The Secrets of Pain

36

Merrily took the phone outside and stood by the grave of the Wordsworths’ faithful servant Jane Winder. Looking across to the possible moat, the clutch of trees on what might be an island, the viridian march of conifers up the flank of Credenhill.

‘There was a party,’ Fiona said. ‘A publication party. Not for Byron: one of the other better-known SAS authors, a friend of Sam’s, so although he didn’t like parties much he thought we should go. And there were a lot of people there that Sam hadn’t seen in years, so he was doing a fair bit of catching up. Are you still there?’

‘I’ll try and improve the signal.’

Merrily moved up to the high ground behind the church, overlooking lumped and tiered fields where a village might once have stood. The signal had moved up to two stars.

‘When was this?’

‘About a month after the book was burned. I hadn’t been feeling well that night, and Sam was talking to his old mates, so I slid away and sat down at a table on my own. And then Byron was there. Not Liz, just Byron. Sam was conspicuously avoiding him, but he came up to me. Very charming and attentive. Very smooth and elegant in his Heathcliff way. Got me a brandy and sat down. Said he didn’t know what he was doing here, he’d never particularly liked… the author we were supposed to be celebrating, and his book was rubbish.’

‘This was in London?’

‘No, it was a country-house hotel, in Buckinghamshire. We’d decided to stay there, so Sam could have a few drinks. All free – the publishers were spending a lot of money on this guy at the time. A lot more than had ever been spent on Byron, anyway, and he seemed to be taking it as a personal slight. But he was very nice to me. Coming out with all sorts of bullshit. How he wished he had a wife like me, who understood.’

‘Understood what?’

‘Oh, you know, what it was like leaving the Regiment. Having to slow down your metabolism… all this. His metabolism didn’t seem to have slowed at all. He was very intense, whatever he was talking about, very concentrated. Much, I suppose, as you’d imagine he’d be on some operation behind enemy lines. In fact, I remember thinking perhaps that was how he saw this party. Someone else’s wealthy publisher, someone else’s inferior book. As though he was at war with other writers who’d been in the Regiment. The underdog, because his was a kids’ book.’

‘This was before Harry Potter, I presume.’

‘Probably. There was a tremendous… frustration there. Pretty soon, he’s pouring out his troubles, and I’m trying to be sympathetic.’

‘Wife didn’t understand him?’

‘Wife didn’t understand anything. Wife was completely bovine. After a while, I was starting to find it repellent. Self-pity I can handle – it was the venom I didn’t like.’

‘Against Liz?’

‘Against life. Anyway… as I said, I really wasn’t feeling terribly well that night. Eventually I excused myself and went to the loo and then went out for a breath of air. In the grounds, which were extensive, though not remote like you get round here. You could always hear traffic. And he was there.’

‘Where?’

‘Emerging from the bushes, as though he was on an exercise. The exercise being… I was the exercise, I-God, I can’t believe I’m telling somebody about this with Sam lying in a mortuary. It makes me feel sick. I feel sick now, and I felt sick then.’

‘He was drunk?’

‘No, I don’t actually think he was. I don’t think he needed to be. I wish I could explain what I mean by that. It was as though the… the night had released something in him. Sorry, that sounds stupid.’

‘Not to me. Go on.’

‘When I said I wasn’t feeling well, he put an arm around me and said some air might help, and he walked me away from the terrace. Down across the lawns, away from the floodlit area. What could I do? He’d been a friend. He said he wanted to talk to me. Seriously. Very focused. He told me Sam was making a terrible mistake in going into the church, that he was throwing away his life and damaging his country, and if I didn’t want a life of misery I should stop him. Or leave him.’

‘Bloody hell, Fiona…’

‘He said Sam was an idiot who didn’t deserve me. And a coward. He actually said Sam was a coward. And when I opened my mouth to protest, he… his lips were there. And he started to touch me. Fondle me. As if it was the most natural thing in the world? And I’m going, No, thank you, Byron, let’s go back now. I was pretty terrified, naturally. Also terrified that Sam would find us.’

A pause. Merrily moved back towards the car.

‘That’s not… how it seems,’ Fiona said. ‘I knew that if Sam had found us, what would’ve happened… it would’ve ended in some appalling violence.’

‘But Sam was becoming a priest…’

‘He was trying to become a priest. He’d had long talks with other priests. Used to say there were aspects of himself he’d have to… alter if it was going to work. There’d’ve been no turning of cheeks here, would there?’

‘What did you-?’

‘I mean, it wouldn’t’ve mattered who came to the rescue, would it? The result would be the same. Do you know what I mean? Sooner or later it would involve Sam in violence. These guys, that was the only way it could ever be resolved. I’m not saying it’s the only language they understand, or that they’re stupid and mindless, but Byron…’

Fiona broke off, as if she was trying to rethink this, to see if there was any other way it might be viewed.

‘Byron, the way he was that night… it seemed to me, in those moments, that that was what he wanted. He wanted Sam to come for him. He wanted an excuse to release some kind of animalistic rage.’

‘You mean at Syd, or just…?’

‘I mean that he wasn’t attracted to me, as such… it was because I was Sam’s wife.’

‘Jesus.’

‘There was a real kind of… a real evil about it, I suppose. That is, an emptiness – a hole where love and humanity should be? Is that evil?’

‘Oh, yes.’

The clouds had gulped up the sun. Merrily, starting to shiver, walked down through the little gate and stepped down towards the car. The fields looked raw and winter-stripped.

‘So… what happened?’

Convinced that Fiona, unprompted, would simply not have finished the story.

‘I didn’t resist him. He had me against the side of a garage block, and I didn’t resist.’

‘He raped you.’

‘It was over very quickly. It was, for him, I think, not so much the doing it as the having done it. What I remember most was the sound of his breath. A hollow sound. As though he was drawing breath from somewhere else. Afterwards, he just said goodnight. I don’t think he even remembered my name.’

‘You’ve never told anyone?’

‘You’re the first.’

One in a million.

Barry had said that.

Merrily smoked half a cigarette, put on her coat and went back into the church.

Byron’s church.

Up to the glittery chancel, but it didn’t feel right. She walked back down the nave and across to the Romanesque stone tympanum. St George spearing a snake-like dragon. An untypical St George in a kind of pleated skirt. Essential violence.

Fiona had said she’d gone back into the hotel through another door. Gone upstairs to their room and locked herself in and showered for a long time and put on fresh make-up and a different dress. Syd had been looking for her. She told him she hadn’t been well. She said she’d been sick and had had to change.

All that night, her skin had felt greasy and she’d had a filthy taste at the back of her throat.

Merrily thought about Denzil Joy, found she was breathing far too fast and became aware that on the wall opposite her, above the church door, another act of violence was evoked in smoke.

She stood staring at it, uncomprehending for a few moments, taking several long breaths before approaching it across the space at the back of the nave.

It was not smoke. Nor was it imagination. She stopped, flipping feverishly through the leaflet.

The 13th century wall painting above the door is of The Crucifixion.

Like most wall paintings, there wasn’t much left. Could have been a dampness stain, like the grey monk in Huw’s chapel.

Two pains… the first wrought to the drying while his body was moist, and that other slow, with blowing of wind from without…

All the colours gone. The cross gone. He was a corpse or very nearly, drained of all resistance. His head, dead weight, had collapsed into an elbow. His body was brittle as a chrysalis, flaking into the wall.