jane just stood there and shivered in amazement and delight, like totally transported.

  Cool!

  Like really, really, really cool.

  * * *

  ‘Visiting time’s not for another hour,’ Sister Miller said. ‘It’s teatime and the patients have to eat. You’ll need to come back.’

  Sister Miller was all nurse: tough and ageless. Merrily concentrated on her seasoned face, because the view along Watkins Ward was dizzying and oppressive. It would have been hard to come up here alone tonight, any night.

  She told Sister Miller that Sister Cullen had said visiting hours were less strict if the patient was in a side ward.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Canon Dobbs.’

  ‘That old man?’ said Sister Miller. ‘Are you relatives?’

  ‘I’m a… colleague.’

  ‘Because my view is that he doesn’t need to be here now, no matter what Dr Bradley says. Why can’t someone look after him at home? He’s just taking up a bed.’

  ‘You mean he’s recovering?’

  ‘Of course he’s recovering. I’ve been in nursing for nearly forty years. Mr Dobbs was walking perfectly well this morning. He can also feed himself. I believe he could also talk, if he wanted to.’ Sister Miller turned on Lol. ‘Have you any idea why he’s refusing to talk?’

  Lol thought about it. ‘Perhaps he’s just impatient with routine questions like “How are we today?”.’

  ‘You have ten minutes and no longer,’ said Sister Miller.

  It was like praying over a tomb. He lay on his back, as still as an effigy. Eyes shut. You were not aware of him breathing. He looked dead.

  Just a short prayer, then. Nothing clever. Someone else having seen to all the smart stuff. Afterwards, Merrily brushed her knees and sat in the bedside chair.

  ‘Hello, Mr Dobbs.’

  He didn’t move. He was like stone. Could he possibly be awake?

  ‘We haven’t spoken before, as such. I’m Merrily Watkins.’ Keeping her voice low and even. ‘I’ve come to say goodbye.’

  On the other side of the door’s glass square, Lol smiled. OK, that was not the most tactful thing to say in a hospital.

  ‘By which I mean that I’ve now decided not to accept the Deliverance… role. I just wanted you to know that. We never met formally, and now there’s no reason we ever should.’

  The side ward enclosing Dobbs was like a drab chapel. A faintly mouldy smell came from him – not organic, more like the miasma of old books in a damp warehouse.

  ‘I’m sorry that you’re in here. I’m sorry we didn’t get to you sooner in the Cathedral.’ She half-rose to pull the bedside chair a little closer and lowered her voice to below prayer level. ‘I’m even sorrier you didn’t feel able to tell any of us what you were doing there.’

  She leaned her face forward to within six inches of his. They’d kept him shaved, but stubble had sprouted under his chin like a patch of sparse grass on a rockface.

  ‘It doesn’t matter to me now – not professionally. I’m out of it, feeling a little humiliated, rather slighted. I know Jesus Christ was the first exorcist, but also that half the world’s population is female, and rather more than half the people with problems of psychic disturbance – or so it seems to me – are female too. I believe that one day there will be a female exorcist in this diocese, without the fires of hell burning in High Town. I just wanted you to know that too.’

  No reaction. Yet he could apparently walk and feed himself. She felt angry.

  ‘I probably felt less insulted, but more puzzled, when I heard you’d been avoiding all women. Dumping your housekeeper – that wasn’t a terribly kind thing to do. Why are you scared of women?’

  Her hand went instinctively to her throat. She still wasn’t wearing the dog-collar.

  ‘I don’t know what makes you tick, Canon Dobbs. I’ve been trying to forgive you for setting me up for that final session with Denzil Joy.’

  She felt tainted just uttering the name, particularly here. Too much like an invocation?

  ‘If you wanted to scare me off, show me how unpleasant it could be, you very nearly succeeded. But that wasn’t, in the end, why I decided to quit.’

  She stood up. On his bedside table she placed two pounds of seedless grapes and two bottles of Malvern water.

  ‘Maybe you could share these with Huw Owen – next time he comes with his candles, and his holy water, and his magic chalk.’

  She waited. Not a movement. She took a last look at him, but he remained like a fossil.

  When she reached the door, she stopped, noticing that Lol’s eyes had widened. She resisted the urge to spin around.

  Once out of the door, she turned left towards the ward entrance, refusing even to glance back along Watkins to the top side ward where Denzil Joy’s spirit had left his body.

  And gone where?

  The sudden shudder ripped up her spine like a razor-blade.

  ‘OK, he opened his eyes,’ Lol informed her, outside the hospital. ‘As soon as you turned your back and walked away, his eyes snapped open. Then closed again when
he saw me standing on the other side of the glass.’

  Merrily’s Volvo was parked in a small bay near a little park. By the path to the Victoria footbridge over the Wye. They leaned against it.

  ‘He heard it all, then?’ she said.

  ‘Every word. His eyes were very bright, fully aware – and mad as hell when he saw me.’

  ‘Good. My God!’

  ‘Mmm.’ Those eyes had spooked Lol. They were burning with the hard, wary intelligence of an old tiger. But the effect of this news on Merrily he found exciting.

  The cold had lost its bite and the fog had thinned. He could see the three-quarter moon as through a lace curtain.

  Merrily said, ‘Could we go for a short walk? I need to clear my head.’

  It was very short. He followed her through the patch of parkland to a kind of viewing platform overlooking the still dark Wye and the suspension footbridge.

  ‘Last time I stood here, Inspector Annie Howe was showing me where a body had been found.’

  ‘What exciting times you have, Merrily. Such drama.’

  ‘Too much drama.’ She stood with her back to the river, beside an ornate lamp standard. ‘Well, this suggests Dobbs was an active participant in Huw’s ritual, doesn’t it? Or maybe even directing it?’

  ‘You’re the expert.’

  ‘Obviously not, or I’d know what this was about.’

  ‘And this Huw going behind your back, that’s the reason you resigned?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘I still don’t see it.’

  ‘Lol, he was my course tutor: the Deliverance man. He’s the nearest I’ve had or wanted to have to a spiritual adviser. I rated the guy. I really liked him.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘No, you don’t. A father-figure, just about. But, more important, the person you trust to guide you through the… through the hinterland of Hell, if you like. But what if there’s something iffy about what they were both doing?’