by Phil Rickman
Prodding Lol, like he used to do physically when they couldn’t agree about a song or what to do after the gig. Using the word ominous. Talking earlier about a sign. No coincidence; he’d remembered that these were always Lol’s words, that Lol was deeply superstitious. Little Mr Ominous, they called him.
‘You have something in mind, son?’
Lol shook his head, too quickly.
‘Shit.’ Karl’s eyes lit up. ‘You’ve thought about it, haven’t you?’
‘Hasn’t everybody?’
‘Only you. Only you would say that. Look ...’
Karl stood up. Lol shrank back into his chair.
‘... I’ll go, all right? I’ll leave you to think about it, and I’ll try not to worry, ‘cause if you were gonna do it you’d’ve done it by now. Kurt Cobain, fair enough, he was mega, now he’s a legend. But Drake, he did it too soon. And you – you’re just ... I mean, who’d notice? Who’d give a shit? Who’d put flowers on your grave?’
A short while later, Jane crept away, wrapped in a clammy confusion of emotions.
‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ Merrily said, as they walked back into the village, the footpath fringing the orchard. ‘It goes back to, you know, that night.’
‘Ah,’ Lucy Devenish said. ‘Twelfth Night. What a disturbing introduction that must have been to our little community.’
‘After it happened, when we were all deeply shocked and uncomprehending, I heard you whispering, I knew it, I knew it.’
‘You have good ears.’
‘Not specially. What did you know?’
‘Only that someone was going to die.’
‘On that particular night?’
‘I thought it might have been sooner, but when autumn turned into winter and it didn’t happen, I began to suspect it might be something rather extraordinary. The orchard had told me, you see.’
‘Right,’ Merrily said calmly. ‘I see.’
‘Of course you don’t, and who could expect you to? I’ve been close to apples and orchards, and particularly that orchard, all my life. The apple’s the fruit of Herefordshire, its colours glow from the earth, its spirit shines out of the land. And the apples are terribly sensitive, the apples know.’
‘Know when someone’s going to die?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘I see.’
Miss Devenish threw her a glance.
‘Sorry.’
‘What you have to watch out for, Merrily, is uncharacteristic behaviour. Unseasonal phenomena.’
Several apple trees were overhanging the path, although not in a graceful way, Merrily thought. The apple was an ungainly little tree, spiky and irregular.
‘They’re going to be laden with blossom this year,’ Lucy observed.
‘That a good sign?’
Lucy sniffed. ‘Implies a big crop, but nothing’s certain about the apple. Especially this particular species, the Pharisees Red.’
‘Why do they call it that?’
Lucy smiled. ‘You asked me how I knew there was death in the wind. It’s because last autumn there was blossom. Out of season.’
‘Ah,’ Merrily said. ‘An old country omen.’
‘A bloom on the tree when the apples are ripe I is a sure termination of somebody’s life! pronounced Miss Lucy Devenish.
‘Classy piece of rhyming,’ Merrily said. ‘So there was blossom in the orchard last autumn.’
‘As late as November,’ Lucy said. ‘But only on one tree.’
Merrily turned away from the orchard, annoyed with herself, as a minister of God, for shuddering.
‘Before we part, my dear ...’
‘Yes?’
‘I want you to know, whatever you may have heard about me, that I have your best interests close to my heart. And if anything disturbs you ... anything frightens you ...’
‘Like what?’ Merrily saw that the old girl was no longer smiling.
‘Oh, I think I’ll wait for your specific questions. I don’t want to ...’
‘Quarrel, huh?’ Merrily said.
‘And don’t dismiss the orchard. It still surrounds the village.’
Part Two
As in the house I sate
Alone and desolate
... I lift mine eye
Up to the wall
And in the silent hall
Saw nothing mine.
Thomas Traherne, Poems of Felicity
13
The Feudalist
EARLY MONDAY EVENING, Uncle Ted took them back to the vicarage. Apart from the new sink and cupboards in the kitchen, square-pin sockets everywhere and a black hole where the monster electric fire had been stuffed into the inglenook, it wasn’t a lot different.
‘It’s still huge,’ Merrily said hopelessly.
