by Phil Rickman
Lol turned and saw Mumford had come out of the house, was backing away, staring at his mobile held at arm’s length. He ended up next to Gomer’s truck, the phone now tight to his ear.
‘Ariconium,’ the young woman said. ‘Last defensive outpost against the techno-invasion.’ She came right up to Lol. She wore a black fleece, the zip pushed halfway down apparently by the pressure of her breasts. ‘I’m Cola French.’
‘Gosh.’ Lol didn’t move. ‘Really?’
‘All names are real. What’s yours?’
‘Lol.’
‘There you go.’
‘What’s Ariconium?’ Lol said.
‘Roman town. On the old iron road between Glevum and Blestium – that’s Gloucester and Monmouth to you. The historians say it was down the valley, where Weston-under-Penyard is now, but Piers reckons most of it was where Underhowle is now. It’s his new buzz-thing. Piers gets obsessions, then there’s no stopping him.’
Mumford came over. ‘Leave that a moment, boys.’
‘Woooh!’ said Cola French. ‘Something came up. Go, go, go!’
Mumford ignored her, jerked his chins towards the house. Lol and Gomer trudged after him to the edge of the paddock, Cola French watching them from behind her writer’s knowing smile.
‘Let’s just quietly pack up the gear,’ Mumford said. ‘We’re on standby to meet Mr Bliss.’
‘Oh we are, are we?’ Gomer said.
‘Bear with us, Gomer,’ Mumford said tiredly.
‘Been bearin’ with you all morning, boy, and we en’t found a bloody thing. Your gaffer wants to check his information ’fore he gets carried away, ennit?’
‘My gaffer,’ Mumford said, ‘says that Roddy’s finally talking.’
‘Ar? Talked about what he done to Nev yet, has he?’
‘I don’t know, Gomer.’
‘They ever tell you anything, Andy boy?’
Mumford, maybe sensing mutiny, said, ‘All right. This goes no further.’
Gomer looked scornful.
‘Looks like he’s coughed on three,’ Mumford said. ‘Lynsey, Melanie Pullman and the girl from Monmouth, Rochelle Bowen.’
Lol turned away. The sky was shabby and sunless now, and only the line of pylons gleamed.
‘Soon as he decides to remember where they’re buried,’ Mumford said, ‘they’re bringing him out to show us. That good enough for you?’
Gomer clapped his hands together, producing a sharp echo from the direction of conifer-clad Howle Hill.
16
The Glory
‘WHEN I FIRST came here,’ Mrs Box said, ‘I’d spent the whole day looking for somewhere to live. An agent had sent me the particulars of a place in the country out past Hereford that was far too big and had all this land – what was I supposed to do with seven and a half acres, buy myself a tractor? Besides, the local church was ugly and the minister was a disinterested auld devil.’
‘I won’t ask which one it was.’ Merrily stood with her back to the candlelit altar and the long painting.
‘Doesn’t matter, I can see that now.’ Jenny Box was demure on the oak settle, hands forming a cross on her knees. ‘But at the time – and for other reasons, too – I was very deeply depressed. And the countryside was flat and unwelcoming and I felt lonely and unwanted and… unnecessary, you know? I’d spent a holiday here once, with my husband when things were good with us, and I loved it and I’d built up my hopes of finding somewhere… but now ’twas all wrong. I didn’t feel I belonged, or was ever going to belong. I was starting to question the whole idea of moving out here. And the clouds were gathering, and I just got into the car and drove in any direction, I didn’t care.’
Merrily asked hesitantly, ‘Your marriage had—’
‘Broken up? No. Oh no. And still hasn’t, though he goes his own way, and has his women like he always did. Well, that’s fine, I don’t have a problem with that any more. No, I just decided I wanted a place in the country and he was in no position, quite frankly, to object. I mean, he comes down sometimes, from London, at weekends, to discuss business matters – you’ll have seen him, no doubt, though not in church – but if he looks like staying for more than one night I’ll go and stay in London for a few days. The marriage, you might say, is winding down slowly.’
