by Phil Rickman
Jane heard herself asking if he was there. Aidan. In the coffin. Lol answered her from the top of the pile of excavated earth, hugging the coffin lid to his chest.
‘Something is.’ He turned to Gomer. ‘Isn’t that enough?’
‘We come this far, boy. Might as well…’
He was right. What if it was just bricks in there or something?
The moon had gone again. They’d need some light.
The lamp was still on the grass between Jane and the opening, out of reach for both of them. She picked it up and took it to the edge of the hole.
‘There you go…’
Remembering how he’d died. Instantly. Hit by a van. Splattered all over the road, Dean Wall had said. So there’d have been a post-mortem. She’d seen autopsy pictures in some magazine. Organs taken out, chest sewn up, skin all ruched like the edge of a meat pie. She was aware of the harshness of her breath as Lol asked her to just pass him the lamp and turn away.
Jane held the lamp high over the open grave and the open coffin. She waited for a sickening waft of putrefaction, but there was only this faint chemical smell that made her think of vinegar and, in her ears, a faint half-musical rattle, like loose bones.
‘Jane, please.’
Lol’s earth-streaked face in the lamplight.
But she was already leaning in, lowering the lamp. Holding the light and her breath, when she looked down, as she knew she must, into the coffin’s interior, pale blue quilting, Lol going,
‘Jane, no—’
Too late.
Part Three
They killed farming… by putting cabs on tractors.
John Lewis-Stempel,
Meadowland (Doubleday, 2014)
17
A dot on the map
BETWEEN THE EUCHARIST and the morning service, Merrily took her e-cig into the churchyard and went to stand, shivering in her surplice, by Lucy’s grave.
No more shall clouds…
No clouds today. Winter – real winter – had come slicing in overnight, clean and severe. The last apple had fallen from the nearest tree to the vicarage but the blackbirds had got to it before the frost.
Come out without her cape again. Never mind, a few cold minutes never harmed anyone. She’d assembled a prayer to resanctify the spot, disperse any feelings of ill-will. She went over it in her head, fingers on the furry shoulders of Lucy’s stone.
A wiry man in jeans and a fleece jacket walked past along the track, murmuring a mild good morning, and she returned it automatically, smiling vaguely, the way you did while thinking, Who the hell’s this? because vicars were supposed to know everybody. And then she did know. Just that last time he’d been in a dark suit and tie, solemn, reticent.
She watched him walking all the way down to the bottom of the churchyard and stopping by the reconstituted mound of green turf. She’d only met him once, and the results of that meeting hadn’t been too satisfactory.
With just under half an hour before she needed to get back to the church, she walked over.
‘I’m afraid I didn’t do a proper job.’
He turned to her, half smiling.
‘In what respect?’
He had a steady gaze under short, fox-red hair. Her own age, maybe a little younger and more than a head taller. His name was Liam Hurst. He’d been sent to the vicarage with some details about the life of Aidan Lloyd, his half-brother. Details that were all too brief, printed on one side of a sheet of A4 and folded into an envelope.
‘When you come away from a funeral feeling you haven’t really made anyone feel better…’
‘What?’
‘You only get one chance to do that. Should’ve known more about him. Just because someone doesn’t go to church…’
‘That’s daft.’ Trace of a local accent, though not much of one. ‘The way the population of villages changes and fluctuates these days, you could spend all your time working out who’s who. Besides, if you didn’t know too much about him… well, don’t you think that might’ve been the intention?’
‘I wondered.’
‘My mother and Iestyn, they both just wanted it over. Only thing they’ve agreed about in years. Iestyn, he—’ He turned away from the grave, as if exasperated. ‘He’s asked me to fix up a monumental mason, get a stone made. Nothing too ostentatious, so I was just… weighing up the location without too many people around.’
‘I’m sorry if I—’
‘Mrs Watkins, I didn’t mean you. It’s your churchyard. As for the funeral, that was never going to be a touching celebration of a full life well lived, was it?’
