The Wine of Angels

1 Third Floor

MERRILY HAD A recurring dream. She’d read somewhere that it was really quite a common dream, with obvious symbolism.

By recurring ... well, she’d have it maybe once every few months, or the gaps might be even longer nowadays.

There was a period, not long before Sean died, when it came almost nightly. Or even, in that intense and suffocating period, twice or three times the same night – she’d close her eyes and the dream would be waiting there like an empty train by a deserted platform. Sometimes it was merely puzzling, sometimes it seemed to open up exciting possibilities. Occasionally, it was very frightening and she awoke shredded with dread.

What happened ... she was in a house. Not always the same house, but it was her own house, and she’d lived there quite some time without realizing. Or sometimes she’d just forgotten, she’d gone on living there, possibly for years, without registering that the house had ... a third floor.

It was clear that she’d lived quite comfortably in this house, which was often bright and pleasant, and that she must have passed the extra staircase thousands of times, either unaware of it or because there was simply no reason to go up there.

In the dream, however, she had to go up. With varying amounts of anticipation or cold dread. Because something up there had made its presence known to her.

She’d nearly always awaken before she made it to the top of the stairs. Either disappointed or trembling with relief. Just occasionally, before her eyes opened, she would glimpse a gloomy, airless landing with a row of grey doors.

In reality, if you excluded flats, she had never lived in a three-storey house.

Now, however ...

‘Jesus,’ Merrily said. ‘We can’t live in this.’

‘Yes, I suppose it is big,’ Uncle Ted conceded. ‘Didn’t think about that. Never a problem for Alf Hayden. Six kids, endless grandchildren ...’

It was big, all right. Seventeenth century, timber-framed, black and white. Seven bedrooms. Absolutely bloody huge if there was just the two of you. Very quaint, but also unexpectedly, depressingly grotty; nothing seemed to have altered since about the 1950s.

‘Of course, it’s church policy these days to flog off these draughty old vicarages,’ Uncle Ted said. ‘Replace them with nice, modern boxes. Worth a lot of money, your old black and whites. Well ... not this one, at present, not in the state it’s in after thirty-odd years of Alf and Betty.’

There was quaint, Merrily thought, and there was horribly old-fashioned. Like the steel-grey four-bar electric fire blocking up the inglenook. Like a kitchen the size of a small abattoir with no real cupboards but endless open shelves and all the pipes coiled under the sink like a nest of cobras.

‘Besides,’ Ted said, ‘we haven’t got any nice, modern boxes to spare. Three applications for housing estates’ve been turned down in as many years. Not in keeping.’ He frowned. ‘Conservation’s a fine idea, but not when it turns a nice, old village into an enclave of the elite.’

In his habitual cardigan and slippers, Ted Clowes, two years retired, didn’t look at all like a lawyer any more. His face had gone ruddy, like a farmer’s, and his body had thickened. He looked as seasoned and solid as one of the oak pillars holding up the vicarage walls.

As senior church warden, Ted had made himself responsible for getting the vicarage into some kind of shape. Negotiating with builders and plumbers and decorators. But, well into April, the work had hardly begun; it looked as though Merrily was going to have to spend the first month of her ministry in a bed-and-breakfast.

She was relieved, in a way. A place this size – it was ridiculous. And an unoccupied third floor, full of dust and echoes.

She stood on the first-floor landing, miserably looking up. ‘All these staircases.’

‘Yeah,’ Jane said thoughtfully. ‘This puts a whole new perspective on the entire scenario.’

‘It does?’

Merrily watched warily as the kid took off up the stairs to the third storey. She’d been sulking, on and off, for three days. She’d quite enjoyed the two years in Birmingham while Merrily was at college, loved the time in Liverpool when Merrily was a curate. Big-city woman now. On the way here, she’d said that if Cheltenham was an old people’s home, rural Herefordshire looked like premature burial.

‘Yes.’ Jane paused halfway up, looking around.

‘You like this?’

‘At least we’ve cleared all those rooms now,’ Ted said. ‘Alf and Betty were generous enough to leave us a quarter of a century’s worth of junk. Yellowing newspapers with pictures of the first moon-landing.’

Jane had a forefinger placed pensively on her chin. ‘Far more rooms than you’d need, Mum, right?’

‘Mmm ... yes.’

‘Even for all your Bible classes and parish meetings and visiting evangelists from Nigeria.’

‘Ye ... es. Unless, of course, they’re travelling with their extended families.’

‘So this whole storey is, in effect, going spare.’

‘Conceivably.’

Her daughter was starting to operate like a slick barrister. (The barrister Merrily might have become had it not been for God’s unexpected little blessing. Would she still eventually have wound up in the Church if Jane hadn’t come along?)

‘Don’t look at me like that, Mum. All I’m saying is I could have a kind of group of rooms up here. Like a suite. Because ... because ... if you think about it, those back stairs come off a separate entrance ... a third door, right?’

Ted chuckled. He knew all about daughters.

‘Right,’ Merrily said. ‘And?’

‘So it would be kind of my own entrance. It would be ... in fact ... like my own flat.’

‘Oh. I see.’

The third door with its own illuminated bell and a card under perspex: Flat One. Ms Jane Watkins. She was fifteen.

‘And you’d pay the heating bills for this, er, suite, would you?’

‘Oh God.’ Jane glared down over the oak banister. ‘Here we go. Mrs bloody Negative.’

‘Or maybe you could sub-let a couple of rooms.’

Jane scowled and flounced off along the short passage. Oak floorboards creaked, a door rattled open. That empty sound.

‘Could be a double-bluff,’ Merrily said, her daughter pacing bare boards overhead, probably working out where to put her stereo speakers for optimum sound. ‘The picture she’s feeding me is that she’s going to be so bored here she’ll have to invite half the young farmers’ club over for wild parties. All these rural Romeos popping pills on the back stairs.’

Ted laughed. ‘Young farmers aren’t pill-popping yet. Well ... none that I know of. Pressure job, now, though. Diminishing returns, EC on your back, quotas for this, quotas for that, a hundred forms to fill in, mad cow disease. Suicide figures are already ... Sorry. Bad memories.’

‘What? Oh.’

‘I seem to remember saying, “If you want an informal picture of village life, why not pop along to this wassailing thing?” Not quite what I had in mind. Awfully sorry, Merrily.’

She looked through the landing window, down into a small, square rose garden, where the pink and orange of the soil seemed more exotic than the flowers. Over a hedge lay the churchyard with its cosy, sandstone graves.

Oddly, that awful, public death hadn’t given her a single nightmare. In her memory it was all too surreal. As though violent death had been an optional climax to the wassailing and, as the oldest shooter in the pack, Edgar Powell had felt obliged to take it.

‘You know, standing in that orchard, covered with that poor old bloke’s blood, that was when I decided to go for it. I clearly remember thinking that nothing so immediate and so utterly shocking ever happened quite that close to me in Liverpool. That maybe, in some ways, this village could actually be the sharp end. I thought, am I going to wash off his blood and walk away?’

‘It always affects you more in the country.’ Ted came to stand beside her at the window. ‘Everything that happens. Because you know everybody. Everybody. And you’ll find, as minister, that you’re regarded as more of a ... a key person. Births and deaths, you really have to be there. Even if nobody from the family’s been to a church service since the war.’

‘That’s fair enough. Far as I’m concerned, belonging to the Church doesn’t have to involve coming to services.’

‘And you’ll find that hills and meadows are far more claustrophobic than housing estates. You see somebody coming across a twelve-acre field towards you, you can’t dodge into a bus shelter.’

‘Fine.’

Ted raised a dubious eyebrow. ‘And everybody gossips,’ he said. ‘For instance, they’ll all tell you Edgar Powell’d been handling that shotgun since for ever.’

‘Making it suicide?’

‘What it looks like, but they haven’t got a motive. Money worries? No more than the average farmer. Isolation? Hardly – not living on the edge of the village. Depression? Hard to say. Perhaps he’d just had enough. Or perhaps he simply wanted to ruin the Cassidys’ olde English soiree. Been a spiteful old bugger in his time.’

‘You are kidding, aren’t you?’

‘Anyway, Garrod Powell’s insisting it was an accident. Came to consult me about it. He’ll be telling the coroner the old chap was simply going soft in the head. Can’t blame him. Who wants a family suicide? I suggested he have a word with young Asprey, get something medical. But it could even be an open verdict.’

‘What’s that mean exactly, Uncle Ted?’

Merrily turned to find Jane sitting on the top stair, elbows on knees, chin cupped in her hands.

‘Means they can’t be entirely sure what happened, Jane,’ Ted said.

‘Wish I’d been there.’

Merrily rolled her eyes. Having made a point of leaving Jane at her mother’s when she’d come to do her bit of undercover surveillance prior to applying – or not – for the post. The kid would’ve given them away in no time.

‘Do you get many suicides in the village?’ Jane asked.

‘Not with audience-participation,’ Ted said dryly.

Merrily was thinking, half-guiltily, how she’d scrubbed and scrubbed at her face that night and had to throw away the old fake Barbour.

They stayed the night at the Black Swan, sharing a room. On the third floor, as it happened, but it was different in a hotel. The Black Swan, like all the major buildings in Ledwardine – with the obvious exception of the vicarage – had been sensitively modernized; the room was ancient but luxurious.

Jane was asleep about thirty seconds after sliding into her bed. Jane could slip into untroubled sleep anywhere. She’d accepted her father’s death with an equanimity that was almost worrying. A blip. Sean had lived in the fast lane and that was precisely where he died. Bang. Gone.

Sadder about the girl in the car with him. She could have been Jane in a few years’ time. Or Merrily herself, ten years or so earlier.

Too many thoughts crowding in, Merrily upended the pillow behind her, leaned into it and lit the last cigarette of the day. Through the deep, oak-sunk window, the crooked, picture-book roofs of the village snuggled into a soft and woolly pale night sky.

Perfect. Too perfect, perhaps. If you actually lived here, with roses round the door, what was there left to dream of?

‘How are things financially, now?’ Ted had asked in the lounge bar, after dinner.

Jane had mooched off into the untypically warm April evening to check out the village. And the local totty, she’d added provocatively.

‘Oh’ – Merrily drank some lager – ‘we get by. Sean’s debts weren’t as awesome as we’d been led to believe. And a few of the debtors seem less eager to collect than they were at first. I think it was meeting me. In the dog collar. It was like ... you know ... dangling a sprig of garlic in front of Dracula. I’m glad I met them. I don’t feel so bad about it now I know what kind of semi-criminal creeps they are. Jesus, what am I saying, semi?’

‘I won’t ask. But I did think he was being a little overambitious setting up on his own. Why didn’t you both come to me for some advice?’

‘You know Sean. Knew. Anyway, I blame myself. If I hadn’t got pregnant instead of a degree, it was going to be Super-lawyer and Lois-thing, defending the poor, serving the cause of real justice. Zap. Pow. But ... there you go. He was on his own, and with the responsibility of a kid and everything, he was floundering, and he got a little careless about the clients he took on. It’s a slippery slope. I wasn’t aware of the way things were going. Too busy being Mummy.’

‘You blame yourself for letting him get you pregnant?’ Ted raised helpless eyes to the ceiling. ‘Blame yourself for anything, won’t you, Merrily? Dangerous that, in a vicar.’

‘Priest-in-charge.’

‘Only a matter of time. Now Alf Hayden ... he never accepted the blame for anything. Act of God. Providence. His favourite words. Had us tearing our hair. But you can’t get rid of a vicar, can you? Once they’re in, they’re in and that’s that.’

‘Not any more. My contract’s for five years.’

‘Red tape,’ Ted said. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

‘Please, Uncle Ted. Don’t do anything ... anything else.’

‘You’re not feeling manipulated, are you?’

‘Of course not. Well ... maybe. A little.’

As if having a woman priest in the family wasn’t enough, her mother, from the safety of suburban Cheltenham, had been out of her mind when Merrily had gone as a curate to inner-city Liverpool, all concrete and drugs and domestic violence. Running youth clubs and refuges for prozzies and rent boys. Terrific, Jane had thought. Cathartic, Merrily had found.

While her mother was putting out feelers.

Good old Ted had come up with the goods inside a year. The vicar of Ledwardine was retiring. Beautiful Ledwardine, only an hour or so’s drive from Cheltenham. And Ted was not only senior church warden but used to be the bishop’s solicitor. No string-pulling, of course; she’d only get the job if she was considered up to it and the other candidates were weak ... which, at less than fifteen grand a year, they almost certainly would be.

‘You’ve had a stressful time,’ Ted said. He’d never asked her why she’d abandoned the law for the Church. It was evidently taken for granted that this was some kind of reaction against Sean going bent. ‘But you do feel right about this place now?’

‘I think so. And listen, don’t imagine I’ll be giving you an easy time.’

‘Ha. Alf was always far too apathetic to sustain a decent dispute. What did you have in mind?’

‘Well, you need toilets in that church for a start. I don’t care if it is Grade One listed with five stars, a lot of people won’t come to a place where they’re scared of being taken short. Especially on winter mornings.’

‘Shouldn’t be too much of a problem. If you can raise the money.’