‘Don’t worry, girl!’ Ted squeezed her arm. ‘You’ll grow into it in no time. You and Jane’ll fill this place in no time. In fact’ – he beamed – ‘the way you’ve held things together, you’ve already grown a hell of a lot over the past few weeks. In everyone’s estimation.’
‘That’s very nice of you, but it was just the honeymoon period.’
‘Nonsense.’ Ted chuckled. ‘Dermot dropped in last night to deplete my Scotch. He says you’re holding your own better than he’d imagined. Your Own Woman, he says. That’s good.’
Bloody Dermot. Bloody Ted. She wondered what else they’d discussed. Her delinquent daughter, product of a disastrous marriage to a crook?
She felt the vicarage looming behind her, huge and ancient and forbidding like someone else’s family seat.
‘Merrily,’ Ted said, ‘you’ll come to love it. I’ve been in some really awful, draughty old mausoleums, but this place has such a lovely, warm, enclosing sort of atmosphere that you’ll simply forget how big it is after a while. Especially when Jane has her Own Apartment. Eh?’
Jane grinned. Merrily said, ‘We’ll see.’
Ted vanished into Church Street, Merrily wondering when she would get to meet his widow. Jane disappeared eagerly into the vicarage. Merrily was about to follow her, somewhat less eagerly, when Gomer Parry appeared in the drive, blinking through his glasses, unlit cigarette wagging in his teeth. For a pensioner, Gomer had a surprising amount of half-suppressed energy.
‘Removals, Vicar. What you got planned?’
‘Erm ...’ She’d given more thought to how they were going to spread the stuff around to make the vicarage look less like a derelict sixteenth-century warehouse than the method of actually getting it here.
‘Only, if you en’t made arrangements, see, you don’t wanner go botherin’ with no expensive removals firm when I got a very clean truck entirely at your disposal.’
When you thought about it, it was going to be a bit complicated. ‘It’s all around Cheltenham, you see. All over the place. Some bits in store, some at my mother’s house, some at—’
‘No problem, Vicar. Couple hours’ round trip. Piece o’ piss-cake. ‘Sides which’ – Gomer leaned closer, taking out his cigarette, confidential – ‘keeps the ole truck in business, know what I mean? Minnie, her says the place looks like a bloody scrapyard, I says you never know what you’re gonner need in life.’
‘How many vehicles have you got there, Gomer?’
‘Oh, no more’n four now. And Gwynneth, the digger.’
The mind boggled; it was only a bungalow with a garden.
‘Her’s given me three months to get ’em out, see. But Minnie’s a bit more, like, you know, religious than what I am. So I tells her, if this yere plant-hire equipment is in the service of the Lord ... Get my point?’
‘Understood. Bless, you, Gomer. Look, I’ll pay you in advance—’
Gomer backed off, outraged.
‘All right, the petrol, at least the petrol. Diesel. Whatever. How many gallons – ten, twelve?’
‘Full tank in there already, Vicar.’ He looked up at the house. ‘Three floors, eh? Gonner take a bit o’ manoeuvring about. What I’ll do, I’ll
get my nephew, Nev. Big lad. What day you want us? Any day but Thursday, which is Nev’s day for the cesspits. Oh, and tomorrow. Inquest tomorrow, see.’
‘Inquest?’
‘Edgar Powell. Opened back in January then adjourned. Took ’em long enough to get it sorted. Ole Edgar’ll be compost by now.’
‘You’re a witness, Gomer?’
‘Oh hell, aye. Me and about half a dozen others. Prob’ly drag on till flamin’ teatime. ‘Specially if it’s true Rod’s gonner get Doc Asprey to stand in the box and tell ’em his dad was halfway round the twist.’
‘Why would Rod want him to do that?’
‘Stigma, Vicar. No way do he want his ole man put down as a suicide. So if they got evidence of Edgar bein’ three bales short of a full stack, it’s more likely he done it by accident, see?’
‘Right.’ She did, come to think of it, remember Alf saying Garrod Powell was insisting his father hadn’t taken his own life. ‘And what are you going to tell the coroner, Gomer?’
