by Phil Rickman
‘I think it’s a probability you should consider.’
‘That he’s written a whole play to get back at you?’
‘Hardly a whole play ... Vicar.’
‘I’m a bit lost here,’ Merrily said. ‘I don’t even know for sure why this would hurt you so much. I know your family’s well-embedded in the village, but, I mean, was one of your ancestors seriously involved in the persecution of Williams?’
Bull-Davies didn’t answer. He looked down at the flagstones and bit his upper lip with his lower teeth, which made him look momentarily feral, and it was at that moment that dear little Jane decided to stroll airily in.
‘Mum, I ...’ As if she hadn’t been listening outside the door. As if she’d had no idea there was a visitor. ‘Oh, hello.’
Bull-Davies looked at the kid and nodded. Merrily said, thinking fast, ‘Jane, if we’re going to spend the evening here, we need to eat. Why don’t you get some money out of my bag and pop over to the chip shop?’
‘They won’t be open.’
‘Yes,’ Merrily said grimly. ‘They will.’
Jane’s eyes had the mutinous look of one who’d been stitched up; she shrugged. ‘OK, then. Can I have a pickled egg?’
‘Get two.’
When the front door slammed, with a vaultlike echo, Merrily turned and faced the Squire. ‘I think we have enough time before she gets back for you to tell me what all this is really about.’
The wooden clock in the fish-and-chip shop window indicated that it wouldn’t be open for another quarter of an hour, so she’d lied again. Mum lied all the time. Like vicars had some kind of special dispensation.
The chip shop was on the corner of Old Barn Lane and the Hereford road. On the edge of the village and therefore outside the main conservation area, which probably explained why it was allowed to exist. It was still a dull-looking joint, denied the brilliantly greasy illuminated signs you found on chippies in Liverpool. Jane turned away and strolled back towards the village centre, wondering if there’d be time to nip into the Black Swan and ditch the uniform.
Circumstances dictated otherwise. As she emerged into Church Street, Colette Cassidy was walking down from the square.
Colette seemed to be studying the texture of the cobbles, and neither of them acknowledged the other until they were about to collide.
‘Hi,’ Jane said, kind of throwaway.
‘How’s it going?’ Colette wore jeans and a black scoop-necked top under a studded leather jacket. But no make-up, no nose-stud. She carried a small brown-paper bag.
‘OK,’ Jane said. ‘I suppose.’
‘Get much hassle?’
‘Bit. You?’
‘They do the motions. Uh ...’ Colette proffered the bag. ‘I got you this.’
‘Oh.’ She took the bag, surprised. It felt like a CD.
‘You were asking about Lol Robinson. That’s his last album, reissued. Well, his band, from way back. One of the guys at school bought one after she read in some magazine how this guy out of Radiohead likes them. When I saw what it was called, I thought you’d ... Anyway, it was the last copy.’
‘Oh. Wow.’ This was unexpectedly touching. ‘That’s amazing. I mean ... thanks.’
‘It was only mid-price,’ Colette said. ‘Don’t take it out of the bag, or people’ll think we’re really sad. Listen, I’m having this kind of a birthday party. My sixteenth. Friday after next. Just guys from school and one or two marginally cool people. And Dr Samedi – this DJ, who’s like really cool. Dr Samedi’s Mojomix? Heavy voodoo, Taney.’
‘Sounds excellent,’ Jane said. ‘Where’s it going to be?’
‘They’re letting me have the restaurant. Big gesture. They’ve promised to go out and stay out.’
‘Are they mad?’
‘Well, Barry the manager’ll be in charge, but he’s relatively OK. Also, it’s got to be invitation only, no riffraff, no lowlife.’ Colette smiled cynically.
‘Cool,’ Jane said. ‘If I tell Mum it’s at the Country Kitchen, no problem.’
‘Good,’ Colette said. ‘Listen. I mean, thanks for not grassing me up about what happened. Like, it was pretty shitty of me, all that Edgar Powell stuff. I was feeling moderately pissed off by then, with those tossers and everything. So, like, thanks.’