‘I’m also into more streamlined services. No, streamlined’s not the word exactly. Shorter and more ... intense. Fewer hymns. Less meaningless ritual. I mean, we won’t be kicking people out afterwards. There’ll be tea and biscuits and all that, though I won’t ask for the espresso machine until I’ve been around for a while.’

‘What about the prayer book?’

‘Oh, strictly Book of Common Prayer. And no happy-clappy. Well, not much, anyway. Not for the grown-ups.’

Ted Clowes twisted his brandy glass around, as if contemplating something. ‘I shouldn’t really be saying this, but a few people were a little wary about you at first. Big parish for ... for ...’

‘For a woman?’

‘Well, yes.’ He looked uncomfortable. ‘But there were other considerations. It’s a mightily useful church, you see. Big. And with quite remarkable acoustics. Best concert hall for a good many miles.’

‘So I gather.’

‘And no shortage of people who recognize its qualities. People who’ve moved into the area. Dermot Child, the composer and early-music expert and your organist, of course. And Richard Coffey, the playwright.’

‘He lives here?’

‘Well, some of the time. With his young friend. An actor, not one you’d have heard of. And the Cassidys are very, er, cultured. Well, that’s just the core of it, but there are lesser figures and acolytes and followers. And you have to take notice of these people because they bring bodies – and money – into the church. Into the diocese. And a certain ... cultural cachet. Can’t be cynical about this sort of thing, Merrily.’

‘Has the Church ever been?’

‘Perhaps not. And most of us realize the Church needs a kick up the backside, and if it’s delivered by a more prettily shod foot, fair enough. Alf was always a bit of an old woman, time for a young one. But, naturally, we have our traditionalists. People who may have tried to block the way.’

‘Ah,’ Merrily said. ‘Would it help if I knew who they were?’

Ted didn’t hesitate. ‘Well, James Bull-Davies. He’s the only one counts for anything. Funny sort of chap, James. Career army officer. Then his marriage breaks up and his father dies quite unexpectedly from some sort of embolism following a routine op. James has to give up his career, come back and take over the estate. Catapulted into the situation really.’

‘What situation’s that?’

‘Weight of tradition, I suppose. Had to sell land and property to cover death duties and what have you, in addition to whatever it cost him to pay Sarah off. Left him with Upper Hall. And the burden of tradition. Soldier mentality, you see. Taken on the role of the squire in a way his father never did. Feels it’s his function to stop the slide of country values. Keep the modern world at arm’s length.’

‘I see,’ Merrily said. ‘And that includes ... what’s her name? Alison?’

‘Oh, well, nobody knows what goes on there. Power of the flesh, I’m afraid. Anyway, women in the boudoir, that’s one thing. Women in the pulpit of the church housing the bones of one’s ancestors is something else entirely.’

Merrily slowly shook her head.

‘It isn’t you, my dear,’ Ted assured her. ‘It’s the principle. The tradition. However, to his chagrin, he’s found that, in what was once a little world where the squire was a demigod, there are now other influential parties. Notably the affluent, articulate incomers, most of whom were rather keen on the idea of a lady cleric. Question of image, you see.’

‘Image? Somebody said that?’

‘They tolerated Alf, of course. Fat, scruffy old cove. Not very ambitious, not terribly bright. Always a bit of egg-yolk on the old cassock. But what the parish needs at this stage of the village’s development is someone more sophisticated, more attuned to the, ah ... is Zeitgeist the word I’m looking for?’

‘They’d prefer a woman priest because it’s cool and state-of-the-art? Jesus.’

‘Not merely a woman.’ Ted shuffled about a bit. ‘I mean, when they saw you at the wassailing and somebody put two and two together ...’

‘What?’

‘Oh, Merrily, don’t make me spell it out. You’re young and you rather, as someone said, rather smoulder ... in black.’

‘Oh no. Oh, hell. Who said that?’

‘Not going to say. Told you I shouldn’t have said anything.’

‘Bloody hell, Ted.’

Merrily awoke just as it was growing light. Above the timbered gables, a wooded hill had formed.

She was brightening with the sky. What had been outrageous last night seemed quite funny now. Smoulder. Who’d said that? And where? Hopefully, not at the bishop’s palace. Things really had changed, hadn’t they? Used to be schoolgirls falling for the new curate.

Merrily smiled, feeling younger than she had in quite a while. She looked across at Jane, who was still asleep. Hey, what the hell? If she wanted to set up some kind of apartment under the eaves, why not? The kid had given up enough these past years: two changes of school, becoming single-parented, coping with a mother who spent whole nights fuming about some of the crap they threw at you in theological college.

And, for Merrily – she glanced at the thick-beamed ceiling – it would take away the irrational, background stress connected with an empty third storey.

She went to the window which was set into a wall divided into irregular, white rectangles by huge varicose veins of Tudor oak. Jane, who was into fine art these days, said those white areas were just crying out for something interesting with acrylics. Oh dear.

Merrily gazed out over the inn-sign, across to the intimate market square with the squat, crablike, oak-legged shelter they called the market hall or cross. Overhung with shape-shifting black and white houses, every crooked beam and truss preserved and presented with pride.

The village wore its past like a row of glittering horse-brasses over an inglenook fireplace. Defined by its past, shaped by invaders. The Norman church with Saxon origins at the end of a Roman road. The cramped, cobbled alleyway where the gutters had once overflowed with pig-blood and piss, now a bijou arcade, soon to be scented with fountains of flowers from a score of hanging baskets.

For the new invaders, the Cassidys of this world, were here not to pillage or desecrate or change, but only to preserve, preserve, preserve. And wallow. Preserve and wallow.

Merrily looked down into the still-shadowed street, saw Dr Kent Asprey, heart-throb GP and fitness-freak leading his jogging party of sweating matrons past the new tourist information office. Saw Gomer Parry, the retired digger-driver, kick a stone into the road and stand on the kerb, hands rammed deep into his pockets, cigarette jammed between his lips. He looked aimless. What, after all, was there to do in this village but stand and stare, appreciate, absorb, be enriched?

Ideal, her mother had said. After what you’ve been through, you need somewhere quiet with no stress and no drug addicts and homeless people to make you feel guilty. Somewhere you can sit back a bit and take stock.

Merrily knelt before the window to pray. She thought, No need for homeless people to make me feel guilty.

According to dream analysts, the one about the realization of a third storey was an indication of a whole new area of yourself which remained unexplored. A higher consciousness.

‘Dear God,’ Merrily whispered, her palms together, angled on the rising sun.

From behind her, she heard the squeak of Jane’s bed as the kid sat up.

‘Oh shit,’ her daughter muttered, sleepy and cross. ‘Do you really have to do that in here?’

2 Black-eyed Dog

LOL PLANNED HIS suicide with all the precision missing from his life.

He drew curtains across the small, leaded windows facing the lane and the orchard. The curtains were cheap and thin but they took away the brightness of the morning. And also meant that Alison would not be able to look through the windows for his body.

On the turntable, Lol placed his third, already-worn copy of Nick Drake’s first album, Five Leaves Left. The lush arrangements, the soft and ghostly vocals of a man with only five years to live. All his adult life, he’d identified with Nick Drake, even though Nick had been taller and posher and dead – by his own hand – since 1974.

The album hissed and clicked into ‘Time Has Told Me’, veined through with Richard Thompson’s serene guitar. Lol went outside to check on the milk. With the bright mornings, the milkman had been arriving earlier of late. So the bottle was already on the step.

OK. He went back for another bottle from the fridge – yesterday’s, unopened – and set it down next to the new one. Then he shut the door and went to explain to Ethel, kneeling down on the carpet, looking into the unmoving green-gold eyes.

‘I’m going to have to shut you in. It won’t be for long. Don’t want you looking for me, OK?’

Ethel looked unconvinced, licked red mud from a paw. She was technically a stray, or maybe dumped. He’d heard this piteous mewling two nights running in the middle of January and finally found this thing in the hedge, about five inches long and not much thicker than a piece of black hosepipe. At first, Alison had not been pleased, displaying that hard edge he used to think would eventually wear away in the country. But on the morning she left, she said she was glad Lol had Ethel. Something for him to feel responsible for.

Lol went into the kitchen and didn’t put the toaster on; the smell of hot toast was one of the great scents of life. It would be hard to die with the smell of hot toast in the air. He didn’t switch on the radio either. He didn’t rake out the woodstove. He sat down at the table, facing the pot of Women’s Institute plum jam. He pulled off the rubber band and the parchment top, smelling the sweetness.

‘You should’ve told me,’ he said to the jam.

Meaning he should have realized. This was the last of the three pots Alison had brought back from the Women’s Institute. The day after she brought it, she’d told him herself and he’d just broken down into tears, here at this table, with the shock.

He’d always been naive. As a kid. As a songwriter. But naivety was something you were supposed to grow out of, like spots.

At the time, the idea of Alison joining all the farmers’ wives at the WI had seemed, OK, a little bizarre. But also kind of quaint and homely. It showed that coming here had really worked. It made him want to become part of the community too, a bellringer or something. Keep chickens, grow tomatoes for the chutney Alison would learn to make ... at the WI.

Just off to the WI. It had been a while before he’d realized that all those times she’d said she was off to the WI and returned a few hours later with a pot of jam, she’d really been with James Bull-Davies in the big bed at the big farmhouse called Upper Hall.

How had it begun? He didn’t know. Everyone else in the village seemed to know – the new woman in the life of the Squire of Upper Hall, that was bound to be a talking point. But there was nobody who’d have told Lol. He was a stranger, even to all the village newcomers. Lucy Devenish might have broken it to him, but he hadn’t known her then, in those long, hazy days of trying to get vegetables to grow and watching Alison’s easy smile slowly stiffen in her beautiful face.

Lol’s chin dropped into the crumbs on the kitchen table. All he wanted was to know why.

He closed his eyes and saw Alison riding, as she did almost every day, down the bridleway from Upper Hall, along the edge of the orchard and out into Blackberry Lane just before the cottage gate.

She was on her chestnut stallion. Alison knew a lot about horses and rode this one with something like contempt. It looked muscular and spectacularly masculine, a thoroughbred beast she could make a gesture out of being able to handle with no particular effort. Like Bull-Davies himself, who was the horse’s owner but would never, Lol was sure, be Alison’s.

He’d kept watching out for her, convinced she’d come back. For several weeks he’d really thought she would. Then he’d thought that one day she would at least dismount, lead the horse to the door, explain what had happened between them. But the morning ride always ended with an apparently casual glance towards the cottage, to see the smoke from the chimney, signs of life, signs of Lol’s survival ... before Alison and the stallion turned, both heads high, back into the bridleway.

Today there would be no smoke.

‘You all right, mate?’

Lol’s eyes had shuddered open when the knock came at the front door.

‘Oh.’ He didn’t know how long he must have been staring at the postman. ‘Sorry. Do I have to sign for it?’

‘No, I just couldn’t get it through the letter box, could I?’

‘Oh,’ Lol said. ‘Right. Sorry. Thanks very much.’

‘Your milk’s come.’

‘Oh ... I’ll come back for it. Thanks.’

‘Cheers,’ said the postman.

Lol carried the parcel into the kitchen, laid it down on the table. Ethel jumped on it, whiskers twitching.

The parcel was about fifteen inches square and an inch thick. It was postmarked Wiltshire. His name was on the front, typed on a label. Did he know anybody in Wiltshire? Lol lifted the cat to the floor and slit the brown paper with the butter knife.

Inside, under some stiff cardboard, was an LP record. Nick Drake. Time of No Reply.

Lol stared at it. He didn’t understand. He was afraid to touch it.

This was the posthumous album. The one with ‘Black-eyed Dog’, the bleak and eerie little song of depression and impending death. The one where Nick said he was feeling old and he wanted to go home. He was twenty-five years old. At barely twenty-six, he’d taken one anti-depressant too many and his mother had found him lying dead across his single bed.

Lol began to shake. Out of the speakers, from slightly happier days, Nick sang ‘Way to Blue’.

What kind of omen was this? He looked up at the curtained window facing the orchard. Suddenly had the overpowering feeling that posh, languid Nick was standing out there among the trees, waiting for him. A bass player he’d once met said he’d been to this party at someone’s flat and Nick Drake, six months before he died, had been there and had stood leaning in a corner next to a candle for two and a half hours, spoken to nobody and then slipped silently away, like a ghost.

There was a letter with the album. Neat and official and word-processed and signed ...

... Dennis Clarke.

Oh. Lol sat down. Oh, yeah. It was, in fact, his own album, the one he’d left with Dennis when he went into the hospital.

Dear Lol,

I found this record when Gill and I were sorting everything out for the move. Sorry, I’ve been meaning to send it for months. To be honest, Gill kept putting me off, saying it might make you depressed again. But now we know you’re over it and settled with a nice lady, well, here it is.

As you can see, we’re in Chippenham now, where I am a partner in a new accountancy firm. A couple of us decided to break away from the old outfit and set up on our own, and I think it’s paying off.

Gill and I have got three kids now, and we live in a four-bedroomed, neo-Georgian villa, extremely suburban. I do think about the old days quite a lot, how things might have been. Disastrous, probably. On reflection I’m always glad it ended when it did. We still get our royalties, don’t we?

Anyway, the real reason I’m writing is that I had a visit yesterday evening. From Karl.

