The Prayer of the Night Shepherd mw-6

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Entertaining Mr Largo, somewhere or other. Don’t panic, lovie, it’s a week or so off yet. We’ll get some more lights by then. We’ll get the plumber. We’ll make this place look almost festive. Well, the bits we allow them to film…’

  ‘Film?’

  ‘Oh, I think so.’ Nat jumped down. ‘Good, eh?’

  And when Amber had edged anxiously away, Nat smiled and shook her head, and Jane said, ‘Why don’t you want to pinch his glory? It’s all down to you.’

  ‘Just that she may not thank me when she finds out,’ Nat said. ‘He’ll maybe want to choose his time, Jane. She hates this place enough already. If she knew there’d been a murder, it might not—’

  Jane came down from the bar top in a hurry. ‘You’re kidding…’

  ‘Long time ago — before World War Two. Pollen told me, and I checked it out with that guy Sampson who played the Major. And then I told Ben.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He decided to keep it to himself for a while. Just a domestic thing, Jane. One of the Chancery women killed her husband. No big mystery, no need to gather the suspects in the drawing room. She was pissed at the time, apparently.’ Natalie started to bundle the alleged Christmas lights together on the bar top, and they sent blue and yellow stripes flaring across her face. ‘On the one hand it adds to the atmosphere of the dump, on the other… might put some people off. You don’t know, do you?’

  Jane said, ‘Erm… did it happen in one of the bedrooms?’

  ‘I think it was outside, actually. In the gardens.’

  Merrily told Sophie that sometimes she wished she was a Catholic or belonged to some hardline Nonconformist sect with strict liturgy and rules instead of guidelines.

  ‘Just it would be nice to meet two Deliverance ministers who operated to the same rules.’

  ‘Is Jeavons a Deliverance minister?’ Sophie asked.

  ‘Not strictly. But… yeah, of course he is. In the cause of healing the sick, he actually goes further into it than most of us. This is where Deliverance meets Healing — the healing of the dead.’

  ‘His wife?’

  ‘Catherine.’ Merrily watched her cigarette end smouldering in the ashtray. ‘This cool, fiercely intellectual, academic theologian.’

  Jeavons had said that he and Catherine had been married in New York, where he was a priest and she was lecturing. As she was English and he’d lived here too, he wanted them to marry in England, but Catherine wouldn’t hear of it. Nor would she invite her parents to the ceremony. And when the Jeavonses did eventually come back, as a married couple, she didn’t even notify them.

  ‘Whatever she told Jeavons about her background, it wasn’t the truth. Some years later, Catherine’s father made contact with Lew. Someone had sent him a local newspaper picture of the Reverend and Mrs Jeavons when Lew became rector of a parish in Lincolnshire. The old man said he and his wife had parted and he’d very much like to get in touch with Catherine again.’

  Jeavons had been surprised to discover that Catherine’s father was a fairly well-known Cambridge theologian, H.F.H. Longman. Longman told Jeavons there’d been a row about an unsuitable boyfriend while Catherine was at university. But Catherine still refused to see her father and became very agitated that he knew where she was — so much so that Jeavons had to negotiate a parish-swap, which was how they’d wound up in Worcestershire.

  Merrily looked down into Broad Street: nearly dark now, the lights misting. Sophie poured more tea, and Merrily told her about the second time Catherine’s father had been in touch — when he was terminally ill, begging Lew to persuade his daughter to see him one more time before he died. Jeavons had told her she’d regret it if she didn’t, and perhaps something would be lifted if she did.

  Although in the end she gave in, Catherine had refused to have Jeavons with her at the Cambridge hospice, where Longman was in his final coma.

  Sophie leaned back into the shadows behind the desk lamp.

  ‘When she got home,’ Merrily said, ‘Jeavons was leaving for an international conference in Cape Town. When he got back, about three weeks later, she’d lost weight, her hair was unwashed, she’d been drinking. He found bottles of whisky under the sink. And she was… distant. Didn’t want to talk to him. And then she moved her stuff into a separate bedroom — a temporary thing, she said. She just needed time on her own. A few weeks later, she had a minor heart attack.’

