by Phil Rickman
‘You liked him.’
‘I… yeah, I probably did. It was an odd situation. I knew who he was, he didn’t know I knew, but he knew what I did. And then afterwards it’s all turned full circle and I’m annoyed with myself, I’m thinking, you idiot, he’s probably writing his follow-up to The Hole in the Sky. Am I going to be in it now, or what? The loopy exorcist with the pagan daughter?’
‘Bit of a comedown from the Dalai Lama.’
‘Oh God…’ Merrily started to laugh. ‘I could, on the other hand, be going just a little crazy, but it…’
Somewhere beyond the scullery a door banged.
‘… It all fits, doesn’t it? I was expecting anger, I got mildness. I was expecting monstrous ego, I got… almost self-deprecating. If I was Shirley West…’
‘Don’t even imagine what that would be like.’
‘No, listen. The atheist is an angry man, but Satan’s spin doctor is a charmer, who puts you at your ease, allays your susp — What’s the matter with that door?’
Banging again in the wind. It sounded like the side door to the yard, by the back stairs. Like something coming in and slamming it behind… Oh God, never log on to a born-again Christian website.
‘Excuse me a minute.’
Merrily went through into the low passage leading to the back stairs, where she caught the side door about to slam again in the wind. It hadn’t been closed properly. But then it shouldn’t have been open, rarely was these days since Jane had stopped regarding it as the private entrance to her apartment.
Odd.
She shut it firmly, locked it at the catch and stood there for a moment, listening.
‘Jane?’
No reply. Back in the scullery the phone was ringing. She heard Lol going through, picking up.
‘No, I’m sorry, she’s not here at the moment. Could I—? Oh…’
Merrily went quietly up the narrow back stairs to the main landing. No sound up here but the rain. The glass in the window at the top of the main stairs was in freeflow. She went up the second, narrower, stairs to the attic apartment.
Its door was ajar. She stopped outside, thought she could hear a faint snuffling.
‘Jane, is that…?’
Hesitated for just a moment before going in and seeing — heart-lurch — Jane lying face down on the bed. Fully dressed, with a damp pillow bent around her head.
32
In Your Veins
‘Lol,’ Eirion said. ‘Wow. Amazing.’
Standing in the entrance to the vicarage drive, bags either side of him on the wet gravel. His red and white baseball sweater looked too big. He’d lost weight. Less stocky, less archetypal-Welsh.
‘Bad down there?’ Lol said.
‘The Valleys — terrible,’ Eirion said. ‘It’s like somebody’s trying to turn them into reservoirs. I was thinking if I didn’t come today I might not get here at all. Tried to call Jane about six times. What’s the point of having a mobile if you keep it switched off? So I thought I’d better ring Mrs Watkins, make sure it was all right.’
Eirion looked around in the damp air. Lol sensed his nerves about meeting Jane again, more than three months since their lives had divided.
The light was still on in the attic. Not knowing any better, Lol had told Eirion on the phone that Jane was still out at Coleman’s Meadow, but they were expecting her back any minute. Putting the phone down just as Merrily had come briefly downstairs. Jane was up there. Jane had been badly upset. They needed some time.
‘So,’ Eirion said. ‘How are you, man? You’re looking well. Bit tired, maybe.’
‘Late nights.’
‘You’re working on something?’
‘And time’s running out.’ Lol picked up one of Eirion’s bags. Maybe take him in the parlour, get him something to drink. ‘Actually—’
‘So how did it go, Lol? I couldn’t believe it when Jane told me. When’s it on?’
‘When’s what—? Oh, yeah, sorry. New Year’s Eve.’
‘What they need to do is erect a big flat-screen TV…’ Eirion looked back towards the square and all the bulging, crooked black and whites leaning over it. ‘Over there. By the Christmas tree.’
‘Eirion, it’s one song. Might even get cut.’
‘No way.’ Eirion rubbed his hands. ‘Strange, it is, coming back here. I’ve dreamt about it, Lol. Couple of times recently. One of those places that come up in dreams. Perhaps because it never changes.’
‘No.’