Lol let the letter fall to the table. He didn’t want to read any more, and he didn’t need to, did he? Karl was over. Karl was gone. Karl was in ...

If you remember, he was in Seattle, managing a band and doing very well. However, it seems they split quite suddenly (musical differences, of course!!) and Karl was left with quite a few pieces to pick up. Anyway, he’s back in this country now because this is now Where the Future Is. He says.

I was a bit thrown when he went on to say he was convinced WE were part of that future. I never read the music papers these days, don’t have the time or, to be quite honest, the interest. However, according to Karl, the first two albums are now considered Seminal. That is, they have been discovered by a couple of the major bands – one of them might have been The Verve, no less – who list them among their influences, and sales are picking up again (expect to see this reflected in the next royalties, or I’ll want to know why!!).

Needless to say, I’d be happy to see those albums get the recognition they never really had in their day (with whatever resulting remuneration might be forthcoming!!) but I’ve been out of the business for a considerable time now and that’s what I told Karl when he said we should be thinking seriously about re-forming the band. Look, I said, I shall be forty-five next year, I have lost most of my hair, I have got three kids to support and I am very happy to be a chartered accountant in a nice part of the country. Also I have had a periodic problem with my elbow and have not lifted a drumstick in about three years.

Well, he didn’t push too hard, because, let’s face it, he can manage without me. I never wrote a song. I wasn’t even a very good drummer. It’s you he needs – not only the major talent in the band but nearly ten years younger than the rest of us and so less likely to seem like an old fart.

I don’t know how you feel about this. I did wonder, with you being in a stable relationship now and perhaps better able to hold your own with Karl, whether you might not be ready for something like this. However, when he asked me where you were living now, I decided on caution. I said, Look, Lol’s had his problems, you had better go easy. I think he got the message. Naturally, I said I didn’t know where you were living now, and I rang that guy Chris in A and R at TMM and warned them not to give your address to him either, but somebody’s bound to leak it, and that’s why I’m writing. I would have phoned, but I find you are ex-directory.

Anyway, I thought I had better let you know. Karl has changed ... well, a little. All the same, Gill didn’t take to him and was not at all happy when he took out what I would swear is the SAME TIN and rolled himself a joint, which, as you can imagine, is not exactly the drug of choice in our part of Chippenham.

Let me know if you hear anything. Give my best wishes to – Alison, is it? We were both so delighted to hear things are working out for you at last on a personal level and once again, sorry for keeping the album so long.

With very best wishes,

Dennis Clark.

Dear old Dennis Clarke.

Methodical, play-it-safe Dennis. If you work it out for yourselves, lads, you’ll see that if we do these two gigs in Banbury, we’ll be twenty-seven pounds better off than if we go up to Sheffield, taking into consideration at least three Little Chef meals, eleven gallons of petrol and tyre-wear ...

Dear old stupid, bloody Dennis. Put it behind you, Lol, it’s not the end of the world. Make a new start. In a couple of years you’ll be laughing about it.

Lol slumped into the old blue armchair.

Nick Drake sang ‘Cello Song’. Calm, upper-class English accent. And yet the black-eyed dog had been at Nick Drake’s door, as sure as the Hellhound had pursued Robert Johnson, the poor bluesman, over half a century ago. Both of them dead before the age of twenty-seven.

The thought of the hellhound who was Karl Windling back on his trail made Lol’s mouth go dry.

He thought, Where will I go?

The days were growing longer. Living in the country, you could really feel the earth turning, and it made you dizzy.

He would do it. He’d go. Now. In the springtime, when the sun was beginning to linger over the village with its ancient black and white cottages and inns, its old and mellowed church, its narrow, brown river.

In a similar village, not two hours’ drive from here, sometime in the night, Nick Drake had opened his door to the black-eyed dog.

Now, out there in the orchard, Nick was waiting for Lol.

3 Local History

ACTUALLY, JANE THOUGHT, it was excellent living at the pub.

Even though they had to share a bedroom: her at one end knocking off her homework, Mum at the other agonizing over a sermon. Even though you had to be up and into the bathroom pretty early to avoid having to watch Mum saying – oh my God – her morning prayers.

You tried not to be embarrassed, you really did try. But a grown woman, who actually wasn’t bad-looking for her age, down on her knees under the window, whispering sweet nothings to some invisible old bloke in the sky ...

What a psychologist would have said, how a counsellor would have put it, was that Jane was actually jealous of God. This single-parent only child, OK, a semi-orphan, and here’s her widowed mother taking up with Another Guy and this time it’s much more intense, this time it’s the Big Guy, the Real Thing.

This was what a psychologist would say. And was, in fact, more or less what a counsellor had said. The counsellor forced on her by Mum’s bloody theological college the time she ran away, as they insisted on putting it. Or took a night off, as she tried to explain it to them.

Anyway, the night off had involved putting on some serious make-up and going to a pub and getting chatted up by a computer salesman from Edgbaston before being spotted by one of the prissy bloody trainee vicars who fancied Mum and took great pleasure in grassing up the delinquent daughter. Jesus, how ironic.

‘All right, what’s on your mind, flower?’

Mum plonked two Diet Cokes on the pub table, the one near the toilets that was always the last to be taken – except, of course, when good old humble Mum was around.

‘Oh,’ Jane said. ‘You know. I mean, nothing really. As such.’

‘As such.’ Mum nodded solemnly.

‘Just wondering if I can put up with that bloody school for another two years before I wind up doing drugs and self-mutilation.’

Third new school in as many years. Though, frankly, when you’d done it once, it got easier. The kids were always more curious about you than you were about them, everybody wanted to hang out with the new girl, and the teachers would give you the benefit of the doubt for months before proclaiming you Public Enemy Number One.

‘Mmm,’ Mum said. ‘Is it that particular school or just any school desperate enough to take you?’

Jane wrinkled her nose. ‘I just sometimes think I’m too old for it.’

‘Too old for school?’

‘Older than everybody else my age, anyway. Do you really have to wear that thing in here?’

Saturday lunchtime. With the post-Easter tourist season starting up, the bar was pretty full. Being seen lunching with your mother was one thing, sharing a table with the Vicar was something else.

‘Yes, I really think I do.’ Mum patted her ridiculous collar with something Jane was horribly afraid could be pride.

She lowered her eyes. Hell, even a real dog collar would look better, one of those with coloured-glass jewels or brass spikes. People of Mum’s generation apparently used to wear them quite a lot during the punk era. She remembered Dad telling her once that Mum, as a teenager, had been a sort of punk. Not exactly the full safety-pin-through-the-nose bit, but certainly cropped hair and black lipstick. Dad talking in a way that suggested he’d been quite turned on by it. Pretty revolting, really. And the music was embarrassingly awful.

‘Going undercover was never a good idea,’ Mum said. ‘Not in the parish. It only leads to embarrassment later.’

Possibly meaning the guy who’d tried to pick her up in this very bar and had turned out to be head of English at Jane’s new school, the smarmball who could be teaching her A-level next year. Which – him being married to the girls’ PE teacher – Jane would not hesitate to use to stitch him up if the oily git should give her any hassle.

It was OK staying at the pub, because you learned things about people. Things you might not find out for ages if you were banged up in the vicarage. Like that TV-playwright guy, Richard Coffey, moving this youngish actor into his house on a fairly permanent basis. The actor was called Stefan Alder and was really succulent totty. Apart from being gay, of course. Or maybe he just hadn’t met the right woman.

So, yeah, it was good at the Black Swan. Swinging off the school bus and strolling coolly into the bar. On the other hand, there was the question of her apartment. Mustn’t let that one slide.

‘So, how long before they finish de-Alfing the rectory?’

‘That’s what I was about to tell you.’

Mum was taking delivery of a couple of ploughmans-wifh-cheddar from the waitress. Don’t do it, Jane pleaded silently. Please don’t say fucking grace ...

‘I meant to say last night.’ Mum speared a piece of celery. (Thank Christ for that.) ‘The rewiring’s complete, they’ve nearly finished work on the kitchen. And yesterday, apparently, they took out that huge electric fire which is so old it breaks every known regulation. According to Uncle Ted, Alf Hayden must have been getting divine protection to have avoided being fried. Anyway the bottom line is, we could be in by next weekend. Good?’

‘Yeah. Could be OK.’

Give her the whole of the summer holidays to get things together, apartment-wise. She had in mind this kind of Mondrian effect for the main room; you could paint the squares inside the timbers in different colours. Ingenious, huh?

It was Uncle Ted, of course, who’d fixed it for them to stay on at the Black Swan, persuading the diocese to fork out for the Woolhope Suite, a bedroom, bathroom and small sitting room with a decent-sized TV. It was still off-season, so Roland, the proprietor, had been amenable to the kind of deal that people like Uncle Ted prided themselves on making.

Uncle Ted was widowed and seemed to have an arrangement with a widowed lady in Church Street. Ledwardine was really quite liberal and sophisticated. Perhaps the country had always been like that.

To Jane’s horror, the local paper had been along, to get a picture of her and Mum outside the pub. Mum had insisted on wearing the clerical clobber, and the photographer had made them both sit on the pub steps, smiling like idiots. B and B Vicar Holds the Fort, it said. Yuk!

Mum’s only objection was to the word vicar. Priest-in-charge was the correct term. It was a temporary thing; apparently there was going to be this big reorganization and Mum could wind up with about four extra churches, making her a kind of flying minister. That was when they’d give her the official title; meantime it was just the one church, which should have been a piece of cake. Would have been to anyone but Mum, who seemed determined to become some kind of spiritual doormat: people cornering her in the pub all the time, emergency meetings of the Church Council, articles to write for the parish magazine (Dear Friends ... yuk!), four trips to Hereford to see parishioners in hospital.

And three funerals inside a fortnight: mega-depressing, or what?

Well, obviously you’d get used to that – be like planting bulbs after a while. Except, if you were Mum, you felt obliged to spend most of a day and a night quizzing relatives and neighbours about what kind of person the prospective interee was prior to being dead. It’s a life, Jane. You can’t just dismiss a life with a handful of cliches and a couple of jam scones in the village hall. She wasn’t even getting bloody overtime. And she was starting to look seriously knackered.

‘Ah. Merrily. Might one perhaps have a word?’

Jane looked up from her lunch. Yeah, she thought. The word is tosser.

‘Sure,’ Mum said. ‘Take a pew.’

‘Thank you.’

Mr Cassidy, of Cassidy’s Country Kitchen – naff, twee, or what? – parked his tight arse, in pristine stonewashed jeans, on the edge of a stool. He held a glass of white wine. He smiled indulgently down.

‘And how are you, Jane?’

‘Getting by.’

‘We really must arrange for you to meet Colette.’

His snotty daughter, who went to the Cathedral School in Hereford. You saw her posing around the square in the evenings. Sixteen (nearly) and sultry. Jane kept her distance.

‘Super,’ she said.

‘Got a problem, Terrence?’ Mum said briskly.

Mrs Fixit. Why didn’t she just tell him to sod off until she’d finished her lunch?

‘No ... No ...’ Cassidy said airily. ‘It’s simply ... Are you doing anything special tonight?’

Is she ever?

‘Depends which part of the night, really, Terrence.’

‘Mum hates to miss Homicide, Life on the Street.’

The vicar frowned at her daughter. Mr Cassidy smiled thinly. Everything about him was thin, which told you all you needed to know about his bloody awful restaurant.

‘This would be about eight,’ he said. ‘It’s an impromptu meeting of the Festival Committee.’

‘Am I on the Festival Committee?’ Mum wondered.

‘Well, Alf Hayden wasn’t. But we rather thought you should have a say. Especially as we were hoping this year to make more use of the church itself in other than musical areas. To be specific: drama.’

‘Oh, I’m sure it’s seen plenty of that in its time.’

‘Quite. In fact, it’s about that ... You see, Richard’s over from London for the weekend ... Richard Coffey.’

‘With his boyfriend?’

‘Shut up, Jane,’ Mum said.

‘As you may have heard,’ Cassidy said, ‘Richard has agreed to write a short play especially for the festival, to illustrate a lesser known aspect of local history.’

‘Gosh,’ Mum said. ‘There’s prestigious.’

‘We originally had in mind something social. Perhaps showing how the trade in high-quality cider was almost irrevocably damaged in the eighteenth century by the growing fashion for French wines.’

‘Yeah, you could invite the Euro-MP—’

‘Jane ...’

Jane retired behind a smirk.

‘However,’ said Cassidy, ‘Richard’s apparently become fascinated by the story of Wil Williams. Which I suppose also has a social aspect, in its way.’

‘Mmm,’ Mum said.

‘Obviously, it’s not something the village nowadays is particularly proud of.’

‘No,’ Mum said. ‘Quite.’

‘Although I suppose it has its tourist possibilities, in a lurid sort of way. Point is, Richard’s drawn certain conclusions which appear to have quite excited him. The case itself is not well documented, as you know – probably some sort of kangaroo court. But this, of course, gives Richard considerable artistic licence.’

‘Right.’ Mum nodded.

‘And as he’s even talking about bringing in some professional actors, which would be wonderful, especially if the play went on to London. Be rather super, wouldn’t it? Premiered in Ledwardine Church, and then conquers the capital.’

