All of a Winter's Night

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Exactly. Thank you, Merrily, I wondered what you might think of that. Likely we’re on the same side, then.’

  ‘I’m not sure which side you’re talking about. What I’m just a bit worried about is you using Aidan’s memorial service as a platform for your… I don’t like to say political ambitions because I realize you’ve always aspired to nothing more than having the people of West Mercia sleeping safely in their beds, but…’

  She registered that Charlie Howe was no longer smiling and stopped.

  ‘Things as didn’t get known about,’ he said, ‘well, that was normal. Country folk took care of their own problems. What you didn’t know about, you didn’t worry about. But when it all gets polluted from outside…’

  ‘I’m also a bit worried about what you might want to say about migrants, like the guy who hit Aidan?’

  ‘An illegal. Paid to get hisself smuggled in. Deeply repentant. Don’t get me wrong, Merrily, I’m all for migrant workers. They’re hard working, cheerful and cheap, and how else would we get the fruit picked? No, there won’t be any racist remarks from me. Not in my political interests, is it?’

  ‘I suppose not. Did you know Aidan?’

  ‘I know the family. In fact I’ve just today been talking to his mother. Her second husband serves with me on the council. Archie Baxter. Wrong party, mind, but I wouldn’t hold that against him.’

  She was guessing that the official line would be the vicar of Ledwardine inviting County Councillor Howe to deliver his eulogy as a friend of the family. A low annoyance began muttering inside her like an idling motor. But, like an idling motor, it wouldn’t be taking her anywhere tonight.

  ‘So this eulogy, Charlie…’

  ‘A eulogy for all the victims of poor policing in rural areas. A promise of better.’

  ‘If you’re elected.’

  ‘When I’m elected, yes.’

  They were on him as soon as he was in there. No introductions, no preamble, no examples. Within a couple of minutes, he was in the black and white rag jacket, the line of bells buckled onto his calves and his face was wet with what smelled like sharp cider before the burnt cork was applied, and they gave him a stick, thick as a broom handle, shorter than a baseball bat – Sally, this is – willow. Don’t hold back – as the musicians started up and they were dancing and he was dancing.

  He felt a small pulse of fear, expanding into awe, when he took in the vastness of the barn, a cathedral barn, hard earth floor with scatters of straw and huge timbers lofted into shadows beyond the hanging lights, the whole place resounding with squeeze box, fiddle and drum played by two men and a woman, so that he could dance with the men who’d danced with the dead.

  He was aware of Darvill directing the dance from his chair under the glassed-in barn bay, his voice raw border now.

  ‘Back-step, swing-step, heel-and-toe…’

  Nothing complicated. Two rows of four, an alley of dancers. For today, he was part of the side. He didn’t recognize the dance, only the tune, from somewhere in his past, but it got under your feet fast enough and the dance seemed slower than the music. He was getting it all wrong but it didn’t seem to matter; he was moving, his legs were moving the way they had all those years ago, only it didn’t seem like years, it seemed like he’d never stopped. Basics are everything, Darvill had said. Start to analyse and it’ll go away.

  After a while – this was disconcerting – it felt like his natural state was to be in the air and his feet had to find the ground,

  ‘… and turn… two taps… strike!’

  At the first clash of sticks, he was shocked by the violence of the impact, vibration up both arms as he took in a black face, the gash of a grin.

  ‘You’ll be all right, mate. We’ll see you don’t get any fingers smashed.’

  His name was Alec. He was a racehorse trainer. There was also George the carpenter and Jed the cheesemaker. There was a cider maker and Darvill’s farm manager and a shepherd and Bob Rumsey, the academic who’d got into a morris-fuelled fight outside the pub. Bob had a grey beard of the size you only found on veteran imams and members of ZZ Top.

  They were having a break. There was cider you didn’t have to put on your face for the burnt cork. Eight men with black faces and top hats.

  ‘You better have a hat,’ Bob Rumsey said, ‘though you won’t need one on the night. Just the mask, and you don’t get that till you’re ready.’

  And then he was pushed behind a bale-wall and out through a small door into darkness, the smell of hay and manure and the sounds of shifting cattle.