‘There’s still quite a lot to say about a life cut short.’
‘Yes.’ He sighed. ‘I expect there is.’
‘I did ask around, but nobody seemed to know Aidan all that well. So I was left with a good farmer and where he went to school. And the asthma.’
‘It went away, the asthma. To Iestyn’s relief. Mine, too, in a purely selfish sense, I have to say. If Aidan had been incapacitated into adulthood, I might’ve been set up as Iestyn’s successor.’
‘With the farm?’
Liam Hurst put on a shudder. He was staring over her towards the church, its sandstone steeple hard against the flawless sky.
‘It’s all going, as they say round here, to shit. Farming’s a twenty-four/seven job, at a time when working hours are decreasing, leisure time expanding. Young people don’t want it any more. Girls used to want to marry a farmer for the money and the big house. Now the money isn’t what it was and the house is cold and drab with no prospect of decent Wi-Fi.’
‘It’ll come. Some places round here had a long wait for electricity.’
‘Nobody wants to wait any more, Mrs Watkins. Farms get inherited and then sold as quickly as possible to city winners looking for barn conversions and pony paddocks. Or some of them think, what else can I do with a field that doesn’t involve drenching sheep or milking cows? Holiday caravan site?’
Merrily thought about the village’s other big landowner, Ward Savitch, who let out his fields for events, like next year’s Ledwardine Folk Festival. Nobody was innocent. She thought of all the years of absentee landlords picking up grants, an annual income for doing nothing. But then she remembered when the payments had been made for numbers of livestock, and her grandad had been furious at the way his neighbours’ fields were overstocked.
‘No going back,’ Liam Hurst said. ‘I see it all from the outside now, and that’s the best place to be.’
‘So you’re not involved in farming,’ Merrily said. ‘I just automatically assumed…’
‘Oh, I’m involved in it, sure. And involved with farmers. Deal with them on a day-to-day business. Not the same thing as being one, though, fortunately.’ He smiled, ruefully. ‘DEFRA. Department of Agriculture. I’m a civil servant, with holidays and guaranteed pension. One of my functions is to inspect farms to make sure that what farmers put on their claim forms for various grants and payments has not been, shall we say, augmented.’
‘That must make you popular in these parts.’
‘An old chap once opened the door to me with his twelve-bore held meaningfully under an arm. Truth is, I sympathize. They’re up against it. Livestock and dairy prices sometimes make it seem unsustainable. The suicide rate amongst farmers is not exactly going down. But I expect you know that.’
‘I do.’
He looked down at Aidan’s grave.
‘If this had been Iestyn, I might’ve thought he’d deliberately driven himself into the path of that vehicle. At one time, anyway. When he was down on his luck.’
‘Not down any more, surely? Must be a few hundred acres here.’
‘Over a thousand.’
‘Gosh.’
‘Each of those acres to be individually worried about. It’s a trap, Mrs Watkins. Bigger the farm, the tighter the trap. It’s a big farm, but still only a dot on the map.’
He turned to look out over the stile at the end of the churchyard to
where the coffin path had long since vanished into the frosted fields.
‘Cattle, sheep, pigs, potatoes, fruit… maize. Oilseed rape. Diversification. It’s a juggling act, but he’s good at that, always has been. Only now it comes without the status or the local respect of the old days. Most of the country squires are long gone. It’s all spreadsheets now – strategy, or you go under. Iestyn – give him his due – was one of the first to appreciate that when he was a farm manager and hired my mother to process the spreadsheets.’
‘He inherited this… from an uncle, is that right?’
‘Almost right. His uncle had left it to his son, who’d let it go… to shit, as they say. Iestyn bought him out. So there was a family link to Ledwardine. A tradition to renew. Not that Iestyn would’ve seen it that way. He simply employed his skills to make it productive again. Buying more ground on all sides.’
‘And one of the last available bits of the churchyard for his family grave.’
‘Last bits?’