Mum nodded again. Her eyes had acquired a guarded look.

‘I’d have to talk to the bishop.’

‘Of course.’

‘And, er, Richard’s going to be revealing his plans at tonight’s meeting, is he?’

‘We hope so.’

‘Eight o’clock, you said.’

‘At the village hall. We normally meet in the restaurant, but Saturday is our busy night. You’ll be there?’

‘Well ... all right.’

‘You haven’t met Richard, have you?’

‘We’ve seen him in the bar, though,’ Jane said. ‘With his b—’

‘Look forward to it, Terrence.’

Mum laid her knife and fork neatly down the middle of her half-full plate. Another aborted lunch. You could get quite worried about Mum sometimes. She wasn’t getting any younger. Past the age when you should be eating like a supermodel.

‘Splendid.’ Cassidy wove off through the crush, holding up his wine like some sort of sacrament.

Jane grinned.

‘I thought you didn’t.’

Mum tossed her bag on her bed.

‘How the hell should I be expected to know who Wil Williams was. I’ve been too busy to even think about local history.’

‘Never mind, you’ve got hours yet.’

‘No, I haven’t. I’ve got to meet Gomer Parry at four. The digger man. Wasn’t for him and the gardening club, the churchyard’d be some kind of nature reserve.’

‘What a great idea.’

‘Don’t start!’

Mum flopped back on the bed, covered her eyes. The sun blared in through the old leaded window and turned her into a tableau: the exhausted saint.

‘And it’s Saturday afternoon, so the libraries are closed in Hereford and Leominster.’

‘Mum, this is ridiculous, nobody expects you to know absolutely everything.’

‘Yes, they do! That’s the whole point. Jane, I’m the bloody priest-in-charge. I’m supposed to have done my homework. I suppose I could go round and see ... who’s that old bloke who does the all-our-yesterdays bit for the parish mag?’

‘God, no. I heard him in the post office once. Great queue of people and he was on about how you could send a three-piece suite through the post for less than a shilling in 1938. You’d be lucky to get away in time for the meeting. Look, OK ... I’ll find out who he was.’

Mum took her hands away from her eyes.

‘How?’

‘Don’t look at me like I’ve never done anything for you ever!’

‘I mean ... properly?’

‘No, I’ll make it all up. Of course properly. And I’ll keep you out of it. I’ll say it’s for a school project.’

‘Where will you go?’

‘Ledwardine Lore.’

‘But that’s—’

‘Miss Devenish.’

Mum sat up. ‘Oh no. You said properly. You’ll just get the Miss Devenish version, which may not ... And anyway ...’

‘Yes?’

Mum did one of her heavy sighs. She’d had this thing about Miss Devenish ever since the great Powell suicide. The old girl had made a scene about this wassailing scenario being all wrong and no good would come of it and ... bang!... no good came of it. Spooky, yeah? Right. Jane was never going to forgive herself for missing all that. Of course, that was in her Ledwardine Denial Period; she was over that now.

‘Mum, look, that’s the only shop in the village where you can get real local history books. We’re going to have to get one sometime.’

‘All right, just pop in and grab a book.’

‘I won’t know which one it’s in, will I? You can’t stand there in a shop that size, going through all the indexes. I’ll have to ask her about it.’

Jane sat on a corner of the bed, searching out her mother’s eyes. People said they had the same eyes, dark and curious.

‘Got you,’ she said. ‘You don’t like me going in there, do you? Because people say she’s a bit of an old witch. Daughter of the priest-in-charge mustn’t be seen consorting with satanic forces, right?’

‘That’s cobblers, Jane. However, until we’ve got our feet under the table we’re going to have to tread carefully, walk on a few eggshells. Is that a mixed metaphor?’

‘No, spot on, actually. In an accidental sort of way. So. How do you want to play it? Do you want me to find out who Wil Williams was, or do you want to busk it with Coffey and Cassidy? Hey, you think Stefan might be there tonight?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Can I come?’

‘Absolutely not. God forbid. Neither will you hang around the bar. You can stay up here and watch TV.’

‘It’s Saturday night.’

‘Look, flower, we’ll have a home in a week or so. We can start shipping all your clothes and your albums and books and stuff over from Cheltenham.’

‘Yeah.’ She supposed there had been cultural withdrawal symptoms, from the music especially. Weeks since she’d lain on a bed with her eyes closed in a room full of Radiohead.

‘You won’t have to be bored any more,’ Mum said. ‘We’ll be settled, for the first time in years.’

‘You think so?’

‘Actually, I don’t know. I don’t really know what I’m doing.’ Mum sighed. ‘Sod it, flower,’ she said wearily. ‘I suppose I could consult Ted, but I’ve been bothering him too much lately. Go on. Go and ask Miss Devenish who on earth Wil Williams is.’

4 Straight Shooter

THIS FRENZIED SLAM, slam slam, flat of a hand on the door panels, someone who’d given up with the bell, given up with the knocker.

Lol flailed out of unconsciousness. Must’ve fallen asleep. Did that so easily now in the daytime, result of spending evenings dozing in front of the stove, staggering miserably to bed and lying awake until it was light. Yet there was something different about today ... wasn’t there?

Now the door handle was being rattled, the letter-flap pushed in and out, his name being screamed.

Oh my God. The black cat sailed from his knees. He rolled out of the chair. Alison. She’s here.

Go carefully. Go slowly. You only get one chance. Be cool.

Yeah, I’m fine. I just needed to talk to you. No weeping, no pleading. Just the truth. Because I can’t believe it was some fast-flowering infatuation did this to us, nor a sudden realization that he was what you’d always wanted. I can’t believe you saw him in his tweeds and his gumboots and you thought, that’s what I need to give my life direction, a genuine old-style landowner in a damp old seven-bedroomed farmhouse with cowshit on the lino and—

‘Laurence! Are you there? Laurence!’

Close to the door, Lol sagged.

It was not Alison. No indeed. He opened up, and there she was under the big hat, elbows making batwings out of the poncho.

‘You dismal tripehound! What the fuck are you playing at?’ Striding into the living room, flinging back curtains. ‘Do you know what time it is?’

He looked at the travel alarm on the mantelpiece. It said 14.15. This had to be wrong; maybe it had stopped.

Christ, six hours?.

Lol looked sheepishly into Lucy’s hot, glaring face. ‘I ... fell asleep.’

He remembered that this was Saturday afternoon. He’d promised to mind her shop.

The Nick Drake album was still revolving on the turntable, the needle grinding it up. It would be ruined now. Like everything he touched.

‘Don’t know what happened, Luce. It was just like ... I got up this morning ... then like fell asleep in the chair. Just completely—’

‘You’re lying.’ She was advancing on him like a big policewoman. ‘Come on, hand them over.’

‘Huh?’

‘Pills.’ She held out a big, pink palm. ‘Don’t fart about with me, Laurence, I’m not in the mood. Pills. Want to see what they are.’

‘I haven’t got any pills.’ He spread his hands. ‘Honestly.’

‘People with a background like yours,’ Lucy said, ‘always have pills.’

‘Oh God.’ He was far too ashamed to explain. ‘Doesn’t everything go pear-shaped?’

‘What you mean by that?’ Her eyes nail-gunned him to the wall. ‘Two days’ milk outside? All the curtains drawn? I won’t ask you again ... How many did you take?’

‘Lucy,’ Lol said, ‘would I leave a little cat to starve?’

She loomed over him. ‘Answer my question, damn you, or I’ll box your bloody ears.’

He stood back, both hands up. ‘I didn’t take any. No pills. All right?’

‘The milk? The curtains?’

‘See, I was lying awake all night. I’m thinking, you know, you’ve got to get your shit together, you can’t be a little wimp all your life, you’ve got to talk to her. And that ... I mean, that isn’t easy. I can’t go up to her in the street, I’m not ready to do that.’

‘Why can’t you simply phone her up?’

‘Because either he answers and I hang up, or she answers and she hangs up. She doesn’t want to talk to me. But she likes to know I’m all right, that I haven’t done anything really stupid. Like, what she really wants is for me to move out, but in the meantime she rides past the house every couple of mornings, presumably hoping she’ll see a For Sale sign but, failing that, some reassurance that I haven’t set fire to the place, cut my wrists in the bath, you know?’

‘How thoughtful,’ Lucy said.

‘I find that ... comforting.’

‘That she’s worried she might have driven you to take your own life? Ah ...’ Lucy took off her hat, tossed it on the chair. ‘One begins to see. You really are a sick, twisted little person, aren’t you, Laurence?’

He said nothing.

‘A silly charade. This was a silly, stupid charade. You wanted her to think you’d done it. You drew the curtains, made it seem as if you hadn’t collected the milk for two days, put on some mournful record. And then what? She sees you’re alive and falls into your arms?’

‘We just talk,’ Lol said. ‘Finally, we talk. See, I tried calling to her. She won’t get off the horse. She just turns around, trots away. You run after her. She—’

‘Pshaw!’ Lucy said. She was the only person he’d ever encountered who actually said this. ‘If attempted suicide is a cry for help, Laurence, this is, at best, a feeble squeak.’

‘Mmm.’ He nodded miserably.

‘Laurence!’ Lucy held his eyes like a hypnotist. ‘You’re letting me bully you! You aren’t even putting up a fight against an old woman with no business interfering in your affairs. We can’t have that, can we? Can we, Laurence?’

‘No,’ he said humbly, and she threw up her arms.

‘Aaagh! You can have what the hell you like, you clown. It’s your life. My God, but those hospital shrinks have a lot to answer for. Keep ’em drugged up to the eyeballs and then send ’em out like zombies.’

‘Actually, I was a bit like that before I went in.’

Lucy shook her head. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Have a pee, splash some water on your face, and then we’ll go.’

Through the window, he saw her moped parked behind his muddied Astra in the short drive.

‘All right,’ Lol said.

She let him push the moped down Blackberry Lane, across the square and into the mews enclosing Ledwardine Lore.

Lucy insisted she needed somebody to look after the shop occasionally. When was she to do her own shopping otherwise? Used to be a girl came in two afternoons a week, but she’d had a baby and left the area.

‘Everything’s priced,’ Lucy told Lol, unlocking the door. ‘And if it’s not, you can always make one up.’

She was doing this to bring him out, bring him into the village. He hated coming into Ledwardine on his own. They still smirked at him in shops. Been smirking at him for months. He’d thought it was because he was such an obvious townie and maybe he should grow sideburns below his ears, buy a rusty pick-up truck. Not realizing they all knew what he didn’t, that the entire bloody village knew.

‘And you won’t have to face any of the locals,’ she said, identifying his fears, gathering them up. ‘Only tourists on a Saturday.’

He relaxed. Lucy’s tiny, overcrowded shop had in it the essence of what he liked about this place, what he’d miss when he sold the cottage and cleared out: the red soil and the long, wooded hills and the twisted houses with old bones of blackened oak. And the apples. Why were apples so cheerful and wholesome, while the orchard was so oppressive?

‘Bad for you,’ Lucy was saying. ‘Wrong type of woman entirely. Not that she won’t be bad for him. But that’s his lookout. And he’s stronger than you are.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I never dress things up. Woman’s a destroyer. What you need is a preserver.’

‘We had something,’ Lol said. ‘I know I’m naive, I know I don’t see things. But you don’t set up a home with someone in a new place unless you feel there’s something worth having.’

Lucy shook her head at his short-sightedness. Lol thought of the day he’d come home to find Bull-Davies’s big Land Rover outside the cottage, filled up to the canvas with Alison’s stuff. How cool she’d been, how matter-of-fact about it, sitting him down at the kitchen table and telling him simply and concisely. Apologizing, in an almost formal way. Kissing him calmly, like she was just going off to London or somewhere for the day.

‘If you’d seen her at that Twelfth Night debacle,’ Lucy said, ‘you wouldn’t be so damned charitable. Where were you on Twelfth Night, anyway?’

‘Oxford. With a bloke I’d done some lyrics for.’

‘A cruel woman. And yet curiously shallow. Horse-riding, point-to-point, driving around in muddy Land Rovers, racing up the sweeping drive, being lady of the manor ...’

‘You’re making her sound starry-eyed,’ Lol said. ‘She’s not.’

‘No, indeed. She’s cunning. Manipulative. Knows how to use her looks. And the Bull’s a male-menopausal stooge who’s known only two kinds of women, garrison-town whores and county-set heifers. She’s got his balls in the palm of her hand and she’s not going to let go. And if you think a passing concern that little Laurence might top himself is any sign she may come back when she tires of the Bull’s body then, my boy, you’re even less bright than you look.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I’m a straight shooter, Laurence. You were just a stepping stone to the mansion on the hill. Poor James.’

‘Poor James?’ Lol sat down on the stool behind the counter. ‘He’s got the mansion on the hill, even if it is crumbling around him. Now he’s got the girl, too, no strings. Yeah, poor old James.’

‘I’m sorry. It’s just that I knew his father. Or at least I knew Patricia Young, who, I suppose, was one of the old man’s Alisons.’

‘Family tradition, huh?’

‘A tradition in most old country families. I say one of the old man’s Alisons, but she wasn’t at all like that. Patricia was bright, but a little naive. Like you. Stablegirl at the Hall who hadn’t realized that part of a stablegirl’s job was to lie down in the hay with her breeches off, as required. For John Bull-Davies.’

