Remains of an Altar mw-8

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Watch the church. Keep watching the steeple.’

  The steeple must have been half a mile away, at least, but from up here you felt you could prick your hand on the tip of the weathercock. Beyond it, to the west, you could see distant Hay Bluff over the mist, a dent in the sky at the end of the Black Mountains.

  Jane put on her sunglasses.

  ‘And then we walk towards it.’

  Lol followed her, keeping a few feet behind, sure now that something else was bothering her. Some problem between her and Eirion? They’d been together a long time. Maybe too long, for teenagers.

  ‘We came up the easy way,’ Jane said over her shoulder. ‘But we have to follow a different route down, to more or less keep to the line. The path zigzags a bit, but if we keep the steeple in view…’

  ‘Eirion OK, Jane?’

  ‘Fine.’ Her voice was a little too light. ‘Off to uni in September.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Depends on his A-level results. Oxford, if he does well. Bristol or Cardiff if he fluffs. Or, if he really fluffs, one of these joints that used to be an FE college until, like, last week?’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I mean, it’s ridiculous how like everybody has to go somewhere. You need a degree to be a hospital porter now. You probably need a degree in, like, hygiene studies to clean lavatories. It’s—’

  Jane slid on a small scree of pebbles and grabbed a sapling to keep from falling.

  ‘—All complete and total bullshit. Just a Stalinist government scam to destroy the individual, get everybody into a slot. Result is you’ve got people walking round with a string of letters after their name, and they’re like, you know, Homer Simpson?’

  ‘So, you, er…’ Lol thought he was beginning to get the picture. ‘If Eirion does well, you won’t see as much of each other, will you?’

  A grey squirrel scurried up a fir tree ahead of them.

  ‘I just don’t see why,’ Jane said. ‘I mean why? Why do you have to waste precious years being lectured to by all these hopeless losers so you can wind up with some totally meaningless qualification that everybody else has got. Why can’t you just do stuff? Original stuff. I mean … you did.’

  ‘You got something original in mind?’

  They climbed over a rotting stile on the edge of a decaying copse at the foot of Cole Hill. Jane waited for Lol. She was squeezing her hands together.

  ‘I want to find out things for myself – like, not formalized curriculum shit that just qualifies you to be like every other—’

  She spun away. She might have been in tears. She moved rapidly through the trees and out to where another stile had been strung with barbed wire. When Lol reached her she was bent over the wire, breathing hard. The canvas bag was at her feet.

  She had both hands around a pair of wire-cutters.

  ‘Jane?’

  ‘It’s supposed to be a public footpath. Nobody has any right to—’

  Two ends of barbed wire sprang apart and Jane stepped back.

  ‘Jane, where did you get the wire-cutters?’

  ‘Gomer.’ Jane clambered over the stile. ‘You coming?’

  All his foreboding becoming justified, Lol climbed over the stile and stumbled after Jane through tall grass, holding his hands up above the nettles. They came to a five-barred gate set into an overgrown hedge, strands of orange binder twine hanging loose from it.

  ‘I pulled that off last night.’ Jane opened the gate. ‘Now. Look at that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just look!’

  Lol closed the gate behind him and stood and looked. He saw a gently sloping meadow full of Hereford cows, red-brown and cream, classic. You didn’t see enough Herefords in Herefordshire these days, but that clearly wasn’t what Jane had meant.

  ‘Oh,’ Lol said. ‘I see.’

  Like the shadow of a tall pole, a path cut directly across the meadow. A visible path that could have been contructed or simply made by sheep crossing the field from gate to gate – dead straight from the gate they’d just come through to another one at a slight angle in the hedge at the bottom of the field. Both gates and the path were directly aligned with the smokey, sepia steeple of Ledwardine Church.

  Lol walked towards the centre of the field, keeping to the path, and turned to see that the path was perfectly aligned, in the opposite direction, with the top of Cole Hill.

  Some of Watkins’s lines demanded imagination, but this one spoke for itself.

  Jane stood on the line, as if she was standing before an altar. Although the sun was high and warm, Lol saw her shiver. She wrapped her bare arms around herself.