Merrily recalled the gist of her words from the other night: The business I was in, the things I was doing for money and self-gratification, all that’s repellent to me now. I came here to cleanse myself. A reference, it had seemed, to her modelling days, her brief career in daytime TV. Was there more to it, though?
‘But you’d still be business partners,’ Merrily said.
‘Would you happen to’ve been in one of the Vestalia stores lately, Merrily? Cheltenham? Cardiff?’
‘Er, no. I don’t seem to get out of the county too often.’
‘Ah well, there’s one supposed to be opening in Hereford in a few months’ time, and that’s what you might call a bone of contention. I don’t like the name much any more – ’twas from my sad New Age days, I was one for the goddesses then. Well, it’s too late now to change that, but I want the Hereford store to reflect a more robust spirituality.’
Merrily recalled what she could: the concept of Vestalia was about introducing spirituality into the home, from sacred candles and ornamental crystals to very expensive hearths like pagan altars. ‘You mean… ?’
‘A Christianization. I’ve been looking at Hereford Cathedral – at the ornamental chantries in particular. But we’ll have a High Church feel, with censers and things. I’m going to London next week to talk to some designers. I want a store which is going to reflect the true magic, if I can use that word, of Christianity. The angelic.’
‘And your husband…’
‘Hates and deplores it. Thinks it’s going to destroy us. Well, the hell with him, I’m the one with the ideas. Gareth has the contacts and the business acumen. Gareth it was who persuaded countless Londoners to install wood-stoves, to burn scented sacred apple logs brought up from the country at enormous prices. Would’ve been cheaper for some people to chop up their furniture and feed it to the flames.’ Mrs Box laughed coldly. ‘I don’t even want to discuss that man, thank you very much, in this holy place.’
She stood up and glided to the door and reached up and put out the lamp, so that the sacred cell was lit only from the altar, and then she went back to her seat, in shadow now.
‘Anyway… ’twas springtime,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry?’ Merrily stepped to one side so she wasn’t blocking the candlelight.
‘This day I found myself driving out towards Leominster. I’m leaving the main roads behind, soon as I can, looking for somewhere to get out and walk and think. ’Twas spring, and the leaves were half out, and some blossom on the trees, which were all startling white against a sky that was deep and mauve- coloured and loaded with rain that it wasn’t about to part with until it was good and ready. I parked up close to a footpath sign, and I climbed over a stile and here I am on the top of a hill overlooking what proved to be this very village.’
‘I think I know which place.’ Merrily recalled a certain afternoon walking with the late Miss Lucy Devenish, proprietor of Ledwardine Lore, who had known everything there was to know about the history of the village and made informed guesses about the rest.
‘Of course you do,’ Jenny Box said. ‘And you’ll know how it overlooks the orchards, with the spire poking out through all the apple blossom. So very white, the blossom was, this day, under that heavy, heavy purple sky. And here’s me just kneeling there on the grass, and praying and weeping, and weeping and praying… You know how it comes over you?’
‘I…’ Merrily looked down at the flagstones. ‘Yes.’
A movement: Jenny Box sliding gracefully to the end of the settle.
Sit with me.’
Merrily hesitated and then came to sit on the oak seat, opposite the altar and the picture of the church and the figure of light in the sky. There
was some other movement, almost imperceptible, a small quiver, a flutter in the close air. Jenny Box gazed directly at the altar. When she began to speak, Merrily felt something like the breeze under Jenny’s voice.
‘I found myself praying to the Highest to be relieved of all that useless so-called spiritual debris. Praying with this absolutely overwhelming intensity – but the intensity wasn’t from me, y’understand. It wasn’t that half-phoney, feverish passion I’d known before; it was something out there that came around me and enveloped me. Something I was powerless to resist, to give you the auld cliché.’
Merrily nodded.
‘You understand that, Merrily? You understand what it is I’m talking about here?’
‘Yes,’ Merrily said and relaxed for a moment into common ground and memories of blue and gold. Yes, this did happen.
