by Phil Rickman
‘You put these things so elegantly,’ Merrily said.
‘Stuff the Parish Council. Say no to it, lass.’
‘Right.’
3
Something Ancient Being Lost
I MEAN, LET’S face it, nobody comes to church just to hear me preach…
It had just slipped out, and now they were all staring at her, as though she’d blasphemed in public or something.
Whatever you said always sounded more strident in the parish hall, the one building in mellow, timber-framed Ledwardine without a soul. The hall had been built in 1964. Its pink bricks and white tiling put you in mind of a disused abattoir; its caged, mauvish ceiling lights made faces gleam like raw meat.
‘What I meant’ – Merrily almost squirmed in her plastic chair – ‘is that I’ve never really thought of myself as much of an orator. I’m… not always entirely comfortable in the pulpit. Like, who am I to step up there and lay down the law?’
Now she’d made it worse. She looked quickly around the table from face to face, aware that she was blushing because it could have been taken as a reference to her private life. She wondered if any of them knew about her and Lol. Maybe they all did. Maybe it was all over the parish. Harlot.
‘Well, since you ask, Mrs Watkins…’ The chairman, James Bull-Davies, looked half-amused. ‘My understanding of the situation was that, for this short period every Sunday, the vicar was supposed to be some sort of mouthpiece for the Almighty. Suffused with the Holy Spirit. Or have I got that wrong?’
Merrily felt in need of a cigarette. She also felt like laying her head on the table and covering it with her arms.
‘That’s a little unfair, Mr Davies.’ The soft, mildly Irish voice of Mrs Jenny Box drifted like scented smoke from the far corner. ‘Mrs Watkins was displaying simple humility, and if that isn’t part of God’s core agenda for us all, then I don’t know what is.’
‘Oh Gord!’ James Bull-Davies leaned back abruptly, to vague splintering sounds from his carved wooden chair. ‘Shut your damn mouth, James.’ He waved a hand in exasperation. ‘Anyone object if we drag this discussion back to our agenda? Or else we’ll be here till the pubs’ve closed.’
James was chairing the meeting on military lines, eight tables arranged into a square. You felt that there should be sand trays and little model tanks. But it was good, Merrily had reflected, to have him back. He’d been out of village life for over a year, gathering his private affairs into some kind of order. Now, he and Alison were breeding horses professionally, and Upper Hall farmhouse was getting its leaking roof retiled.
In the semi-feudal past, it had been understood that the Bull family fortune should also maintain the fabric of the parish church; nowadays it was accepted that the odd crumpled tenner in the collection was going to be James’s limit. The church was on its own now. It needed more income, short and long term.
‘Sorry,’ Merrily said. ‘My fault.’ In a roundabout way, she’d been attempting to make the point that, while incorporating a gift shop could be a good idea, the parish church should also be available simply as a quiet, sacred place – that it wasn’t only about hymns and preaching. It wasn’t only about Sunday.
‘Look, I’m not…’ Uncle Ted Clowes raised himself up. He looked irritated. ‘I’m not entirely getting this. How does running a small shop in the church prevent it being a place of sanctuary? No one’s suggesting the proposed outlet should be open for business all day and every day.’
‘No,’ Merrily said, ‘but the church itself should be.… within reason. But what I’m really saying is…’
And then she lost the thread. The problem was, she was still in two minds about this. She was all for the church becoming more open, less formal. Hadn’t she fought Ted’s plan to lock the doors nightly at six p.m.? Hadn’t she held out against parish purists outraged when she’d let Rex Rosser’s sheepdog, Alice, lie on a back pew next to Rex?
The harsh lights hurt Merrily’s eyes. There’d been no mention yet of the mobile-phone mast. Maybe Ted was thinking that if he could push the shop through without a struggle then he could slip the mast in near the end or save it for a future meeting – one even more poorly attended than this, with its handful of delegates from local societies: the Women’s Institute, the Young Farmers’ Club, the tourism association. A couple of shop owners had shown up to voice mild fears about competition if the church went into the giftware business. But nothing serious, nothing likely to cause undue worry for Ted Clowes and the pro faction.
