by Phil Rickman
Perhaps, wherever he was, that was a better place to be tonight.
‘Of course, we all know what all this is about,’ Miss Devenish told her in a very loud whisper. ‘These awful people – these Cassidys – they think the Powells could be terribly quaint and old-fashioned, with their ancient cider press and their old recipe, and they just want to turn them into a tourist sideshow. And Garrod Powell’s going along with it to keep the peace and just in case there’s a few quid to be made without too much work, and—’
‘Is that so bad for the village?’
‘Bad?’ Miss Devenish snorted. ‘The Cassidys’ll just turn honest cider into some horrible fizz in champagne bottles and sell it for a quite ridiculous price in their ghastly restaurant to awful people like themselves. When I was a gel, the farm labourers still used to receive gallons of Pharisee Red as part of their wages. It was the People’s drink. Do you see?’
‘My grandad used to say it was just a way of keeping them grossly underpaid and too drunk to notice,’ said Merrily.
‘Your grandad?’ Miss Devenish observing her shrewdly from under that hat, possibly putting two and two together. ‘Are you local, my dear?’
‘Sort of. My grandfather had a farm about six miles away. Mansell Lacy.’
‘Jolly good. Who was your grandfather?’
‘Charlie Watkins?’
‘Didn’t know him personally, but there are many Watkinses in the area. My God ...’ Miss Devenish was gazing over Merrily’s left shoulder. ‘Just look at that little whore with Bull-Davies. She’ll have his cock out in a minute.’
‘Huh?’
‘Alison Kinnersley. A destroyer, I suspect.’
Merrily risked a glance. Bull-Davies was talking to some of the other guys with guns. Alison Kinnersley was standing behind him, keeping her hands warm in his trouser pockets.
‘That poor boy.’
‘James Bull-Davies?’
‘Good heavens, no. Kinnersley’s boyfriend. Former boyfriend. Not the Bull. The Bulls can look after themselves. Trouble is, they want to look after everyone else. But it goes wrong. Never trust the Bulls, my dear. Remember that. Remember poor Will.’
‘Sorry?’
‘OK! Listen, everybody!’
James Bull-Davies had disentangled himself from Alison. He reached up, snapped a lump of brittle, dead branch from the Apple Tree Man and banged it on the cider cask, like a chairman’s gavel.
‘We’re going to do it. Had a brief chat with the chaps here. Seven of us brought shotguns along, and if we’re talking about old traditions, well, I rather suspect there must be one about it being bad luck to take one’s weapon home without loosing orf a single shot. Miss Devenish – apologies, but we’re going to do it.’
Miss Devenish stiffened as the shotgun men gathered in a semicircle around the tree, shuffling cartridges from their pockets.
‘Something we have to sing or something, is there, Terrence?’ boomed Bull-Davies.
‘I have it here, James. It’s a sort of chant. If you say it after me ...’
‘OK. Orf you go then. Stand back, everybody. Well back.’
There was silence, everyone waiting.
Miss Devenish said loudly, ‘Well, I’ve done all I can. If you wish to disturb the dead, go ahead.’
Her voice still rang in the hard air as she turned away. Bull-Davies shrugged as he accepted the folklore book, cleared his throat and began to read.
‘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 in
tense 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,’ Jane 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.