‘Of course you do,’ Jenny Box said. ‘See, I’d always thought myself to be a deeply spiritual person. But ’twas a poor spirituality, if I had but known it – Tarot cards and magical crystals and all the shiny paraphernalia of the Devil. Paganism slithering in round the back, like a door-to-door salesman with a suitcase full of glittery trash.’
Merrily, whose attitude towards paganism had become less black and white lately, said nothing.
‘But I was drawn to it all, in the beginning, you see, because of its leanings to the feminine, its exaltation of womankind. Let no one say, Merrily, that it isn’t men that’ve brought the world to the state it’s in. Let no one dare to tell me that – me that was hurled away from the Catholic Church when I was barely out of my teens, soiled with the sick hypocrisy of men.’
Ah. ‘Is this men in general?’ Merrily said. ‘Or…’
‘Or more specifically, our parish priest, Father Colm Meachin.’ The words coming out in a rapid, breathy monotone.
‘The saintly Father Colm, with his stately manners and his high-flown rhetoric and his political friends, and his thin, white hands all over a quiet girl, Niamh Fagan, who was my friend. But that… Ah, you see, it’s too perfect, that’s the real problem.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Too neat and hard, it seems to me now, and it doesn’t capture the glory of it all. The picture, Merrily – doesn’t capture the quite explosive glory of the moment, and I never really expected it to, but I thought the moment should be commemorated here nonetheless.’
Merrily moistened dry lips.
‘The moment?’
The unsettling thing was that Merrily was sure she could remember the exact day, last April or May… a ferocious electric storm heralding rain that had been almost equatorial. A Sunday. Tourists in the village hurrying into the church porch. Jane bored because Eirion had the flu and she’d been stuck indoors all weekend.
‘A flash of lightning, Merrily! A flash so wild and bright I had to shut my eyes against it. And when I opened them, the whole of the sky was as black as a peatbog, and then’ – the soft voice putting a thrill in the still air of the underground chapel – ‘came the tiny light, right at the centre, in the very darkest part of the storm.’
The church steeple in the painting was, without any doubt, Ledwardine’s, shooting out of crowded apple trees, with the wooded hills behind it and the stormy sky above, charcoal clouds delicately parted as if by the point of the sword, and the light oozing through in violet-magnesium bubbles.
‘The little light’s growing larger before my eyes, until it’s like a ball, or an egg shape, like some UFO thing. But I knew from the first that it would be more than that, more glorious.’
Merrily looked at the white figure, the sword-bearer: not Michael nor Gabriel but, apparently, Uriel, a peripheral archangel. Uriel came from the Biblical fringe, the Apocrypha.
As I stood there on that little hill’ – Jenny Box stood up – ‘absolutely transfixed, there was a sudden’ – she swung her arm – ‘slash of fork lightning, and the lightning itself became the sword. The sword was the lightning. You know? And I just shut my eyes, Merrily, and the rain came down, so very hard that I was soaked to the skin inside a minute. Soaked through, and laughing like a fool.’
Jenny Box’s face shone with joy in the altar lights. She’d stolen the show, had been in charge from the beginning. There had been no way of putting that question – So was it you who brought a sack full of money into the church last night? – not now, not here in Jenny’s private chapel, Jenny’s holy space, in the light of the candles and Jenny’s holy vision.
‘So I drove down to the village, and by the time I got here, in less than ten minutes, it had almost stopped raining and the weakest of suns had come out. And here I am, walking around the village in a dream, burning inside with the white heat of pure joy. I’m walking around the square, looking up at the old buildings and just revelling in the atmosphere… not the quaintness – that’s all rubbish – but this tenuous strand of sanctity that still threaded its way through the streets in spite of all this commercialism. I seemed to see the thread unravelling before me, and so I followed it and… you can guess the rest.’
‘It led you here?’
‘There was a FOR SALE sign. The only one in the whole village, as I remember.’
Merrily tried for a smile. ‘These things happen.’
But they didn’t really, did they? Not very often.
‘They do. I know that now.’ Mrs Box’s face was flooded with happiness. But, at the same time, Merrily was recalling the sense of loneliness and disturbance which had blown like dry leaves around the woman in the square on the night of the fire.
