Crybbe

CHAPTER V

And let's pray now,' Murray Beech said, head bowed, 'for the soul of our brother Jonathon Preece…'

Kneeling in a back pew, Fay tensed.

'… taken so suddenly from the heart of the agricultural community he served so energetically. Those of us who knew Jonathon – and can there be any here who did not? – will always remember his tireless commitment to the Young Farmers' movement and, through this, to the revival of an industry in which his family has laboured for over four hundred years.'

Powys slid the Uher into the empty pew next to Fay and stepped in after it. Fay kept on looking directly ahead, over the prayer-book ledge, seeing, near the front of the church, the heads of Jack Preece and Jimmy Preece. One of the few places you ever saw these heads uncapped.

'And we pray, too,' Murray intoned passionlessly, 'for the Preece family in its time of sorrow and loss…'

Fay saw young Warren Preece, head nodding rhythmically now and then, as if connected to some invisible Walkman.

Saw Mrs Preece, Jimmy's wife, hands clasped in prayer, expecting to see a damp tissue crumpled in her palm. But Mrs Preece, seen side-on, looked as dry-eyed and stern as her husband. They seemed to have their eyes open as they prayed – if indeed they were praying.

Looking around. Fay found that even-one's were open, everyone she could see.

Crybbe: a place where emotions were buried as deep as the dead.

Wisely, perhaps, Murray didn't make a big deal of it. He went into the Lord's Prayer and didn't mention Jonathon Preece again.

Fay relaxed.

What had she expected? A denunciation from the pulpit? All heads turned in mute accusation?

Whatever, she breathed again. And became aware of the significance of something she must surely have noticed already – the presence of her father, on the end of a pew two rows in front of her and Powys.

The Canon went to church every Sunday, sometimes attending both the morning and evening services. He sat near the front and sang loudly – 'Bit of moral support for young Murray – boy needs all the back-up he can get.'

So what was he doing further back, a couple of rows behind the nearest fully occupied pew? Could it be something to do with there being only one other person on Alex's pew and the person being at the same end of the pew as Alex? And being a woman?

'Bloody hell,' said Fay to herself. 'He's found a totty.'

Guy Morrison woke up into the greyness of… 5. a.m., 5.30?

He found his watch on the bedside table.

It told him the time was 11.15.

For crying out loud! He turned over and found he was alone in a king-size bed of antique pine, in a pink-washed room with large beams in the ceiling and a view, through small square panes, of misty hills. He'd never seen this view before.

Guy lay down again, regulating his breathing.

He saw a door then, and a glimpse of mauve tiles told him it led to an en suite bathroom, which put him in mind of another bathroom, full of seeping yellow.

With a momentary clenching of stomach muscles, everything came back.

He remembered peeing on his shoes in the dark paddock because she wouldn't let him return to that bathroom – not that he needed much persuading.

He remembered them staying in the kitchen for a long time, drinking coffee – him not talking much and not listening much either, after she'd been gushing like a broken fire-hydrant for an hour or so – until it was nearly light and she'd decided it was safe to go to bed. This bed. He remembered waking up periodically to find her hanging on to him in her fitful, unquiet sleep and wondering how he could ever have found her so attractive.

Guy pushed back the duvet to find he was naked, and he couldn't see his clothes anywhere. If he went downstairs like this it would be just his luck to find the vicar and the entire bloody Women's Institute having morning coffee in the drawing-room.

He went into the en suite bathroom, looked at himself in the mirror and was horrified at the state of his hair and the growth of his beard, detecting a distressing amount of grey and white stubble. He looked around for something to shave with – normally, he used a state-of-the-art rechargeable twice a day – and could find only a primitive kind of safely razor.

Remembering, at this point, the old man with the cut-throat razor in the other bathroom. And hours later in the well-lit kitchen, thrusting aside his fourth cup of coffee, asking her directly, 'Are you telling me it was a ghost?'

He'd once done a documentary about ghosts. They were, the programme had suggested, nature's holograms. Something like that. You might get images of the dead; you could just as easily have images of the living. When the phenomenon was eventually understood it would be no more frightening than a mirage.

This one was frightening, he supposed, only briefly, in retrospect. What had he really felt when he saw the glow around the door and then walked into the bathroom and the old man had looked up and met his eyes? Fear, or a kind of fascination?

