The Wine of Angels

by Phil Rickman

  ‘I BEG YOUR PARDON,’ Terrence Cassidy said, irritated.

  ‘Old Cider!’ Dermot Child, the musician, thumped the table. ‘That’s what we should call it!’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘The entire event. The festival. Old Ciderrrrrr! Resonates.’

  Everything Dermot Child said seemed to resonate. He was a plump friar of a man, who, without being obviously Irish, Scottish or Welsh – indeed, his accent was closer to Oxford – vibrated with an emotional fervour you could only describe as Celtic. Merrily quite liked him.

  In the absence of the parish secretary, who was also the treasurer of the Women’s Institute (as distinct from the Women’s Group, formed by newcomers) and was attending some sort of WI convention, she’d agreed to take the minutes of this hastily called meeting. She wrote down, Old Cider?

  ‘Explain, shall I ... Mr Chairman?’ Child leaned over onto an elbow, making a determined fist, as if prepared to arm-wrestle Cassidy into submission.

  ‘Please do,’ Cassidy said, resignation soaked in acid. It was, after all, his festival, Merrily thought. His idea, his concept. Eccentrics like Child should content themselves with being occasionally amusing.

  Merrily smiled. Child caught her eye, winked. Outside, a small motorcycle was being expertly skidded on the cinders under the open window. Councillor Garrod Powell moved swiftly to the door. ‘Give it a rest, Kirk,’ they heard him shout mildly. ‘Else 111 be round to see your dad, boy.’

  It was getting rather dim in the village hall, screened from the sunset by two huge oaks. On the way back to his chair, Councillor Powell lifted a hand over the panel of metal switches to the left of the T’ai Chi group noticeboard. ‘Leave it a moment, would you, Rod?’ Child said.

  Powell, tall and trim and oddly dignified, shrugged and went back to his seat between Cassidy and a moody-looking James Bull-Davies.

  ‘It begins with “Crying the Mare",’ said Child. ‘You’d know all about that, Rod. They used to do that on your farm?’

  ‘Sure to,’ Powell said uncertainly.

  ‘Harvest custom. They’d leave the last of the corn standing, separating it out into four bundles, sticking up like legs. The Mare, you see? Then they’d tie these together at the top to make a single sheaf, step a few paces back and hurl their hooks and sickles at it, to try and cut off the ears of corn.’

  ‘Sounds rather pointless to me,’ observed Terrence Cassidy, apparently failing to recall his role as principal organizer of the infamous Twelfth Night event in which shotguns were discharged into an apple tree.

  Dermot Child ignored him. ‘Be interesting to arrange a contest in one of the fields, see how many chaps can still do it.’

  Somehow, Merrily couldn’t quite imagine Lloyd and Garrod Powell, plus sundry seasonal labourers, abandoning the combine harvester to waste a valuable daylight hour attempting to shave a sheaf with tossed sickles.

  ‘However,’ Child said, ‘this was really a preamble. On this and other occasions, the ritual would invariably conclude with mugs of cider all round. Now. This would be preceded by all the chaps gathering into a circle and intoning—’

  Abruptly, he pushed back his chair, stood up, filled his lungs. And with his fingertips pressed into the tabletop, bellowed in a lugubrious bass, ‘Auld ... ciderrrrrrrrrrrrr.’

  Rolling and dragging out the word on a single note, in a deep, rumbling drone, a Herefordshire mantra. Merrily was startled. How eerily primeval it seemed in the purply gloom. You felt that if several of them were doing it, the walls would start to peel and crumble.

  No one spoke again until Child sat down.

  ‘Aye,’ Rod Powell said then, into the silence. ‘I remember.’ He moved to the switches again, and bluish fluorescent tubes began to flicker.

  Merrily recalled, as the lights revealed the sickly, sixties, pink-brick interior of Ledwardine’s only real architectural embarrassment, what Gomer Parry had said about even the mercenary Powells being far from immune from superstition.

  Dermot Child was patting his chest.

  ‘Don’t know about the rest of you, but I find that absolutely thrilling. Bunch of working men using their lungs and their throats to make contact with the earth itself. Setting up this marvellously powerful vibration ... Ciderrrrr. The very roots of music’

  ‘Sort of vibration we need for this festival,’ said James Bull-Davies. ‘That’s what you’re saying?’

