by Phil Rickman
‘The few people who come here, if you’re meditating they leave you alone. They understand that much.’
Lol tried again.
‘The demons. That is the Royal Oak? The demonic counterpoint to what you’re doing. Like when the demons come for the soul of Gerontius … they’re discordant. They’re taunting him.’
‘Didn’t really notice it,’ Tim said. ‘Not at first.’
‘You didn’t hear the noise?’
‘I could block it out with headphones. Put on the old cans, close my eyes and I’m in a concert hall. Or a cathedral. Or when I’m writing just put them on, unplugged, and it’s a blank canvas. But she made me take them off. She said it was meant.’
‘Winnie?’
‘Made me take my headphones off while I was writing, to experience the violence. Suppose I didn’t react strongly enough. So we walked down the hill one night, a Saturday night – we’d been drinking … well, I’d been … and she said, this is evil. It’s deriding you. And it was filling the valley, terribly loud, and I was getting pretty sick of it and I said, can’t we go? And then she took me to where there was a loose stone in the wall.’
‘She made you throw the stone through the window?’
‘Had a few drinks. And you learn not to make her annoyed.’
‘And then…’
‘Just stood there, thinking, what the bloody hell have I done now? Next thing, they’re all on me. Big chaps. Beat the shit out of me.’
‘And where was Winnie?’
‘Gone for help.’
‘She let them beat you up.’
Tim sat down under the tree.
‘She’s a writer,’ he said.
Driving through Wychehill, picking up speed but not too much, Syd Spicer said, ‘You understand about Louis Devereaux, now? Loves to kill.’
Merrily fumbled out a cigarette, both hands shaking. Once you sat down, it all caught up with you again.
‘Odd thing was, Emily was always anti-hunting till she started going out with Louis. And then it was, Oh he just does it for the riding and the excitement. I wasn’t too happy about a teenage kid going out with a bloke six years older. So I asked around. There’s a few hunting types in my other parishes. Some of them very doubtful about Louis.’
They passed the gates of Wychehill Church, with its cracked lantern alight.
‘Can’t you go any faster, Syd?’
‘Too many traffic cops. They’ll stop anybody tonight.’
Merrily had rung Bliss again and left a slightly hysterical, urgent message on his voicemail. Now she was even wondering about trying to get Howe. Meanwhile, groping for self-reassurance. No way anyone’s going to mistake Lol for Tim Loste. Not even in the countryside in the dark.
Please God.
She lit the cigarette.
‘Let’s have the worst, then.’
‘I’m telling you this in case we run into him. Heroics are inadvisable. Louis will kill anything. Example: when the hounds start to slow up in the chase, they get shot, a side of hunting seldom advertised. Louis would volunteer to do it. For other hunts as well, which made him popular with kennel men, who mainly dislike that side of it. There’s more, of course, mostly hearsay. Essentially, people who love to kill will find or create a need for it. Justification. What it tells me is that killing Wicklow, after Louis justified it to himself, would have been an act done in a frenzy of pure excitement.’
‘You understand that feeling?’
‘I understand the rush you get when you convince yourself that, in the great scheme of things, it’s not only justified but necessary. When you know that a difficult situation can only be resolved by an act of swift, efficient, intense and quite colossal violence.’
‘And to a woman?’
‘No,’ Spicer said. ‘No, I could never see that far.’
Merrily thought, irrationally, of Lyndon Pierce and the blue tits: tiny, mean, cowardly violence, with no risk to self.
For the Devereaux boys, something far bigger. A war.
But Winnie?
‘Sometimes it’s a fine line, Merrily. Luckily, in the armed forces, especially the more hands-on areas, there’s also a very thick line, and it’s called training.’
‘And without that?’
‘Without training there’s no efficiency and no safe judgement. In this instance, we’re looking at a perceived justification gone wild.’
‘Your daughter had a relationship with Louis.’
