by Phil Rickman
Firmly and decisively, Jane shut the door of the house in Church Street and then was stopped, very scared, by the sight of the winter poncho draped over the post at the bottom of the stairs.
The poncho hung there, dark and sombre like a kid’s idea of a ghost. It was both frightening and awfully moving. It made her wish she hadn’t come because it brought home to her – more even than the sight of the body in the road – the cruel reality of Lucy’s death.
To banish the fright, she threw her arms around the poncho, buried her face in its folds. Burst at once into sobs, hugging the woollen thing tight, but the hardness, the deadness of the oaken post beneath only made it worse, its rigid, knurled point imprinting on her forehead the message that the wonderful Lucy Devenish really was never coming back.
When she pulled away, the poncho fell in a heap to the floor, as if the spirit had drifted away from under it. She gathered it up quickly and carried it up the narrow stairs, finding Lucy’s bedroom, putting the poncho on the bed and walking out without looking at anything because a bedroom was private.
She went into the bathroom and looked at her face in the mirror. She looked like a child, and the tear stains didn’t help. She washed her face, dried it on an Aztec-patterned bathtowel that reminded her of the summer poncho and was just so Lucy she nearly wept again.
Wipe your eyes, you little snot! Pull yourself together!
She tried to hear Lucy’s voice saying it, but it wasn’t there, was it?
She wasn’t here, and there was nobody else who knew the real truth about Ledwardine. The place was all tarted up and polished like the archaic tools and farm implements on the walls in the Swan that nobody quite knew the original purpose of anymore.
Downstairs, in the low-ceilinged living room, she felt a bit better. There were photos on the walls to look at, which was different to photos in some dusty album at the bottom of a wardrobe. And, of course, the bookshelves beckoned.
But first, Jane went into the little kitchen, which faced north – always the bleakest light – and overlooked the old bowling green, a few morose sheep nibbling out there now. Under the window was a Belfast sink beside a sturdy-looking cast-iron cooker, and there was a small fridge and a kind of sawn-off Welsh dresser with a cardboard box on it. A note was tucked into one of the box’s flaps.
Compliments of the Ledwardine Festival.
Thanks for your help,
Barry Bloom
The box contained six champagne bottles. She lifted one out. Its ornate label featured the familiar black line-drawing of the parish church, and, in archaic lettering,
The Wine of Angels.
Oh, Lucy. Oh, wow.
Jane went quickly to the back door, unbolted it, turned the key and then removed two bottles from the box.
It was like they’d been waiting for her.
She looked out of the window, giving Lucy’s hook-nosed ghost a chance to manifest among the sheep, its arms rising angrily from the dark poncho’s folds. Put those back at once, you tripehound!
But nothing appeared. The Wine of Angels lay heavy in her arms. Jane carried the bottles out of the back door and over the fence on to the path bordering the bowling green.
It was meant.
‘You duplicitous woman. Your hypocrisy defies belief. You lied to my face!
The machine, as Merrily came in, recording a message. Distorting badly.
‘To my face, Mrs Watkins.’
‘And good afternoon to you too, James.’ Merrily dumped her bag on the hallstand. When the shit hit the fan, an answering machine was mercifully absorbent. She saw Lol in the kitchen doorway and smiled weakly. ‘I get more popular all the time.’
‘It is clear to me now that you were, from the beginning, conspiring with certain subversive elements to undermine the stability of my village. I am a soldier. I cannot tolerate that!
Lol said, ‘Is he real?’
‘My information is that tonight you propose to allow this man to lay out his foul smears in public. I am giving you this opportunity to call it off. You may consider this an ultimatum.’
‘My God,’ Merrily said. ‘This is a prepared statement.’
The red light on the answering machine blinked and swelled like some warning vein in Bull-Davies’s forehead.
‘If I do not hear from you before four o’clock, I shall personally take action to put a stop to this homosexual farce. And to ensure that you never again have an opportunity to use Church of England property to defame and to destroy. If you are representative of women priests then, by God, I shall make it my business to ensure this village will never have another when you are gone. Good-day to you.’