  ‘Before you reach the village, there’s a mound just inside the orchard – behind Church Street? It’s not marked on the map, but it must be an ancient burial site, if only by its position in the landscape. Absolutely on the line. Like, it’s not very high now, but a lot of them aren’t any more; they’ve been ploughed in over the centuries. And then, on the other side of the mound, you’re dead on course, across the market place, for the church.’

  ‘You’ve convinced me,’ Lol said. ‘It’s a nice one.’

  ‘And … and, Lol, if you continue the line, through the church – I’ve only done this on the map, but it works, it totally works – within a mile, on the other side, you’ve got an ancient crossroads and a genuine prehistoric standing stone which is not very big but is actually marked on the map.’

  ‘Well, congratulations,’ Lol said. ‘You’ve found a new ley line.’

  ‘Ley,’ Jane snapped. ‘Alfred Watkins called them leys. Ley lines – that’s just a term that’s been adopted in almost a disparaging way by so-called experts who say they don’t exist. And, OK, some of them you can draw the line by circling the sites on the map, but when you go there you can’t really see it. But this…’

  ‘Textbook,’ Lol said. ‘I suppose.’

  ‘I mean, I can’t claim any credit – except maybe for rediscovering it. This side of the hill’s been more or less hidden away for years, probably since the orchards went into decline. And, oh yeah, you know what this field’s called? Coleman’s Meadow. Geddit? The field where the track was laid out by the Cole-man, the shaman, the wizard … ? And you can feel it, can’t you?’ Jane stamped a foot. ‘Come on, Lol. You’re an artist, a poet. Do not tell me you cannot feel it.’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘You stand on the track and you’re, like, totally connected with the landscape. And with the ancestors who lived here and marked out the sacred paths. Thousands of years ago when people were more in contact with the elements? So like whether or not you believe the leys channelled some form of mystical life-force through the land, or they were spirit paths where you could walk with the dead, or whatever … I don’t care. I don’t need to understand the science. I just need to know that I can stand here and feel I’m, you know, part of something … bigger. Belong.’

  ‘It’s probably the most any of us can ever hope for,’ Lol said. ‘To belong somewhere.’

  They stood quietly for a few seconds. You could hear neither the sounds of the village nor the traffic on the main road, only birdsong and the grass wrenched from the meadow in the jaws of the Herefords.

  The sun was already high. Caught in its glare, Jane, in her yellow crop-top, looked young and uncertain.

  ‘I need some information off you, Lol.’

  ‘For this … project?’

  ‘Sort of. I need to know who decides what happens around here. Like with the council and stuff. I mean, I think I know the basics. Just want to be sure before I make a move.’

  ‘A move?’

  Oh, hell.

  Jane looked at her feet.

  ‘Jane…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘This day off school, to work on the project…’

  ‘Look,’ Jane said, ‘it’s nearly the end of term, the exams are over, nobody really cares. And this is a major crisis. And anyway it’s connected with the project, which is about how artists
have dealt with earth mysteries, the secret harmonies in the landscape.’

  ‘You’re not making this very clear, Jane.’

  ‘All right.’ Jane unfolded her arms and pointed. ‘You want it made clear, go and read it what it says on that sign.’

  A small placard was affixed to the gate on the opposite side of the field. Lol wandered over. On the other side of the five-barred gate the path broadened out, and he saw that he was in the orchard at the back of his own cottage, which fronted on to Church Street. When he looked back, Jane’s ley was no longer obvious, which presumably was why she’d brought him down from the hill.

  Lol adjusted his glasses and read what it said on the sign, which was headed HEREFORDSHIRE COUNCIL PLANNING DEPARTMENT.

  What it said, basically, was that an application had been submitted to turn Coleman’s Meadow into an estate of twenty-four high-quality detached executive homes. It invited observations from the public.

  Oh.

  Lol turned, at a click of the latch on the gate, to find that Jane had followed him.

  ‘Only they’ll need to kill me first,’ Jane said.

  6

  The Sunset Chair

  Joyce Aird’s drive sloped steeply down from the road in a tunnel of dark trees. It was like entering a badger set, until you emerged into a vastness of light.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Mrs Aird said. ‘Your sins always find you out, don’t they? Yes, bring that chair out, dear, we can sit together in the window. Bring your tea.’