‘Wouldn’t hear a word against him. Well, he’s a charming boy. OK, he was arrested for attacking an MP’s minder during a pro-hunt protest – well, a lot of strong feelings at the time. OK, he went to pieces when the ban went through – poor boy, his life dismantled. Goes off to the city at weekends to work off his frustrations … nicked for possession of coke, gets a caution. Well, he was chastened by that. And look how he’s changed.’
Merrily was thinking about the five minutes or less she’d spent in the company of Louis Devereaux: posh, educated, good-looking, flirtatious.
‘He was one of the reasons you wanted Emily out of Wychehill?’
‘He was one of the reasons I wanted Winnie out of Wychehill.’
‘So stopping them using the church—’
‘Partly.’
‘Syd…’ Merrily gulping smoke. ‘I still don’t know why they did this. Wicklow, yes, an invader from the hated cities. But Winnie … I’m not getting it.’
Syd swerved into the Ledbury road under the ramparts of Herefordshire Beacon.
‘Take too long, Merrily, and I’m still not totally sure of my facts. And your bloke’s out there. And he doesn’t know what else is, does he?’
At first, seeing the curious white clouds in the northern sky, Lol had thought for a moment that time itself, at Whiteleafed Oak, was unreliable and this was the dawn. But the visible landmarks had told him the lights were in the wrong part of the sky; these were just unusually pale clouds over the southern Malverns, gassy, white and luminous, as if they were chemically producing their own glow.
It lit up the valley like a vast sports stadium, and Lol was starting to see the pattern … the structure.
This much was not fantasy: Tim Loste was working on a piece of music, in the dramatized, semi-operatic style of The Dream of Gerontius. And it was about Gerontius. Or rather, about the spiritual and emotional challenges, for Elgar, of composing what was regarded as his greatest work: orchestrating a metaphysical world.
But it was also about Loste’s own links with both Gerontius and Elgar. Some perceived by Loste, some perceived – or constructed – by Winnie Sparke. Bizarre. But art was allowed – even expected – to be bizarre.
‘When you came to Wychehill, it was as if you were entering a different world. Elgar’s world. And Winnie’s your guardian angel. That really came to you in a dream?’
Tim’s eyes widened. There was enough light now to see that they were not yet normal. Like an owl’s eyes.
‘Had a horrible, ghastly dream. Dreamed that Winnie was bleeding. I heard her screaming her heart out. I saw … the shadows of demons. But I couldn’t do anything. Why couldn’t I do anything?’
Lol looked at the stains on Tim’s singlet.
‘When was this?’
‘I don’t know. Last night? Gha … ghastly.’ He stared at Lol, his eyes still too wide. ‘Look, I don’t … How do you know all this about me?’
‘Just know people who’ve worked with you. Whose lives you’ve changed.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I think I … wanted to learn. I’m a musician. Of sorts.’
‘Yes.’ Tim seemed to accept that, his mind veering off again. ‘Used to walk the hills night after night. Listening to G along the path.’
‘Gerontius.’
‘Wanting to die because I knew I was never going to be as good as that. I was engaged, and she wanted us to go to London – chance of a teaching job with some conducting, on the side, with a jolly decent choir. But Winnie was on the s
cene by then, said I mustn’t leave Elgar. Got the ring thrown back at me. Pretty bad times at work. All got too much. Kept on listening to G, over and over. Got drunk. Embraced death.’
‘But then Winnie told you that you didn’t have to die. She rescued you. You called her the guardian angel.’
‘She said the journey could be accomplished in this life through the use of symbolism. With great art as a byproduct.’
‘What’s it going to be called?’
Tim looked blank for a moment. The white clouds were like pillows on the lumpy mattress of the hills.
‘Mr Phoebus,’ he said at last. ‘Mr Phoebus and the Whiteleafed Oak.’
‘I like it. It’s a wonderful title.’
‘Winnie’s doing a book, too. All about me and Elgar.’
‘Elgar’s biographer, Kennedy, says Elgar scored Gerontius in a kind of trance,’ Lol said.
‘Yes. Composing G, he said he could look out from Birchwood and see the soul rise. Tremendous emotional experience. State of near-ecstasy when he’d finished it. That was the summer he’d learned to ride a bike. In his element, laughing and joking … and then…’ Tim’s chin sank into his chest.