‘Anyway, I’m glad I’ve seen you first. Got presents in the car. Nothing much, but I was wondering, would it be OK if I left them at your place?’
Lol looked back at the vicarage. The light in the attic had gone out. ‘No problem at all,’ he said. ‘In fact, why don’t we do that now?’
In the scullery, the rarely used third bar of the electric fire was glowing neon-red and making these little zinging noises, like open nerves. Merrily lit a cigarette and carried her tea to the window overlooking the dank Decembered garden.
‘Have you ever thought of leaving here?’ Jane said.
‘Not really. Well… once or twice. Have you?’
Surely not. Surely never in a million years.
Jane, sitting on the old sofa, expressionless, made no reply. Not since Lucy…
No, that wasn’t the same. When Lucy was killed, Jane had lost control, pulling her hair and screaming abuse at God, even Merrily failing to realise at the time how big a death this was. But Jane had been a kid then and Merrily a nervous, novice parish priest, and their relationship was on a permanent cliff-edge.
‘I… heard Bill Blore on the radio at lunchtime,’ Merrily said. ‘They’d been asking him about Clement Ayling’s murder.’
Jane said nothing. She’d insisted on washing her face before she came down. Washing it over and over, with cold water.
‘It struck me that he might’ve had to delay your interview. Or even call it off?’
She’d been thinking that Lol might be the one to reach Jane. Lol with his sixth sense for humiliation and despair. But when she’d slipped downstairs, Lol had whispered that Eirion was on his way, a day early because of the floods. Everything happened at once in this house. She hadn’t told Jane who, when the front-door bell rang, had still been on the edge of the bed, body language screaming, Leave me alone, like for ever.
‘He didn’t want to talk about it,’ Jane said.
‘Sorry?’
‘Blore. Wanted to get on with his excavation. Naturally, they — the media — didn’t want to talk about anything else.’
‘And that put him in a bad mood? I was thinking maybe he’d kept putting you off and you were hanging around the site getting cold and wet and nothing happening.’
‘If only.’
‘Flower…’ Merrily on her knees by the sofa, picking up Jane’s left hand. ‘Just because Blore didn’t want to talk to you today…’ Watching the nails of Jane’s right hand sinking into the cushion. ‘There’ll be another opportunity. He clearly needs you for his programme, if he’s going to—’
Merrily held Jane’s hand firmly in both of hers. No, of course. It was worse than that, wasn’t it?
‘You don’t understand.’ Jane’s hand was gripping Merrily’s fiercely, tears pooling. ‘You weren’t listening. I’ve been stupid. Unbelievably stupid.’
Eirion had the Takamine on his knee. He’d worked out some chords to Sufjan Stevens’s ‘Chicago’. He seemed to have improved a lot. He looked around at the whitewashed walls, the orange paint that Jane had insisted should be applied between the beams in the ceiling.
‘You’ve got this place fantastic, Lol. Is that your mother?’ Nodding at the picture over the inglenook.
‘It’s Lucy Devenish,’ Lol said. ‘The only known photograph. For which she seems to have been determined not to pose. Hence the blur.’
‘Ah. That’s her, is it? That blur over the face makes her look a bit… unearthly.’
‘Mostly, she was very earthly. I always hear her saying…
after Alison had left and before I met Merrily, when I was really low and a bit deranged, she said…’ Lol did the voice ‘“You really are a sick, twisted little person, aren’t you, Laurence?” Never dressed things up.’
Eirion laughed.
‘Then she gave me Thomas Traherne to read to straighten me out. “Have to learn to open up, Laurence. Go into the village on your own and go in smiling. That’s what Traherne did. Discovered felicity.”’
‘Did it work?’
‘Eventually.’ Lol opened a couple of bottles of Westons cider. ‘That and a few other things. Always presuming I am straightened out.’
‘This was her place, wasn’t it?’
‘Still is. Lucy’s house, my mortgage.’
‘Jane talks to her,’ Eirion said. ‘At her grave. Is that healthy, do you think?’
‘I always think graves are for us, not the dead. Lucy’s grave… Jane thinks it’s on an energy line. A spirit path.’
‘Well, that’s Jane, isn’t it?’