‘No problem.’
‘So you gonna tell me?’
‘Huh?’
‘What happened. Weird scenes, Janey. I thought you’d gone.’
‘Gone where?’
‘Like dead. Then suddenly opening your eyes, rambling about these kind of little lights. And then you’ve like, gone again. Coma-stuff.’
Jane felt strange. She looked behind Colette and along Old Barn Street. There was a couple of women with a pram heading down from the Market Cross, no one else in sight. She felt strange, like she wasn’t here at all.
Colette’s eyes flashed. ‘Oh, come on, Janey. Don’t tell me you don’t remember. Don’t shit me.’
‘I don’t.’
‘What did Devenish say then?’
‘She just brought me back. She was just like ... cool about it. I don’t even know how she came to be there.’
‘Lol phoned her. Any crisis, he calls Lucy. She’s like his therapist, poor little sod. He was really shit scared. Wouldn’t go in that big, old orchard in the dark without Lucy to protect him. Well, he wouldn’t go in with me. I think he’s even scared of me. You imagine that?’
Jane didn’t say anything. Colette was trying to recapture ground, saying Lol was scared of her. She decided not to tell Colette about what she’d heard under Lol’s window. Maybe the person to tell was Miss Devenish. Really needed to see the old girl, like soon.
‘I don’t know why the fuck I bothered,’ Colette said bitterly.
On the way back to the chip shop, Jane took the CD out of its paper bag. When she saw what it was called, she gasped.
‘People don’t understand. Think we’re simply stuff-shirted shits. Hunting, shooting and fishing, lording it over the peasants.’
James Bull-Davies stood up straight and still very much the army officer.
‘We merely serve,’ he said. ‘We serve our country. We serve the countryside. Wasn’t for us, the traditional landowners, place just wouldn’t look the same, wouldn’t have the same atmosphere, the same beauty, the same harmony. We’re the stewards. The custodians. We don’t have power. We have responsibility.’
It sounded very noble. It didn’t, however, sound like the man who liked to call his mistress a slinky whore while she called him My Lord. Unless, of course, that was all down to Alison and her feminine wiles, bringing out the feudalist in him.
‘I’m an army man. Understand the army. Well-oiled machine. Puts human relations, dealing with people, into some form of order. You know who you are, what you are. Most chaps like me, when they come out, go on calling themselves Colonel, as though they still have some sort of authority, as though the commoners should salute. Look in the local phone book: Colonel this, Colonel that. Pointless. Meaningless affectation. No time for it. I’m Mr Bull-Davies, now. James, to chaps I wish I’d had in the army, knock off some of the damn pretentions.’
Like Terrence Cassidy, presumably. Merrily smiled to herself.
‘I’ve no illusions.’ James paced the kitchen. ‘Wasn’t expecting it to happen when it did, wasn’t expecting the old man to keel over for another twenty years. But no getting out of it. When the time comes, you have to shoulder the responsibility and that’s that. No arguments. And you become someone else. In the army you’re what you are. No complications. Here – no getting away from it – you’re what your family is. What your family was. You have a responsibility not only to the living – the living people, the living countryside – but also to the dead. You see where I’m heading, Mrs Watkins?’
Merrily stirred the tea in the pot. ‘Army-strength?’
‘Not too strong. Civilian now. Do you know what Cassidy said to me? Came to see me yesterday. Dithering. “But, Jame
s,” he said, “this was a long time ago.” You credit that? Man’s an arsehole. Shows the state of Britain that the rural economy’s now increasingly reliant on specimens like this – bloody caterers.’
His eyes met Merrily’s for the first time. They were pale blue and showed a surprising insecurity.
‘I’m sorry if I speak crudely. You’re ... Well. Never minced words with Hayden.’
‘My last parish was in a rundown part of Liverpool,’ Merrily said. ‘The only soldiers were squaddies back from Iraq. They tended to be the more refined parishioners.’
James barked a laugh.
‘I do understand,’ Merrily said, ‘that three centuries, in the history of a rural family like yours, is not so very long.’