  Bull-Davies was wearing a tan gilet over a checked shirt with a cravat. Until you actually lived in a place like this, Merrily thought, the idea of there still being a kind of uniform for local squires would strike you as a joke. But it was a fact that people like James did not wear jeans, they did not wear T-shirts, and they would never, under any circumstances, be seen in a baseball cap, even the right way round.

  ‘You know ...’ Child leaned across the table. ‘You’d be absolutely perfect for it, James. Your voice has the timbre.’

  Cassidy scowled but said nothing. Probably not caring to emphasize his own reedy lack of timbre. Merrily wanted to giggle. James Bull-Davies caught her eye and looked away at once. Merrily stifled a sigh. How long would it take for this guy to come to terms with a woman priest? Answer: he never would; it wasn’t the thing.

  ‘I’m planning, you see,’ Child announced, ‘a new choral work, for which this will be the focus. Old Cider. I’m looking for voices. Local voices. I want to work with the voices. I want the composition to arise from those voices. From the earth, the red earth of Ledwardine. Any thoughts, Rod?’

  ‘We did have a male voice choir, Mr Child, some years back. Folded through lack of support. A few of the ole boys still around, though, sure to be.’

  Child beamed. ‘Vicar?’

  ‘I could put the word around the church choir,’ Merrily said. ‘See if we can get a few volunteers.’

  ‘Good girl’ Child reached over and patted her hand, lingering perhaps a little too long on her fingers. ‘So what’s the committee’s view on using “Old Cider” as the name of the festival. Terry?’

  ‘Terrence,’ Cassidy said tightly. ‘Well, we obviously can’t make a decision tonight—’

  ‘Who says we can’t?’

  ‘Look, I suggest you submit a paper on the proposal and we’ll circulate it before the next meeting.’

  ‘Hell fire!’ boomed Bull-Davies. ‘Only a question of a bloody title. I propose, Chairman, that we take a vote on whether to decide it here and now. In fact, not to prolong the issue, I formally propose the Ledwardine Festival be known hereafter as the Old Cider festival’

  ‘Seconded,’ Child said quickly.

  ‘Now just a minute ...’ Terrence Cassidy’s thin face was flushed. ‘What this means is that the entire festival would effectively be promoting your as yet unwritten choral work.’

  ‘Or my choral work, for heaven’s sake’ – Child threw up his arms – ‘would be supporting the concept of the festival’

  ‘Proposition on the table, gentlemen.’ Bull-Davies made a grimace of a smile. ‘And, ah ... lady. Chairman, my understanding of the rules of the committee game is that what you do next is ask if there are any amendments.’

  Cassidy folded his arms obstinately. ‘I think we should wait until Richard Coffey arrives. His play’s going to be the thing that gets us national publicity, and he might—’

  ‘Chap knew it was eight p.m., didn’t he?’ Bull-Davies rumbled. ‘Can’t wait all night. Move progress.’

  ‘All right.’ Cassidy very red now. ‘Very well. If that’s what you want. So be it.’

  Looking around for an amendment. In vain. Even to Merrily, the idea sounded simple and unpretentious, reflected the identity of the village and would look good on posters. Why waste time?

  ‘Old Cider’ was passed by three votes to one. Councillor Garrod Powell, as the only official local politician there, did what local politicians did best and abstained. Hostile looks were exchanged.

  Oh God, Merrily thought, it’s going to be that sort of committ
ee.

  She was suddenly depressed. Was this how Alf Hayden had started out: dutifully attending all the bitchy little meetings, wondering how God wanted him to vote? Wondering, after a while, if God was really concerned one way or the other. Village life: the cradle of society, or just a shallow pond across which Jesus surely would never have bothered to walk?

  Tyres crunched the cinders under the window.

  ‘Richard, I imagine,’ Cassidy said, as if it didn’t matter any more, as if he’d washed his hands of them all.

  Merrily had hoped Coffey wouldn’t show. After what Jane had told her, she needed a bit of time to think about Wil Williams, minister of this parish 1668 to 1670. She needed to consult a few people. If James Bull-Davies was in a decisionmaking mood tonight, she might be pushed into a corner on the issue of whether the local Church should be actively involved and allow its premises to be used for the resurrection of a seventeenth-century minister apparently hounded to death by his own parishioners.

  Her first dicey decision. Sitting directly beneath the No Smoking sign, Merrily ached for a cigarette.