Lol said, ‘And you thought Alison was playing with fire.’
‘Sometimes,’ Merrily said, ‘you do things without quite understanding why.’
‘You don’t know why you’re doing this?’
‘Well, I know how it started.’ She leaned against the hallstand with her back to the flashing red light. ‘It started with me feeling pressured by anonymous letters and veiled threats and people trying to use the media to get what they want and ...’
She sighed and dug in her bag for cigarettes.
‘And then we were sitting there in Coffey’s house, and this idea was suddenly taking shape and it all came pouring out almost like I was speaking someone else’s thoughts. I hadn’t reasoned it out, it just ... I don’t know, maybe my self-destruct mechanism came into play.’
‘Maybe, when it’s over,’ he said, ‘they’ll all wonder why they made such a fuss.’
She looked at him over her lighter, shaking her head. ‘You don’t think that.’
He didn’t know what to say.
‘I suppose I was kind of hoping Coffey would put the arm on Stefan and it would all fall through, and then I’d have done my bit, given them a chance. But of course Stefan got his way. And then this morning I mentioned it to Gomer Parry and now we have a whole bunch of people due to turn up in fancy dress. So it’s been generating its own momentum. Like it was meant. Preordained. Destiny. Fate. Something working me like a puppet. Out of control. Except of course it isn’t. I could stop it now.’
Lol turned to her and put out a hand and she took it.
‘What should I do?’ she said. ‘Looking at it objectively.’
He had no idea what to say. How could he be objective when he was falling in love with her?
‘Is it the right thing?’ Merrily said. ‘That’s the only question, isn’t it, when you think about it.’
Part Four
A mist involves the eye
While in the middle it doth lie
And till the ends of things are seen
The way’s uncertain that doth stand between.
Thomas Traherne,
‘The Demonstration
44
Pink Moon
STEFAN ALDER WAS waiting for her under the lych-gate just before eight. She’d expected some smart, stately late-Stuart gentleman, but he was no more in period costume than he had been this morning. The neutral black trousers and white shirt, a little crumpled now, a smudge of green mould on the arm where it reached a muddied open cuff. A deep, red scratch dividing the back of one hand.
‘I don’t want ...’ Stefan stepped away from her scrutiny as though it were a court summons. ‘I don’t want a twee little costume drama. I don’t want a pantomime. They understand this, don’t they?’
‘It’s all right.’ Merrily backed off, putting up her hands. ‘Nobody wants that, Stefan.’
‘Sorry.’ He smiled palely. ‘First-night nerves.’ He laughed, as if this was a private joke.
‘You eaten?’
‘An apple.’
Symbolic, but insufficient calories. He looked lonely and he looked frail. Merrily suspected he’d been given a bad time at the lodge. She imagined the patchwork face sneering, but inwardly Richard Coffey would be eaten up with unquenchable jealousy because his beautiful Steffie was in love with a ghost.
The sun
was going down behind the church, which had faded from red to brown and would soon be black.
Merrily wasn’t in costume either. Not period, nor clerical. She wore a long black skirt and a black, high-necked cashmere sweater – another relic, like the Volvo, of Sean’s boomtime. There would only be room in there for one minister tonight.
‘Stefan,’ she said. ‘What’s in this for you?’
He looked frightened of the question. The moon was rising over his shoulder. An unusually distinct moon, already yellow.
‘Redemption,’ Stefan said bleakly. ‘Isn’t that what we all want?’
‘I suppose. But for whom?’
He didn’t answer that. He looked out across the empty market place, where the first lights were coming on. ‘Which way will they come? Where shall we stand?’
She led him to a tree. An apple tree, as it happened, which in the evening was absorbed into the big shadow of the church. He stood rigidly, a bag of nerves. Bloody Coffey. He might have helped; he could have been here for moral and artistic support, he could have enlisted the aid of his technical friends. Or did Coffey, perhaps, want this to fail, so that the whole project – not his idea, anyway – might be discreetly dumped? Had she actually been playing into Coffey’s hands?