‘We’re virtually full. If you don’t already have a grave to go into, you’re now more or less limited to an urn space.’ She nodded to the broken wall at the end of the churchyard. ‘Unless whoever winds up owning that feels moved to donate some of it to the parish.’
‘Iestyn,’ he said.
‘Sorry?’
‘Iestyn bought that field a couple of months ago when the Rudge farm was finally broken up. You didn’t know?’
‘No. Blimey… Last I heard the family were still haggling over it, with Ward Savitch in the background, waving his wallet.’
‘My stepfather tends not to advertise these things. This would’ve been the last dozen or so acres separating his ground from the village. I suspect he bid over the odds for it. May’ve belonged to his uncle’s family years and years ago, I don’t really know.’
She stared across the field, with its copse of bare trees and a single galvanized gate at the far end. So Iestyn Lloyd now owned what remained of the coffin trail. She didn’t think even Gomer knew about this.
‘Don’t misunderstand me,’ Liam Hurst said. ‘I don’t think Iestyn’s sentimental enough to’ve bought it because it runs right up to the grave plot he’d acquired. Not consciously, anyway. Although if you look on the map, you’ll see the farmland narrowing as it approaches the village. Like an arrow. On the map, this field puts a point on the arrow.’
‘The whole…’ She hugged in her surplice against a sudden icy breeze. ‘The whole farm pointing directly to the grave?’
‘Ironic, isn’t it? In a macabre kind of way. Not that Iestyn would notice. No time for superstition.’
‘So what… what will happen to it, when Iestyn…?’
‘Ah, the big question. The son’s gone. Who’ll have it now?’ He shook his head. ‘My mother fears he’s looking at me. I do so hope not, because I’ll have to say no. I’ll help him all I can, as I always have, but, as I say, I’ve seen too many decent men destroyed trying to hold a farm together at the expense of a normal life. If he ever asks me, I’ll advise him to sell while it’s still profitable.’
‘All this?’
He shrugged.
‘You wouldn’t feel tempted…?’
‘Do I sound like I’d feel tempted? No way. I like my freedom and my holidays. Time to see the bigger world. A farmer gets himself stitched tight into the land and before he knows it he’s become…’ Scrunching his elbows into the sides of his chest. ‘… all tightened up inside.’
‘Oh.’
She took a step back from the grave and all its sombre symbolism. Liam sank his hands into the pockets of his fleece, looking more weathered and farm-fit than you’d ever expect of a government official. He smiled.
‘It’ll sort itself out one way or another. Farmers are pragmatists. Mrs Watkins, I see your problem, but Iestyn will think you did your job. His grief is private grief. He sees no need to involve anyone else. Certainly not the wider community. Let them mutter.’
‘Mutter?’
She registered a slightly strained patience on his narrow face.
‘Personal use, you don’t even get a police caution any more. He was a young chap. When people talk of industrial quantities, it’s probably an exaggeration.’
‘Erm…’ Merrily folding her arms for warmth. Too late for the blessing now, but this was just as important. ‘Can you tell me about him?’
He smiled, shrugged.
‘I didn’t know him that well. Seven years apart, you tend not to mix in the same circles. As a boy he was always quiet, inhibited by his asthma. Didn’t want to ride or hunt. I was – to be honest – a little afraid for him when it became clear he was expected to take over the farm. So much on his shoulders and his father watching him like a hawk. Because Iestyn didn’t really know him either. They worked together – isn’t that what a farmer’s son was born for? He was raised by my mother until the asthma was gone and then she left Iestyn, with his approval and me away at university. I’ve somehow been the go-between ever since. Get on quite well with Iestyn. All you need is to be able to work with him.’
‘Did Iestyn really not know? About the cannabis?’
‘Good God no.’ Liam reared back theatrically. ‘He’d’ve gone ballistic. His own father having lost his own farm because of drink, leaving the family near destitute.’ He paused. ‘Are you beginning to see what made Iestyn into the kind of man he’s become?’
‘But he knows now.’
‘Hence the quiet funeral.’