“Pends what they ask me. All I can say is what I seen. Which is not a lot, on account my glasses got all bloodied up. But before that, I do recall as when the others put up their guns, Edgar, he just didn’t. Now make of that what you like.’
‘I suppose it’ll be a question of whether he just had a funny turn and got all confused, or ...’
‘Or he had it all worked out. Gotter say that don’t ring true to me. He wasn’t no kind of show-off, farmers en’t, as a rule. You’d think if he wanted to do away with hisself, he’d do it in the barn. Yet ... I dunno ... He weren’t daft in any respect, ole Edgar. How ‘bout Wednesday?’
‘That would be brilliant. This is above and beyond, Gomer.’
Gomer slipped his cigarette into his grin. ‘You don’t owe me nothing, Vicar, never think that. But there may be one small thing one day, just one ... How’s the kiddie, now?’
‘Oh God, does everybody know?’
‘Hell, Vicar, don’t go worryin’ about that. They all knows what that Cassidy girl’s like. Too promiscuous by half, Minnie reckons.’
‘I just hope she means precocious,’ Merrily said.
‘Aye,’ Gomer said. ‘That was prob’ly it.’
Jane stood on the first landing, looking up.
‘Hey, listen. Why don’t we just move in? Like tonight.’
Her voice echoing in the emptiness. She was still in her school uniform, the dark blue blazer, the pleated skirt. Merrily, at the foot of the stairs, felt a heart-pang of love and fear that she wouldn’t have been able to explain.
‘How can we do that? Even with Gomer’s help, it’ll be nearly the weekend before we can get all the stuff in and sorted out. Besides, with the Diocese paying for the hotel, it means we can get everything right, for once. Instead of being in the usual chaos.’
Going to be a disaster, she was thinking. You could get all their stuff, beds included, into two rooms; they’d be rattling around like two peas in a coffee tin.
‘We’ve got sleeping bags, Mum. We could spread them out in the drawing room. Get the feel of the place. Go on. It’d be fun.’
‘On those flags? Jane, you are joking.’
Jane stared down the stairs at her. ‘You don’t really want to move in at all, do you?’
‘That’s stupid,’ Merrily said uncomfortably.
All around her, doors. Above her, doors. All of them half open, to signify empty rooms. She wanted to rush from door to door, shepherding Jane before her, banging each one shut and then finally the front door, behind them, as they ran into the square and the sanctuary of the Black Swan.
‘I can tell by the way you talk about it,’ Jane said. ‘Always going on about how big it is. At the Swan it’s kind of temporary, like a holiday. In here you’ve got to face what you’re taking on. Like the full burden.’
God, the perceptiveness of this kid was frightening.
‘Come on, Mum, there’s no shame in admitting it.’
‘I just want to do it efficiently, I ...’
Did it remind her of moving from the flat into the four-bedroomed – it seemed enormous at the time – suburban villa that Sean had suddenly acquired, at an amazingly modest price, from A Client? Somewhere for her to organize, decorate. Somewhere to keep her occupied while ...
‘... I just want it all to be, you know, right,’ Merrily said.
Which, right now, seemed an impossible dream.
‘For a major-league Christian,’ Jane said, ‘you don’t half lie a lot.’
Merrily felt her face darken. The doorbell saved them both.
‘Heard you were finally taking up occupancy. Called to see if I could be of any help.’
No, you didn’t.
‘That’s kind,’ Merrily said. ‘But we’re just giving the place the once-over. We won’t be actually moving in for a couple of days yet.’
James Bull-Davies looked around the empty, dusty hall. Sniffed once, like a pointer on a heath. He’d obviously waited until Gomer Parry had gone. Damn. She’d as good as told him to leave it for a while; he was either dense or simply didn’t believe his family was obliged to bow to the wishes of anyone in Ledwardine.
‘Interesting sermon of yours, yesterday, Mrs Watkins. Wrote that after the meeting, I suppose.’
‘Didn’t write it at all,’ Merrily said brusquely. ‘Came off the top of my head, more or less. Sometimes you have to busk it.’
‘Really. Don’t recall Hayden “busking”.’
‘Perhaps he was just better at it than me,’ she said sweetly. ‘Er, I think I can cobble together a mug of tea, if you have the time. Can’t do any better than that at the moment.’