‘And I knocked on the door, and the people didn’t want to show me around at all – “Oh, you’ve got to go through the agent,” they said, but I insisted, I was very strong that day, and I felt the absolute rightness of it and I virtually made an offer there and then. I don’t think for one minute they believed me – thought I ‘was some stupid, doolally tourist woman, but it didn’t matter. I left the house and the sun was shining, and I walked down to the church, and it was there – it was right there in the churchyard – that I was granted another small vision: the one that clinched it.’
Merrily was silent. Too many visions.
Mrs Jenny Box, née Jenny Driscoll, this former model, this former minor TV-person turned successful businesswoman, said, ‘What I saw was… I saw you.’
Merrily looked down at her own hands, one squeezing the other.
‘In your dog collar and your long white tunic. Walking out of the church, talking to some visitor-type people with their anoraks and their cameras. I saw you… all in white. And I felt I was in the centre… of the future.’
Merrily became aware that she was no longer the least bit cold. Too warm, if anything.
‘Will we pray now?’ Mrs Box said very softly. ‘Will we pray together?’
By the time Merrily got back to the vicarage, she was disgusted with herself: woman of straw.
In the scullery, the computer took for ever to boot up. It was a reconditioned PC bought primarily to receive e-mails, mainly from Sophie, and it hadn’t seemed too healthy for some weeks now.
There was one message highlighted, from ‘Deliverance’, subject ‘Extraterrestrial’, and she printed it out. Couldn’t get her feet under the desk because of the bin sack, which she now had no damn choice but to take to Uncle Ted.
After those brief and nervous prayers, Mrs Box had been very gracious, giving Merrily tea, giving her fruit cake, in a white-walled, low-beamed parlour that was furnished almost frugally: two grey sofas, a low, Shaker-style table, no pictures on the walls. And Merrily, sitting in the middle of one of the sofas, on the crack between two cushions, had said, eventually, ‘We’ve had… there’s been a donation.’
Watching Jenny Box who knew it, arranging herself on one of the sofas, a bleached sunbeam stroking her hair.
‘To the church,’ Merrily said. ‘A substantial donation.’
‘Really?’ Mrs Box smiling vaguely. ‘That’s really wonderful. I’m so glad.’
‘It’s a very large amou
nt, in cash. So large that… I’m not sure I can keep it.’
‘Oh? Why ever not?’
‘Because a cash donation of that size is bound to be considered—’
‘Miraculous?’ said Mrs Box. ‘An answer to a prayer? To a dilemma?’
‘Suspicious. Because it’s anonymous, and in cash.’
Jenny Box inclined her head to one side, appearing to consider the implications and then said, in that light, velvety voice of hers, ‘Well, now, surely, if the donor didn’t want to put his or her name on the bottom of a cheque, then it would not be in the spirit of the gift for you to institute inquiries and thus risk causing unwarranted embarrassment. Would it not be the thing to treat it as just the most lovely coincidence and perhaps even an indication from God that turning His House into a place of business was not the way ahead?’
Merrily nodded, smiling weakly. Had she really been expecting a confession? Under the surface vulnerability, Jenny Box was clever, a slick operator – and rich. But that didn’t make it feel any more right. So much of this seemed wavery, blurred by an intermittent aura of flickering instability. I saw you… all in white. And I felt I was in the centre… of the future.
Had she been wearing the surplice that afternoon… the white alb? She didn’t remember.
But, to Merrily’s knowledge, no one throughout the recorded history of the village had ever claimed to have seen an angel lighting up the sky over Ledwardine Church.
Hard to say which was the most unlikely: that or aliens in Underhowle.
***
I’m sorry, Merrily, this took rather a long time to find, and as, like most of Canon Dobbs’s files, it was handwritten, I’m afraid I had to type it out. I’m now back in the office, if you have any more queries.
Sophie.
How extraordinary! Not, I would have thought, Canon
Dobbs’s ‘thing’ at all.
The report itself, dated April 1997, was quite short.
Subject:
Miss Melanie Pullman, of 14 Goodrich Close, Underhowle, near Ross-on-Wye.
