by Phil Rickman
‘I used to think she was given money to go abroad. But now I know they hadn’t got that kind of money. No way. And this is the country. What do you do with nuisances in the country? What do you do with the dog that’s worrying your sheep? What do you do with the badgers you’re convinced are spreading tuberculosis to your cows, even though badgers are officially protected? What do you do with the woman who’s threatening to expose you to the county?’
‘Was she?’
‘No way. She probably just asked for a few thousand quid. Perhaps he was worried she’d be into him for money for the rest of his life, but I can’t imagine she’d have even thought of that. She just went to ask for a bit of help.’
‘Lucy said she was naive. Kind of innocent.’
‘Which would’ve made it even easier for him.’
‘Easier?’
‘To get rid of her. The way people always did in the countryside. With pests.’
‘That’s ...’
‘More difficult than it used to be. But not that much more difficult. I knew it as soon as I came here.’
‘With me?’
‘No ... years earlier. Ten years ago. With a couple of girl friends. Camping holiday. It had been gnawing at me more and more. The number of times I found this place on the maps, circled it and circled it until the biro went through the paper. Then, when Gran died ... I mean, she died hard. She was working well into her seventies, cleaning people’s houses so I could stay on at school, go to university. She died hard and she died full of regrets and remorse – with no reason, whatever, she was a saint, my gran. She died when I was in my final year and I dropped out at once and I got a job and I thought, those fucking rich, smug bastards, they killed my mother and they killed my grandmother, and I ... I just wanted ...’
She was hunched up now, gripping the sides of her chair with both hands. A side of her she’d never before let him see. She tossed back her hair again, getting herself together.
‘So we were on this camping holiday, Julie, Donna – mates from college. I made sure we came here, never told them why. Yeah, it would be twelve years ago, the year after I dropped out. It was a good summer, we hired mountain bikes. I had the route all marked out on the OS map, and when we came to Upper Hall, there he was, the good and great John Bull-Davies, overseeing the haymaking. Sitting on the edge of the bottom meadow in his linen jacket, with his fat bum on a shooting stick. John Bull-fucking-Davies.’
‘How did you know it was him?’
‘I didn’t. At first. I walked over on my own and asked for directions to Canon Pyon. It was very hot, and I was wearing shorts and a skimpy top and sweating profusely, and he said I looked awfully hot and I could probably do with something long and cool. Always remember that. Something long and cool. He leered. Must’ve been in his sixties. Then he saw the other two waiting for me down by the field gate. Too many. Too awkward. So he gave me the directions to Canon Pyon.’
‘You think he’d really have made a play for you, with all the blokes at work in the field?’
‘Absolutely. Probably wanted them to see. The old squire as potent as ever he was. They’ve always fucked who they liked. It was the way. Their right. Droit de seigneur. Before I went back to the bikes, I stood there and looked at him. Full in the face. Memorizing every little, poxy detail. Been a good-looking guy in his time. I stood and I kept on looking at him, until even he became uncomfortable and turned away. Then, that night, in a pub – in this pub, actually – I stared at myself in the mirror and I was nearly sick with disgust.’
The coffee came, and Lol paid for it. It was a different waitress, who clearly recognized Alison, so Lol said, ‘Oh, and Auntie Doris sends her love, by the way.’
Alison poured the coffee with a steady hand.
Cramp in her left leg awoke her.
She’d fallen asleep in the middle of her attempted prayer, head in a curled arm on the duvet. The arm was numb. She was cold. She needed to pee.
She struggled upright, rubbing at the cramped calf. There was no sound from above or from below. What time was it? She groped for the alarm clock, peered at its luminous hands.
Nearly half-twelve. Sunday. The Sabbath. The Working Day. Holy Communion. Morning service. An unusually full church. What would the vicar look like? How would she behave? Would she be pale and penitent? Would she have crimson eyes and drool? However the vicar looked, there’d be enough material for a whole week’s gossip.