‘I said to him’ – James’s lower lip jutted and curled – ‘Cassidy, I said, you’ve been here about two minutes. In the past three centuries, your family – what anyone can trace of it – has probably lived in a couple of dozen different houses in God knows how many different towns. However many generations it goes back, whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation, this is my family. In my village. How could I possibly condone some fatuous little pageant’ – he spat out the word like a pip – ‘which seeks to demean and ridicule my heritage? Yes, the local magistrate was Thomas Bull. Yes, he was one of the party who confronted Wil Williams. Yes, he was there when they found the body. And yes, he believed the evidence. Yes, he was convinced Williams was in league with the devil and should die for it. He was a man of his time. Homosexuality doesn’t come into it, and I won’t have his memory soiled by some sordid little queer in the name of so-called art and a few dozen visiting trendies paying London prices for fancy fodder at Cassidy’s Country bloody Kitchen.’
He came up to Merrily. The stove was hot against her bottom, but she didn’t move.
‘Went along with the wassailing fiasco last winter because that was at least an attempt at reinstating a tradition. But this festival’s in danger of going the wrong way and dragging my village along with it. Realize there’s going to be some change. Even if I disagree with it. Recognize that your presence here’s part of that change.’
‘And naturally you’re opposed to the ordination of women.’
James backed off a little. ‘There are some who say it strengthens the Church. Have my doubts about that, but there’s nothing I can do now. You’re here, and you at least seem like a reasonable sort of woman, head screwed on.’
‘Thank you very much,’ Merrily said acidly.
‘But you must understand my position, Mrs Watkins. Where my family stands. We have a role. That role, regardless of how we may feel as individuals, is to resist change. It’s what we do. We defend. And so I opposed your appointment, made no secret of it. Well, all right, that battle’s lost, it’s over. You’re here. Generally speaking, under most circumstances, you can now count on my support.’
Merrily said nothing.
‘So long,’ he said, ‘as you remain sensitive to the best interests of this village.’
‘I see. And if’ – Merrily prised herself painfully from the Aga – ‘on some significant and controversial issue, we don’t agree on what those best interests might be?’
‘I really don’t think,’ said James Bull-Davies, ‘that you would ever be so short-sighted.’
‘But say there was. Say there was an issue on which your idea of what was in the best interests of the village was in conflict with what I considered to be morally and spiritually right.’
He sighed. ‘You make it hard for me, Mrs Watkins. And perhaps for yourself.’
Merrily took a deep breath. ‘You haven’t answered my question. How would you react in a situation where we found it impossible to work out our differences?’
‘All right. Depending on the seriousness of the, er, matter under discussion, I should be obliged to use what influence I have. To get you out of the parish.’
Like your wretched ancestor did with Wil Williams? Merrily didn’t say it.
She didn’t say it.
‘Thank you for your honesty,’ she said.
He nodded to her and left before she could pour his tea.
When Jane came back with the fish and chips, she found her mother white-faced and furious, hands wrapped around the chrome bar of the Aga and twisting.
‘Mum ...?’ Jane stood in the doorway, holding the hot paper package. ‘What ...?’
‘Put them in the warming oven.’ Mum’s voice was a small, curled-up thing. ‘We’ll go and get the car.’
‘Car?’
‘And the sleeping bags, if you want.’
‘We’re staying the night?’
‘Yeah. We bloody are.’
‘Oh. What changed your mind? Something he said?’
‘We’re getting our feet under the bloody table. We’re letting the good folk of Ledwardine know we’ve arrived.’
Mum’s hands had stopped twisting on the bar. She was very, very still now.
‘No more shit.’ She’d never used that word to Jane before. ‘No more shit.’
14
Grown Women, or What?
TRUST NOBODY.
OK, not a very Christian maxim, but ...
Merrily dragged a bulging suitcase through the Black Swan’s porch and out on to the steps.
Remembering being in this very spot on Saturday night, in the frozen moments before the James Bull-Davies drama, when Dermot Child had so confidently slipped an arm around her waist, shortly after explaining to her how Cassidy and Powell, politicians both, had nominated her for the role of parish scapegoat.
