by Phil Rickman
He turned full into the light, his hands held out in supplication, half an apple in each. His face was creamed with sweat. Even from the back, Merrily could see the film of desperation over his eyes.
He was losing it. He’d gone on too long. Without Coffey’s cohesion, his performance had become shapeless and over-emotional. The dramatic edge was blunt. The audience shuffled and coughed, older Ledwardine folk beginning to see the holes.
And there were holes, despite the research. Richard Coffey had not wanted this because he was not ready, but Stefan had been lured here by Merrily and when the evening was discredited as a piece of faintly tedious, overdramatized, gay propaganda the remaining fragments of her own credibility would go with it.
By the light of a cluster of candles, she could see a satisfied smile on the face of Dermot Child. Occasionally he would glance towards one or other of the police.
He would have told them Lol could well be here. Knowing that the vicarage was now unsafe, where else would she hide him? One of the few pieces of information to escape Dermot’s intelligence net, perhaps, would be Merrily’s appointment as Lucy’s executor, her receipt of the keys to Lucy’s house. Although you could rely on nothing in a village this size.
But where – much as he would enjoy the sight of Lol being taken away with Merrily as an accessory – did Bull-Davies come into this?
She’d followed them into the church prepared to battle this out; now she felt drained again. Get it over. Whatever it is, just get it over.
‘For God was inside every apple.’ Stefan held up the halves. ‘And here had left his mark, the five-pointed star of wisdom.’
‘That’s not God,’ a woman called out scornfully from the middle of the Northern aisle. ‘I’ve seen that. We all know that. That’s a pentacle. It’s satanic. It’s the mark of the serpent! That’s why you’re supposed to cut the apple the other way.’
Stefan reeled for a moment, as if struck in the face and then, in a graceful piece of theatre-craft, came back.
‘There!’ Dropping the apple halves, he arose, pointing, straight-armed, at the woman. ‘This is how it starts. What upon a tree is more beautiful, more wholesome, more sacred than an apple? The whole world is in an apple. The apple was God’s most precious gift to Hereford. The apple heals! And yet ...’
His arm and voice dropped together. He backed against the pulpit, glanced from side to side, hunted.
‘... in the wrong hands, even an apple can be poisonous. And this is how it began. This is where the hounding began.’
In front of Merrily, Annie Howe leaned forward, revealing the fine, light hair cut close to the nape of the neck, the ears exposed, no earrings. Raised a forefinger to someone.
Towards the front, a hand went up. Merrily saw that it belonged to James Bull-Davies, sprawled now in the Bull family pew, an arm stretched along its back. Although every eye was focused on him, he seemed entirely relaxed.
Stefan had left the spotlight, was walking from candle to candle in a circle round the church, showing how the net had gathered around Wil Williams. Who was alone now in Ledwardine, the much-respected Thomas Traherne, although still nominally the vicar of Credenhill, having gone to London as chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgeman. Now Wil had no champion, no defender. No lover was the implication.
‘And one enemy,’ Stefan said, arriving back at the pulpit.
A buzz. With those words he had his audience back. They didn’t want to hear about his sensitivity, his affinity with nature, his perception of the whole world in an apple. They wanted the full, unexpurgated chronicle of hate.
‘We were friends, Tom Bull and I,’ Stefan Alder mused. ‘He was not a well-schooled man, but he had some small understanding of Latin and of the Welsh language and was always eager for news of advances in the physical sciences. He would dine at the vicarage and sometimes I would spend an evening at the Hall and talk of letters we had received from Oxford and London. So what went amiss?’
It was clear that Stefan had not yet noticed James.
‘I will tell you,’ he said. ‘The Bull discovered – or rediscovered – an aspect of himself that he could not bear to confront.’
Stefan rose up several inches in the pulpit, as though jagged lightning was working through his body. Abruptly, he turned away and vanished into the darkness, reappearing at the foot of the pulpit, sitting on a step, full in the spotlight.
‘What do you think?’ he said. And laughed. ‘Tom Bull had fallen in love.’
A tapping on the window this time.
Lol stood in the dark, with his back to the kitchen door. The front doorbell had rung twice, the back door had been knocked on.