He looked down at her with suspicion. Perhaps wondering if she’d heard about him being rolling drunk in the square on Saturday night, offering to lay his concubine on the cobbles. She walked through to the kitchen, which had fitted units now but still some of the old formicaed shelves and white tiles. She wrinkled her nose. Not yet her kind of kitchen.
James Bull-Davies shuffled awkwardly in the middle of the flagged floor. She was clearly not his kind of vicar. He didn’t know what to do with her. He wasn’t even happy looking at her, preferred the ceiling.
‘Used to be two rooms, this, as I recall. When I was a boy. That section over there used to be a pantry or buttery or something.’
‘Did you come here often?’ Someone had left a tiny kettle for the Aga; Merrily filled it over the open sink, with all the pipework visible underneath. ‘I mean recently.’
‘Only when there was business to deal with. Parish business.’
Don’t offend anyone called Bull-Davies, Ted had said. The church would be rubble but for them. Strange how things changed; from what she’d heard, Upper Hall was closer to rubble these days. Not a great deal left from the old days. His divorce, presumably, had not helped. Were there children, or was that another source of pressure, the inheritance factor?
Perhaps, after the parish business had been dealt with, he’d have discussed some of his problems with Alf. As his priest, his padre. The way a man like James would never be able to do with a woman because women were mothers or aunts or sisters or you fucked them.
Merrily set the kettle on the stove. Perhaps she was wrong. ‘Sorry, there’s nowhere to sit. We’ll have to lean on the Aga.’
It occurred to her that this was the first time they’d been alone together, the squire and the parsoness he didn’t want in his village. She hoped Jane would stay out.
James Bull-Davies propped himself stiffly against one end of the big stove’s chromium bar, leaving a good two feet between them. A woman in a cassock? Perverse, surely.
Or did it secretly turn him on, like, say, the matron at his public school? Merrily suspected she would never know.
‘That sermon ...’ She squeezed the warm bar. ‘I suppose I was just stalling for time.’
‘Message seemed to be that you were going to lay the whole vexed issue before the Almighty, let him sort it out.’
‘If you want
to look at it that way, yes, I suppose that’s what I’m going to do. In the end.’
‘Way I look at it,’ he said, ‘it has bugger-all to do with God. Question of honour. And responsibility.’
‘Meaning your honour, my responsibility?’
Merrily looked sideways at him, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes, stared across the kitchen, his full lips in a kind of pout. A surprisingly powerful shaft of evening sunlight brutally exposed his bald patch and put a shine on his tightly shaven jaw – he’d shaved again, before coming here?
‘Why did you walk out the other night, Mr Davies? I’d’ve thought you’d have wanted to stay and confront the enemy.’
He lowered his gaze to the stained flags. ‘Perhaps I couldn’t trust myself not to smash his smug face in.’
‘Oh, I think you could. Disciplined, military chap like you.’
He exhaled a short laugh.
‘I mean, I can see your point,’ Merrily said. ‘If he’s got to make a statement about the treatment of gay people, why use a real character who might not, in fact, have been—’
‘It’s personal. It’s political’
‘Yes. Obviously.’
‘Oh, I don’t mean poo/politics. Though obviously that’s the other chip on his shoulder. Coffey fell in love, if you like, with the village, the area. Wanted the keeper’s lodge, bottom of my drive. Wasn’t for sale, but it was empty – had to dispense with the keeper’s services year or two ago, matter of cash flow. But that’s the nearest dwelling to Upper Hall and I wasn’t letting it go for peanuts. Made him pay. Made him pay.’
‘And he resents that, does he?’
‘Look ...’ Bull-Davies levered himself from the stove. ‘He wanted the lodge. I wasn’t touting. Never told him he wouldn’t have to spend a substantial amount of money on the place.’
‘Oh.’
‘Didn’t need that much to make it perfectly habitable. Of course, to turn it into the kind of perfumed brothel he wanted – I mean, the water supply was perfectly fine – nobody has to have a ... a whirlpool bath.’
Merrily tried not to smile. His father would probably have said the same about hot water. ‘So it’s a personal vendetta because of what you’ve cost him. That’s what you’re saying?’