Stefan was watching her now. The evening was quite warm, and ashen hair hung damply over his ears. He pushed some back. ‘And what’s in it for you, Merrily?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said truthfully. ‘I really don’t know. Answers, perhaps, to the things I don’t know.’
‘Anyone can ask questions. That’s the point, isn’t it? There’s nothing I won’t be able to answer. I’ve read all Richard’s research, but I’ve thrown away the script.’
Merrily walked into the empty church and sensed at once a disturbance.
There’d been a temporary estrangement between her and the church, but when you preached and prayed in a building, it began to send messages to you in the atmosphere and the echo.
Tonight, the church was agitated, and it wasn’t with anticipation. Something had happened. She walked out past the font and into the nave. In the north-west corner, the door to the tower and steeple was closed and padlocked. The vibration was not like the shiver of bells, but it did seem to be on this side of the church.
She stood by the tower door and looked along the northern aisle towards the organ pipes. The curtain screening the organ was drawn. She thought of malevolent goblins, strode up the aisle and swept it aside.
The organ loft was curiously like the cockpit of a very old-fashioned aircraft. Merrily switched on the curling brass lamps which lit the keyboards and the panels of knobs. Nothing seemed disturbed, but she lingered, allowing herself to consider what, until today, had been unthinkable: that Dermot Child might be connected with the disappearance of Colette Cassidy.
He might have been giggling when he exposed himself on the tombstone this morning, but it was in fact an act of rage, of violence. She’d made Dermot lose his temper, and he’d brandished his cock like a knife. A peevish child grown into a bitter, screwed-up, middle-aged man who thought he was entitled to more. Arrogant enough to believe younger women could fancy him. Remorselessly devious enough to lie in wait for a sixteen-year-old girl who everyone said was asking for it?
She backed out, snapped off the lights, drew back the curtain. Perhaps she should play Dermot’s own game and send an anonymous note to Annie Howe. Perhaps she should swallow her pride and go to see Annie Howe.
Still unsettled, she moved up the steps and under the rood screen into the chancel. The altar shone down at her in white and gold. Nothing wrong there.
She entered the side chapel which began a few yards behind the organ and ran parallel to the chancel. The Bull chapel. Its high east window was dulled now, but the bigger, north-facing, leaded panes cast a hard and coarsening light on the face of Thomas Bull, on its trim beard, its bulbous lips, its scarily wide-open eyes.
In the bleak, northern light, this was a dour and creepy place. But there was nothing here but the unsleeping Bull in his frugal sandstone clothing, the dull blade of his naked stone sword quiescent at his side. It irked her that this chapel should be next to the chancel, so that you couldn’t approach the altar without getting a glimpse of him.
Her shoe crunched something. She bent down. Cement or sandstone dust on the flags near the foot of the tomb and directly below the place where it seemed to have been repaired at some stage, where, she remembered thinking, it looked as though Tom Bull had stretched out his legs and kicked out a couple of bricks.
She sprang back in horror. It looked as though he had.
Merrily took a long breath, gritty with still-floating cement dust. The eyes of Tom Bull sneered at her as she pulled up her skirt and then, lowering herself beyond his field of vision, knelt on the flags by his stone-booted feet on their stone cushion.
She saw that all the cement had been chipped out around two bricks.
She put hands either side of one and lifted it. It was old and parched and not very heavy, and it came out easily and she laid it on the floor.
Removed the second brick, revealing a hole like a large letterbox.
It was black in there, and she had no torch. With a rising dread, she slipped a hand in. He’s bones. Unless you touch him, and then he’s dust.
She didn’t touch him. A small draught caressed her fingers. She snatched her hand back, shaking.
‘You’ll be OK, Lol?’
Jane seemed quite anxious to get away. ‘Sure,’ he said.
‘She’s not here, you know. In case you were worried.’