  ‘Looks like we couldn’t find a hat after all,’ Bob Rumsey said.

  Then there was another voice, kept low.

  ‘Garry Brewer, this is, Lol.’

  ‘Oh, right. So you’re not…’

  ‘Not dancing. I’ll be back in the side, I will, when they put the mask on you. Just felt I oughter have a word, see, after what Mrs Watkins done.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Don’t take this as a warning, more a cautionary word, and don’t you say nothing out there. Thing is, Lionel, his heart’s in the right place, but he’s busking it, you know what I’m saying? His dad, it come out of knowledge and experience. Li, it’s out of a chair and a sense of time running short and mabbe some guilt and regret.’

  ‘Over what?’

  ‘If I really knew, boy, I’d tell you. I’m just saying don’t see him as any kind of guru, that’s all. And remember that when they puts the mask on you – and they won’t do that till the night – it can be a bit of shock to the system.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Look… I grew up, like most of the village boys, rejecting all this. It was offensive. Superstition. Like we were yokels. All the customs that gets brought back, it’s always some buggers from Off, thinks they knows more about it than you do.’

  ‘Darvill’s not from Off.’

  Sound of a breath expelled.

  ‘Lol, I… I dunno how to put this, but fellers like Lionel, they’re allus gonner be from Off. Listen, you better go back in, else he’ll be after you. Go on. You en’t got that much to worry about.’ Brewer patted him on the shoulder. ‘At least you din’t dig nobody up.’

  58

  The man he was

  ‘I HAD A male child already,’ Sarah Baxter said on Friday afternoon. ‘Job done.’

  A severely modern fitted kitchen, with all the works hidden behind white wood, only dials visible. White tiles underfoot, white light from the walls and white-haired Sarah Baxter – Sarah Lloyd as was and Sarah Hurst before that – wraith-like at a white worktop.

  Not a farmhouse kitchen, essentially.

  ‘He’d been grooming Liam for the farm from a ridiculously early age. Had him shooting crows by the age of eight, which I didn’t approve of. And I was pregnant. Unexpectedly. And had refused to do away with it.’

  ‘Iestyn wanted you to?’

  ‘He already had a boy. Most people, they marry someone with a child, they have to have another of their own. Iestyn, he’d acquired a good strong boy without all the nappies and the teething. And I was there already, handling the office work. That was how he saw it.’

  ‘A practical man.’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s the word for it. When Aidan turned out to be a sickly child, with the asthma, you’d’ve thought it was all my fault.’

  ‘And when he got rid of the asthma…?’

  ‘Oh, yes, altogether different then. He suddenly remembered which of them was his son. I was glad for Liam at least. He liked the countryside but he never much liked the idea of being manacled to a farm and being Iestyn’s unpaid skivvy. It amuses me that Liam works for DEFRA now, good, well-paid job with a pension. Inspecting farms, making judgements on Single Payments, and Iestyn Lloyd has to be polite to him.’

  ‘I talked to Liam,’ Merrily said. ‘He wasn’t optimistic about a future for farming. Also saw it as a destroyer of lives.’

  Sarah brought two coffees in long china cups to th
e white-wood table, sat down opposite Merrily. She wore a jersey top and jogging pants. Must be approaching seventy, and very spry and fit and contented in her clinical kitchen.

  ‘What would you expect? He knew what Iestyn was like – you’re not doing this right, you oughter be doing that. No, he never wanted that. He likes the country life, but he likes his freedom, too, and his foreign holidays. Goes abroad a lot – to Africa and places like that. He has an interest in wildlife. Not many farmers get holidays of any kind. A few because they love farm-life too much, Iestyn because he wouldn’t trust anyone else to manage it. A slave driver, and he was driving himself just as hard. It’s what broke us up in the end.’

  ‘All work, no free time?’

  ‘That’s how it was. Even on the farm, Liam’d always rather be out shooting rabbits than raising sheep. So Iestyn was stuck with two boys, one too sick for years to work on the farm, the other healthy enough, but didn’t want to do it. Quite funny, really. I’m so glad to be out of all that.’

