The Wine of Angels

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Yes.’

  He shook his head slowly, like a boxer coming up after being knocked to his knees, only to be told that he might still win on points. Some part of him trying to equate the random, meaningless deaths of his mentor and his tormentor within the same twenty-four hours, both in road accidents with nobody else involved. Punch-drunk. Not sure what any of it meant.

  ‘So Colette ...’

  ‘Ruled out, Lol. According to that report, he died last night. When she was still at the party. They never met. It’s all a bitterly ironic coincidence.’

  I’ve been there, she wanted to say, sensing Sean moving towards her across bare, bedroom floorboards, smiling through his fatal injuries. I’ve been exactly there.

  Feeling, in one of those spinning, crystal moments, that they must both be part of the same bizarre pattern.

  And then, turning, she saw Jane looking down at them in manifest bewilderment from the doorway of the sitting room/ study. Her face was white and blotched, her usually sleek dark hair like knotted string.

  She said, ‘Mum, will you come in? Please?’

  They clung together for a long time, Jane’s hot, wet, sticky face against Merrily’s under the blue and gold ceiling, Jane’s body shuddering as the accordion was wheezing up from the market square, and Merrily found she was crying too, for Miss Devenish and Sean and even the wretched Windling, united in road-death. Crying for Colette and the suffering Cassidys and other sufferings, known and unknown, and Lol and all his wasted years and all those senseless wasted days for Jane and her, hiding from each other behind screens of divisive superstition.

  From the square came a chattering of polite, muted applause. Jane broke away and stood in the centre of the room as if unsure where she was. She swallowed. Merrily looked around.

  The cheap stereo and its white-cased speakers sat on bare boards. There was also the old couch the kid had insisted on having in her bedroom in Liverpool, even though you had to climb over one of its arms to get to the bed. There were paperbacks in piles. There was Edwin, the teddy, one-eared and balding. Familiar items. But the blue of the timber-framed walls and ceiling made the room dark and mystical, like a grotto in a wood. The yellow-white lights were out of an over-the-top starry night by Van Gogh.

  ‘Lucy said ...’ Jane sniffed and straightened up. ‘She told me to like paint it out of my head. To externalize it.’

  ‘She told you to paint all this?’

  ‘She gave me this book of hers to read, The Little Green Orchard, and this kid in the book did that. She was afraid of the orchard until she brought it home in her head and did drawings and that gave her ... not control, exactly, but like a stake in the orchard, a connection. I’d already told Lucy about the Mondrian walls idea, so ...’

  ‘This is what you saw in the orchard? The night you ...’

  ‘The night Colette dragged me into the orchard and she was trying to scare me, saying the ghost of Edgar Powell had been seen by the tree where he shot himself. But when I looked up, instead of seeing something horrible and grisly, it was—’

  Jane looked up to the ceiling.

  ‘It was beautiful?’ Merrily said.

  ‘Yeah. I was floating. It was awesome. And warm. Dreamy. It was like outside time. And all these little lights moving about among the branches, and they were like ... like they had existence. Life. You felt they were responding to your moods. Needs. Lucy said it was kind of reaching out to me. The spirit of the orchard.’

  ‘Why couldn’t you tell me about it?’

  ‘You need to ask that?’

  Merrily remembered her anger at the absence of headache, queasy tummy, morning-after contrition. Lucy Devenish’s explanation about the cider and the orchard, Like curing Like. Natural holistic medicine.

  Crawl into the centre of the orb and curl up. Let nature do the rest. Wouldn’t work for everyone. The orchard’s a risky place, an entity in itself a sphere. And this is a very old orchard. So it tells you – or rather it tells me – something about your daughter.

  ‘All that evening,’ Jane said, ‘I’d had this kind of a sense of coming home. First it was Colette. She just like appeared in the Black Swan and we clicked, and that was great. But when I looked up in the orchard I was on my own again and it was like a different kind of bonding with ... I don’t know. I still don’t know.’

  ‘Something beyond everything,’ Merrily said clumsily.

  ‘She must have felt excluded,’ Jane said. ‘That was the problem.’

  ‘Colette?’