Lucy frowned. She took a paperback book down from a shelf, laid it on the counter.

‘Dissolute old bastard, John Bull-Davies. Slave to the flesh, and let everything else slip through his fingers: money, land, public esteem. If he hadn’t died when he did, there’d’ve been nothing left for James. Perhaps that would have been no bad thing, boy seemed to have been on the straight and narrow in the army. Now he’s been forced to pick up the pieces. And seems, unfortunately, to have slipped further into the family mould than I’d have expected.’

‘What happened to the stablegirl?’

‘I warned her to get out and she did. She left. I’m sure he must have found a replacement – or two, or three – before he died. Time that family faded out of the picture, I say. Turn Upper Hall into a nursing home. And that’s coming from an old conservationist. No, I hope your Alison takes him for everything he’s got, forces him to sell up and move away. It isn’t healthy for him here, because James has some sort of conscience. But that’s not your problem.’

He no longer understood what she was on about. She looked down at him, pushed towards him the paperback book she’d taken down.

‘I shall be back by five-thirty,’ she said. ‘Read this between customers. If you don’t get any customers, you’ll be able to read the lot.’

Lol picked up the book. A Penguin Classic. Thomas Traherne: Selected Poems and Prose.

‘This is the man you need,’ Lucy said. ‘Sitting there playing your mournful, wistful records. Do you no damn good at all. It’s spring. Let Traherne into your life. Open your heart to the Eternal.’

Lol had heard of the guy. Seventeenth-century visionary poet, born in Hereford, lived in Credenhill, about seven miles from here, where he was ...

‘He was a priest, wasn’t he? Vicar?’

‘Rector of Credenhill. I know what you’re thinking, but Traherne’s spirituality and your parents’ so-called Christianity are poles apart. That’s the whole point of this. You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crown’d with the stars’

‘That was him?’

‘You have to learn to open up. Let the world flow into you again. Go into the village on your own and go in smiling. That’s what Traherne did. Happiest man in the county. Discovered felicity. His great realization was that God wants us to enjoy life and nature. That if we don’t, we’re throwing it all back in His face. Traherne walked the fields and was truly happy.’

‘Maybe he’d just discovered magic mushrooms,’ Lol said.

Lucy snorted, pulled down her big hat and left him to it.

5 Buds

THE TRUTH OF it was that, from that first solo stroll around the village, Jane had been looking for an excuse to go into Ledwardine Lore.

She’d been up to it several times, but you could see through the window that the place was too small to browse around and escape without buying something. Maybe that was why so few local people seemed to go in – made more sense than all this stuff about Miss Devenish being weird. Like weirdness was something new in the countryside.

Emerging from the lustrous oakiness of the Black Swan, Jane skipped down the five steps to the cobbles. These were mainly new cobbles, the original ones being so worn away by horses’ hoofs that they’d apparently been considered too dangerous; smart ladies en route to Cassidy’s Country Kitchen might fracture their stiletto heels.

The alleyway was just yards from the bottom of the steps. It was tres bijou, the most terminally bijou part of the village, all bulging walls and lamp-brackets. In the days when the Black Swan was a coaching inn, it was probably a mews, with stables. Now the stables and an attached barn had become Cassidy’s Country Kitchen, with its deli and its restaurant, specializing in game and salmon and things served in nouvelle-cuisine-size portions at silly prices. Jane thought she’d have preferred it in the old days when the best you could expect was a nosebag full of oats.

There were a few early tourists about. Also the famous Colette Cassidy, shrugged into the Country Kitchen doorway, looking like a high-class hooker in a short, white dress. She raised an eyebrow at Jane but didn’t smile. Jane, in jeans and an old blue Pulp T-shirt, breezed past with a noncommittal ‘Hi’.

Ledwardine Lore was at the very end of the mews, crunched into a corner by the flatulent spread of the Country Kitchen. The sign over the window was uptilted so that ‘Lore’ was almost pointing at the twisted chimney; if it had been horizontal they’d never have squeezed all the letters in. As she pushed open the door, Jane could have sworn she heard an amused snort from Colette and was disgusted with herself for blushing.

Inside the shop, there was more standing room than you found in a phone box, but not a lot more. Jane felt suddenly nervous, like when you went into a fortune-teller’s tent and it was just you and her. When she closed the door behind her, this smell went straight to the back of her throat: not the usual horrible incense, but a piercing fruity scent.

She looked around and, at first, it seemed like just the usual tourist bric-a-brac: pottery ornaments and those little stained-glass panels you put over your windows. Cellophane-covered jugs of pot-pourri and gift packs of local wine. And books. Jane’s eyes went in search of history and found the usual paperbacks: Herefordshire Curiosities, Herefordshire Castles, The Folklore of Herefordshire, The Old Straight Track, The Old Golden Land.

Plus dozens of other books about apples. Apples for Growing. Apples for Health. Identifying Apples. Books of apple-legends, apple-customs, superstitions, games, even a book of poems called Ripest Apples.

And then she saw that most of the tourist stuff was apple-shaped and apple-coloured. The pottery was little apple jugs and mugs. The pot-pourri was orchard-scented, which accounted for the pervading smell. The stained-glass panels featured Eve and what looked like an oversized Cox’s Orange Pippin. The local wine was in fact cider, twin green bottles labelled Bittersweet and Bittersharp. There were also rosy apples in small oil paintings, crudely framed. Russet apples glazed on kitchen tiles. Wax apples, apple-shaped notepads and address books and naff fluffy apples, like the dice people hung in their cars, dangling in bunches from the ceiling beams.

And clinging to the fluffy apples and the jugs and the mugs and the frames of the paintings were scores of what looked like butterflies, but on closer inspection proved to be ...

‘Fairies!’ Jane said in surprise. They were tiny and delicate with little matchstick bodies and wings of soft red and yellow and green. Apple colours.

‘Lucy makes them. Two pounds each or three for a fiver.’

‘Oh!’ She jumped. She hadn’t seen him behind the counter. Well, until he stood up you couldn’t see anything at all behind the counter because of a pile of big green and red apple-shaped candles promising to give your living room an exquisite orchard ambience.

He peered out between the candles. He had long hair tied up in a ponytail and small, brass-rimmed, tinted glasses. He didn’t seem very tall.

‘Sorry,’ Jane said. ‘It didn’t look as if there was anybody here. Just ... apples.’

‘Pick-your-own?’ He plucked a fairy from a candle wick. ‘Spend over ten quid, we throw one of these in for nothing. They’re very lucky. Apparently.’

‘I didn’t really come in for a fairy. I was looking for a book on local history.’

‘Right,’ he said uncertainly. ‘Well, they’re around. They are around. You just have to keep moving things until you find what you’re after.’

She turned to look around and everything started to rustle and jingle.

‘I’m scared to touch anything. You never know what you might bring down.’

He smiled, indicating a small sign in a wooden frame between the candles on the counter. It said,

Lovely to look at

Delightful to hold

But if you break it ...

don’t worry, it’s my own

bloody fault for daring to

run a business in such a

grotty little hovel.

‘Cool,’ Jane said, impressed.

‘Lucy’s got a bit of a thing about these really precious gift shops that have all this delicate stuff in precarious places then make you pay through the nose when you dislodge one with your elbow. You said local history ... How local?’

‘Very local.’

‘Try up there.’

He didn’t seem to want to come out from behind the counter. A Roswell-style alien face stared impassively from his black sweatshirt. She reached up to a stack of volumes between stone book-ends featuring a sort of Gothic Rottweiler with an apple in its mouth.

‘There,’ he said. ‘That one.’

Pulling down a soft-backed book, she knocked over a stack of greeting cards displaying appley watercolours.

‘Chaos, here.’ But he didn’t come round the counter to help her pick them up. ‘It’s OK. I’ll do it later.’

The book she held was not very thick. The Black and White Villages: A short history. Jane flicked through it; it seemed to be mainly photographs.

‘I’m trying to find some information about a guy called Wil Williams.’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Mmm. Right.’

‘You know who I mean?’

‘You won’t find much in there.’

‘So where would I find something?’

He shrugged. ‘Difficult.’

‘This is my only hope. I need it. School essay.’

‘Well ...’ His accent wasn’t local, but there was an accent there, a vaguely rural one. ‘It’s difficult.’

‘You keep on saying that.’ What was it with this guy? He seemed harmless but he was definitely weird. Almost like he was scared of her.

‘Problem is,’ he said, ‘Lucy’s not happy about the way the story’s been handled. Doesn’t think they’ve got it right. Lucy has very definite ideas about things.’

You’ll just get the Miss Devenish version ... Yeah, OK, Mum.

‘Look,’ Jane said. ‘I don’t need anything in any great depth. I mean, just who was Wil Williams?’

‘I thought you were doing a school essay on him.’

‘I ...’ Her mind went fuzzy.

He smiled, took off his glasses. He wasn’t as young as she’d first thought. That is, he had a young face, but there were deep little lines around his eyes. He’d be more like Mum’s age, really. Pity.

‘He was the vicar.’

‘Oh, really? When?’

‘In the seventeenth century. About 1670, something like that. I’m not sure whether they actually called them vicars in those days, but that was what he was. See, Lucy’d give you the whole bit, but she takes Saturday afternoons off when she can. I don’t know that much about it. Keep meaning to find out, but at the end of the day, I don’t really think there’s much known for certain. It’s like one of those murky areas of history. All kinds of atrocities in those days, weren’t there?’

Atrocities?

‘But he was the minister of ... this church?’

He didn’t reply. He seemed suddenly to have forgotten she was here. He was staring through the window, into the mews, where Colette Cassidy still stood in her doorway and a bearded man was strolling by. The man looked at Colette’s legs.

‘This church,’ Jane said. ‘You mean the village church? Excuse me?’

‘Oh, shit.’

The shop guy folded his fingers together and squeezed hard. It was difficult to be sure in this light, but Jane thought he’d gone pale. He looked at her.

‘Look ... You on your own?’

‘Well ...’

She felt uncomfortable, found herself backing instinctively towards the door.

‘What I mean ... you’re not with that bloke out there?’

‘What?’

The bearded man was standing in the middle of the mews, about fifteen feet away. He wore jeans and a denim shirt and those dark glasses that went all the way round. He had his hands in his pockets and was gazing at the shop window. He seemed a quite ordinary tourist-type, perhaps waiting for his wife.

‘Why would you think I should know him? I’ve never even seen him before.’

The shop man had his glasses back on. He didn’t look cool any more. He sort of ... jittered. He bit his lip.

‘Yeah. Right. OK. Do me a favour, er ...?’

‘Jane.’

‘Jane.’ He shook his head, in a wry you-have-to-laugh kind of way. Then the hunted look was back. ‘Jane, could I ask you to mind the store?’

‘Right,’ said little Gomer Parry through his cigarette. ‘That bit, that’s all yours, Vicar, see.’

She’d given up correcting people when they called her vicar. You couldn’t really have people calling you Priest-in-Charge anyway, could you?

Gomer was pointing to a small meadow, about two acres, Merrily reckoned, sloping gently from one end of the churchyard down to the river.

‘Now, what we done the past couple o’ years,’ Gomer said, ‘is we mowed ‘im, end of July roundabout, then we sells the bales to Powell. We could sell the ole grass standing, let Powell cut it ’isself, but bein’ as how I got the gear, where’s the point in loppin’ off the profits? Plus, Gomer Parry Agricultural and Plant Hire, we does a tidy job.’

‘And what do you charge, Gomer?’

‘Aye, well,’ Gomer Parry said. ‘Bloody retired, en’t I? Can’t charge nothing no more, see.’

As Minnie, his wife of four years, never neglected to remind people, Gomer Parry Plant Hire, in the literal sense, was no more. Which Merrily reckoned accounted for Gomer’s general air of depression.

‘But the running costs,’ she said. ‘The maintenance of all that machinery ...’

‘Ah, does it good to get the ole things up and turnin’. All it is now is just a’ – Gomer struggled to cough up the contemptible word – ‘hobby.’

She felt sorry for him. Apparently, Minnie had refused to marry him unless he promised to pass on the operational side of the business to his nephew, Nev, and move these twenty miles back over the English border. But as he kept on telling you, he was only sixty-eight. What was sixty-eight in the Age of Power Steering?

Could it really be that Minnie hadn’t realized that Plant Hire was part of his name, part of who he was?

‘Mabbe you could mention me to the Ole Feller sometime,’ Gomer said. ‘In passing, like.’

‘Old ...? Oh. Right.’ Merrily nodded. ‘I’m sure He does notice these things.’

‘All respect, see, but the way I sees it, it’s a better thing all round if I’m out yere getting to grips with God’s good earth than inside that ole church throwing everybody off key with my deplorable bloody singing.’

‘Mmm,’ Merrily said dubiously. ‘We’ll, er, maybe go into that argument in more detail sometime.’

‘I never argues with the clergy,’ Gomer said, putting the lid on that one. ‘Now, your ditches. As I kept pointin’ out to the Reverend Hayden, them ditches is in a mess. En’t been cleared in my time back yere, which is four years come October, and there’s all kinds o’ shit down there.’