Did this old man have eyes? He must have had. Guy couldn't recall his features. Only a figure bent over the wash-basin, shaving. The image, perhaps, of a man who had lived in this house for many years and perhaps shaved thousands of times in that very basin – well, perhaps not that actual basin, but certainly in the room. And this mundane, everyday ritual had imprinted itself on the atmosphere.

The apparition was frightening, Guy decided, because it happened at night during a power cut. Also, because he feeling a few misgivings about what he'd got himself into a was perhaps a little jittery anyway.

Guy shaved with the razor, his first wet-shave in years, and cut himself twice, quite noticeably – no pieces-to-camera for him for a couple of days. Perhaps this chap didn't have an electric shaver because he couldn't rely on one with all the power cuts they apparently had. Jocasta had gone on and on last night about the power cuts and the exorbitant electricity bills. How living in the country wasn't a simple life at all and certainly not cheap. How she couldn't get out of here fast enough. How her poor husband was weak and naive beyond comprehension.

Guy didn't like the sound of that bit at all, much preferred screwing happily married women whose only need was a touch of glamour in their lives.

The true horror of the night, now he thought about it, had been the hours he'd spent with a furrowed-faced Jocasta in the kitchen afterwards, listening to her whingeing on and on.

'Guy, where are you?'

He looked around the bathroom door and saw her standing by the bed. She wore a floor-length Japanese silk dressing-gown and fresh make-up. Facade fully restored. She must have spent an hour or so in here before he was awake.

'Good morning, Jocasta.' Guy stepped naked and smiling into the bedroom, forgetting about the two cuts on his face, staunched by small pieces of soft toilet tissue. Perhaps… Perhaps he could afford to give her just one more…

But she didn't look at him in any meaningful way. 'Please get dressed," Jocasta said crisply. 'I want to show you something.'

Guy's smile vanished.

'Your clothes are in Bedroom Two, across the passage. Coffee and croissants in ten minutes.'

And Jocasta swished away, leaving him most offended. Women did not turn their backs and swish away from Guy Morrison.

When he arrived in the kitchen nearly twenty minutes later, he was fully dressed, right up to his olive leather jacket, and fully aware again of who he was. He accepted coffee but declined a croissant. He must, he said, be off. Perhaps she would give him a time for the exhibition opening, keeping it as light as possible because he had quite a few people to see.

Jocasta pushed a large folder towards him across the kitchen table. 'I'd be glad,' she said, 'if you could take a look at these.'

'Look, I am rather pushed…'

'It won't take a minute.' She was very composed this morning, probably embarrassed as hell about last night's tearful sequence. He opened the folder in a deliberately cursory fashion. What the hell was all this about? Was he expected to buy something?

The drawing was pen-and-ink. The face was inspecting itself in a mirror. Every wrinkle on the face – and there were many – was deeply etched. The eyes were sunken, the cheeks hollow, the nose bulbous.

Guy inhaled sharply. He looked up at Jocasta in her Japanese dressing-gown, could tell she was working hard to hide her feelings, holding a mask over her anticipation. Anticipation and something else. Something altogether less healthy.

He looked down at the drawing again. He felt a deep suspicion and a growing alarm.

'Is this some son of joke?'

'Is it him?' Jocasta asked.

'I don't know what you mean. Who did these?'

'Is it him?'

Of course it was him. It was either him or Guy was going mad. His deep suspicion was suddenly drenched in cold confusion and a bitter, acrid dread.

'Look at the next one.'

All the sensation had left his fingers. He watched them, as if they were someone else's fingers, lifting the first drawing, laying it to one side, face-down on the table.

He didn't understand.

A moment earlier, he saw, the old man had slashed his throat. The open razor had fallen from one spasmed hand – it was drawn in mid-air, floating a fraction of an inch below a finger and thumb – while the fingers of the other hand we pushing into the opened throat itself, as if trying to hold the slit tubes together, to block the tunnels of blood.

The blood was black ink, blotch upon blotch, spread joyously, as if the pen nib was a substitute for the cut throat razor.

Guy thrust the drawing aside, came raggedly to his feet. He stumbled to the sink and threw up what seemed like half a gallon of sour coffee.

It was not the drawing, he thought as he retched. It was the knowledge of what, if he'd stayed a moment longer in the bathroom last night, he would have seen.

He wiped his mouth with the back of a hand, saw Jocasta watching him in distaste, knew exactly what she was thinking: that perhaps all men were as pathetic as her husband.