‘Mr Robinson? Lol Robinson? Gomer Parry, it is, see.’
Well, everybody knew Gomer Parry, even Lol. Genial, harmless Gomer.
It was the name you’d announce yourself by if you didn’t want to scare someone away, if you wanted them to open the door, nice and quiet ...
‘You listenin’, Lol?’ the voice said. “Cause this is what the vicar told me t’say, see? ‘Er says – you ready for this? – ’er says, have you noticed ... the Dick Drake Moon? Hope I got that right.’
Lol let him in anyway.
Now that the blossom had dropped from neighbouring trees, and because it was lighter tonight than the last time, you could see that the Apple Tree Man was actually very sad. Half-dead. Covered with scabs and sores and his branches stuck up like an umbrella with its fabric torn away, some of the prongs bent.
The more Jane drank, the more bent they would seem against the brown sky and the brick-coloured moon.
She lay with her back to the tree, roughly where she’d lain the night Colette had brought her here. It had been easy to find the Man, in his small clearing, but now she was here nothing was quite as she remembered it. It was a different kind of night.
And a different kind of cider.
She’d come in over the wall from the vicarage, tossing the strong, heavy, dark green bottles before her. The idea she’d had from Lucy, of this traditional Ledwardine drink, made from the legendary Pharisees Red, was that this was the booze endorsed by the fairies, who were the little angels of the orchard, and so it would be like nectar, right? The cider itself would have mystical properties.
She’d eased out the champagne-style cork, expecting an emphatic pop, like a magical starting pistol. This is where it begins. But the cork had merely fallen out and rolled away and, although the bottles must have been shaken up getting here, there was no exciting frothy rush either, just this joyless dribble.
Oh well. Jane had leaned back against the trunk, trying not to think of Edgar Powell with his grizzled old head blown off – that episode was a complete irrelevance – and had gripped the lips of the bottle with her own and thrown her head back.
And then came the real shock.
The Wine of Angels was actually pretty foul.
To begin with, it was dry. Horribly dry. The cider she and Colette had drunk that night in the Ox was cheap and sweet and went down very easily and made you happy and bubbly. But the Wine had this cloying taste that was more like soil than apples. She recalled the first time she’d had real champagne, at a wedding Mum had conducted up in Liverpool, and what a bitter disappointment that had been, especially out of such a brilliant bottle. This was worse.
And this was The Wine of Angels, named by Lucy Devenish.
She sat in the toffee-coloured night and felt like crying. What it was – she was bloody useless on her own. She was just a kid and a townie kid as well. She’d tried to imagine Lucy walking alongside her into the orchard, but Lucy was cold in the mortuary, Lucy was never coming back to the orchard.
Upset and furious and frustrated, Jane had another drink. It couldn’t really be so yuk. Must be another sign of how immature she was that she couldn’t appreciate the quality of a fine cider made to an ancient recipe, fermented in the bottle.
But she wasn’t bloody well going back now. She had to go all the way with this, so that
nobody could say she hadn’t tried. She’d even put on the same old blue Pulp T-shirt she’d been wearing when Colette had first brought her in here. All for Colette.
Do it. Be there for her. Use your contact.
What she needed was to get into the same mood, to find the same state of mind. She went over all the events leading up to the golden lights moment, getting the sequence of it, starting with the outstanding time they’d had in the pub, laughing at people like James Bull-Davies, realizing they had this repartee going between them, that they could be good mates, if not exactly soulmates. Then that sweating boil, Dean Wall, and his cronies eyeing them up and coming after them, the smell of urine from the Gents’ toilets, the flight past the old bowling green to the church porch, the afterhours social club, Colette’s delight at Jane throwing up all over ...
Her stomach lurched at the thought of that and she pressed her hands down on it and belched. This cider was so much gassier. And it wasn’t working. She’d drunk masses of the stuff, or it felt like it, and yet she didn’t seem to be particularly drunk. Certainly didn’t feel at all happy. All the optimism was long gone, the feeling that Ledwardine was her real, preordained home, that she could really function here, help Mum make a go of it, have some laughs with Colette – maybe find some cool guys together – help Lol get himself straightened out and organized and recording again, work with Lucy on re-establishing the natural way of things, become more aware of the orb.