  I took my eye off the ball, was how Jeavons had put it. And he’d done it again, after the doctors had given Catherine a tentative all-clear and the situation between her and Lew was gradually restabilizing. Took his eye off the ball, because this was when he was being courted by both the Church and politicians. He’d thought she’d secretly like the idea of him in episcopal purple.

  When Catherine had the second heart attack, Lew had thrown himself into three desperate days of prayer and hands-on. Rarely left her bedside, never slept, the bitterness and self-recrimination lasting long after Catherine’s funeral and the memorial service and Lew’s rejection of the purple.

  ‘He’d located Catherine’s mother to ask if she wanted to be at the funeral, and she hadn’t even replied but, some months later, he tracked her down. He said he was in a rocky mental state himself by then — could often feel Catherine’s presence in the rectory. He… said he awoke one night and saw her in the doorway of his bedroom. But he could only hear the sobs as echoes.’

  At this stage, Lew had said, he was close to dumping his ministry, having been offered a teaching and community post back in Brooklyn. He’d had his letter of acceptance in his pocket, ready to post, when the mother-in-law he’d never met had arrived without warning at the rectory and he’d finally learned the truth about his dead wife’s relationship with her father.

  ‘Oh God,’ Sophie said irritably.

  ‘Intellectual sparks between a father and his brilliant daughter. Her mind excited him — Longman used to say that, apparently. When she was at Oxford, he’d visit her at weekends.’

  Sophie snorted.

  ‘Jeavons said he’d often suspected there might have been someone else, someone she still thought about. Remembering the “unsuitable boyfriend”. Never imagining how unsuitable the boyfriend might actually have been.’

  ‘It’s more common than we might imagine among the so-called educated classes,’ Sophie said. ‘They encourage their children to be “liberal-minded”. Makes me sick.’

  Merrily shook out a cigarette. ‘The reason Catherine’s mother had come to see him was that she also was experiencing problems. Maybe it was guilt at having walked away, or at her own resentment of Catherine. Understandable. It’s often hard to draw a line between mental unrest and… and the other thing. Lew brought in another minister, a friend, to bless the vicarage, sprinkle holy water around in the room where Catherine had slept. Then they held a Requiem Eucharist for Catherine, in the presence of her mother. Which, in normal circumstances, you might expect to resolve it.’

  ‘It didn’t?’

  ‘Got worse. He didn’t go into details. But he gave back word on the Brooklyn job and just spent a lot of time praying for an answer. Also, putting himself through a kind of ritual scourging — sleeping in the bedroom that Catherine had switched to, because he felt it was… their room, you know?’

  ‘The father?’

  ‘Jeavons felt that the fact that she’d been there, at the hospice, when the old man died, even if he wasn’t conscious — at least, she thought he wasn’t conscious — that this might have… created an opening. Maybe something had been reclaimed, something renewed. Her father had wanted her back with him. You know?’

  Sophie’s face was hollowed behind the lamp. ‘That’s horrible, Merrily. Sick.’

  ‘Lew didn’t know what to do, or who to turn to for advice. Just kept on returning to that bedroom every night, with his Bible, and whenever he awoke — which was several times every night — he’d pray for help. He maintains that to heal we
often have to suffer. A priest must go on suffering, without complaint, until something turns around. And you don’t have to look very far into the New Testament for his sources, do you?’

  Sophie looked momentarily anxious and then stern. ‘I do tend to wonder if you really need this, Merrily.’

  ‘Tell a woman about the need for suffering and you touch a very deep seam. Anyway, it came to Lew one night that there should be a Requiem for this person he’d grown to hate: H.F.H. Longman. So… Lew Jeavons, his mother-in-law, his Deliverance friend and two other colleagues gathered in the bedroom. Lew doing the honours. Part of the suffering.’ Merrily paused.

  ‘And?’ Sophie said.

  ‘He told me he went to bed that night for the last time in that room. And he awoke in the night, as he always did, but this time he didn’t feel the need to pray. He simply turned over and… and the other side of the bed was warm. He got out of bed, pulled up the sheets and went back to their old room.’

  Sophie leaned forward into the lamplight. Merrily felt the heat of her own tears and was irritated somehow.

  ‘He gave me a copy of a book called Healing the Family Tree by Kenneth McAll, who was a priest and a doctor. I knew about it, never read it. It argues that your mental and physical health is often conditioned by your ancestors. They fuck you up, your mum and dad, and their mums and dads and so on.’