‘Then it all went wrong.’
‘First performance in Birmingham … complete disaster. Chorus was under-rehearsed and performed badly. The chorus master had died suddenly and the man they brought in to replace him wasn’t up to the job. All went to pieces. Elgar was suicidal.’
‘Actually suicidal?’
‘It brought on the most dreadful depression. I wish I were dead, he kept saying. He wrote, I’ve always said God was against art. Swore he’d never again attempt to write religious music. Closed his mind against the spiritual. ’Course, in later years G would be beautifully performed, its genius exalted, but in the early days…’
‘Elgar thought it was cursed? Why?’
‘Because he thought God was punishing him for overreaching his … mere humanity. For daring to approach … to approach God, I suppose. Head-on.’
‘You mean through the music.’
‘After the soul has withstood the torments of the demons, after his encounter with the Angel of the Agony, as he approaches judgement … he’s given one glimpse – sudden, cataclysmic – of the Holiest.’
‘God.’
‘A glimpse of God, yes.’
‘And Elgar had to convey that in music.’
‘Couldn’t do it,’ Tim said. ‘Or wouldn’t. Shied away from it. As a Catholic, he was afraid it might be approaching blasphemy. Anyway, thought he’d finished – I’ve put my heart’s blood into the score, he said, and sent the manuscript to his publishers. Thought he’d got away with it, but his friend there – friend and confidant – August Jaeger, accused him of bottling it, running scared of the big moment. Jaeger’s saying, you’re not doing enough with this. You’re not showing us God … you’re not giving us the moment. Pushing him. And Elgar, the timid Catholic, going, Can’t. Not humanly possible, almost blasphemous to try to convey in music the ultimate blinding light.’
Tim’s deceptively warlike face glowing now with sweat in the unnatural night whiteness.
‘And this, you see … in my own work, this is Elgar’s most agonized solo. We agreed, Winnie and I, that it should contain elements of foreboding … perhaps a premonition of that disastrous first performance in Birmingham.’
‘Nice touch,’ Lol said.
‘Jaeger was joshing him, knew exactly how to handle the poor chap. He said something like, Of course, conveying the full glory of God, that would take a Wagner…’
Lol nodded. Elgar’s major influence had been Wagner.
‘So Elgar goes back? To try again?’
‘Looks like muso-banter to us now, Jaeger winding Elgar up. But it would have cut him to the quick. Yes, of course he went back.’
‘Back here. To Whiteleafed Oak?’
‘Where else?’
‘And … what happened?’
‘On a basic level, I suppose you’d say he … simply restructured some chords to manufacture a climactic moment. This short series of swiping chords, and then … Do you know G?’
‘To a point.’
Certainly this point. The Guardian Angel had warned the soul that the momentary vision would blow him away with its power. When it finally happened, it was barely flagged-up and it went through your spine, that single chord, every time you heard it, like a razor-edged, shining scythe.
‘You see, my job here … I have to capture the moment it came to Elgar. Or Mr Phoebus fails.’
‘That’s why you’re here?’
‘Have to catch the moment, and more.’
‘More?’
‘No good just copying Elgar, Dan. You have to try to take it further or what’s the point?’
‘Further than Elgar?’
‘Winnie believes that whatever happened to him was so personal and terrifying that he was still afraid to orchestrate the full intensity of it. Clearly, the build-up to that one frightening, revelatory slashing chord was enough to convince Jaeger. Winnie – God knows, Dan, I’m not the bravest chap on the block either – but Winnie believes I can widen the crack in the door.’
‘That’s…’ Lol stepped back. ‘That’s a big thing, Tim.’
‘The biggest.’
‘That’s what the preparation’s all been about? Those three simultaneous choirs in the three churches?’
‘Yes. And the…’
‘She’s not without ambition, is she, Winnie?’
‘And the exercises. The meditation and the visualization. Endless. And the need for Elgar to be part of it. I just couldn’t hack it at first. Too much of an ordinary bloke, Dan.’
Tim sighed, sat down on the grass.