Stitched up, sexually patronized ... and now, openly threatened.
Stuff them all.
Even less Christian. What was this place doing to her? Were all rural parishes this stifling?
Jane had already carried down a bag full of toiletries and overnight stuff, a few clothes. Merrily had stopped at reception to leave a message for Roland, the manager, who, with the approach of the real tourist season, had been mildly indicating that he could use their rooms more profitably. As a tourist venue, Ledwardine was finally taking off.
Just at the moment, and for the first time, Merrily felt like taking off too. They’d been in Ledwardine over a month, and the only resident she’d felt entirely relaxed with had been Miss Devenish. Of whom the cautious Ted Clowes had once said, Delightful old girl, may be some sort of witch. Don’t be tempted to get too close.
Plaintive music drifted across the residents’ car park, in the yard behind the inn. It was coming from the Volvo, their onetime ‘family car later spurned by Sean for something smaller and faster and, as it turned out, less resistant to impact. The Volvo still had the eight-speaker stereo with built-in CD-autochanger presented to Sean, as such items often had been, by A Client. As Merrily got in, a wispy male voice sang low and breathy over an acoustic wash.
Walked her up and down the garden in the rain.
I called her name.
She didn’t know it ...
‘Turn it down, huh, Jane.’
‘Isn’t it great? It’s like really moving. His girlfriend’s a junkie and he doesn’t—’
‘It’s OK. Sounds like, what’s his name? He killed himself – Nick Drake?’
‘Nick Drake killed himself?’
‘We had all his albums when I was a kid, courtesy of your Uncle Jonathan in his morose phase. Listen, I said we wouldn’t be back tonight, but we’d get the rooms cleaned out by tomorrow night, so that Roland can charge twice as much for them. So don’t make any other arrangements, all right?’
‘Would I?’
‘No, flower,’ Merrily said. ‘You wouldn’t. You’re my very best friend.’
‘Oh please!’ Jane made a vomiting sound. ‘You can’t be that sad!’
Merrily turned on the engine for the first time in days. All she had to do was drive out of the yard, across the square and about thirty yards down Church Street to where the vicarage drive was overhung by a weeping birch. Although she didn’t eve
n get out of second gear, it felt like driving across some distant frontier into another country. A foreign country where no one could be trusted.
‘Oh, I can, flower,’ Merrily said.
Through the eight speakers – on the dashboard, the rear parcel shelf and all four doors – the same voice sang another song, its muted chorus concluding,
... and it’s always on the sunny days
you feel you can’t go on.
Jane picked up the CD box from the dash, running her finger down the track list as the Volvo wobbled over the cobbles. The track was called Sunny Days, and it was followed by one called Song for Nick.
By nightfall, they must have walked all over the vicarage about four times, trying to make it seem smaller. And failing, as Merrily always knew they would.
Yeah, sure, it was a big mistake, coming to camp here – a futile gesture of defiance from Merrily, a silly adventure for Jane.
They were both overwhelmed. Even small houses looked enormous without furniture. Even small, new houses. This place – without a TV set, a microwave, even a bookcase full of paperbacks – was oppressive with age. In the light of naked bulbs, the walls looked grey and damp. Upstairs, where wardrobes had stood, there were great meshes of cobwebs, big as fishermen’s nets.
‘Before ...’ Jane said. ‘Before ... it just looked big. You know what I mean?’
Merrily nodded. Freshly vacated, the house was huge and naked and dead, its skeleton of woodwormed oak exposed – the shrunken remains of trees, killed half a millennium ago, embalmed and mummified in the walls. How, with their minimal furniture, their token pots and pans, could they possibly get its blood flowing again?
‘I wonder if I’m allowed to take in lodgers,’ Merrily said gloomily. ‘Maybe one of those guys who sit in the middle of Hereford with a penny whistle and a dog.’
‘Or four of them,’ Jane said. ‘All with dogs. Barking.’
Because it was so quiet. Whether it was the trees all around or whatever, you wouldn’t know you were near the centre of the village.