  The sun-lounge overlooked the valley, across the long village of Colwall and on and on over Herefordshire, all the way to the Black Mountains and Wales.

  ‘How did you know?’

  Mrs Aird had the kind of West Midlands accent which wore anxiety like old and trusted slippers. She was about seventy-five, soft-featured and with lightly blonded hair.

  ‘Oh…’ Merrily put down the cane chair with its thick, padded seat. ‘It’s just that if anyone’s inquired about exorcism, the arrangement is that the office tells me or our secretary, Sophie. And nobody seems to have.’

  ‘Well, no, I never rang the Diocese. That’s just what I told Mr Spicer. He’s a good man, Mr Spicer, at the bottom of him, give him his due, but he’s a man, isn’t he? And he has had a lot of personal problems lately. I thought, he’s just not going to do anything, is he? And I was telling a friend – we used to be neighbours when I lived in the Forest of Dean and we’ve kept in touch, and I was telling her on the phone about what had happened, and she immediately said I should get the Rector to ask for you. That’s how I got the number. Her name’s Ingrid Sollars.’

  ‘Oh.’ That was OK; nothing wrong with Ingrid Sollars. ‘Yes, she was involved in … a problem we had. She’s a nice woman.’

  ‘A much stronger person than me, I’m afraid. I get very frightened about things I don’t … well, none of us understands them, do we? We can’t. We’re not supposed to. But Ingrid gave me your number and she said you’d take it seriously, but it would be best to go through the Rector, for political reasons. But I get so frightened, now, you see.’

  Mrs Aird had a single, lonely chair in the window. Called it her sunset chair. Never missed a sunset. You could just see Herefordshire Beacon, on the far left, but nothing of the road, although you could hear the traffic above you, like a sporadic draught in the attic.

  ‘I used to think it was better this time of year with the holiday cottages starting to fill up and the village more like a real village. I’ve got to know some of the holiday people, and they’re quite nice. Gave me their keys to go in and make sure their cottages were all right, switch the heating on in winter. Made me feel useful and I thought it made them feel more welcome so maybe they’d stay for a bit. But I’ve had to give the keys back. I don’t like to go into a strange house alone any more. Well, would you?’

  Merrily must have looked blank because Mrs Aird leaned forward, going into a whisper.

  ‘There was a poor man – a bit solitary – who’d come in the summer for weeks at a time and we never knew whether he was there or not, and one day … someone noticed all the flies.’

  Mrs Aird gripped the arms of her chair, shuddering.

  Merrily apprehensively balanced her tea, in its willow-pattern china cup, on her knee.

  ‘Doesn’t the Rector go to see people?’

  ‘Well, he does. Comes to see me about once a week, but then I’m a regular churchgoer. But some people don’t like it – see it as an intrusion, as if he’s going to evangelize. But of course Mr Spicer’s not like that, is he? And he’s got these other parishes to look after. And he’s on his own, too, now. Not been easy for him, with his wife … and his daughter. And everything that’s happened.’

  Mrs Aird sat with her arms folded, looking expectant.

  ‘You were there when … the lorry driver…’

  ‘It was like an explosion, Mrs Watkins. I have a key to the church and I’d gone in early to put the flowers out because there was a funeral that day – Mrs Hatch, a mercy – and bang. I went rushing out, and the cab of the lorry was almost flattened on the driver’s side. He had to come out of the other door. I brought him in here and I gave him a cup of tea while we were waiting for the police and the breakdown people. He had his hands to his eyes, just thinking about it, and he said – I’ll always remember – he said, It was like a little sun.’

  ‘But it wasn’t a sunny day?’

  ‘It was later, but it was very dull then. Only about half past seven. When the police came, they breathalysed him straight away, and he was completely clear. They said he couldn’t have seen a light, but he insisted that was why he’d swerved, and he was a nice man – not young. One of the policemen said to me afterwards, Oh, I expect he fell asleep at the wheel and dreamed it. I said, That’s not fair, you don’t know…’

  An orb, Merrily was thinking without much enthusiasm. Very fashionable with cable-TV ghosthunters, orbs. Bit of glare got recorded by the camera and it was an orb, a semi-formed manifestation. What Huw Owen called a spirit-egg, though you were never quite sure when Huw was being disparaging.