Gomer led Merrily along a crooked avenue of eighteenth-century graves to where the churchyard met the Powell orchard. It was a raised, circular churchyard, partly bordered by a bramble-covered ditch about four feet deep.

‘Get rid o’ this lot, no big problem, Vicar. However, wise not to widen the ditch this side, on account some of these ole graves’ve slipped and slid a bit over the centuries like, and you goes into that bit o’ bank you never quite knows what’s gonner tumble out, you get my meaning.’

‘Oh.’

Merrily imagined ancient bones rattling into the shovel of Gomer’s JCB.

‘As for the other side ... Well, who knows, Vicar, who knows?’

‘Who knows what?’

She hitched up her cassock to bend down and peer into the ditch. A rich, musty smell rose up. She looked across to the other side; the nearest apple tree was a good twenty yards away. Further into the tangly orchard, she was sure she recognized the twisted boughs of the Apple Tree Man and couldn’t suppress a shudder.

Gomer followed her gaze.

‘They won’t do that again, Vicar.’

‘The wassailing? No, I suppose not.’

‘Funny thing, though ... You wanner see the buds on ‘im now.’

‘On the ...?’

Merrily looked at Gomer. Those ridiculous, little round glasses and the often-unlit cigarette, like a baby’s dummy, made it hard to take him seriously.

‘Gonner be ablaze with blossom in a week or two, that ole bugger. You’d’ve sworn he’d given up. Makes you think, don’t it?’

She was chilled.

‘I think I’d rather not think. What did you mean just now when you said who knows? About the other side of the ditch.’

‘Ah. Well. You gotter ask yourself why the ole orchard’s still there, see. Rod Powell, he en’t a man to keep a worthless bit o’ scrub without there’s a reason for it. Well, a cider apple’s no use for nothin’ but cider, specially them stunted little buggers, and the Powells en’t made but their own in half a century. Rest of the farm’s beef and’ – Gomer growled – ‘battery chickens.’

Merrily, who also disapproved of battery chickens, kept quiet.

‘So you gotter ask yourself, Vicar, why’s he keep that ole orchard?’

‘Sentiment?’ Before the word was out, Merrily felt embarrassed.

‘Superstition.’ Gomer tapped his nose. ‘Them as don’t believe superstition counts for much in the countryside no more en’t never lived yere. Powells put in a bunch of new trees down the bottom end, to please that Cassidy, but Edgar wouldn’t grub up this bit, nor even scrat around too much in there, on account of he knows and all his family knows that there’s ...’

Gomer paused, took off his flat cap. Wild white hair erected itself.

‘... the First Unhallowed Ground.’

Merrily thought she understood, but she wasn’t sure.

‘You dig up decently buried bones, see, well, that’s one thing. You just puts ’em straight back. But any bones the other side o’ that ditch ... Now don’t get me wrong, Vicar, I’m not saying I goes for this ole toffee, I’m just telling you the kind of superstition you’ll encounter if you sticks around these parts ... But the bones t’other side, them’s the ones you don’t wanner be diggin’ up, you get my meaning.’

On the other side of a curtain behind the counter was an iron spiral staircase leading up into what seemed like complete darkness, apparently a loft without a window. Jane stuck her head through the curtain.

‘OK, Lol. He’s gone.’

‘You sure?’

The voice was hollow with – Jane was amazed and thrilled – actual, real fear. It made her think again about the little crunch before the man had left.

‘Jane?’

‘Yeah, honest. I’m certain. Gave him two minutes, then I went to the end of the mews and he was talking to Colette Cassidy, then he was getting into this pretty smart yellow sports car. Toyota.’

‘He didn’t see you following him?’

‘Not a chance.’

His face appeared at the top of the spiral, blinking from the dark, full of suspicion and ... yeah, anxiety. Definitely that. The lines around his eyes deeper.

‘You know the Cassidy girl?’

‘Only by sight.’

He came down. ‘That means you’re local?’ He looked dismayed.

‘I am now,’ Jane said. ‘For my sins.’

She was still feeling rather electrified. This could be the most utterly bloody brilliant place she’d ever lived. Best of all, she felt in control. She’d saved this man from God knows what. He owed her one.

‘So what exactly are we looking at here?’ Jane said loftily. ‘Drugs?’

‘Huh?’ He slumped back on the stool behind the counter, shaking his head. He looked drained, as though he’d spent the last few minutes on the lavatory.

Pretty heavy.

‘Listen.’ Putting on her cynical smile. ‘I might be local now, Mr Robinson, but I’ve been around. Like you’re into that guy for some amount you can’t afford, and he wants his money. What are we talking? Coke? Smack?’

‘What?’

Jane said, ‘Es? Whizz?’

‘Huh?’

‘You can tell me.’

‘Oh ... God.’ It was probably the last thing he felt like, but he started to laugh. ‘Who the hell are you?’

‘Don’t change the subject. My general feeling is, that wasn’t a very nice guy. Underneath all the charm and the Florida tan and the really white teeth. I can sense these things.’

‘He buy anything?’

‘He said he was looking for an old friend. He described you. Puny little guy, long hair, glasses. He said he’d been to your house and asked around and somebody said they’d seen you with Miss Devenish, and this is her shop, so ...’

‘And you said?’

‘I said I didn’t know anybody called Robinson, which was true. I said I couldn’t think who he meant. So he’s like ... Oh, well, he might’ve changed, got fatter, lost his hair. And I’m saying, Well, in that case he could be any one of a dozen people.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Like, I don’t think he believed me that you weren’t here. He said – in this kind of knowing way – that if I should just happen to come across you, tell you he’d be back. And he kept like looking at the curtain. As if he was wondering whether to thrust me aside and go in and drag you out.’

God, this was fun. If not so much for Mr Robinson.

‘He say when he’d be back?’

‘Nn-nn.’

‘What was his attitude?’

‘Like I said, charming. Lovely white teeth. Capped, I suppose. He imports the stuff, does he?’

‘Look ...’ Mr Robinson pulled hair out of his glasses. ‘He may be into drugs, I wouldn’t know. We are not business associates. He’s what he said he was. An old ... friend. Sort of.’

‘If you think I’m that dumb,’ Jane said loftily, ‘you’re spending too much time with the fairies.’

‘He’s just hard to get rid of. You must’ve had friends like that. That’s all it was. No drugs. Sorry. Oh—’ Alarm doubled back across his face. ‘You say he talked to the Cassidy girl?’

‘Briefly. Like he was asking her the way or something.’

‘Look. Seriously. Jane? You listening? If you see him again, keep out of his way, yeah? Will you promise me that, Jane?’

‘You want me to come and tell you if I see him again?’

‘No! Just stay out of his way. Tell Colette, too ... No, don’t, it’d just get her interested. Leave it. Please. Forget it happened.’

Fatal instruction. ‘Bit bloody one-way, this, if you ask me,’ Jane said.

‘Suppose I give you the dirt on Wil Williams.’

‘Oh, sure,’ Jane said. ‘Change the subject.’

‘It’s one L, by the way,’ Lol said. ‘If you didn’t know. W-I-L. The Welsh way.’

‘All right then,’ Jane said. ‘Wil Williams. One L. And it better be good.’

‘It wasn’t that good for him. But I expect you’ll find it good. It’s spooky. Here, have a notebook to write it down.’

Lol reached up, flipped one from a rack behind him. A quick, nervous thing, as though he was giving his hands something to do to stop them shaking. He laid the notebook on the counter; it had an apple on the front.

‘I’ll pay for it,’ Jane said primly. ‘And what should I do about this?’

Opening her left hand over the counter. A tiny fairy looked up, stricken, from her palm, its apple-streaked gossamer wings in shreds, its matchstick spine snapped.

‘Your ... old friend ... knocked it off its perch. Crunched it under his shoe on his way out. Pretended not to notice, but I think he did.’

Both Lol’s hands were behind his back now. He bit his lip.

After the lady vicar had gone, Gomer Parry was down the ditch dragging some of the brambles away, sizing up the job, when the shadow fell across him.

‘What d’you think of her, Gomer?’

The hooked nose under the hat. Like some old eagle, she was.

‘The vicar? ‘Er’s all right, Lucy. Nice little girl. Don’t throw the Ole Feller in your face the whole time.’

‘Nice little girl. Pshaw! You know what I’m asking, Gomer. Is she strong?’

‘’Er gonner need t’be, Lucy?’

‘She’s a woman.’

‘Never thought to hear that comin’ from you.’

‘Because you don’t know what I mean, do you?’

Gomer tried to climb out of the ditch, slipped back, and she offered him a hand and pulled him out easy as this hydraulic winch he used to have.

‘What did you talk about? When you were looking out to the orchard?’

Ah, watching them, was she? ‘This an’ that,’ Gomer said. ‘Number of buds in the Apple Tree Man kind of thing.’

‘The Apple Tree Man?’ Face near black against the light. ‘Heaven save us, there’s no such damn thing as the Apple Tree Man! Not here. That’s Somersetshire lore. Ours is a different tradition altogether. You should know that. No apple tree man, no guns.’

‘Well, pardon me,’ Gomer said, ‘for bein’ just a humble plant-hire operative.’

‘It’s important, Gomer. These clowns move in with their twisted interpretations, and we wake up one day and we’re living in a different place – a fantasy village. It’s what happens when you get too much change too quickly. This was a terribly poor place when I was a child – miserable farm wages, children still in rags. Now it’s damn near the richest village in the county. Looks beautifully authentic, but it’s a sham. And do they care, the locals, what’s left of them? Do they hell.’

‘Money’s money,’ Gomer said, winding her up, see where this was heading. ‘Shops doin’ well. Plenty jobs for plumbers, builders, carpenters, the ole rural craftsmen. Why should they care?’

‘It’s false wealth, you know that. Cider was Ledwardine’s wealth, and it dried up long ago.’

‘But hang on yere, Lucy, if this Mr Cassidy’s out to revive it—

‘In his dilettante, touristy fashion.’

Gomer studied her. She’d never been what you’d call pretty, but there was a time when she could’ve had her pick of men. And, from what he’d heard, she’d picked a fair few in her time and thrown them back a bit more out-of-breath than they might’ve reckoned on. But time passed.

‘Well,’ He fished out his ciggy. ‘I wouldn’t know what that means, dilly-whatever ... me bein’ just an ill-educated plant-hire man, like. But it do strike me, Lucy, as you’re bein’ a bit of a wosname in the manger. Cause you din’t think of it yourself, you don’t wannit to work. Same with the festival. You feels ... what the word? Sidelined.’

Lucy Devenish blinked and brought a hand to her face, and for one terrible moment, Gomer feared she had a tear coming. But she used the hand to straighten her hat.

‘What I feel, Gomer,’ she said, ‘especially when I stand on this side of the churchyard, is a certain fear for your nice little girl.’

6 Cold in the House of God

MERRILY WALKED SOFTLY into the darkening church, still hesitant, still unsure.

‘Do you know what I couldn’t do?’ her mother had said a couple of years ago. ‘I couldn’t go into one of those old churches alone at night. Spooky. Anybody could be in there: tramps, rapists. That’s another reason why it isn’t a job for a woman, in my view.’

Least of my problems, Merrily thought, still half-afraid that she would be met by a chill of hostility, a cavernous yawn of disapproval.

It had all been too easy, so far. Respectable congregations (all right, curiosity, novelty value). Sermons which seemed to write themselves, even in the hotel room at midnight. No dark looks in the street, no suspicious stares.

And not even inducted yet. Apart from reducing the number of hymns, she hadn’t even started on what she planned. Although she didn’t, to be honest, know what form it was going to take yet.

It still didn’t feel quite real, this was the problem. Staying in a hotel – even when you had to drive into Hereford at night to use the launderette – created this illusion of a holiday. Perhaps when they moved into the vicarage, reality would set in.

She wasn’t looking forward to that; the vicarage was too big to be a home; it scared her far more than the church.

It was a dull evening now, the stained glass fading to opaque. Her hand slid over the stone, up to the light switches. Even the air in here was temperate. The brass-bracketed lamps came on. In the soft amber, the walls themselves glistened with antiquity, yet not in an austere, forbidding way. The stones were mellow and softly encrusted, like country honey.

The evening visit had become a kind of ritual. Her trainers pattered on the flagged floor of the nave. Her footsteps made no echoes; the acoustics, as Alf had said, were warm and tight.

Walking on bones. Several of the flags were memorial stones, dating back three, four centuries. Francis Mott, d. 1713. John Jenkyn, whose dates were worn away into the sandstone like the lower half of the indented skull in the centre of Jenkyn’s flag – they didn’t dress it up in those days.

Couldn’t be more different from the last place, in Liverpool: a warehouse: scuffed, kicked about, a city church of smutted brick, with no graveyard, only rusty railings. The building couldn’t have been less important; it was what you did there, what you brought to it.

This church was important – medieval, Grade One Listed. Beautiful beyond price, even to people with no faith. And it felt friendly. Even to a woman. It enfolded you.

Hey, don’t knock it.

Merrily faced the altar through the rood-screen out of which row upon row of apple shapes were carved. Closed her eyes and saw a deep, dark velvety blue. Feeling at once guilty about this habitual need for reassurance.

‘Mum? That you?’