'I'm sorry,' Guy said. He washed his hands and his face, snatched a handful of kitchen towel to wipe them. No, dammit, he wasn't sorry at all.

'I think you owe me an explanation,' he said coldly.

Murray Beech leaned out of his pulpit, hands gripping its edges, as if he were sitting up in the bath.

'And what,' he demanded, 'is this so-called New Age? Can there be any true meaning in a concept quite so vague?'

He paused.

'The New Age,' he said heavily.

He glared out into the church – late-medieval and not much altered. 'Some of you may remember a popular song, "This is the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius".'

'He's going to knock it, then,' Powys whispered to Fay.

'Well, of course he's going to knock it,' Fay said, out of the side of her mouth. 'That's why I'm here.'

The Uher sat on the pew at her side, its spools turning, the microphone wedged between two prayer books on the ledge, she was recording the sermon for her own reference. She wouldn't get anything of broadcast quality at this range and she hadn't got permission anyway. She'd talk to him on tape afterwards, throw his own words back at him and see how he reacted.

'"Harmony and Understanding",' Murray quoted. "Sympathy and Trust Abounding".'

Alien concepts in Crybbe, Fay thought cynically. The vicar's words must be settling on this comatose congregation with all the weight of ash-flakes from a distant bonfire.

Caught in white light from a small Gothic window set high in the nave, Murray Beech – light-brown hair slicked flat, metallic features firmly set – was looking about fifteen years older than his age. A man with problems.

Fay's dad shuffled and coughed. He didn't know she was there.

Who was this woman, then? Slim and small-boned, she wore a wide-brimmed brown felt hat which concealed her hair and neck.

The Vicar announced there would be a public meeting in Crybbe on Tuesday night, when the members of this congregation would be asked to consider the merits of the New Age movement and decide to what extent they would allow it to infiltrate their lives.

Now, he had no wish to condemn the obviously sincere people who offered what appeared to be rather scenic shortcuts to their own idea of heaven. Indeed, it might be argued that any kind of spirituality was better than none at all.

The Canon coughed again; the woman next to him was very still. Almost… almost too still.

'We have a choice,' said Murray. 'We can pray for the strength and the will to confront the reality of a world defiled by starvation, injustice and inequality – a world crying out for basic Christian charity.

'Or,' he said, with the smallest twist of his lips, 'we can sidestep reality and amuse ourselves in what we might call the Cosmic Fairground."

Everyone alive moved a little, Fay thought, watching the woman. Even sleeping people moved.

No. Not here. You can't follow him here. Not into church.

Murray hauled himself further up in his pulpit, raised his voice.

'How appealing! How appealing it must seem to live in a little world where, if we're sick, we can pass off the health services and the medical advances of the past hundred years as irrelevant and call instead upon the power of… healing crystals.'

Powys smiled.

But Fay had stiffened, feeling the tiny hairs rising on her bare arms. Her father's face was turned towards the pulpit. He had never glanced at the woman by his side. Fay thought, I can see her, but can he?

'… a little world, where, if we feel we are suffering a certain starvation of the soul, we need not give up our Sunday mornings to come to church. Because all we need to do is to go for a stroll along the nearest ley line and expose ourselves to these famous cosmic rays.'

Fay heard him as if from afar. She was looking at her father. And at the woman. Neat, small-boned, wide-brimmed hat concealing her hair and neck. And unnaturally still.

The church was darkening around Fay. The muted colours had drained out of the congregation. Everything was black and white and grey Nobody moved. Murray Beech, flickering like an ancient movie, black and white in his surplice, was gesturing in the pulpit, but she couldn't hear him any more.

She stared hard, projecting her fear and – surprised at its strength – her uncontrollable resentment. Until she felt herself lifting from the pew, aware of a sudden concern in the eyes of Joe Powys, his hand reaching out for her from a long, long way away, but not touching. Fay rising on a malign wave while, at the same time, very slowly, the woman sitting next to her father began, for the first time, to move.

Began, very slowly, to turn her head.

And Fay was suddenly up on her feet in the silent church, shrieking aloud. 'How dare you? Get out! How dare you come in here!'

Gripping the prayer-book shelf so hard that it creaked.

'Why?' Fay screamed. 'Why can't you just get on with your death and leave him alone?'

Then everybody was turning round, but Fay was out of the church door, and running.