  ‘Did the driver think there was anything … strange about the light?’

  ‘Well, it was certainly strange, but I didn’t think there’d have been anything ghostly. Not then. But then there was Mr Loste … and the others.’

  ‘Mrs Cobham.’

  ‘She’s a bit…’ Mrs Aird put her nose in the air ‘… if you ask me. And not over-friendly. Mr Loste … well, some people think he’s a bit … what’s the word … ?’ Mrs Aird waved her cardiganed arms about in a random sort of way. ‘Maniac … manic. Obsessed with his music and his choirs … and, give him his due, he’s marvellous. He’s done wonders. But some people think he’s not reliable in other ways. And his friendship with the American woman who goes to the wells. Bit peculiar. But … he saw what he saw, and he’ll tell you as much, give him his due.’

  ‘I’m hoping to see him later. I’ll probably need to go back and see the Rector first.’

  ‘He’s not in,’ Mrs Aird said. ‘His car’s gone.’

  How did she know that from down here? Had she got a periscope?

  ‘He’s got three parishes, you know. And all his problems.’

  Merrily drank some tea.

  Oh, well.

  ‘I’m … afraid I don’t really know anything about that. Don’t really like to ask him these things.’ Peering over her cup. ‘Sounds like I’m prying.’

  Mrs Aird looked up at the ceiling and made a sad, wounded noise.

  ‘It was his daughter wrecked everything. Emily. Got a son as well, but he’s too young to cause trouble. Emily would be … what, eighteen? Mrs Spicer, Fiona, she was from Reading, somewhere like that, near London. She didn’t really like the country, and when Mr Spicer left the Army—You know what he was, don’t you?’

  ‘Erm … no.’

  ‘S … A … S.’

  Mrs Aird mouthing it silently, like a breach of the Official Secrets Act.

  �
��Really?’

  No wonder Syd Spicer was familiar with the Brecon Beacons.

  ‘Been out about eight years,’ Mrs Aird said. ‘But there’s something that doesn’t leave them, if you ask me.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  Probably right. And they often didn’t leave the area. After many years based in Hereford, learning to become the most efficient killers in or out of uniform, they formed connections with the people and the land. Married local girls. Surprisingly – or maybe not – Spicer wouldn’t have been the first of them to become a priest.

  ‘Imagine the stress she must’ve been through,’ Mrs Aird said. ‘Never sure where in the world he was at any time, but knowing it was always going to be somewhere terribly dangerous.’

  Merrily nodded. The SAS had probably the worst matrimonial record outside Hollywood. Breakfast with the wife, late supper in a cave in Afghanistan. Then retirement, still hyper, and they couldn’t settle down. The wives had to be very special to survive all that. Long periods alone, counting the Regiment graves in St Martin’s churchyard.

  ‘Sometimes…’ Mrs Aird leaned forward again ‘… Fiona came to talk to me on her own. She said he’d always promised her that when he came out of the Army they’d go back down south – bright lights and no sheep, she used to say. But then I suppose he found his faith. I don’t know where a man like that finds it.’

  ‘Oh … sometimes it’s just lying there, in your path, like an old coat, and before you know what you’re doing you’ve picked it up, tried it on and it seems to fit.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ Mrs Aird said. ‘I suppose.’

  ‘How did Mrs Spicer react to that?’

  ‘Oh, she stuck by him.’

  Merrily smiled. Like Spicer had come out as a transsexual.

  ‘At least she knew where he was. He was a curate in Hereford, at first, and she didn’t mind that, thinking they’d move south as soon as he won his spurs, so to speak. They’d bought themselves a little house near his in-laws down in Reading, and they’d spend holidays there. But then he was offered Wychehill and the surrounding parishes – a bit closer to London, but it turned out to be the worst of both worlds. And the girl, Emily, she hated every minute she had to spend here. Off with her friends to nightclubs, every chance she got. And that, of course, led to boys and … the other thing. You know?’