  ‘Genetics.’

  Merrily shook her head. ‘Maybe related — I’m no scientist. Jeavons spent about three years researching all this, here and abroad. Visiting societies where the placating of the ancestors is still considered all-important. Which was controversial, as some of them were more or less pagan.’

  ‘He thinks his wife was in some way destroyed by her father from beyond the grave?’

  ‘Lew thinks if he’d known what he was looking for, if the so-called maladjusted essence had been dealt with earlier, Catherine might still be alive. Like so much of this job, it’s hard to separate the spiritual from the psychological. He also talked about this tennis player, Kim Redmond, who was supposed to have been cured of MS. Jeavons said he spent a lot of time talking to Kim, and it came out that the kid’s father and his grandfather were both doctors. And the grandad was furious when Kim walked out of medical school with his tennis racquet — accusing him of betraying the family and his obligations to the sick.’

  ‘As if medicine was an ancestral obligation?’ Sophie said. ‘A tribal thing?’

  ‘Mmm. During Kim’s first Wimbledon, grandad dies. By the end of the week, just after the funeral, the kid’s having nightmares, beginning to feel his body is no longer his to control. His game’s shot to pieces, the doctors eventually start to suspect the worst. Jeavons’s solution was a serious Requiem for the old man, conducted at the church where the funeral had been held.’

  ‘And it obviously worked.’ Sophie followed tennis.

  ‘Or something did. The docs said it was probably an initial misdiagnosis. Which they would, wouldn’t they? Similarly, you could say that the Requiem — the emotional weight of this ancient, solemn ritual — had an immediate psychological effect on Kim, removing the burden of guilt and related symptoms. Anyway, Jeavons says we generally do half a job.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Us. Deliverance. Because most of us don’t take into consideration the true psychic weight of the family or tribe. And because we’re only concerned about the dead when they’re conspicuously haunting us. Jeavons’s view is that the dead always haunt us, whether we’re aware of it or not.’

  Sophie sat up. ‘That’s untenable. He’s virtually saying every one needs deliverance.’

  ‘To a degree.’

  ‘And then, in no time at all you’ve become like that man Ellis, exorcizing everything from the demon drink to the demon—’

  ‘Tobacco,’ Merrily said. ‘Not as bad as Ellis, maybe, but it’s… perplexing.’

  ‘It’s the quickest way to a nervous breakdown, if you ask me,’ Sophie said. ‘My advice, for what it’s worth, is to avoid this man and all he stands for.’

  ‘He’s a very influential voice in Deliverance worldwide. He showed me his computer files. He’s in contact with more than three hundred priests, in the US, Canada, Africa, Australia… all submitting records of their work, building up this huge database on the healing of the dead. There are people out there who’ve been trying to heal… I dunno, Hitler?’

  ‘Stop.’ Sophie pointed at her, very calm, very stern. ‘Stop now. Don’t go near that man again, Merrily. Just don’t.’

  11

  Welshies

  The smoky dusk was settling over Stanner Rocks when Gomer Parry picked Jane up in his truck, and she wondered if he could see some kind of glow coming off her.

  ‘Cold ole night, Janey. Gonner have at least one big snow before Christmas, I’d say.’ Gomer’s teeth were clenched like a monkey wrench on his ciggy.

  With Antony Largo as the only guest, Amber and Ben didn’t need Jane to stay over, so she’d phoned Gomer and arranged for a lift home. But before she left, Antony had cornered her, and put this proposition to her and… it was like incredible.

  ‘Me and Danny, we falled this ole dead oak for Mrs Maginn, Cwmgaer,’ Gomer said. ‘Then we sets up the tractor and the sawbench, cuts him up for her stove.’

  Gomer was now spending most days at Danny Thomas’s farm in the Radnor Valley, ten minutes from Stanner, while his yard was cleaned up after the fire and the big shed was being rebuilt. Danny was Gomer’s new partner in the plant-hire business — which made all kinds of sense, with Gomer’s nephew Nev dead and Danny having discovered how much he hated farming.

  Rural serendipity.

  In the dimness of the truck, with no dashboard lights working, Jane watched the tip of Gomer’s ciggy receding towards his mouth. He had to be over seventy now, not that anybody would ever prove it. Mum always maintained that Gomer had his own organic generator, and you could sometimes see light in his glasses when there wasn’t any around to be reflected.