  Her new husband ran a reclamation business: architectural salvage, the sort of rubbish Sarah said she wouldn’t have in her house but, thankfully, some people did. Archie was at a meeting with colleagues on It’s Our County, the local party set up by people who didn’t like the way the council’s ruling Conservatives were failing to conserve.

  ‘Iestyn… I suppose I was flattered at first. Good job, a good income. And a good-looking man. He’d always had girlfriends and not always one at a time. And I was part of the business – a small part but important at the time.’

  ‘You did all the paperwork.’

  ‘Still do, only for other farmers. There’ll always be some as don’t want to know about VAT and form-filling. And so much better when you don’t have to live with one.’ Oddly, in this blanched environment her voice was warmer, more flexible than it had sounded on the phone. ‘Now. Why isn’t my son being left to lie in peace?’

  Pale blue eyes unmoving. Eyes that looked all-cried-out. Merrily momentarily jolted.

  He wasn’t normal, Sarah always knew that. Liam had been normal – played football, did his share of underage drinking, one of the boys – whereas Aidan was awkward, didn’t even try to fit in, and the asthma didn’t help. In and out of the doctor’s surgery for that. And all those funny phobias, and making up stories.

  ‘I’ll be honest with you, Mrs Watkins. There were times I felt almost painfully close to him and times when I wondered if he was really mine.’

  ‘Phobias?’

  Here was a word nobody had mentioned before in connection with Aidan Lloyd.

  ‘World of his own, that boy. He’d go off – from an early age, he’d wander off and I’d be worried sick, and they’d find him on his own in some little wood or a dingle, quite happy. Playing with his friends, he’d say – well, he didn’t have any friends.’

  ‘Imaginary friends?’

  ‘And always some places he wouldn’t go near. I would’ve had him to a psychiatrist. Iestyn wouldn’t. Not the sort of son he wanted, see, a mental case. Iestyn’s tragedy, again – never quite got the son he wanted. I’m telling you this ’cause there’s people down in Kilpeck who know all the background. It’d be foolish to cover things up that are known about in Kilpeck. Like his fear of the church.’

  ‘Kilpeck Church?’

  ‘Wouldn’t go in. Wouldn’t go in through that big doorway with the arch. He’d start to cry till you took him away.’

  ‘Was he like that with all churches?’

  ‘I was afraid he would be, but when we had to go to weddings in other places it didn’t bother him, so I don’t know. It’s a strange church, isn’t it, Kilpeck? Maybe they frightened him, all those the faces on the walls. I don’t know. There are things I wouldn’t talk about in his lifetime and maybe it’d’ve been better if I had.’

  ‘The phobias – was this just when he was a child, or did they persist?’

  ‘Well they – you know, I only thought about this for the first time the other day – but it all changed, like a lot of things, about the time the asthma cleared up.’

  ‘How old would he have been then?’

  ‘In his teens.’

  ‘And when you say it all changed…’

  ‘He was calmer. More… outgoing. Still quiet, he’d always been quiet, but more… more relaxed within himself. Are you sure this is the sort of thing you’re looking for?’

  ‘Well… phobias are perhaps not too appropriate for a memorial service. Did you, by any chance, talk to Julie Duxbury? The rector?’

  ‘Oh my God.’ Sarah drawing an appalled breath. ‘I had a phone call from Mrs Duxbury, and she was to have come to see me yesterday. When it was on the television, what happened to her, I just went as cold as ice.’ She shivered in the warmth of the kitchen that looked so cold. ‘Anyway, you haven’t come to talk about that. What is it you want me to tell you? The asthma, that was quite a miracle. But then there was too much to think about – too many bad things over a period of about three years. Sir Peter dying in an accident, then the title going to his brother who was… a bit mental, I always thought. Unstable. Scatterbrained at the very least, with all his stupid ideas. I expect you know what happened there?’

  ‘Most of it, I think.’

  ‘Iestyn always said you couldn’t use a working farm to experiment with stupid ideas, so it ended badly. Except for Aidan’s asthma. Miracle. Like, I said, it seemed like a miracle.’

  But it was said in a sharp and final way. Sarah’s face had become a mask. She probably knew what might lie behind the miracle. But, even now, with a new husband and Aidan dead…

  ‘If I were you, Mrs Watkins, I’d simply say he was at last able to become the farmer his father had always wanted him to be. At a time when he was needed the most.’