Merrily’s eyes opened. ‘In here!’

Jane’s head appeared round the door, hair as dark as the oak. ‘You’re not doing anything ... private?’

‘Like what, for heaven’s sake?’

‘You know...’

‘Like doing the rounds? Locking up?’

Merrily stood with hands on hips. Getting a bit fed up with this attitude, the kid treating God like a stepfather. Was it always going to be like this until she left home and old mum in the dog collar became a figure of affectionate amusement?

‘Got him, Mum.’

‘Well, don’t leave him on the mat. Who are we talking about?’

‘Wil. Wil Williams.’

‘Oh.’

‘One L. He was Welsh.’

‘Anything wrong with that in the seventeenth century?’

‘A lot wrong with him,’ Jane said. ‘In the seventeenth century. Though I don’t think it would’ve worried me.’

‘Well, that’s wonderful,’ Merrily said glumly. ‘That’s all we need, isn’t it?’

They sat side by side in the front pew.

‘There’s no evidence he was.’ Jane picked at the thick varnish on the prayer-book ledge. ‘Not what you’d call real evidence. I mean, people were always getting stitched up in those days.’

‘But not vicars. Believe me, there’s very little history of this kind of thing inside the Anglican Church.’

‘Very little of interest has ever gone on inside the Anglican Church.’ Jane grinned. ‘Still, they haven’t had you very long yet, have they?’

‘Ha.’ Merrily looked up at the Norman arch, so plain, so curiously modern-looking. ‘All right, why hadn’t we heard about this, Jane? Why isn’t it a celebrated case, like Salem, Massachusetts?’

‘Because he was only one bloke, I suppose. Besides, it never came to a trial, according to Lol.’

‘Lol?’

‘Guy in the shop. Very nervous.’

‘You make everyone nervous. Where was Miss Devenish?’

‘Day off. Look, it’s all straight up.’ Jane pulled a little notepad from her jacket. ‘Date: 1670. That makes it after the Reformation, right?’

‘Restoration.’

‘Whatever. After Cromwell. Was that Charles the Second’s time, guy in the curly wig? Anyway, in rural areas, they were still very reactionary and always on the lookout for witches to persecute. Poor old Wil put himself well in the frame.’

‘Meaning?’

‘I’ll tell it in sequence, so I get it right. He’d been vicar a couple of years, OK? Got the job possibly on the recommendation of the Rector of Credenhill, the poet guy ... ?’

‘Thomas Traherne.’

‘Yeah. They were mates. Went for long nature rambles together, Lol reckons, discussing ethics and stuff. Only then Traherne gets a new job near London, and when he leaves there’s nobody to stick up for little Wil and somebody like dropped him in it, big-time.’

Merrily smiled. Jane’s style of historical narration wasn’t exactly textbook, but it did confer a certain immediacy.

‘See, from what I can make out, Wil Williams was serious, serious totty. Like really great-looking, in a poetic, ethereal, unworldly sort of way. Strawberry-blond, unblemished, lovely smile. Women swooning in the aisle kind of scenario.’

Merrily frowned. ‘You’re not embellishing this by any chance? Because if you drop me in it at this meeting ...’

‘Swear to God. And it’s significant because this could be one reason he wasn’t all that popular with the men. I mean the macho, hunting types who ran things. Lol reckons parsons in those days were expected to ride with the hunt, drink too much port, get gout ...’

‘Sure. Go on.’

Jane turned over a page in her notebook, following the lines with a forefinger; she’d never quite outgrown that.

‘Very superstitious times, OK? So when you get reports of strange phenomena, I mean, you know ... Sounds like complete rubbish, total crap, today. But people didn’t take too much convincing back then. Everything was an omen. You only had to start a rumour and they’d all be screaming for blood.’

‘What sort of phenomena?’

‘I’m coming to it. Most of it was centred on the orchard ... just over the wall? Powell’s orchard? Mum, you shivered ...’

‘I didn’t!’

‘You bloody did. And now you’ve lied in the House of God!’

Merrily growled. ‘It gets cold in the House of God after a while. Just shut up and get on with it.’

Jane peered at her notes. ‘Something about ... hogs? Oh. Yeah. The orchard belonged to the Church back then. They produced quite a lot of cider in those days, apparently, and the vicar’s stipend included what he could make out of it. Which was expected to be about fifty hogsheads of cider every year. Is that a lot?’

‘I have no idea. What happened in the orchard?’

‘Lights,’ Jane said. ‘Lights and music.’

‘Parish barbecue?’

‘Strains of eerie music in the night.’ Jane’s voice dropped to a sepulchral whisper, which wasn’t actually all that funny in the vast, lamplit church. ‘Fiddle music, like for dancing. Little, glowing, bobbing lights among the apple trees. Wil Williams ... dancing with demons.’

‘I see.’

‘One guy actually did see. Or claimed to. Lol couldn’t remember his name, but he was a local miller or tanner, one of these quaint, rustic professions. One dark night, he was coming back from the pub – probably well pissed – and he strayed from the track and wound up in the orchard. Or was kind of lured towards the lights and the music, couldn’t help himself. What’s that noise, Mum?’

‘Bats, probably. Vampire bats. Don’t try it on, Jane, I’ve got approximately an hour before the meeting. What happened to the miller?’

‘Private screening of the seventeenth-century equivalent of a dirty video. Wil Williams stark naked, dancing around an unearthly light with these silvery, shapely ... demons. Or sprites, as he called them.’

‘How very tawdry.’

‘Obviously gave the miller a hell of a hard-on.’

‘Jane!’

‘Sorry. Sorry, God. No, naturally, the miller claimed to have been shocked and terrified and he spread it all round the village, and word reached the Sheriff of Hereford and the Bishop of Hereford, and eventually a bunch of them went round to the vicarage, all official—’

‘Our vicarage?’

‘Presumably. It’s old enough, isn’t it? So all these sanctimonious gits arrive on Wil’s doorstep to ask for an explanation or arrest him for devil-worship or whatever the charge was. But there was no answer when they knocked on the door. So they came ... here.’

Merrily didn’t move. Resisted the urge to look around. It was only a story, it was all in the past, and yet ... she was apprehensive. She didn’t want there to have been some sort of Thomas a Becket death scene at the altar, the honeyed stones stained with innocent blood ... some set-piece slaughter she’d have to try not to think about when she arrived to take communion on drab winter mornings.

‘Somebody kicked open the door,’ Jane said.

This time Merrily did look – towards the main oak door, imagining the group of po-faced guardians of the law striding righteously past the font, bearded men with swords half-drawn.

‘But the church was empty,’ Jane whispered. ‘Wil Williams wasn’t here.’

Merrily sighed. The kid really knew how to spin out a story.

‘He was outside,’ Jane said. ‘In the orchard. All dressed up for them, in his full vestments and things.’

‘He was expecting them?’

‘Presumably,’ Jane said.

‘This is the suspense bit, is it?’

‘You could say that.’ Jane gave half a smile. ‘He was hanging from an apple tree.’

‘Oh God.’

‘In his richest vestments,’ Jane said dreamily. ‘Poor Wil, dangling there, all aglow on a bright, sunny morning.’

Jane nodded to signify The End and closed the notebook with a snap, raising her gaze to the vaulted ceiling so that the amber lights were reflected in her big, dark eyes.

‘Terrific.’ Merrily blacked out a flash-image of the half-head of old Edgar Powell hanging like a left-over Christmas bauble on the Apple Tree Man. ‘I hate that bloody orchard.’

Funny thing, though, Gomer Parry had said ... You wanner see the buds on ‘im now.

So the orchard used to belong to the Church, although it was not, of course, holy ground. And yet close. The First Unhallowed Ground, Gomer had called it. Suicides were invariably buried in unhallowed ground.

‘He knew they’d be coming for him,’ Jane said. ‘And he couldn’t face it. The trial, the abuse and everything. Poor, sensitive soul. He was only about twenty-five.’

Obviously, Terrence Cassidy had said, it’s not something the village nowadays is particularly proud of. Although I suppose it has its tourist possibilities, in a lurid sort of way.

‘So they buried him where he died – in the orchard. With only an apple tree to mark his grave. And, as apple trees don’t live very long, nobody knows where it is now.’

Merrily recalled what Gomer had had to say about the reasons the Powells had never grubbed up their unproductive orchard.

... the bones t’other side, them’s the ones you don’t wanner be diggin’ up, you get my meaning.

Unless you were a distinguished playwright, for whom no bones could be buried too deep.

She watched Jane’s gaze travelling around the church with a new interest. The first time, in fact, that the kid had displayed any interest. It would have a history now, a mystery, a romance. In that age-blackened pulpit had stood the doomed Wil Williams, serious totty, with the sunlight in his strawberry-blond hair.

‘Heavy stuff, huh?’ Jane said, well satisfied.

Nothing unhealthy about this. Wil Williams was as remote and unreachable as the lead singer of some boy band in Sugar magazine. Merrily remembered the stage when she would fall in love with the ludicrous heroes of fantasy novels, princes with magic swords. It was a phase. A safe phase which wouldn’t last long. Not long enough. Real boys, real men would be in the picture all too soon.

‘Sure,’ Merrily said. ‘Heavy stuff.’

And felt a pang of impending loss. The sandstone walls still had an old-gold glaze in the lamplight but, when she stood up, she was sensing an end to the honeymoon period.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘Thanks, flower.’

7 Dirty Video

‘I BEG YOUR PARDON,’ Terrence Cassidy said, irritated.

‘Old Cider!’ Dermot Child, the musician, thumped the table. ‘That’s what we should call it!’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘The entire event. The festival. Old Ciderrrrrr! Resonates.’

Everything Dermot Child said seemed to resonate. He was a plump friar of a man, who, without being obviously Irish, Scottish or Welsh – indeed, his accent was closer to Oxford – vibrated with an emotional fervour you could only describe as Celtic. Merrily quite liked him.

In the absence of the parish secretary, who was also the treasurer of the Women’s Institute (as distinct from the Women’s Group, formed by newcomers) and was attending some sort of WI convention, she’d agreed to take the minutes of this hastily called meeting. She wrote down, Old Cider?

‘Explain, shall I ... Mr Chairman?’ Child leaned over onto an elbow, making a determined fist, as if prepared to arm-wrestle Cassidy into submission.

‘Please do,’ Cassidy said, resignation soaked in acid. It was, after all, his festival, Merrily thought. His idea, his concept. Eccentrics like Child should content themselves with being occasionally amusing.

Merrily smiled. Child caught her eye, winked. Outside, a small motorcycle was being expertly skidded on the cinders under the open window. Councillor Garrod Powell moved swiftly to the door. ‘Give it a rest, Kirk,’ they heard him shout mildly. ‘Else I’ll be round to see your dad, boy.’

It was getting rather dim in the village hall, screened from the sunset by two huge oaks. On the way back to his chair, Councillor Powell lifted a hand over the panel of metal switches to the left of the T’ai Chi group noticeboard. ‘Leave it a moment, would you, Rod?’ Child said.

Powell, tall and trim and oddly dignified, shrugged and went back to his seat between Cassidy and a moody-looking James Bull-Davies.

‘It begins with “Crying the Mare”,’ said Child. ‘You’d know all about that, Rod. They used to do that on your farm?’

‘Sure to,’ Powell said uncertainly.

‘Harvest custom. They’d leave the last of the corn standing, separating it out into four bundles, sticking up like legs. The Mare, you see? Then they’d tie these together at the top to make a single sheaf, step a few paces back and hurl their hooks and sickles at it, to try and cut off the ears of corn.’

‘Sounds rather pointless to me,’ observed Terrence Cassidy, apparently failing to recall his role as principal organizer of the infamous Twelfth Night event in which shotguns were discharged into an apple tree.

Dermot Child ignored him. ‘Be interesting to arrange a contest in one of the fields, see how many chaps can still do it.’

Somehow, Merrily couldn’t quite imagine Lloyd and Garrod Powell, plus sundry seasonal labourers, abandoning the combine harvester to waste a valuable daylight hour attempting to shave a sheaf with tossed sickles.

‘However,’ Child said, ‘this was really a preamble. On this and other occasions, the ritual would invariably conclude with mugs of cider all round. Now. This would be preceded by all the chaps gathering into a circle and intoning—’

Abruptly, he pushed back his chair, stood up, filled his lungs. And with his fingertips pressed into the tabletop, bellowed in a lugubrious bass, ‘Auld ... ciderrrrrrrrrrrrr.’

Rolling and dragging out the word on a single note, in a deep, rumbling drone, a Herefordshire mantra. Merrily was startled. How eerily primeval it seemed in the purply gloom. You felt that if several of them were doing it, the walls would start to peel and crumble.

No one spoke again until Child sat down.

‘Aye,’ Rod Powell said then, into the silence. ‘I remember.’ He moved to the switches again, and bluish fluorescent tubes began to flicker.

Merrily recalled, as the lights revealed the sickly, sixties, pink-brick interior of Ledwardine’s only real architectural embarrassment, what Gomer Parry had said about even the mercenary Powells being far from immune from superstition.

Dermot Child was patting his chest.