‘I think the point is, Mr Chairman…’ Again, it was Jenny Box, née Driscoll, one of the few with no obvious reason to be here, who came to Merrily’s aid. ‘The real point is that commercial enterprise would surely conflict with the sanctity and peace that the church must be allowed to provide at all times. If I want to go in and say a prayer, I may not wish to do so in front of a coachload of holidaymakers choosing picture postcards.’
And Jenny Box did go into the church and pray alone. Merrily had seen her several times and walked delicately past with a quiet smile, making herself casually available, in case this woman needed help. No particular response so far, and she didn’t want to be thought of as courting the newest Ledwardine celeb.
The truth was that, while much of the village – especially the growing retired faction – recognized Mrs Box from daytime ‘lifestyle’ TV or had shopped at Vestalia, Merrily had never even seen daytime TV, except by accident, and couldn’t afford Vestalia. She was faintly embarrassed because the face of Jenny Box, from the start, had meant nothing to her.
But…’ Ted was looking pained. ‘If you look at Hereford Cathedral, it’s had a sizeable shop for years, virtually next to the nave.’
‘But not in the nave,’ Merrily said. ‘And the cathedral’s just a tiny bit bigger than Ledwardine church, and if you do want to pray there you can always find a quiet corner somewhere, or an empty chantry.’
‘Well, if…’ James Bull-Davies pushed fingers through his thinning hair. ‘… If you’re talking about a quiet place, there’s always the Bull Chapel, isn’t there?’
Merrily said nothing. Even she had found it hard to pray in the Bull Chapel.
Again, Mrs Box dealt with it. ‘I accept it’s your family’s traditional resting place, Mr Chairman, but I don’t think I’m alone in finding that chapel just a tiny bit sinister, with that forbidding old tomb and the effigy of the man whose eyes seem to follow you around. Sorry, I suppose that’s silly of me.’
James gazed at Jenny Box, as he had several times tonight because, although he’d probably never seen her on TV either, Mrs Box was magnetic, her beauty soft and blurred under red-blonde hair just short of shoulder-length. There was very little make-up on her pale, regretful face, but even the livid lighting couldn’t insult her skin. She lived in a narrow, three-storey house on the edge of the village, near the river – alone, it seemed, although there was said to be an estranged husband somewhere.
‘Right, OK,’ James conceded surprisingly. ‘Point taken. We require a degree of separation, so I think we have to come back to Ted’s suggestion of the vestry. Reasonable enough size. Not as if we’re going to be selling country clothes or picnic hampers or what have you.’
‘Well… it’s a possibility.’ Merrily had already thought about it; she didn’t use the vestry much any more, not since the night it had been broken into. Now she kept all her clerical gear at the vicarage, and there was a cupboard in the body of the church for communion wine and stuff. ‘I mean, I suppose I could spare it, but I can’t speak for a future minister.’
‘Not our problem,’ James snapped. ‘Future chap can sort himself out. Or herself. Be many years, anyway, before you think of moving on, I trust, vicar. Nothing to stop us sticking a couple of counters and a till in the vestry meantime, is there?’
‘It’d need better lighting for a start, James. And some structural alteration, I’d guess. Costly?’
‘But it’s an option,’ said James. ‘At last we have an optio
n. Thank Gord for that. We’ll get it costed out, report back. Yes?’ He looked at Merrily; she shrugged.
When they came out, half an hour later, without anyone having raised the possibility of installing a mobile-phone mast in the spire, Merrily wasn’t entirely surprised to find Jenny Box, in a brown Barbour and a white scarf, waiting for her on the cindered forecourt.
‘Look, thanks for…’ Merrily gestured vaguely at the hall behind them. She felt short and inelegant in the old navy-blue school duffel coat that Jane had rejected as seriously uncool. ‘I get a little flustered in there sometimes. I think it’s the lighting, but if I turned up in sunglasses, somebody’d be putting it around that I’d been beaten up.’
Jenny Box didn’t smile. Uncle Ted Clowes came over and put a patronizing hand on Merrily’s shoulder. ‘I think you’ll find it makes a good deal of sense, my dear. Tourism’s going to be very much the future of Ledwardine, we all have to accept that.’