  ‘Yeah. She felt ... That was why she tried to lead them all into the orchard at the party. She wanted to ... I don’t know.’

  ‘Re-establish control. Inspector Howe said she was shouting ...’

  ‘Jane knows. Like it was a secret we had between us. But there wasn’t. It’s not something you can share. She didn’t know anything about it. She was going in mob-handed, trampling on everything. She was going to cause offence.’

  ‘What?’ Merrily stiffened.

  Going to cause offence. Miss Devenish on the night of the wassailing, nose twitching in disdain. Can’t anyone see that? Deep offence.

  Merrily said, ‘Offence to whom?’

  ‘The watchers,’ Jane said. ‘The watchers in ... in the little green orchard.’

  Merrily tensed. ‘Who are the watchers, Jane?’

  Jane’s mouth opened, but the words wouldn’t come. She saw Lol, standing shyly in the doorway.

  ‘Poor Karl Windling,’ she said. ‘But you must be awfully glad.’

  It was all very strange and cathartic. Merrily and Jane sat on the old sofa, Lol walked around, and they talked about levels of existence and the life-force in nature. The Lucy Devenish Memorial Discussion.

  ‘So how does the Apple Tree Man come into this?’ Merrily said. ‘I thought he represented the spirit of the orchard.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Jane. ‘You haven’t been listening. Lucy said that was wrong. That wasn’t local folklore. She said different places grew their own customs and beliefs according to what was needed. She said Wil Williams knew the reality of it because he was so psychic. And all that about him being seen dancing with sprites, that probably had a basis in fact, because when he was in the orchard the spirits would show themselves to him.’

  She and Lol explained about the Pharisees Reds. How, when the old farmers found out they had an exceptional cider apple that was different to the ones growing anywhere else, they thought it was a gift from the spirits of the orchard.

  ‘Or the angels,’ Jane said. ‘Lucy said that in the seventeenth century if you said too much about fairies, you’d wind up ... well, like Wil Williams.’

  ‘Oh.’ Merrily sank into the old sofa. ‘I see. The Wine of Angels. Barry Bloom said that was Lucy’s idea.’

  ‘She wasn’t happy about it though, Mum. She wasn’t happy about the way the orchard had been let go and now it’s all started coming back after the wassailing and old Edgar shooting himself.’

  ‘Lucy thought things were coming to a head,’ Lol said. ‘And when Jane ... Oh shit, this is really difficult.’

  Down in the house, the phone was ringing. Jane exchanged a glance with Lol. ‘I’ll get it,’ she said.

  Lol said, ‘She was just there. One second there was blossom on the ground, lots of it, and the next Jane was there, kind of ... enshrouded in it. I don’t know where she came from. I don’t know how long she’d been there.’

  ‘And what had you taken?’ Merrily said coldly.

  Lol sighed.

  ‘I’m sorry’ She spread her hands on her lap and looked down at them. ‘That was the scary thing, right? The thing you discussed with Miss Devenish. If there was anything calculated to scare you it would be the appearance of a fifteen-year-old girl lying on her back, wearing a school uniform and apple blossom. Could she have been there all the time and you just didn’t see her until you were close up?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s possible. She had on this white school blouse. When she sat up, it
was covered with petals. She sat up just like she’d been asleep, sunbathing. Except there was no sun. I took her right back to the cottage and phoned Lucy.’

  ‘She could have been there all day, that’s what you’re saying. Since she failed to get on the school bus.’

  ‘I don’t know. Lucy said it ... sometimes happened. Though not as often as you might imagine from all the folk tales. She said a day was nothing. Sometimes it could be a year before people came back, although it only felt like a few moments. And sometimes it felt like years but it was only a few moments. She showed me stuff in books.’ He looked sick. ‘You see why I was reluctant to tell you this. You imagine me telling the cops?’

  ‘Don’t even contemplate it.’ Merrily placed a cigarette on the arm of the sofa, searched around for her Zippo. ‘It’s like these alien abductions. Was it a dream, was it hallucination? You want me to believe that, in some way, the orchard took her. That Jane has – or thinks she has – in some way been possessed by the orchard, which is itself an entity, a sentient thing. And that it’s now taken Colette, maybe?’

  Lol shook his head in defeat.

