Crybbe

CHAPTER VI

When the Mercedes estate carrying Simon and his three young assistants had vanished into the lane, Rachel watched Andy Boulton-Trow, stripped to the waist, supervising the loading of three long stones into the back of a truck. There was a small digger m the back, too, one of those you could hire to landscape your own garden.

'Last ones,' Andy said, jibbing a thumb at the stones. He'd acquired, very rapidly, an impressive black beard, somehow hardening his narrow jaw.

Rachel said, 'The others are in?'

'The ones that are safe to put in, without arousing complaints from the landowners We've got a nice one here for your friend Joe.'

He didn't, she noticed, put any kind of stress on the words 'your friend'.

'And then I'm pushing off for a day or two,' Andy said, stretching.

'Is Max aware of this?'

'I really don't know, Rachel.'

She wondered if perhaps he was pushing off somewhere with Max. 'A very heavy guy,' Max had said once. 'He knows all the options.'

Whereas J.M. had implied that while Andy knew as much about earth mysteries as anybody could reasonably be expected to, it was unwise to trust him too far. 'He takes risks, especially when the potential fall guy is someone else.' The implication being that he, J. M. Powys, had once been the fall-guy. One day, away from here, he would tell her about this.

'What's going on over there?' Rachel had seen a cluster of men emerging from the rear entrance of the Court. Two of them carried a rotting plank which they hurled on a heap of rubbish in a corner of the courtyard.

'Big clean-out,' Andy said. 'Before the renovation proper begins. All the junk from upstairs – the detritus of the various attempts to modernize the Court, anything not in period has to go. Didn't Max tell you?'

'I think he mentioned something,' Rachel said uncomfortably. He hadn't, of course. Increasingly, things had been happening around her without any kind of consultation.

Like the appropriation of Gomer Parry's bulldozer in the night?

Max liked to live dangerously; she didn't. She was deeply glad to be leaving his employ.

'Make a good bonfire,' Andy Boulton-Trow said, nodding at the pile of rubbish. 'Maybe we should organize one for Lammas or something. A cleansing.'

He stretched his lithe body into the truck. 'Have fun,' he said.

Powys raced out of the church, clutching the Uher by its strap She'd left it there, on the pew, still recording, with a motor hum and a hiss of turning spools.

He scanned the churchyard, but she was gone. He ran to the gate, looked both ways, thought he could hear running footsteps, but there was nobody in sight. He glanced over his shoulder and saw a white-bearded, dog-collared old man in the church entrance, also looking from side to side.

Her father. Both of them looking for Fay.

Powys stabbed vaguely at the Uher's piano-key controls until the hum and hiss ceased with a final whirr. Then he slung the machine over his shoulder, stuck the microphone in his pocket and set off towards Bell Street. Or would she have gone to the studio?

Making an outburst in church was a clear sign of instability. People who made outbursts in church were usually basket-cases.

Except in Crybbe. Leaping up and screaming, Powys thought was surely a perfectly natural reaction to the miasma of almost-anaesthetized disinterest emanating from that congregation.

Bloody weird, though, what she'd said.

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

Bloody weird.

As he came to the corner of Bell Street, he almost lost a foot to a familiar red Ford Fiesta, shrieking round the corner in low gear, crunching over the kerb.

The driver saw him, and the Fiesta squeaked and stalled. The passenger door flew open and bumped the Uher, and the driver called out, 'Get in!'

Powys climbed in and sat with the Uher on his knee. 'You left this in the church,' he said.

'Thanks.' Fay started the engine and the car spurted into the square.

'Your father…'

'Fuck my father,' she snapped, and she didn't speak again until they passed the town boundary and there were open hills all around and a rush of cold air through the side windows, the glass on both sides wound down to its limits.

Fay breathed out hard and thrust her small body back into the seat, the Fiesta going like a rocket down a lane originally created for horses.

'Got to be something awry,' she said remotely, 'when the most newsworthy item on the tape is the reporter having hysterics.'

Powys said, 'When's visiting time at the vet's, then?'

She turned towards him. 'You want to come?'

'I've got a choice? Watch the road, for Christ's sake!'