The efficient Ted would have rung back while she and Jane were at the lodge, and, on getting no reply, gone ahead and summoned the trusty, retired minister from Pembridge. Making long-term plans, no doubt, to distance himself: a discreet word here, an expression of concern there. Did my best for her, but the traumas of the past, you know. My fault, should have realized her nerves were simply not up to it, parish this size ... all the pressure ...
Pressure on her bladder. Merrily slid her feet into her sandals, found the sweater at the bottom of the bed and pulled it on over her nightdress. Shuffled to the door, aching with weariness, feeling old and beaten, worn out, done in.
For several minutes after she’d finished, she sat there on the lavatory, bowed over, her face in her hands. Her nerves were shot. It made her ashamed. Dozens of people in the village had real, solid, frightening problems – serious illness, recent bereavement, job loss, the prospect of a house being repossessed because they couldn’t meet the mortgage, and, of course, the extreme and constant anxiety and fear when a daughter has disappeared. Compared with all of this, her own problems were meaningless, ephemeral, fatuous.
Merrily washed her hands and face in cold water.
Go back to bed, forget it. Don’t think about tomorrow night either, or how you’re going to organize it; if it’s meant to happen, it will; if it isn’t, let it go, let the original decision stand, no Wil Williams in the church, thank you. Thank you and, if necessary, goodbye. She pulled the bathroom door closed behind her.
Something rushed at her from the blackness. In a vivid instant, she had the clear impression of a hard nucleus of bitter cold, rolling along the lightless passage like a soiled, grey snowball, rapidly gathering momentum, frigidity.
She shrank away, flattened herself against the bathroom door, turned her head into the wall.
The cold hit her. It stank of misery. It wrapped itself around her, a frigid winding sheet. She couldn’t breathe.
She squirmed. Wake up. Lips pulled tight around a prayer: 0 God, yea, though I walk through the darkness of the soul, though my heart is weak ...
At the end of the passage, a light hung over the stairs.
Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake ...
The light was a lean, vertical smear. It wasn’t much, promised no warmth, but she reached out for it, her hands groping for the stair-rail on the landing.
Should she try to run downstairs? She looked down. She tried to call down to Lol, who might not even be there. There was no easier name to say, but she couldn’t say it. ‘L ... L ...’ Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth and all that emerged was a sound like an owl-hoot, weak and lonely, and looking down the stairs was like looking down an endless, cold, black well.
The only way was up.
She looked up, just as the light flared over the stairs, like a small, contained area of sheet lightning behind cloud and she was briefly caught in its periphery, which sent a jagged shock into her still-tightened chest, and she stumbled in panic, fell forward on to the stairs into a clinging, damp vapour, dense with particles of fleeing light, and the wooden stairs under her were very rough and the air around her cold. Cold for January, desperately cold for May. She pulled herself up and was nearly pulled down again because her heart was so packed with pain.
Despair. A worm of liquid despair wriggling inside her. The light flared again for a moment, and she felt a penetrating agony in her chest as she toppled into the attic.
There was no sound but the whine of the night wind in the exposed roof timbers and her own breathing.
&n
bsp; As she pulled herself up, the tightness fell away and she breathed odourless air. Stood, panting on the top floor of the vicarage, a place of dreams, where there were no doors. No bedroom, no sitting room/study.
No Jane.
Only a long empty space, with a sloping roof, where something cold and naked, wretchedly embracing an unending misery, metamorphosed for a wild, defiant instant into a spinning, swirling, silken vortex of silver-grey and then was gone.
39
Levels
DOWNSTAIRS IN THE drawing room of the vicarage, the lights were on. There were brown, smoking embers in the grate. She was wearing a shapeless, green polo-neck jumper over a white nightdress. It was still night. She’d lost a sandal. She felt cold and drained and heartbroken.
And didn’t know why.
‘She’s sleeping,’ Lol said. ‘I went back and stuck my head around the door. She’s fine. Everything’s normal.’
‘Except me.’ Merrily threw coal on the fire. She would never be warm again.
Lol contemplated her seriously through his glasses, round and brass-rimmed like some old, nautical telescope.
