The Secrets of Pain

17

‘ You don’t have to take that crap,’ Barry said. ‘There comes a point where you just… you realize you just don’t.’

He’d come back from the kitchens looking dark-faced, angry, and that was rare. A few more customers had come in since, and Marion, the head barmaid, had taken over. Barry had poured himself a Guinness and come to sit with Merrily and Lol.

‘Behaving like a servant is one thing. Being treated like one is something else.’

‘He’d killed a pheasant?’ Lol said.

‘Don’t matter. None of it matters too much now, anyway. When the worst happens, I’m not going to be around.’

He got up suddenly, unhooked a big black poker, turned over the last big apple log, and the flames were instantly all over it. Barry came and sat down, rubbing soot from his hands.

‘The worst?’ Merrily said.

‘I apologize.’ Barry drank some Guinness, wiped his lips almost delicately on a white pocket handkerchief. ‘There’s no reason at all for me not to tell you. Savitch is buying the Swan.’

Pool balls plinked off one another in the Public. Lol put down his pencil.

‘When you think about it, it was only a matter of time,’ Barry said.

‘I didn’t…’ Lol’s voice was parched. ‘The Swan’s for sale?’

‘Way things are now, Laurence, any pub’s for sale. Every day, somewhere in Britain, another one shuts down.’

Merrily stared into the fire. After Christmas, it had become known that the Black Swan’s elderly owner had handed it over to her son, who ran a building firm. The building trade would revive, but the future for pubs…

‘Savitch put in an initial offer last week.’ Barry’s voice was flat. ‘Ridiculously low, and it got turned down, of course. But that was just round one. He’ll be back.’

‘Why’s he doing this?’ Lol said. ‘Why not just, you know, live here?’

‘He’s a businessman. The place you live, you want it to look like an enterprise, not a loser’s refuge.’

‘This can’t happen,’ Lol said.

‘It could happen tomorrow, mate, if he doubles his bid. Which I’m sure he can afford to. But I think he’ll wait.’

‘What can we do?’ Merrily said.

‘Pray?’

‘What are his plans, exactly?’

‘Village is set to grow. Maybe he’s on a promise. All too friendly with Councillor Pierce these days.’ Barry leaned his chair back against an oak pillar where a wall had once divided the bar into two rooms. ‘End of the day, we’re just the little people. These things don’t happen on our level, do they? I mean, the word is he’ll ask me to stay on, but that’s… not for me.’

‘I’m so sorry, Barry.’

‘Nah, I’ll be all right. Not sure about Ledwardine, though.’ Barry settled into his chair, evidently more relaxed now it was out. ‘So what’s the problem with Syd Spicer, then, Merrily?’

‘Didn’t think you wanted to talk about him.’

‘I didn’t. Now, suddenly, it seems like light relief. One of your lot now, last I heard.’

‘Actually, one of your lot again. Been made chaplain at Credenhill.’

‘Has he now?’

‘You didn’t know?’

‘They don’t put out a newsletter. Chaplain, eh? Padre. Well, well.’

‘Barry, could I ask you something in general? About the Regiment?’

Barry shrugged, his jacket tightening, a sleeve rising to expose a purplish scar snaking up his wrist from the palm of his left hand.

‘I’m sorry if it-’

‘Nah, nah, just it’s usually teenage boys. How many men you killed? How many times you been tortured? It can get wearing.’

‘Just that Syd once told me… he said there was a kind of mysticism in the Regiment. His word.’

‘Oh, I see. This is about the things you do on the side.’

Much of the time, Barry’s broad face was smooth and bland, but his eyes were the eyes of a far thinner, warier man. Maybe a colder man. He sucked some froth from his Guinness.

‘Not quite sure what you mean by mysticism. There’s a lot of myths .’

Merrily waited. The old apple log was well alight and it felt warmer in here now, almost like old times. But this was the last good log.

‘What can I tell you?’ Barry said. ‘There’ve been geezers I knew, up against a wall, who’ve prayed their hearts out and the wall never moved, know what I mean? And there’s a bloke I know survived against all the odds, and he’s seen it as a miracle and gone hallelujah, praise the Lord, born-again.’

‘What about superstition?’

‘Rabbits’ feet? Not treading on the cracks in the minefield?’ Barry shook his head minimally. ‘Small obsessions can get you hurt.’

‘Fear of the unknown?’

‘You don’t give in to it. If you’re in a tight situation, personal fears take a back seat because you’re concentrating on how to deal with it.’

‘What if it’s something a man knows he can’t get at? I’m wondering at what stage he would think he was going mad.’

‘Blimey,’ Barry said. ‘What’s this about? Only, generally speaking, we don’t do mad. All right. What I’d say is you might start by eliminating the possibility of there being, say, something in the water – practical stuff.’

‘And when you’ve eliminated the rational, the hallucin- atory…?’

‘We talking about Syd here? Only he’s a bleedin’ vicar.’