She said, 'You want me to talk about it, I suppose.'

'Up to you.'

'Well,' she said, 'I suppose if I can talk about it to anybody, I can talk about it to you. Don't suppose I'll be telling you anything you haven't heard before.'

'That's right,' Powys said. 'I'm an accredited crank. And I'll be a dead crank if you don't…'

'Yet so cynical.' Fay slowed down. 'You didn't used to be cynical. Unless that wide-eyed, wow-man-what-a mind-blower feel to The Old Golden Land was a put-on.'

'Well,' he said, 'the light-hearted element kind of dissipated.' He closed his eyes and the past tumbled down to him like a rock slide.

Joey goes round the Bottle Stone

And he goes round ONCE.

What's happening is you're developing a link with the stone, in an umbilical kind of way. You're feeling every step you take, bare feet connecting sensuously with the warm, grassy skin of the earth. And all the while the terrestrial magnetism – let's imagine it exists – is seeping up through the soles of your feet…

And he goes round TWICE.

Stop it.

He rubbed his eyes. 'That was your dad, was it, with the white beard? Rachel told me about him. She said he was, er. something of a fun guy for his age.'

'He was always fun,' Fay said. 'That was the problem. Clergymen aren't supposed to have that much fun.'

Powys watched her drive, not like Rachel. She bumped the gears, rode the clutch and went too fast round blind bends.

He tried to watch the landscape. 'Nothing like this where I grew up. Love at first sight, when I came down here.'

'Where was that? Where you came from.'

'Up north. Very industrialized part. A long bus-ride to the nearest cow. Every square yard, for as far as you could see, built on for about the fourth time. Where we lived they'd eradicated grass like a disease. It's quite nice now, if you like Georgian-style semis with concrete barbecue-pits.'

Fay said, 'I grew up in old vicarages and rectories, in little villages with thatched houses. And Oxford for a time.'

'Deprived childhood, huh?'

'There's more than one kind,' Fay said. 'Not many ley-lines where you came from, I suppose.'

'You just had to work harder to find them," Powys said, stiffening as Fay clipped the hedge to avoid an oncoming lorry.

'Bloody loony.'

Could she, he wondered, really be referring to the innocent lorry driver?

'How long has he known Jean Wendle?'

'Who?'

'Your dad. He was sitting next to Jean Wendle. In church.'

After a moment. Fay trod on the brakes. The Fiesta was almost in the middle of the road The driver of a BMW behind hem blasted his horn and revved in righteous rage.

'What?'

She didn't seem to notice the middle-aged, suit-and-tie-clad BMW driver thrusting up two furious fingers as he roared past.

'Jean Wendle,' Powys said. 'The healer.'

Fay gripped the wheel tightly with both hands, threw her head back and moaned.

'Oh God, Joe. That was Jean Wendle?'

'It was.'

Fay unclipped her seat-belt.

'Would you mind taking over, before I kill us both? I think I've made the most awful fool of myself.'

Alex had given Murray Beech the usual can of Heineken, and this time Murray had snapped it open and drunk silently and gratefully.

'You heard my sermon,' Murray said. They were in the living-room at the back of the house in Bell Street. The vicar was slumped in an armchair. He looked worn out.

'And you heard my daughter, I suppose,' Alex said.

'What was the matter with her?'

'You tell me, old boy.' Alex had once been chaplain to a rehabilitation centre for drug addicts; Murray reminded him of the new arrivals, lank-haired, grey-skinned, eyes like mud.

'What did you think of my sermon?'

'Good try,' Alex said. 'Full marks for effort. Couple of Brownie points, perhaps, from the town council. Then again, perhaps not. What d'you want me to say? You and I both know that this fellow Goff's congregation's going to be a bloody sight more dedicated than yours.'

'Sour grapes, eh?'

'You said it, old chap.'

'I don't know what to do,' Murray said, desolate.

Alex sighed.

'I could be good at this job,' Murray said. 'Anywhere else, I could be really good. I'm a good organizer, a good administrator. I like organizing things, running the parish affairs, setting up discussion groups, counselling sessions. I've got ideas. I can get things done.'