She said, ‘Where was I?’
‘At the top of the stairs. Swaying about. I thought you were going to fall’
‘What did you see? What was it like? Was it a kind of big, open space? Rough joists. Damp ...’ Her voice faded. She knew what he was going to say.
‘It was normal. Just like now.’
‘You didn’t go to the right place,’ she said.
‘Maybe not.’ He sat her down on the sofa and positioned himself at the other end, his back against the arm. Ethel jumped into his lap. ‘Maybe not, no.’
Seconds passed. He was thinking.
She said, ‘You’re still wearing your vicar’s gear.’
Absurd reversal of roles.
‘Mm.’ He was calmer than she’d seen him, or maybe that was merely relative to her own condition.
‘Time is it, Lol?’
‘About twenty past one.’
‘You been back long?’ His sleeping bag was on the rug in front of the fire, still rolled up.
‘Hour or so. I was wandering around the garden for a while. Thinking things out.’ He looked down at his black chest. ‘Scared to take these off, I suppose. This guy looks at things objectively.’
‘Let’s put some more coal on the fire,’ Merrily said.
She told him about all the times it had happened before, from that first night when she thought she’d followed Jane and she’d kept opening doors and wound up at the foot of the stairs, looking up to the third floor.
She shut her eyes and rolled her head slowly around, small bones creaking at the back of her neck.
‘And then Sean.’
‘Your husband?’
‘My dead husband. I know it wasn’t a dream, because ...’
She told him about the door handle which fell out again, proving she’d been in the empty bedroom when she saw him and not in her own bed, dreaming.
In the fireplace, cool yellow flames were swarming over the new coal. Lol pushed in the poker.
‘What happened?’
‘I don’t know. I did wake up in bed, and it was morning, and I thought it had been a dream. It was a hallucination, I suppose. I went into that room and I hallucinated Sean. A source of guilt, because I didn’t help him when he needed help. But he didn’t want me to. He had another woman.’
‘You’re the kind of person always feels responsible.’
‘Jane tell you that?’
‘No. I’ve actually started figuring things out for myself.’ He prodded at a cob of coal until it developed fissures and opened up and let more flames through.
‘If it’s not the house,’ Merrily said, ‘it has to be me.’
‘Could it be a combination of both? You and the house setting something off in each other? Or you and the house ... and Jane?’
‘Yeah, I know. Like adolescents cause poltergeist phenomena. I’ve heard all that. But this doesn’t happen to Jane. Nothing happens to Jane here.’
‘Only in the orchard.’
He looked into the fire for a while and then he said, ‘This question of different floors. When you’ve read lots of books on psychology like me ... That’s what I used to read in hospital. They had a library, for the doctors and the staff, with a resident librarian, and I got to know her, and that’s where I used to spend ... days. Whole days, I suppose. Reading books on psychology and psychiatric syndromes. Some of it made more sense than the patronizing crap I was getting from most of the staff.’
‘How did you stand it?’
‘Time passes,’ Lol said. ‘You don’t notice. But, anyway ... levels. The floor where you’re sleeping, that’s where you’re at. That’s your situation. Your husband’s there, your past, all your problems, your insecurities, your fears, your guilt. That’s where you keep opening doors and they lead nowhere, except into the past. That’s where you saw Sean. And when it gets too stifling, just when you feel there’s no escape, you wind up at the stairs leading to the third floor.’
Psychological claptrap. She needed a cigarette.
‘But, up there, Merrily, is the Unknown. It could be Enlightenment. But it could also be madness. You’re afraid of what you might learn.’
‘I didn’t learn anything. I’d fallen asleep in the praying position and woke up feeling really low and beaten and hopeless. But until I went up into that attic, I didn’t know what sorrow was. Or felt like, because I still don’t know what it was. Why I felt so bad.’
‘And it was different.’
‘I wasn’t frightened. I had this freedom up there. The freedom to cry for ever. And I knew I couldn’t. I couldn’t make a sound. Mustn’t be heard.’
‘By Jane?’