‘Not all vicars feel able to take the funny stuff on board. Don’t all take God on board any more. At what stage do you think he might seek help?’

‘On a mission, you rely on your mates, your gang. The circumstances would have to be very special for you to venture outside. You read Frank’s book? Frank Collins?’

‘Should have, shouldn’t I?’

Frank Collins: former curate at St Peter’s, Hereford. Ex-SAS. Occasionally spoken of among Hereford clergy, warily.

‘Wish I’d known him,’ Merrily said. ‘But he was dead before I came here.’

By his own hand. Gassed himself in his car. She’d heard it said that he’d become depressed after writing the book about his time in the SAS and his conversion to Christianity. It hadn’t been well received – by the Regiment, not the clergy.

‘Some weird stuff in that book,’ Barry said. ‘How God spoke to him through the radio. There’s one tale in there of a guy who knows his best mate’s bought the farm in the Falklands on account of he’s appeared to him in his house, thousands of miles away, all dripping wet. Made me shiver a bit, that. I served with them both. Frank, too. Blondie, we called him.’

‘I’ll read it. Did start it once, but life intervened. Did, erm… did Frank Collins find the same level of support in the Church as he had in the SAS?’

‘Evidently not,’ Barry said.

‘I see.’

‘In the Regiment, you rely on your mates not only because they’re your mates but because each of you’s got special skills. Abilities the others respect.’ He looked at Lol. ‘Like in a band. Only a band where, if you forget your chords, you might get the drummer killed.’

‘Good analogy,’ Lol said. ‘I’m guessing.’

‘We don’t like to rely on guesswork,’ Barry said.

Some nights, Lol would just go back to the vicarage with Merrily for coffee or hot chocolate.

This wasn’t going to be one of them. They both knew that, as they walked out onto cobbles already slick with black ice. Almost touching, not quite. They never publicly held hands in Ledwardine, not even after dark.

A few icy stars were out over Cole Hill, a wreath of them above the church steeple. Merrily shivered with cold and unease, watching Lol beside her, head down, the lyrics pad under an arm, a hole in an elbow of his Gomer Parry sweatshirt. The Ledwardine village musician, one day playing music, the next following a JCB down to the riverbank with a hand shovel. She could almost hear his thoughts echoing across the cobbles: what kind of fantasy is this?

Lol had never really been much of a pub guy. Didn’t drink much, didn’t play darts or pool, didn’t have mates. It was only after his Christmas concert at the Swan that he’d achieved a degree of openness in Ledwardine. After he’d been lured out to play his music in front of his neighbours. And now…

I’ve agreed with Barry to do a few more gigs. Here at the Swan. And maybe something outside in the summer.

‘If Savitch can’t get it cheap enough, he might not bother,’ Merrily said at the entrance to Church Street. ‘I mean, what’s he going to do with it anyway, to make it show a decent profit… on his scale?’

Wishing, as soon as it was out – like with a lot of things she’d said tonight – that she’d kept quiet.

‘You know exactly what he’ll do,’ Lol said. ‘He’ll make it into some kind of apres-shoot retreat for his corporate clients… and for all the wives and girlfriends who don’t want to stay in a chalet, however luxurious, on a muddy farm. He’ll build up the restaurant and double the prices. It’ll just… regularize things.’

They stood and contemplated the clutch of lights down Church Street, where the holiday homes – sixteen at the last count – would be in darkness until Easter weekend. One of the For Sale notices had acquired a cross-strip saying sold. Had Savitch bought that, too?

Merrily saw Lol bent over his guitar in a corner, his music drowned out by the laughter of loud-voiced, faux -rural thugs.

‘They look out from their penthouses across all the lights,’ Lol said. ‘And they can’t see it but they know it’s there… all those thousands of square miles of it, all dark and empty. It just… it starts to irritate them. They’re thinking, what’s it doing? We’re the masters of the universe, why isn’t it giving us anything?’

Merrily was nodding gloomily. Had it ever been otherwise, since Norman kings designated thousands of acres as hunting ground? Great slabs of it going to the barons, who settled and grew, in their brutal way, to love it and eventually became the old squirearchy.

The Bulls and the Bull-Davieses.

Until they, in turn, started to lose it under the weight of inheritance taxes, leaving it prey to the new money. Savitch.

Cycles of exploitation.

The last fake gas lamp on the square was behind them now. A merciful mesh of shadows claiming them for its own. Lol brought out the keys to the terraced cottage where Lucy Devenish used to live. The folklorist. The guardian of the soul of the village. Jane’s first mentor.

‘I suppose what gets me,’ Lol said, ‘is that most people don’t seem to mind. The first time somebody off the TV comes to stay at the Swan, bit of glamour, they’re all in favour of it. It’s brought the village alive… but not in the right way.’

‘A bit of glamour,’ Merrily said. ‘Maybe we all need that.’

Her eyes felt damp.

Lol held open the front door for her. Inside, the wood stove was burning a surprising terracotta red.

Merrily’s black woollen top was off before they reached the sofa.