‘There was a girl. On a bike. Legs pumping up and down. For a while we … No!’ His voice going shrill and transatlantic. ‘Don’t you realize you will never have a chance like this again? You gonna throw it all away?’
‘Winnie.’
‘I owe her so much, you see. Saved my life. Made my life.’
Lol said nothing. Tim blotted the sweat from around his eyes with the heel of his palm.
‘Yes, we had a practice, in the three churches. Would have been wonderful to have the three cathedrals, hundreds of choristers, but even Winnie’s energy doesn’t extend that far.’
‘And did you come here – to Whiteleafed Oak – when the choirs were in the three churches?’
‘No, I was at Wychehill, then drove to Little Malvern. It was a run-through. Only a run-through.’
‘Did Winnie think it was going to be just a run-through?’
‘Dan, I was scared. Quite often scared. Gerontius has always scared me. You think it’s easy to live with something so … cosmically huge? Day in, day out? And the nights. Tried to psych myself up, on the quiet. Booze wasn’t doing it. I even went up the hill one night, scored a few – not my thing at all, normally – few grams of coke off— They said I’d killed him, did you know that?’
Lol nodded.
‘I was scared, Dan. This hallowed place. I don’t know. Is it hallowed? Are we fed – still – by the old choirs? Help me.’
‘Would be good to think so.’
And Lol saw it all now. The psychology of it. She said the journey could be accomplished in this life through the use of symbolism. With great art as a by-product.
All it needed was for Tim to believe in it strongly enough, through months of meditation, visualization, conditioning, and the magic would happen.
‘Are you frightened?’ Lol said.
Tim covered his face with his hands for a moment and then tore them away and looked all around at the strange, blanched landscape, a winter landscape in the heat of June. Looked up into the northern sky where the white, gaseous clouds hung like smothered lamps over the southern Malverns.
‘A great orchestral slash of light, Dan. His one shattering glimpse of God. And Gerontius sings … worshipful submission as a kind of triumph…’
Tim
stepping away from the tree, raising his arms, releasing this vast torn and piercing tenor.
‘Take me awayyyyyyyyyy!’
Tim sank to his knees, kept his eyes down.
‘Think it’s time for you to bugger off, Dan.’
‘You need to be alone for this?’
‘Otherwise there’s no courage required,’ Tim said. ‘Is there?’
‘Suppose not.
‘What are you going to do?’
Tim placed a hand on his chest, over the stained singlet.
‘All happens in here.’
‘Right.’ Lol turned and walked away from the oak. ‘Just … be careful.’
Tim grinned.
After a few paces, Lol looked over his shoulder to see what he knew he was going to see: what the combination of the moon and those northern clouds had done to the leaves of the oak.
59
Life-Force
A painfully slow and twisting half-mile short of Whiteleafed Oak, Syd Spicer asked Merrily to feel under her seat for a small leather case.
‘Night glasses. High-tech.’ He cleared his throat. ‘We all loved our gadgets, the Hereford boys.’
‘The Hereford boys.’ She found the case. ‘Look, there’s something I should’ve mentioned, but with Winnie—’
Merrily gripped the sides of her seat. Every time she thought of the name, she saw the breathless mouth, the unseeing eyes. The body ripped up like old clothes. A woman who was sometimes a life-force and sometimes a vampire.
‘We can see this place from some distance, right?’
‘Reasonably well. But there’s lots of cover when you get there. Dells, copses.’
Within a minute, a small green area came up in the headlights. A display case for local notices.
‘This the village?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the five-barred gate?’
‘End of that little lane, but you can’t get … I mean you’ll just block the track.’
‘I’ll pull in here, then. Close your door quietly when you get out.’
At the five-barred gate, Spicer pointed ahead of them. He was still wearing his thin black gloves.
‘Know what that is?’
‘Shiny white clouds. Weird.’
‘Noctilucent clouds. Quite rare. Sometimes caused by chemicals, sometimes natural. Second night this week we’ve had them. Maybe a good thing, maybe not, but something to be aware of. What were you going to tell me back there?’