  Back at the Black Swan, Jane watched National Lottery Live on TV, alone in the tiny, half-panelled residents’ lounge, and almost began to understand why her mother had gone into the Church.

  The bloody lottery. Look at them all, whooping and squealing with every number drawn. Was this what the human race had come to – naked lust for money, mob greed?

  Greed. Well, of course, Dad had been greedy. No getting around that.

  Poor bloody stupid Dad.

  For nearly two years, she’d kept a secret picture of the wreckage. Secret from Mum, that is. Mum having tried to shield Jane, at eleven, from the worst of it. No local papers had been allowed into the house that week.

  But Dad’s car was such a horrific mess, like a screwed-up ball of newspaper, you could hardly tell it had ever been a car, that the picture had made it to a couple of the nationals. She’d cut it out, hid it under her mattress.

  The picture froze her up inside, but she’d forced herself to bring it out every night before she went to bed and she’d stare at it and stare at it, knowing he was still in there when the photo was taken, like shreds of meat in a burger.

  Dadburger.

  With added Karen. Fragments of Dad and Karen all mixed up, intermingled: flesh around flesh, bone to bone, tissue on tissue, sinews intertwined. More together than they could ever have been in life. More intimate than Sean Barrow had ever been with Mum. Karen had him totally at the end and for ever and ever, and it would be convenient to think that this was what had driven Mum into the arms of God. Only it wasn’t that easy, it had been coming on for quite a while before that. The impenetrable paperbacks, the long walks, the tedium of evensong, the voluntary work at the Christian Youth Centre. Creepy.

  ‘Ah, here you are.’

  A powerful whiff of musk made Jane spin round in her chair, and there, in the doorway, was the glamorous Ms Colette Cassidy in her teenage-hooker dress. Glancing at the TV, smirking.

  ‘Yeah, they said you were an intellectual. Want to come for a drink?’

  ‘More than my life’s worth,’ Jane said frankly. She hadn’t been Mum-less in a bar since the infamous running-away incident in Birmingham, since the creepy counselling session.

  ‘I didn’t mean here,’ Colette said. ‘We could go down the Ox.’

  Jane was reluctantly impressed. The Ox was this tiny, seedy pub, flickering with gaming machines on the corner of the alleyway leading to the public toilets.

  This was a test, wasn’t it?

  ‘Your mother isn’t going to get away from that meeting this side of eleven,’ Colette said. ‘My old man’ll see to that. Gives you a couple of hours, at least.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Jane was thinking fast, too fast, feeling flustered. Street cred on the line in a big way here.

  Colette tossed back her dark-brown hair like an impatient, thoroughbred pony. She had this scintillating diamond nos-estud. Could you get away with that at the Cathedral School, or was it a weekend thing? Must be a pain to keep taking it in and out. Worthwhile pain, though.

  ‘And if you’re worrying about word getting back to the Reverend Mummy,’ Colette said smoothly, ‘I think it’s fair to say that the clientele of the Ox aren’t known for religion.’

  ‘Especially on the morning after Saturday night, I suppose.’

  ‘You got it.’ Colette smiled her sophisticated smile, fifteen going on thirty-five.

  ‘It’s a bit close to the village hall.’

  ‘Live dangerously,’ Colette said.

  Jane stood up, no option.

  ‘Am I late?’

  Not actually sounding as if he cared one way or the other, the playwright slid his briefcase across the table, shed his jacket, spidered into a seat. A single motion. Richard Coffey was all motion.

  ‘Not at all’ Terrence Cassidy gathered his papers, and his dignity, to his chest.

  ‘Yes,’ James Bull-Davies snapped.

  This was unnecessary, Merrily thought. Uncalled for. But nobody appeared to have heard him. The lord of the manor had been eclipsed. There was a powerful new energy in the meeting.

  ‘Er, Richard ...’ Cassidy half-rose, ‘I’d like to introduce our new vicar, Merrily Watkins.’

  ‘Charming name,’ Richard Coffey said.

  Merrily had never seen him up close before. He was, she thought, almost shocking. Had the taut, muscular body of an ageing ballet-dancer, at the stage where staying fit was becoming painfully obsessive. His lean, pocked face vibrated with colours and textures, divided into pulsing segments like a portrait by Lucien Freud or Francis Bacon, full of life and personal history, a history, you would have to conclude – even if you hadn’t heard the stories – of sensual excess.