‘If it gives her energy…’
‘What about this house?’
‘Who knows? I only got it because the last people moved out after a short time. Claiming it was haunted.’
‘But you…?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Maybe Miss Devenish is happy you’re here.’ Eirion drank some cider. ‘God, listen to me, I’ve not been here half an hour and I’m talking like Jane already.’
‘But I’m always conscious that if I slip back, she’ll bloody well manifest with that hooked nose and the eagle eyes and the poncho flapping…’
‘Steady on, Lol.’ Eirion shuddered, put the bottle down. ‘Slip back how?’
‘Or it’s like I’m only allowed to stay here for some purpose.’ Lol sat down on the hard chair at the desk in the window. ‘Anyway… I’ve been putting these songs together.’
He told Eirion about Christmas Eve at the Black Swan and the suite of songs illustrating elements of what Lucy had called the Ledwardine Orb.
‘Traherne… Wil Williams, the 17th-century vicar here who was accused of witchcraft… Alfred Watkins, who discovered leys… his friend Edward Elgar, the composer who turned the landscape into music… and Lucy, who bound it all together.’
‘How many songs?’
‘Five so far, three more in the works. And a reworking of Nick Drake’s “Fruit Tree”, which seemed appropriate. Apple trees… change and decay. Mortality.’
‘Nearly enough for an album. Hey…’ Eirion’s eyes lighting up. ‘This is actually the second solo album? The sequel to Alien?’
‘Maybe, if I can pull it off, I won’t be an alien any more.’
‘Like you’ll’ve landed?’
Lol shrugged, uncertainly.
‘Sounds a bit pathetic, doesn’t it? As for playing the songs for the first time in public, in the Black Swan on Christmas Eve…’
‘Bollocks!’ Eirion played a ringing C7th. ‘The heart of the village. Couldn’t be better, man. It was meant.’
‘You could almost think that,’ Lol said. ‘I came down this morning and the book of Traherne’s selected poems and prose was lying on the desk. The one Lucy gave me. Lying just there. No memory of getting it down from the shelf. Picked it up and it fell open at You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens…’
‘… and crowned with the stars.’ Eirion looked momentarily embarrassed. ‘Jane used to…’
Quote it when they were in bed, probably, Lol thought. Very Jane.
‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘if you’re just the bloke with a guitar in the corner on Christmas Eve, nobody listens, and I’ve realised I want them to. Want the incomers to know about this stuff — it’s a bit of a white-settlers’ pub, the Swan. Even if they say This is crap, I want them to listen. So… I was thinking I could use back-projection? They’ve got some kit at the Swan, and Jane has this collection of old photos of Ledwardine — and some new photos of Cole Hill, taken by you, I believe…’
‘I look at them often,’ Eirion said. ‘Too often, really. Especially the one of Jane with her blouse… but, you don’t need to know this.’
‘So would you be able to take care of that aspect? Make sure the right pictures come up on the screen behind me at the right time? Also, with one song, I need to use a recording of Elgar’s Cello Concerto. I’ll need fingers on mixers.’
‘Hey…’ Eirion put down the guitar. ‘Look no further, Lol. Jane, too? Me and Jane?’
‘Well… hopefully.’
Eirion stiffened. ‘Lol, she is OK, isn’t she? There’s not something about Jane you aren’t telling me?’
Lol went to the window. Dusk was forming. There were no lights upstairs in the vicarage.
‘Oh my God, there’s something wrong, isn’t there?’ Eirion said. ‘I felt it as soon as I walked on to the drive.’
‘Eirion…’ Lol turned round; he wasn’t good at this. ‘To be honest, I’m not sure.’
‘Listen, you might as well tell me.’ Eirion had gone pale. ‘Is it this fucking Neil Cooper?’
An hour or so later, with night wrapping itself around the village like an old grey coat, Jane and Eirion went down to the river with a lamp.
The air seemed to be throbbing with unshed rain. Merrily and Lol went back into the vicarage and sat in the kitchen.
‘I hope he gets more sense out of her than I did,’ Merrily said.
33
A Corridor
The river was in an angry world of his own, heaving himself up against the arch of the bridge. Jane tried to get into his mindset; sometimes anger was a lifeline.