‘Erm… were there people in the village who didn’t like Aidan… either because of the cannabis or anything else?’
He peered at her.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘I—’ Her brain was scrabbling for something convincing when she became aware of voices behind her in the churchyard. A small congregation assembling. ‘Oh, hell— Sorry. I should be in church. What I… I was going to mention him during the service. Something I often do after a funeral.’
Liam Hurst nodded. Then he smiled – a small, sympathetic smile.
‘I rather think I’ve said too much already. But I suspect you can put two and two together from that. And draw a line under it.’
Merrily nodded. She wondered if he’d come here this morning – or been sent here – to make sure that line had been firmly drawn.
‘Mmm,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’
‘And just be a bit careful what you say in your sermon. That is… if you want Iestyn to spare a part of his field to extend the churchyard.’
‘Right.’
‘Joking,’ he said.
18
Lucky day
A PALE MOVEMENT in the top of the window dragged Jane’s gaze to the end of the garden where the vicarage apple trees tangled with the churchyard trees.
The butterfly-white thing could only be the vicar in her surplice.
Watching from the single window in the cold East Wing, Jane was struck, as frequently happened, by the utter strangeness of Mum as a priest – the anglican shaman, leaving early to celebrate Holy Communion.
Celebrate. Did that ever really happen or did you just get better at fooling yourself that it didn’t all end in a muddied coffin in wet cold earth that even the moles avoided?
The vicar vanished and Jane looked down to where two blackbirds were manoeuvring a rotting apple under a bush, ripping bits away as they hopped around it in their…
… rag jackets.
She stepped sharply back from the window. The blue sky mocked her.
She’d slept, eventually. How had she slept? Had Lol managed to sleep? She imagined him scrubbing and scrubbing at his hands, his clothes, his trainers, at some point catching sight of himself in a mirror with streaks of grave dirt like red abrasions from his cheeks to his jawline. As soon as she was up she’d phoned him from her mobile but he couldn’t talk, having been summoned to a festival meeting at the Swan, with Barry. Said he’d call her as soon as he could.
And they would talk about something Jane had seen for n
o more than two or three seconds before he’d gripped her wrist and the lamp had been taken away and there was only the half-moon, the smell of embalming fluid and that… metallic chuckle.
Did she really hear that? Would she keep on hearing it, the giggling herald of a repulsive memory that would live at the back of her mind for ever and would occasionally spring out in the night?
Jane went downstairs, gave Ethel a second breakfast. Hadn’t made herself anything. Unable to face food. She’d managed a cup of weak black tea, despite smelling in the steaming pot the thin, astringent odour of what she now knew to be formaldehyde.
Oh, Christ, she had to get some air.
And there was something she had to do. She pulled down a cheerful scarlet scarf and her red beanie, dropped the phone into a pocket of her parka and let herself out of the back door. It was coming up to half past ten. Mum wouldn’t be back from work for at least a couple of hours. Long enough to decide what – if anything – to tell her, but she really mustn’t find this.
Jane moved carefully, still mindful of her ankle, down the frosty garden towards the gnarly old apple trees.
It would have landed just about… here? She bent and scrabbled in the grass and found its shaft amongst a scattering of rotten windfalls that the blackbirds hadn’t got to yet. The blade shone. Gomer had given it a clean first, as you’d expect. She picked it up and hid it behind the shed.
It had been her idea that he should toss his spade over the vicarage wall rather than be seen carrying it through the dark streets. In Ledwardine, whatever the time, there was always someone awake.
Behind Barry, parched applewood was blazing fragrantly in the inglenook. A mild autumn had meant a healthy woodpile, fires all day in the Black Swan now the cold weather had come. Nothing brought in Sunday custom better than a log fire with a scent that settled over the village.
‘The gallery couple,’ Barry said. ‘Ledwardine Fine Arts?’
‘It’s closing, isn’t it?’
Lol looking up from his coffee. He’d thought they were supposed to be discussing the folk festival line-up, his failure to find another name as big as Moira Cairns willing to play for peanuts.