  ‘So the new farm, at Ledwardine…’

  ‘Went from strength to strength. Became what you’d call an agricultural factory. It was time for me to do what I’d been putting off for years and so I did. I doubt he even noticed me leave.’

  ‘But you continued to see Aidan…’

  ‘Aidan lived with me for a time during the week, going to the farm at weekends. This was till he left the Cathedral School and went to agricultural college and I’d met Archie. There’d been what you might call a widening chasm between Iestyn and me that Iestyn did absolutely nothing to heal. When Aidan left college he went full time with his father and I was seeing very little of him. I rang Iestyn once and asked him quite civilly if he wasn’t working the boy too hard. His reaction… well, if I tell you that was the last time we spoke…’

  ‘What did he say – do you mind me asking?’

  ‘I told you you’d get the truth from me. He claimed Aidan had as much time off as he wanted and if he didn’t choose to visit me then perhaps he just didn’t want to hear any more of my lies.’

  The mask was dissolving now, Sarah on the edge of breaking down with grief or rage, hard to tell which. She drank some coffee.

  ‘They weren’t lies.’

  ‘I’m sure they weren’t.’

  ‘What’s sickened me… do you know what they’re saying in Ledwardine?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘About Aidan taking drugs?’

  ‘Erm, cannabis. I’ve heard cannabis. It’s just mindless gossip. Who told you about it?’

  ‘I hate that place with its posh little shops and everyone from Off.’

  ‘Was it Charlie Howe?’

  ‘My husband says I shouldn’t trust him, but why would he make up a story like that? If it’s in any way true, all I can say is that working with Iestyn must’ve driven Aidan to it, but I don’t believe it’s true. They seemed to be getting on a lot better.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Aidan told me that a few months ago. He had his own ideas about the future of farming, and he thought his father was listening to him more. ’Specially after they won a contract to supply meat to Waitrose. I have to say he was happier than I’d seen him in a long time.’

/>   ‘Because they’d got a Waitrose contract? Erm…’

  Had she known about Rachel? Probably not. Don’t go there.

  ‘Who’ll take over the farm now, Mrs Baxter? Liam seemed worried that now Aidan was… gone, that there’d be pressure on him to give up his job and get ready to take over from Iestyn… eventually.’

  ‘He doesn’t want it, and he knows I don’t want him to have it. Though I expect Iestyn will try to persuade him to take it on at some point. He’s seventy-five now, but he has his own manager, and a good housekeeper and about a dozen people on the payroll. It’ll tick over, with Liam’s help some evenings and at weekends, and when he consents to retire, he could sell it as a going concern. But he won’t want that.’

  ‘I, erm…’

  Merrily didn’t know what to say, having been aware for some minutes of something snaking poisonously between her thoughts, perhaps her own prejudices coming through? She started again.

  ‘I’ve tried several times to get through to Iestyn on the phone. He doesn’t seem to want to speak to me.’

  ‘Or anyone, it seems. When I saw him at the funeral, he didn’t even acknowledge me. Not that we parted as friends, but we were on speaking terms. And stayed in touch. There are things you need to discuss sometimes. But he looked at me as if he didn’t even know me. Perhaps I’ve changed.’

  Sarah drained her coffee, stood up with the cup. At the gleaming sink, she turned round and her smile was almost malicious.

  ‘Or perhaps he’s not the man he was. Do you know what I mean?’

  59

  Hereford’s finest

  IT WASN’T THE bright lights, Leominster. You didn’t drive into the town centre, you burrowed in through side streets. Strangers needed a guide.

  Bliss quite liked that about it. Lot of things he liked about Leominster. One thing in particular he didn’t.

  ‘All right.’ Annie was suddenly straining against her seat belt. ‘Stop. Let’s stop this now.’

  ‘Annie—’

  ‘No, just… stop here.’

  ‘Yeh.’

  Bliss pulled into a bay marked loading only, left his engine running, his lights on. His Honda was the only car on a short street where the shops were all closed for the night and the pavements were dully gleaming, about to freeze over.