  Serendipity. Maybe Antony would change his mind. Maybe it wouldn’t happen. She wouldn’t be holding her breath exactly. But, like… wow.

  ‘Hope that bugger’s still paying you, Janey.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Foley. Word is he en’t doing brilliant business. Danny’s Greta’s sister, she yeard as they wanted help in the bar over Christmas, and then when she gived ’em a call they said they was all right now. But there en’t been nobody else took on, otherwise her’d have yeard. Don’t miss a thing yereabouts, Gret and Gret’s sister.’

  ‘That’s bollocks.’ Jane was annoyed. It was sunk deep into the collective psyche of this area: the joy of failure. ‘In fact, things are really picking up. They’ve just had a major conference booked.’

  ‘From Off?’

  ‘Of course from Off. Off’s where the money is, Gomer.’

  ‘True.’ Gomer wasn’t parochial himself, he just mixed with people who were.

  ‘And Nat can handle the bar, anyway.’

  Gomer slowed for the roundabout at the end of the bypass. ‘This’d be Miz Natalie Craven, Jeremy Berrows’s… friend.’

  ‘Why, what are they saying about her?’ Jane had often wondered, although she could probably guess.

  ‘Oh… hippy,’ Gomer said. ‘Not Danny, mind. He don’t call her that.’

  That was probably because Danny was a real hippy, Jane thought, as Gomer cleared the roundabout and the sporadic lights of Kington were behind them, dark fields on either side.

  ‘There was plenty folks, see, wanted Jeremy to get back with Mary Morson, after this do with the plant feller from the Rocks — well, Mary’s ma, partic’ly, on account of Jeremy’s worth a bob or two. This plant feller, he was just on some Government work scheme. Gone now, and never even said he was off.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Gomer, I’m not getting this.’ She was interested, naturally: the enigma of Nat and Jeremy.

  ‘Mary Morson, her was engaged to Jeremy?’

  ‘OK.�
�

  ‘Two year or more, sure t’be. Then her goes to this rock music night at The Eagle, with some mates. Meets up with this smoothy plant feller.’

  ‘You mean one of the botanists working on the Rocks? For the Hereford and Radnor Nature Trust?’ There was a study project, Jane knew, centred on this rare plant, the Early Star of Bethlehem, found on Stanner Rocks and virtually nowhere else in Britain.

  ‘Sure t’be,’ Gomer confirmed. ‘Bit of a fling. ’Course, Mary Morson reckoned her could easy go back to Jeremy on account of Jeremy, he en’t going nowhere, is he? He don’t never go nowhere, that boy, won’t leave his stock no more’n half a day. But meantime this Natalie turns up sudden, with the kiddie, in this van. No accounting for circumstance, Janey.’

  ‘Served the bitch right, if you ask me.’

  Gomer’s grin flashed in the gloom. ‘Exackly what Danny’d say. Danny reckoned her was good for Jeremy, this Natalie. Bring him out of ’isself.’

  ‘Quite right,’ Jane said. She stared at him. ‘Was good?’

  Gomer clamped his teeth on about a millimetre of ciggy. ‘Boy en’t right, n’more, Janey.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  But he just shook his head and said nothing, and Jane didn’t push it. Maybe she ought to have pushed it, if only for Clancy’s sake, but everything else was looking too good tonight.

  The heavy stuff started for Danny not long after he got in. It started with Greta pulling off the left-hand channel of his big old Wharfedale cans and booming down his ear like her was taking over lead-vocal.

  Danny sat up. ‘Who?’

  Greta said it again, slowly. ‘Jeremy Berrows. Needs help. At The Nant. Urgent. Won’t tell me n’more, but you just be careful what you takes on, Danny Thomas, because—’

  ‘Bugger.’ Danny blinked at the telly, the Foo Fighters still roaring somewhere in his brain. The telly was on, but Danny had been watching the wood-burner, like he always did when he had his music playing on winter nights, just gazing and gazing into the glass. They had these lovely barn-dried ash logs on there tonight, burning bright orange and molten gold, just coming up to perfection, and he could smell his tea, cheese toasting, and the curtains were drawn against the cold black night and… Bugger!