'Archdeacon material, if ever I saw it.'

'Don't laugh at me, Alex.'

'Sorry.'

'You see, I did what I thought was right in the context of my position in Crybbe. The sermon, I mean. I expected people to come up to me outside. You know… Well said, Vicar, all this. I thought I was echoing their own thoughts. I know they don't like what's happening at the Court.'

'How d'you know that?'

'Not from listening to them talk, that's for certain. They don't even seem to talk to each other. No chit-chit, no street-corner gossip. Do you think that's natural? Nobody said a word to me today. I was standing there holding out a hand, thanks for coming, nice to see you, hope you're feeling better now, the usual patter. And some of them were taking my hand limply, as if I was offering them a sandwich at the fete. Then they'd nod and trudge off without a word. No reaction in church either except for Fay's outburst and the boy, Warren Preece, who was staring at me with the most astonishing malevolence in his eyes.'

'Which boy's that?'

'Warren Preece? The Mayor's grandson, the younger brother of the chap who drowned in the river. Looking at me as if he blamed me for his brother's death.'

'Doesn't make much sense, Murray.'

'Didn't to me, either. I tried to ignore it. Perhaps it was nothing to do with his brother. He's a friend of the girl, Tessa Byford. You remember I asked you about exorcism.'

'Oh. Yes. How did that go?'

'You haven't heard anything, then?'

'Nothing at all, old chap. Didn't it go well?'

'You're sure you haven't heard anything? You wouldn't be trying to save my feelings?'

'Sod off, Murray, I'm a Christian.'

Murray said. 'That girl's seriously disturbed. Tessa Byford. The Old Police House. I think I'm talking about evil, Alex. I think I was in the presence of evil. I think she invited me in to flourish something m my face. As if to say, this is what you're up against, now what are you going to do?'

'And what did you do?'

'I ran away,' Murray said starkly. 'I got the hell out of there, and I haven't been back, and I'm scared stiff of meeting her in the street or a shop because I think I'd run away again.'

'Oh dear,' Alex said.

Murray leaned his head back into the chair and closed and opened his eyes twice, flexing his jaw.

Alex said, 'I seem to remember asking you what you thought were the world s greatest evils.'

'I expect I said inequality, the Tory government or something. Now I'd have to say I've seen real evil and it was in the eyes of a schoolgirl. And now, I don't know, in a boy of eighteen or nineteen. What does that say about me?'

'Perhaps it says you've grown up,' Alex said. 'Or that you've been watching those X-rated videos again. I don't know either. I've been fudging the bloody issue for years, and now I'm too old and clapped out to do anything about it. Perhaps, you know, this is one of those places where we meet it head-on.'

'Crybbe?'

'Just thinking of something Wendy said. May look like a haemorrhoid in the arsehole of the world, but the quiet places are often the real battlegrounds. Some of these New Age johnnies are actually not so far off-beam when you talk to them. You come across Wendy?'

Murray loosed blank.

'Strict Presbyterian upbringing,' Alex said. 'No nonsense. Yet she apparently cures people of cancer and shingles and things with the help of an egg-shaped oriental blob called Dr Chi. Now, I ask you.. . But it's all terminology, isn't it. Dr Chi, Jesus Christ, Allah, ET

… There's a positive and a negative and whatever all this energy is, well, perhaps we can colour it with our hearts. Pass me another beer, Murray, I don't think I'm helping you at all.'

'I thought you weren't supposed to drink.'

'Sod that,' said Alex. 'Look at me. Do I seem sick? Do I seem irrational?'

'Far from it. In fact, if you don't mind my saying so, I've never known you so lucid.'

'Well, there you are, you see. Dr Chi. Little Chink's a bloody wonder. And there's you trying to drive his intermediary out of town. We think we're so smart. Murray, but we're just pupils in a spiritual kindergarten.'

'I think I'm cracking up,' Murray said.

'Perhaps you need to consult old Dr Chi as well. I can arrange an appointment.'

Murray stood up very quickly and headed for the door. 'Don't joke about this, Alex. Just don't joke.'

'Was I?' Alex asked him innocently. 'Was I joking do you think?'