  ‘Which,’ Merrily said, ‘I suppose could hardly be dismissed as entirely incredible by someone whose profession implies she believes a dead man appeared to his mates, displaying his crucifixion scars. Right?’

  Lol shrugged.

  ‘Except’ – Merrily located her lighter in a cuff of her sweater – ‘that this is paganism.’

  ‘I suppose it must be.’

  ‘It really is, Lol. It makes me want to reach for my big cross.’

  ‘Mum,’ Jane said from the doorway, ‘it’s some solicitor in Hereford called McGreedy.’

  ‘So you told her. You told her her daughter had been spirited away.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘She scoff?’

  ‘No. But that doesn’t mean she believed it, though. You’re going to have to be patient with her. Supportive, as they say.’

  ‘That’s what Lucy said.’ Jane pulled the teddy bear on to her knees. ‘She said Mum was the catalyst. I’m not sure what that means.’

  ‘Means she’s the one who’s going to make things happen.’

  ‘She’s the one? We could wait for ever.’

  ‘What for? What do you expect to happen? What happened to you? Where did you go? Did you just fall asleep or what?’

  ‘It’s a blank. I mean, maybe there’s some part of my subconscious that remembers being prodded about by little green men or whatever, but it must be well buried. Suppose that’s what happened to Colette. What can we do about that? Suppose, because she wasn’t respectful, she’s been received ... less kindly.’

  Lol was allowing himself to wonder whether they were really having this conversation or whether he himself had been abducted, slipped back into the hospital, back on to the medication, when Merrily returned, a little out of breath from all the stairs, her forehead furrowed.

  ‘This your doing, flower?’

  Lol, relaxed for the first time in nearly two decades in the company of a teenage girl, let himself think how very pretty her mother was.

  ‘That was a lawyer called Harold McCready. He is Lucy Devenish’s lawyer. He says she went to his office a couple of days ago to add a codicil to her will, appointing an extra executor. As though she knew she hadn’t long to live, McCready said. A folksy, country lawyer. Seen it before, he said. People often know, even when they’re not ill.’

  Jane sat up. ‘What’s an executor?’

  ‘Someone responsible for seeing that the wishes of the deceased are carried out to the letter. Normally, just a formality. Somehow, I suspect this is going to be more complicated.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it’s me, flower. Things get stranger. Why would she do that? Someone who’s had so little to do with her. It’s weird. I’m supposed to look over her possessions for any indications of her last wishes ... As vague as that. There’s a clerk from McCready’s office driving over with a key to her house. Have either of you ever been in there?’

  ‘Just the shop,’ Jane said. ‘Mum, you have to take this very, very seriously. She said you might get cold feet and want to leave. Because of what happened in the church and stuff. She said you mustn’t. She also said you should change your mind about not letting that play go on in the church. She said—’

  ‘Flower—’

  ‘I’m just a kid,’ Jane said. ‘Does executor mean the same as catalyst?’

  36

  Dancing Gates

  ‘DISASTROUS,’ DERMOT CHILD said into the early evening stillness. ‘Totally disastrous. By the end of the afternoon it was fairly conclusive. About three dozen genuine ones, the rest were rubberneckers hoping for a body bag. When the police cars dwindled to one, they took themselves off home.’

  He stood on the corner of Church Street looking out to the square, where the last stallholder was packing up, spreading stains of armpit sweat on his polo shirt uncomfortably reminiscent, for Merrily, of the menacing dream-Dermot.

  ‘The bloody Press, too. Not an arts journalist among them. Ten people went into the exhibition, none of them bought a thing. Thirty tickets sold for the string quartet. Is it even worth it? Come and have a drink, Merrily. Do your understanding-vicar bit. Tell me you’ll offer a prayer for the festival.’

  ‘Priest-in-charge,’ Merrily said dully. Lack of sleep was already corroding her resolve. The last thing she needed was a cosy drink with Dermot Child. ‘Understanding-priest-in-charge. I’m sorry, I can’t, Dermot. I have an appointment. I’ll try and make it to the concert.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s telling us something. Controversy certainly attracts attention, but this was the wrong kind of controversy. Pulls in the wrong element.’