‘Not the whole of the future, I hope, Ted.’
‘Well, there is another possibility.’ He glanced warily at Jenny Box. ‘But we’ll talk about that again. Goodnight, ladies.’
Ted put on his hat and strolled away. A walkover, then. Merrily was aware that Jenny Box’s expression had stiffened. For the first time tonight, in the thin light from the tin-shaded bulb over the doors of the village hall, she looked her probable age: forty-three, forty-four?
‘Crass auld fool.’ An unexpected venom thickened her accent. ‘Sell his own grandmother.’
Merrily said nothing. The two of them walked away from the hall, into Church Street and up towards the square. The air glistened with moisture and the deserted village centre looked film-set romantic under a mist-ringed three-quarter moon.
‘So how much are you thinking you’d need?’ Mrs Box’s voice had softened again without losing any of its insistence. ‘For the church.’
‘Well, I can’t really…’ Merrily hesitated. It was the first time she’d spoken more than superficially to this woman.
‘Per year, say. How much per year, to maintain the church without the need of this tourist shop?’
It was a serious question, and there was no walking away from it. Merrily shook her head. ‘I don’t really know what a shop would turn over in a year.’
Mrs Box stopped on the edge of the deserted square. ‘Tell me, have you asked God?’
‘Sorry?’
‘For the money. For the resources. Have you asked God?’
‘Erm…’
Jenny Box smiled faintly, indicating that she wouldn’t pursue it now. Directly in front of them, the small medieval building known as the Market Hall squatted on its stocky oak pillars. Mrs Box stood with her back to it, hands thrust deep into the pockets of her Barbour, a firmer, tougher proposition than she’d been in the hall.
‘You were absolutely right, of course,’ she said. ‘Women, as a rule, aren’t terribly good at preaching. Listening is what we do best. That’s why women priests are so important. Women listen, and so women receive. I’m not talking feminist nonsense, but the time’s come. Don’t you feel that?’
‘I think we can all receive, women and men,’ Merrily said carefully. They were alone on the square, lit by bracket lamps projecting from gable ends. Mrs Box glanced over her shoulder.
‘That man – Clowes. What he said about us all having to accept that tourism’s the future, it makes me feel quite ill. Look at this place… it’s getting like the Cotswolds – most of the people here born elsewhere, virtually all the businesses owned by outsiders.’
Merrily said nothing. Across the square, the lighted panes in the leaded windows of the Black Swan seemed as comfortably irregular as the moon-washed cobbles. She used to think of Ledwardine as an indestructible organism that ate and gradually digested change.
‘Oh, I know I’m part of the invasion,’ Jenny Box said. ‘I can’t help that. But when I see them trying to make this lovely old church into just another arm of the tourist industry… and I watch men like Clowes, who must be at least half local, just sitting there on their fat, complacent behinds and inviting it in, for short-term gain, I see something ancient being lost… and something insidious and inherently filthy creeping in. I want to go up in the tower and ring the bells and scream a warning. Don’t you?’
‘I don’t know,’ Merrily said honestly. ‘In one way, I do want to get lots more people into church. I like the idea of these villages in parts of Italy and places, where the church is the natural centre of everything, people wandering in and out, hens laying under the pews. And yet…’
She looked up at the woman she vaguely recalled as a fashion model in the 1980s, pale and waiflike then, and a little damaged- looking, like an orphan taken in by Vivienne Westwood. Jane had said that once, when she was off school with flu, she’d seen Jenny Driscoll – newly arrived in the village then and a talking point – on some daytime chat show discussing fame, how shallow it all was. On the other hand, as Jane had pointed out, there were few aspects of modern life more shallow than daytime telly.
‘I suppose you think I’m just some bored neurotic looking for a cause, to get noticed. Just say if that’s what you think.’
‘Oh, everybody here gets noticed. The real trick is to be anonymous.’ Merrily smiled tiredly. Normally, she was invigorated by this kind of searching approach by an actual parishioner; she just didn’t feel up to it tonight. ‘I’m sorry, I should have got to know you better by now. I admit I haven’t spent as much time in the parish as I should have, due to one thing and another.’