The orchard smelled damp and mouldy. She was sure it hadn’t been like this before. She tried to remember the moment they’d both flopped down under the Apple Tree Man, but she couldn’t. Her only memory was of saying she was dying and then Colette’s voice, so cool, so smokey, so sassy, coiling out of the ground beside her.
You ain’t felt nothin’yet, honeychile.
Those really prophetic words. Like she really knew the score. But it was just some scam to scare Jane. Colette hadn’t known a thing. Not then. And afterwards was far too cool to think she had anything to learn from a weird old bat like Lucy Devenish. But she’d hated to feel she’d been left behind by anybody. She had to be the leader, and on the night of her party she’d impulsively led some kind of raiding party on the orchard, determined to break through to whatever it was Jane had accessed. Bust into what Lucy called the orb, find the contact.
And had vanished.
Search was made for her and she appeared to her friends from time to time, but when they spoke to her she immediately disappeared.
Jane took another swig of the awful Wine of Angels and slumped back with her hair against the knobbly bark of the Apple Tree Man, still clutching the big bottle by its neck. She closed her eyes, lay very still and tried again. She imagined Colette in a land of lights, separated from the orchard by a billowing night mist. The point being that Colette was nobody special in this place; she was learning that there were higher forces and inner structures and that most of the things she thought were really cool were actually quite trivial and insignificant.
It was time for her to return, chastened.
‘Colette,’ Jane whispered. ‘You hear me, you dumb slag? It’s me. I’ve come back. I’ve come to fetch you.’
There was an answering rustle of leaves from somewhere beyond the edge of the clearing. It was probably a fox or a badger, but in her mind Jane turned it into Colette.
She had a clear picture of Colette strolling through the orchard. She could see the nose stud and the red plastic windcheater open over the daring black dress.
The rustling came closer. If she opened her eyes now, she would see ... She was getting shivery vibrations at the back of her neck, remembered Dr Samedi:’... and de drummin’ begin, feel de drummin’ inside, fingers dancin’, dancin’, dancin’up an’ downyo spine...’
Colette. Colette was coming. She was coming back. The urge to open her eyes was overpowering.
But she didn’t. She mustn’t. The moment must be absolutely right.
She must be very quickly seized, without speaking, or she would never come back.
She heard breathing. It wasn’t a fox or a badger, it was her old friend Colette Cassidy, and she’d stop in the clearing, the cynical cow, and she’d go, Aw, Janey, you’re not still here? This is just so sad. And then they’d both crease up laughing.
Come on, lady.
She concentrated on keeping her eyes squeezed tight, tight shut and holding her breath, and putting everything she had into the image of Colette, summoning this incredible detail: a light sheen of sweat on the forehead overhung by a wing of hair, a blob of mascara on the end of an eyelash, the weird red moon glinting in the nose-stud, a slick of crimson lipstick on her avaricious little teeth when she smiled.
She heard Colette’s voice calling to her across the nights.
Look up. For me. Just look up, once. And then we’ll go.
Jane looked up.
47
False Lover
GOMER SAID, ‘DON’T suppose Lucy kept the odd bottle about the place? Helps you think better, it do, my experience. Well, not better, mabbe, but a bit wilder, like. You gotter think wild to get your brain round this kinder business.’
He certainly looked wild tonight. Lol recalled them watching the little guy troop past the shop one afternoon and Lucy saying Gomer Parry was an object lesson on the dangers of retirement. Not the man he used to be. Not the man he was a year ago.
Tonight though, Gomer’s springy white hair was on end like a lavatory brush and his eyes looked hot enough to melt the wire frames of his glasses.
‘No accident?’ Lol said, going through to the kitchen. ‘You sure of that?’
‘Course I en’t,’ Gomer snapped. ‘All I’m sayin’, see, is I’ve used bloody hedge trimmers with more power than that little bike. And it never got much stick from Lucy Devenish. You know Lucy, it makes no sense.’