  ‘The gossiping classes, as distinct from the chattering classes.’

  He smiled. ‘Clearly, the morris dancers were a mistake. Terrence’s idea. Falls between two stools. The cultured consider it quaint but a little simplistic, the working class find it more than a bit of a yawn. Terrence is all for harmless tradition. I think we need to be a touch more avant-garde.’

  ‘Like your Old Cider thing?’

  ‘Ah.’ His eyes went to sly slits and he tapped his nose. ‘You haven’t seen that yet, Merrily. And neither has Terrence, thank God. It might seem tame, but what you have is this very male celebration of fecundity.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ Merrily said. ‘I’m sorry, I do have to go.’

  ‘Approached it the wrong way at first, you see. I was looking for singers when I should’ve been seeking out untamed virility. Chaps who, with a little training, can learn to sing not from the throat, not from the stomach but from the, ah, loins.’

  ‘Yes,’ Merrily said. Dermot talking dirty only made her feel more exhausted. ‘Well, good luck with tonight – I’m sure you’ll get lots of people turning up on spec’

  She walked across the street, but carried on down past Miss Devenish’s house, not wanting him to know where she was going. At the junction with Old Barn Lane, she turned, and he was gone. She walked back to Lucy’s terraced black and white, taking out the key. As she pushed it into the lock beside the goblin knocker, a gruff and loaded male chorus sang in her head. Auld ciderrrrrrrrrr.

  Dermot’s choral work was going to be a kind of aural hard-on.

  She shuddered.

  She was several feet into Lucy’s living room when the door twitched shut behind her.

  She started and turned her head, but no one was there. The silence, in fact, was almost companionable, and she understood that she was more afraid of Dermot Child having crept in behind her than she was of Lucy’s ghost. Would almost have welcomed the jolly, ponchoed apparition.

  To advise her, for a start, on what the hell she was supposed to be doing in here.

  The muted evening light was a soft presence in the single, small window, leaded and lace-curtained. But not in the room, which was well into its own dusk. Merrily went back to the door and found a light switch,
an old metal one like a pewter pip.

  It activated two Victorian bracket lamps over an ornate, ebony desk which sat under the window and dominated the room like an altar. The beams above it were stained as black as the exterior timbers. There was a rigid-looking armchair and a Victorian chaise longue. All four walls were half-panelled, to waist level, white-painted above, between glass-fronted bookcases. There was a single etching – two Victorian fairies, elegantly pool-peering – in a thin black frame. And some framed photographs.

  Merrily stood, for a moment, hands by her sides. Trying for quietness inside, receptivity.

  The solicitor’s clerk from McCready’s office had arrived on a red Honda motorbike just before six, handing her a brown envelope containing only the front-door key and a smaller one. No instructions, no advice.

  Jane had wanted to come across with her, but she’d felt that would be wrong. This apparently was between Miss Devenish and her. Although it would have been useful having Lol in here, the person who’d known her best of late, but who dare not be seen on the streets.

  She was still reluctant to touch anything without at least a sensation of having permission. It was all so tidy. As though Lucy Devenish had actually walked out of here this morning under a premonition that she might not be returning.

  Merrily folded her arms. ‘What do you want me to do, Lucy?’

  It didn’t seem foolish to ask aloud. She’d always had the slightly unorthodox idea that the dead were not fully gone until after the funeral service. Sometimes she’d look at the coffin in the church and sense a relief, a gratefulness, emanating from it. Occasionally, a sense of indignation.

  ‘What do you want me to know?’

  Nothing happened. The lights did not go out. No bat-winged, hook-nosed spectre peeled itself from the panelling. Neither did she feel anything, nor hear any inner voice.

  She went to look at the photographs on the walls. One, in blurry black and white, showed a much younger, bushy-haired Lucy in a summer dress sitting on a bench. A young, smiling man in cricketing clothes was leaning over the back of the bench, hands on her shoulders. Lucy wore a sad half-smile, as though she knew it wouldn’t come to anything. In another picture, a shorter haired, middle-aged Lucy, trousers rolled into riding boots, held out a feed bucket for a piebald pony, while a younger woman looked on. She looked curiously familiar. Sister? Close friend?