‘Like being an exorcist,’ Jenny Box said, all whispery sibilance.
‘Deliverance Consultant is the preferred term these days.’
‘Well, I prefer the old word. How often are you called on to exorcize people?’
‘I never have.’
‘Never?’
‘Well, I’ve only had the job for just over a year. I’ve never encountered a… confirmable case of demonic possession.’
‘But you believe it can happen?’
‘Of course.’ Merrily wasn’t used to this. If local people ever talked about what she did outside the parish, it was never to her face.
‘What about houses? You exorcize houses, do you?’
‘Occasionally.’
‘And would you agree,’ Jenny Box asked, ‘that whole communities are sometimes in need of it? Whole establishments, situations… whole milieux?’
‘I’m not sure what you mean.’ Merrily was thinking of last winter and the fundamentalist, Father Nicholas Ellis, who’d exorcize anything you could shake a cross at.
‘Cleansing. The expulsion of evil. You probably know that the business I was in – when I was modelling – all that’s pretty damn repellent to me these days. And though I’m well out of it all now, it’s like when you give up some bad habit – smoking – you can’t bear to be near smokers any more. You can smell them a mile off, and it’s unbearably obnoxious, all the worse because it’s tinged with this… foul desire.’
‘Right.’ Merrily was instinctively feeling the outside of her coat pocket, the familiar bulge made by her mobile phone… and the packet of Silk Cut and the Zippo.
‘So coming out here was like going into detox for me. But why would I come here, you’re asking, to this particular village, to be cleansed?’
‘No, I wouldn’t ask that. I try not to be nosy.’
‘All right, then, why are you here?’
‘Oh, I ask that all the time.’
Mrs Box laughed lightly. ‘Vicar, tell me, have you ever had what you might call a visionary experience?’ Merrily stared at her; Jenny Box raised both hands. ‘I know, I know, it depends on how you’d define visionary. Oh, the clergy, you’re so cautious these days, even the women.’
‘Especially the women. We still feel we’re on probation.’
Jenny Box regarded her solemnly. ‘But you’re the future. You must know that. Look, I’d like to discuss this and… some other things with you sometime… if you hav
e an hour or so to spare – I mean, not now. I can see you’re anxious to be off.’
‘Well, it’s just that my daughter—’
‘No husband, though,’ Mrs Box threw in quickly.
‘He died. Some years ago.’
‘A young widow, remarried to the Church.’
It was what people often said, and it was irritating. It began to rain again.
‘Which is a wonderful thing,’ Jenny Box said. ‘You were… saved.’ She smiled. ‘It’s hard to avoid the old clichés, isn’t it?’
Merrily heard a voice calling from somewhere down Church Street.
‘I’m learning all about that because I’m writing a book,’ Mrs Box said. ‘About some things that happened to me.’
‘Oh?’ No big surprise. Jenny Box: the heartache I left behind. Serialized in one of the Sunday papers, a women’s magazine. If it was sensational enough, if there were ‘revelations’.
‘Mum!’
Merrily turned, saw the kid running up the street. ‘I’m sorry… that’s Jane… my daughter.’
Jenny Box took a step back, and Merrily had a sudden powerful sense of something around this woman making small, anxious flurries in the air: disorientation, loneliness.
‘I’d… like to hear about your book sometime.’
‘It isn’t finished yet. It isn’t over, you see. What the book’s about… those things aren’t over. Those things have hardly begun.’ Jenny Box shook her head and began to move away. Then she stopped beside one of the pillars of the market hall, turning her face to Merrily. ‘You said we could all receive…’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, that…’ She looked at Jane stumbling to a stop, shook her head with finality. ‘Goodnight, Mrs Watkins.’
Pulling her scarf over her head, Jenny Box walked quickly away across the cobbles into the shadows behind the hanging lamps.
And here was Jane, the kid’s face shining with rain and sweat.
‘Oh God, Mum, I’ve run all the way down to the sodding hall. Tried to call you on the mobile.’