‘I wasn’t.’
He was sitting at Lucy’s desk, with the two lamps on and the velvet curtains drawn. The windows faced the street, but Jane had been outside and said no chinks of lights were visible. Unless they wandered round the back and into the garden, no one would have reason to think the house was occupied.
‘I thought she would be here,’ Jane said gloomily. ‘I really didn’t think she’d left us for ever.’
‘Well, maybe she’s ... gone on, as they say. To something better.’
‘But her work here isn’t finished!’
‘No,’ he admitted. ‘Perhaps it isn’t. What are you going to do now?’
‘Just muddle on, I suppose.’
‘No, I meant now as in ... now.’
‘Oh. I’m going to the church. I’m supposed to be in charge of lights. Wow. It means I get to switch on one spotlight just before it goes dark.’
‘That’s it?’
‘She just wants me there to keep an eye on me.’
‘So suspicious,’ he said, ‘mothers.’
Jane turned in the doorway. ‘She does like you. I can tell. I think, on reflection, the way things turned out, you probably did the best thing not actually sleeping with her.’
‘That’s what you think.’
‘It will stand you in good stead,’ Jane said solemnly.
When she’d gone, he thought about Lucy and he thought about Merrily.
He looked around the tidy little room. Jane was right. Lucy’s spirit was not here. Perhaps it never had been. You could look around this room and you would not know her. You’d know what she’d looked like from the photos on the walls, what she’d eaten from the food in the kitchen, what she’d worn from the clothes in the wardrobe, but you would not know Lucy. If there was a shrine, it would be the shop with its fruit and its fairies.
It seemed to Lol, though, that the spirit was too small to be confined in one small space. It would have to hover over Ledwardine, its guardian hills and its apple trees. The spirit would want to light up the orb.
But it was too late to help Lucy in any practical way. Lol opened the annotated copy of Ella Leather’s Folklore.
The living light tonight was in Merrily Watkins, and he was scared because it was flickering.
‘Let me help you. Please.’ Outside the porch, Stefan was bending over Mrs Goddard in her wheelchair, a rug over her knees. The st
ress lines had vanished from his handsome face, concern glowed out, the setting sun colouring his hair.
Stefan was acting. Or something.
‘Thankyou,’ Mrs Goddard said, ‘Mr ...?’
‘Williams,’ he said simply.
The daughter pushing the wheelchair frowned, Merrily noticed, but Mrs Goddard smiled. ‘They didn’t want me to come, but I insisted.’ She patted his hand resting on the arm of the chair. ‘I believe in you.’
‘I am glad,’ Stefan said.
‘And, you know, I believe what poor Miss Devenish often used to say, that until we face up to our history and uncover the truth, we shall never be a real village again, merely a tourist museum. A sort of black and white theme park.’
Stefan listened and nodded. Merrily marvelled at the old girl, although she’d noticed this before, the way disabled people often became clearer sighted, more focused and certainly more outspoken.
Most of the others had been less forthcoming. A couple of men had uncomfortably declined to shake the hand Stefan offered them, as though they might contract HIV or something. A retired headmaster called Carrington had pushed past him into the church, grunting, ‘Don’t take us for fools, Mr Alder.’ But most of the women had seemed charmed, if, in some cases, reluctantly. They’d all seen him on television, many had been scandalized and titillated by the news that he was living in Ledwardine with an older man who was also a controversial playwright. But he was young and good-looking, magnetic, charismatic ... and he was performing exclusively for them, and they were part of that performance.
‘Boy knows what he’s doing.’ Big Jim Prosser, from the shop, had come to stand with Merrily, on the grass to the left of the porch. ‘Look at ’em all. Nearest they’ll ever get to being extras in Pride and Prejudice. I know that’s a century or so out, but what do they care?’
‘Yes.’ There was an unfortunate number of rather showy dresses drifting along the path from the lych-gate. Jim himself, in a striped apron over a collarless shirt, was rather more than a century out, but he didn’t seem to care either.