‘You think there’s room for someone like me in journalism?’
They were heading for the riverside footpath which did a half circuit of the village before veering off and ending up, like all the Ledwardine paths did, in one of the old orchards. Despite the growing darkness, Jane was walking fast and hard.
‘Don’t like the sound of that.’ Eirion scrabbling after her, not really dressed for this, looking fairly respectable for Mum. ‘Why would you suddenly want to get into journalism?’
‘Because you get to…’ Jane didn’t stop, climbing over the stile leading to the riverside footpath ‘… shaft people?’
She heard Eirion sigh, glanced quickly back at him. She’d always been on at him to lose weight but now he had, it was wrong. His face was leaner, more streetwise, less vulnerable, less… manageable.
Jane held the lamp and watched him climb over the stile without stumbling. In the old days he’d have stumbled. She turned and started walking away, against the flow of the river. The other side of it, the lights had come on, the big red Santa plumping out like some gross cyst from the wall of a new bungalow on what Gomer Parry called the hestate.
‘See, I used to think that was a pretty shoddy thing to do, but now I realise some people deserve it.’
‘Well, yeah, obviously,’ Eirion said, ‘but—’
‘Really arrogant people? Bastards who destroy other people without a thought?’
The rushing river beside her was brown with churned-up silt and gassy like cheap draught bitter. Eirion stopped.
‘So we’re talking about Professor Blore, are we?’
Jane kept on walking, forcing him to come after her. She wished it would start raining, give her an excuse for looking messed-up. Bloody rain, always there except when you needed some.
‘Blore?’
Eirion shouting like maybe she hadn’t heard. A bit out of breath now, she noticed. So he wasn’t doing gym, just missing meals.
‘Why would it be?’ Jane said.
‘Because when you rang last night to set this up, it was like, Oh Bill Blore’s going to save the Meadow, Bill Blore and me, Bill Blore who’s like totally cool and—’
‘Shut up, you—!’
Jane spun and stumbled, one foot going down the river bank, Eirion trying to grab her but she reeled away, fell on her bum on the soaking grass.
> ‘Oh, Jane…’
‘I need to rethink my future, OK?’ Jane refusing his hand, refusing to get up, feeling sick and stupid. ‘It’s no big deal. There are loads of other careers. No big deal. The world’s my… hairball.’
Blinking back tears like some little kid, an auto-reaction to the unexpected.
‘It is, Jane.’ Eirion standing with his arms by his sides now, shaking his head. ‘It’s a bloody great mega-deal. You had it all sorted. You knew totally where you were going. You couldn’t understand why you hadn’t spotted the obvious.’
‘I can make a mistake.’
‘Yeah, but you usually can’t bring yourself to admit it, which is why this is so totally… What happened? What did Blore do? Is he still around?’
‘Dunno.’
‘I mean, I can go and ask him. Corner him in the pub. Get him up against a wall, like, what’ve you done to my…?’
Behind Jane, the river surged and frothed, pitiless. But Eirion had dried up. God, he didn’t know what to call her any more: My former girlfriend? My ex?
She was shocked.
Eirion came and sat down next to her on the sodden grass in what was clearly a new jacket — worse, new trousers.
‘Start at the beginning,’ he said.
The hestate behind them now, they were walking more slowly, hand in hand, like thirteen-year-olds on a first date. Or at least like thirteen-year-olds did when Jane was thirteen. Five years ago… hell, that was a long time ago. So much pressure to grow up fast, pressure to put your life into a Jiffy bag, tick the boxes, meet the targets. Pressure, pressure, pressure.
‘He did exactly what he said he was going to do.’ Jane took a steadying breath. ‘Shot me.’
Eirion looked at her, up and down, like for exit wounds.
‘Can’t say I wasn’t warned, Irene. Like, Coops had said he was probably going to be in a crap mood. He said it was best not to approach him afterwards.’
‘Coops.’
‘Neil Cooper. County archaeologist guy?’
‘I know who you mean,’ Eirion said.
‘A friend, Irene. That’s all. Married.’
‘I’m sorry. Go on.’