  She was fascinated and wasn’t aware of how long she’d been staring at him until the vacuum of silence around them was popped by a discreet chairman’s cough.

  ‘Mustn’t waste time.’ Terrence Cassidy tapped his pen on the table. ‘You all know Richard as one of our most celebrated contemporary writers for both the stage and television. He’s now living, part of the time, at Upper Hall Lodge, and naturally we’re glad he chose our village as his weekend retreat.’

  ‘My feeling now is that it chose me,’ Coffey purred diffidently.

  Merrily saw James Bull-Davies gazing at the ceiling. Envisaged words in a bubble above his head. Tiresome bloody poofter, something like that. He’d be seeing rather more of Coffey than any of them; Upper Hall Lodge was, of course, at the bottom of his drive and used to be occupied by generations of Bull-Davies gamekeepers.

  Cassidy nodded. ‘I’m sure that’s true. And we’re all delighted at Richard’s plan to use the Ledwardine Festival to premiere a major new drama illuminating a rather ... rather unfortunate episode in our history. Unfortunate, but ... but fascinating. Ah, at the moment, apart from its general theme, I know no more than any of you about the project. Which is why I asked Richard along tonight to tell us as much as he feels able to divulge at this stage of the, ah, creative process.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Chairman.’ Coffey fluidly opening his briefcase and extracting a file of papers. ‘I should, however, say from the outset that the prospect of staging a complete production, with a full cast, here in late summer, early autumn, is not really a viable one.’

  ‘But, I ...’ Cassidy fought for balance, the rug sliding from under him. Merrily saw Dermot Child perk up.

  ‘However – calm yourself, Terrence – what I do have in mind will be very much an event in itself. A re-creation, in the original setting, which I think could be absolutely electric. Will not only, I believe, lay a ghost, clear the name of a good man, but effectively solve a three-hundred-year-old mystery.’

  ‘Oh. Is that all?’ Bull-Davies said sourly.

  Yes, it would upset him, having his village’s history mined for nuggets of controversy by the celebrated interloper who’d turned his one-time gamekeeper’s lodge into a less-tha
n-discreet second home. Had he, Merrily wondered, seen The Crystal Dungeon, Richard Coffey’s controversial TV play about a reclusive earl’s incestuous relationship with his sister and their persecution by an evil butler?

  Coffey didn’t even seem to recognize the big, tweedy person as the owner of the rundown heap at the top of the drive.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said smoothly, ‘I propose to outline my idea and then leave you to discuss it amongst yourselves. If it bothers any of you, I’m sure one of the other villages—’

  ‘No!’ Cassidy looked helpless. ‘I mean, tell us, Richard. Tell us.’

  ‘Wil Williams.’ Coffey slid on half-glasses, spoke with precision. A man with nothing to prove and no time to waste on dissent. ‘I take it we’re all conversant with the brief facts.’

  Merrily was able to nod. Thank God for Jane.

  ‘Williams became rector here in the late 1660s. We don’t know how old he was when he arrived. We think late twenties. His friend and neighbouring cleric, the poet Traherne, in a letter to his brother Philip, describes Williams as fair-haired, youthful in appearance and exuding a kind of perpetual joy.’

  ‘Traherne.’ James Bull-Davies was scornful. ‘Chap never had a bad word for anybody. Walked around in bloody cloud-cuckoo-land half the time. Wrote as if he was on something.’

  ‘One could argue at some length with you there. But this is not the occasion. I think no one would deny Williams was a man who loved the area and exulted in his ministry.’

  Bull-Davies shrugged impatiently. Merrily wrote down, Traherne, feeling a bit ignorant. Traherne had been mentioned briefly at college as a major literary precursor of Wordsworth and Blake and one of the greatest Christian mystical poets, but she actually didn’t know that much about him or his work. Fairly reprehensible, really, considering he’d been rector of a parish not ten miles away.

  ‘As I understand it,’ Dermot Child said, ‘it was Traherne who more or less secured the Ledwardine post for Williams. Then buggered off.’

  ‘It’s never been proved that Traherne had a hand in the appointment of Williams,’ said Coffey. ‘Although, as you say, it is a theory. Certainly the two knew each other before Williams came here, possibly at Oxford. You say “buggered off ... Traherne certainly appears to have lost touch with Williams when he left the area in 1669. We know of no correspondence, and it seems unlikely that Traherne knew of the subsequent persecution. Perhaps because Williams made a point of not telling him.’