‘Jane wasn’t there. Nobody else was there. It was a different time, Lol. It was a time of indescribable unhappiness.’
Merrily wept.
The sorrow she was giving off was so profound, he had to blink back his own tears.
He wanted to hold her.
He didn’t touch her.
He went to make tea.
Later, he lay on the sofa and watched her sleep in front of the fire, curled up in the sleeping bag there like a child, the orange coals and the wire fireguard making glowing, crisscross patterns on her face. The cigarettes and Zippo lighter on the rug, a few inches from her nose, Ethel by her feet.
Never had got around to telling her about Alison. He’d wanted to ask her, How will this end? What can we do about it? He’d asked Alison. She said she had no idea.
But it’ll be on my terms. When I tell him.
You still hate him?
How can I hate him? My own flesh and blood.
Alison had laughed.
Yesterday morning, she’d told most of this to Lucy and then Lucy had died, bequeathing the responsibility to Merrily Watkins.
Lol was back in the alien sweatshirt, the vicar’s clothes neatly on hangers behind the door. Merrily had not told him what had happened when she and Jane had gone to Richard Coffey’s place.
Lol looked at Merrily, sleeping. He thought of Lucy on her back on a mortuary table in Hereford, cold and hatless and awaiting her post-mortem. This made him anxious, too anxious to sleep.
Ethel, the cat, wasn’t sleeping either. She lay at the bottom of the sleeping bag, where Merrily’s ankles were, and she watched Lol, golden-eyed and purring gently.
Merrily’s face was flushed by the firelight. He couldn’t stop looking at it.
Twice in the night, he got up to put more coal on the fire to keep her warm.
40
Bad Year for Apples
‘OH, WOW,’ JANE said.
She was standing in the drawing-room doorway, fully dressed. Lol came up behind her from the kitchen, with tea things on a tray. Over Jane’s shoulder he could see Merrily, hurriedly propping herself up in the sleeping bag.
‘Flower, before you say a word—’
‘Well, well,’
Jane said. ‘So you got it together.’
It was nearly eight a.m. Substantial sunshine had collected in the bay window, coloured pale green by the trees.
‘You slept together,’ Jane said.
‘No!’ Merrily sat up in the sleeping bag. ‘I mean yes, but no.’
‘This’ – Jane ambled into the room, hands on hips – ‘is really quite seriously cool’ She turned, beamed at Lol. ‘And she looks so much better. Don’t you think she looks fantastic?’
‘Yes,’ Lol said honestly. ‘However—’
Merrily stood up. The sun shone through her white nightdress. Lol thought maybe he should close his eyes. Couldn’t quite manage that.
‘That’s it. That is just about enough.’ Merrily looked around for her sweater, failed to find it, covered herself with the sleeping bag. ‘Make some toast, child.’
‘Right,’ Jane said. ‘Anything you say.’
The phone rang. ‘I’ll get that.’ Merrily gathered the sleeping bag around her. Jane giggled. Lol moved out of the doorway. Merrily passed him without a glance.
Lol shut the drawing-room door behind her, faced up to Jane.
‘Vicars don’t lie. Nothing happened.’
‘In which case’ – Jane frowned – ‘you ought to be bloody well ashamed. She doesn’t attract you?’
‘Well ... ye-es ... yes, she does.’
‘God.’ Jane breathed hard through her teeth. ‘She’s not quite a nun. She needs somebody.’
‘But preferably somebody stable.’
‘Oh yeah, somebody really, really stable.’ She glared at him. ‘Come on. My dad was stable. My dad was this like utterly focused individual who knew exactly where he was going the whole time.’
‘I thought he was bent.’
‘And getting away with it! Because he knew he could. Because he was stable inside. Focused. Balanced. Never worried about anything, not really. My dad thought a neurosis was ... was ...’
‘Something you can grow in a window box, with care.’
‘Yeah. Exactly. So, you know, screw stable. Life’s too short. Look, I know you’ve had your problems. I listen at doors sometimes, I’m not afraid to admit that.’