‘They’re calling it a freak accident.’
‘Freak accident my arse,’ said Gomer. ‘Lucy seen a ewe amblin’ out the hedge, she’d just pull over and wait for the ole thing to get across. This is a country woman, born, bred and what you like, through and through. That woman could sense a sheep from fifty yards. But you try tellin’ that to one o’ these bloody inquests. It’ll be Edgar Powell all over again. Accidental bloody death!’
‘If it wasn’t an accident, what was it?’
‘Suspicious is what it was.’
‘You think somebody killed Lucy?’
‘That’s a wild question,’ Gomer said. ‘But it’s gotter be asked, see. Gotter be asked. En’t nobody else gonner ask it, are they? All right then, it’s n’more than a feelin’. En’t never gonner be no evidence now, coppers’ve made up their minds. Open and shut. Shut for ever, like a lot o’ stuff in this village. But when the wind’s in the right direction ...’
Pulling his tobacco tin from his jacket pocket, Gomer got going furiously on a roll-up.
‘Put it this way, boy. You don’t dig out two thousand cesspits in thirty years without learnin’ what shit smells like. I know the vicar’s taken a few shovel-loads she en’t deservin’ of, and we had a bit of a chat about tonight and ’er says, do me a favour, you go round and talk to Mister Lol Robinson about this and anythin’ else that’s on your mind, give him summat to think about ‘stead o’ worryin’ about the colour of the moon, like.’
‘She said that?’
‘Give or take. So yere I am.’
‘Well,’ Lol brought the presentation case of The Wine of Angels into the living room. ‘I’m glad to see you, Gomer. I’ve been sitting here getting nowhere fast.’
‘We can pool what we got, mabbe. I told you that about Lucy, see, ‘cause I know you and ’er was friends ...’
Lol nodded. Point taken. Resolve strengthened. He put down The Wine of Angels box, the only bottles he could find in the house. Gomer sniffed.
‘No thank you, boy. Once was enough.’
‘Looks like a present to Lucy from the festival committee.’
‘Er was mabbe keepin
’ it to donate to the Christmas raffle.’
Lol observed that two bottles appeared to have been drunk already.
‘Impossible,’ Gomer said. ‘Nobody’d ever drink a second. Wine of Angels? Balls. Must be fifteen year back, Rod Powell, he calls me in to dig out a couple hundred yards o’ drainage ditch. Well, Edgar’d made a few barrels of Pharisees Red cider, strictly for their own consumption, like, and it was a hot day, see, and they gives me a jugful and, by God, that weren’t the kind o’ cider you forgets. And this’ – Gomer brandished a bottle with some contempt – ‘en’t it.’
‘What is it?’
‘Supermarket cider, boy. Pop. Not quite cheap muck, not far off. This never come out o’ the ole Powell cider house, the Bull cider house as was, I’d stake my JCB on it. They bought this in, knowing poor bloody Cassidy and his flash friends wouldn’t know the difference if it come out of a fancy bottle. Now why they done that?’
‘That’s a mystery,’ Lol said dubiously.
‘Aye.’ Gomer’s glasses gleamed. ‘Another bloody mystery, boy. You might reckon that en’t got nothin’ to do with nothin’. But cider, as Lucy used to say, was the lifeblood of Ledwardine. This is central, boy. Central’
‘I know I’m not thinking too well tonight,’ Lol said, ‘but I don’t see where this is going.’
‘Nor me,’ said Gomer. ‘Not yet. But it all smells off. We looks at things and we draws conclusions and sometimes they’re wrong – like the vicar sees all these coppers movin’ in on the church and she reckons they’re after you. I think there’s summat else afoot, but we’ll have to wait and see, isn’t it?’
‘Except we don’t have time to wait,’ Lol said. ‘Merrily’s playing it by ear in there, Bull-Davies is planning to get it stopped and drive her out of the village for good, and a lot of things are ... closing in, you know?’
‘Ar,’ Gomer said.
They stood there in Lucy’s living room, two little guys in glasses who wanted to help and didn’t know how. Eventually Lol said, ‘You know anything about Wil Williams, Gomer?’