‘Don’t know about the rest of you, but I find that absolutely thrilling. Bunch of working men using their lungs and their throats to make contact with the earth itself. Setting up this marvellously powerful vibration ... Ciderrrrr. The very roots of music.’

‘Sort of vibration we need for this festival,’ said James Bull-Davies. ‘That’s what you’re saying?’

Bull-Davies was wearing a tan gilet over a checked shirt with a cravat. Until you actually lived in a place like this, Merrily thought, the idea of there still being a kind of uniform for local squires would strike you as a joke. But it was a fact that people like James did not wear jeans, they did not wear T-shirts, and they would never, under any circumstances, be seen in a baseball cap, even the right way round.

‘You know ...’ Child leaned across the table. ‘You’d be absolutely perfect for it, James. Your voice has the timbre.’

Cassidy scowled but said nothing. Probably not caring to emphasize his own reedy lack of timbre. Merrily wanted to giggle. James Bull-Davies caught her eye and looked away at once. Merrily stifled a sigh. How long would it take for this guy to come to terms with a woman priest? Answer: he never would; it wasn’t the thing.

‘I’m planning, you see,’ Child announced, ‘a new choral work, for which this will be the focus. Old Cider. I’m looking for voices. Local voices. I want to work with the voices. I want the composition to arise from those voices. From the earth, the red earth of Ledwardine. Any thoughts, Rod?’

‘We did have a male voice choir, Mr Child, some years back. Folded through lack of support. A few of the ole boys still around, though, sure to be.’

Child beamed. ‘Vicar?’

‘I could put the word around the church choir,’ Merrily said. ‘See if we can get a few volunteers.’

‘Good girl,’ Child reached over and patted her hand, lingering perhaps a little too long on her fingers. ‘So what’s the committee’s view on using “Old Cider” as the name of the festival. Terry?’

‘Terrence,’ Cassidy said tightly. ‘Well, we obviously can’t make a decision tonight—’

‘Who says we can’t?’

‘Look, I suggest you submit a paper on the proposal and we’ll circulate it before the next meeting.’

‘Hell fire!’ boomed Bull-Davies. ‘Only a question of a bloody title. I propose, Chairman, that we take a vote on whether to decide it here and now. In fact, not to prolong the issue, I formally propose the Ledwardine Festival be known hereafter as the Old Cider festival.’

‘Seconded,’ Child said quickly.

‘Now just a minute ...’ Terrence Cassidy’s thin face was flushed. ‘What this means is that the entire festival would effectively be promoting your as yet unwritten choral work.’

‘Or my choral work, for heaven’s sake’ – Child threw up his arms – ‘would be supporting the concept of the festival.’

‘Proposition on the table, gentlemen.’ Bull-Davies made a grimace of a smile. ‘And, ah ... lady. Chairman, my understanding of the rules of the committee game is that what you do next is ask if there are any amendments.’

Cassidy folded his arms obstinately. ‘I think we should wait until Richard Coffey arrives. His play’s going to be the thing that gets us national publicity, and he might—’

‘Chap knew it was eight p.m., didn’t he?’ Bull-Davies rumbled. ‘Can’t wait all night. Move progress.’

‘All right.’ Cassidy very red now. ‘Very well. If that’s what you want. So be it.’

Looking around for an amendment. In vain. Even to Merrily, the idea sounded simple and unpretentious, reflected the identity of the village and would look good on posters. Why waste time?

‘Old Cider’ was passed by three votes to one. Councillor Garrod Powell, as the only official local politician there, did what local politicians did best and abstained. Hostile looks were exchanged.

Oh God, Merrily thought, it’s going to be that sort of committee.

She was suddenly depressed. Was this how Alf Hayden had started out: dutifully attending all the bitchy little meetings, wondering how God wanted him to vote? Wondering, after a while, if God was really concerned one way or the other. Village life: the cradle of society, or just a shallow pond across which Jesus surely would never have bothered to walk?

Tyres crunched the cinders under the window.

‘Richard, I imagine,’ Cassidy said, as if it didn’t matter any more, as if he’d washed his hands of them all.

Merrily had hoped Coffey wouldn’t show. After what Jane had told her, she needed a bit of time to think about Wil Williams, minister of this parish 1668 to 1670. She needed to consult a few people. If James Bull-Davies was in a decisionmaking mood tonight, she might be pushed into a corner on the issue of whether the local Church should be actively involved and allow its premises to be used for the resurrection of a seventeenth-century minister apparently hounded to death by his own parishioners.

Her first dicey decision. Sitting directly beneath the No Smoking sign, Merrily ached for a cigarette.

Back at the Black Swan, Jane watched National Lottery Live on TV, alone in the tiny, half-panelled residents’ lounge, and almost began to understand why her mother had gone into the Church.

The bloody lottery. Look at them all, whooping and squealing with every number drawn. Was this what the human race had come to – naked lust for money, mob greed?

Greed. Well, of course, Dad had been greedy. No getting around that.

Poor bloody stupid Dad.

For nearly two years, she’d kept a secret picture of the wreckage. Secret from Mum, that is. Mum having tried to shield Jane, at eleven, from the worst of it. No local papers had been allowed into the house that week.

But Dad’s car was such a horrific mess, like a screwed-up ball of newspaper, you could hardly tell it had ever been a car, that the picture had made it to a couple of the nationals. She’d cut it out, hid it under her mattress.

The picture froze her up inside, but she’d forced herself to bring it out every night before she went to bed and she’d stare at it and stare at it, knowing he was still in there when the photo was taken, like shreds of meat in a burger.

Dadburger.

With added Karen. Fragments of Dad and Karen all mixed up, intermingled: flesh around flesh, bone to bone, tissue on tissue, sinews intertwined. More together than they could ever have been in life. More intimate than Sean Barrow had ever been with Mum. Karen had him totally at the end and for ever and ever, and it would be convenient to think that this was what had driven Mum into the arms of God. Only it wasn’t that easy, it had been coming on for quite a while before that. The impenetrable paperbacks, the long walks, the tedium of evensong, the voluntary work at the Christian Youth Centre. Creepy.

‘Ah, here you are.’

A powerful whiff of musk made Jane spin round in her chair, and there, in the doorway, was the glamorous Ms Colette Cassidy in her teenage-hooker dress. Glancing at the TV, smirking.

‘Yeah, they said you were an intellectual. Want to come for a drink?’

‘More than my life’s worth,’ Jane said frankly. She hadn’t been Mum-less in a bar since the infamous running-away incident in Birmingham, since the creepy counselling session.

‘I didn’t mean here,’ Colette said. ‘We could go down the Ox.’

Jane was reluctantly impressed. The Ox was this tiny, seedy pub, flickering with gaming machines on the corner of the alleyway leading to the public toilets.

This was a test, wasn’t it?

‘Your mother isn’t going to get away from that meeting this side of eleven,’ Colette said. ‘My old man’ll see to that. Gives you a couple of hours, at least.’

‘I don’t know.’ Jane was thinking fast, too fast, feeling flustered. Street cred on the line in a big way here.

Colette tossed back her dark-brown hair like an impatient, thoroughbred pony. She had this scintillating diamond nose-stud. Could you get away with that at the Cathedral School, or was it a weekend thing? Must be a pain to keep taking it in and out. Worthwhile pain, though.

‘And if you’re worrying about word getting back to the Reverend Mummy,’ Colette said smoothly, ‘I think it’s fair to say that the clientele of the Ox aren’t known for religion.’

‘Especially on the morning after Saturday night, I suppose.’

‘You got it.’ Colette smiled her sophisticated smile, fifteen going on thirty-five.

‘It’s a bit close to the village hall.’

‘Live dangerously,’ Colette said.

Jane stood up, no option.

‘Am I late?’

Not actually sounding as if he cared one way or the other, the playwright slid his briefcase across the table, shed his jacket, spidered into a seat. A single motion. Richard Coffey was all motion.

‘Not at all’ Terrence Cassidy gathered his papers, and his dignity, to his chest.

‘Yes,’ James Bull-Davies snapped.

This was unnecessary, Merrily thought. Uncalled for. But nobody appeared to have heard him. The lord of the manor had been eclipsed. There was a powerful new energy in the meeting.

‘Er, Richard ...’ Cassidy half-rose, ‘I’d like to introduce our new vicar, Merrily Watkins.’

‘Charming name,’ Richard Coffey said.

Merrily had never seen him up close before. He was, she thought, almost shocking. Had the taut, muscular body of an ageing ballet-dancer, at the stage where staying fit was becoming painfully obsessive. His lean, pocked face vibrated with colours and textures, divided into pulsing segments like a portrait by Lucien Freud or Francis Bacon, full of life and personal history, a history, you would have to conclude – even if you hadn’t heard the stories – of sensual excess.

She was fascinated and wasn’t aware of how long she’d been staring at him until the vacuum of silence around them was popped by a discreet chairman’s cough.

‘Mustn’t waste time.’ Terrence Cassidy tapped his pen on the table. ‘You all know Richard as one of our most celebrated contemporary writers for both the stage and television. He’s now living, part of the time, at Upper Hall Lodge, and naturally we’re glad he chose our village as his weekend retreat.’

‘My feeling now is that it chose me,’ Coffey purred diffidently.

Merrily saw James Bull-Davies gazing at the ceiling. Envisaged words in a bubble above his head. Tiresome bloody poofter, something like that. He’d be seeing rather more of Coffey than any of them; Upper Hall Lodge was, of course, at the bottom of his drive and used to be occupied by generations of Bull-Davies gamekeepers.

Cassidy nodded. ‘I’m sure that’s true. And we’re all delighted at Richard’s plan to use the Ledwardine Festival to premiere a major new drama illuminating a rather ... rather unfortunate episode in our history. Unfortunate, but ... but fascinating. Ah, at the moment, apart from its general theme, I know no more than any of you about the project. Which is why I asked Richard along tonight to tell us as much as he feels able to divulge at this stage of the, ah, creative process.’

‘Thank you, Mr Chairman.’ Coffey fluidly opening his briefcase and extracting a file of papers. ‘I should, however, say from the outset that the prospect of staging a complete production, with a full cast, here in late summer, early autumn, is not really a viable one.’

‘But, I ...’ Cassidy fought for balance, the rug sliding from under him. Merrily saw Dermot Child perk up.

‘However – calm yourself, Terrence – what I do have in mind will be very much an event in itself. A re-creation, in the original setting, which I think could be absolutely electric. Will not only, I believe, lay a ghost, clear the name of a good man, but effectively solve a three-hundred-year-old mystery.’

‘Oh. Is that all?’ Bull-Davies said sourly.

Yes, it would upset him, having his village’s history mined for nuggets of controversy by the celebrated interloper who’d turned his one-time gamekeeper’s lodge into a less-than-discreet second home. Had he, Merrily wondered, seen The Crystal Dungeon, Richard Coffey’s controversial TV play about a reclusive earl’s incestuous relationship with his sister and their persecution by an evil butler?

Coffey didn’t even seem to recognize the big, tweedy person as the owner of the rundown heap at the top of the drive.

‘Anyway,’ he said smoothly, ‘I propose to outline my idea and then leave you to discuss it amongst yourselves. If it bothers any of you, I’m sure one of the other villages—’

‘No!’ Cassidy looked helpless. ‘I mean, tell us, Richard. Tell us.’

‘Wil Williams.’ Coffey slid on half-glasses, spoke with precision. A man with nothing to prove and no time to waste on dissent. ‘I take it we’re all conversant with the brief facts.’

Merrily was able to nod. Thank God for Jane.

‘Williams became rector here in the late 1660s. We don’t know how old he was when he arrived. We think late twenties. His friend and neighbouring cleric, the poet Traherne, in a letter to his brother Philip, describes Williams as fair-haired, youthful in appearance and exuding a kind of perpetual joy.’

‘Traherne.’ James Bull-Davies was scornful. ‘Chap never had a bad word for anybody. Walked around in bloody cloud-cuckoo-land half the time. Wrote as if he was on something.’

‘One could argue at some length with you there. But this is not the occasion. I think no one would deny Williams was a man who loved the area and exulted in his ministry.’

Bull-Davies shrugged impatiently. Merrily wrote down, Traherne, feeling a bit ignorant. Traherne had been mentioned briefly at college as a major literary precursor of Wordsworth and Blake and one of the greatest Christian mystical poets, but she actually didn’t know that much about him or his work. Fairly reprehensible, really, considering he’d been rector of a parish not ten miles away.

‘As I understand it,’ Dermot Child said, ‘it was Traherne who more or less secured the Ledwardine post for Williams. Then buggered off.’

‘It’s never been proved that Traherne had a hand in the appointment of Williams,’ said Coffey. ‘Although, as you say, it is a theory. Certainly the two knew each other before Williams came here, possibly at Oxford. You say “buggered off" ... Traherne certainly appears to have lost touch with Williams when he left the area in 1669. We know of no correspondence, and it seems unlikely that Traherne knew of the subsequent persecution. Perhaps because Williams made a point of not telling him.’

‘Not telling him he’d been accused of bloody witchcraft?’ Child leaned over the table, hands clasped together. ‘Man’s life was on the line. Surely, he needed all the support he could get. Traherne had good contacts by then – chaplain to this fellow, er ...’

‘Sir Orlando Bridgeman, one-time Lord Keeper of the Great Seal for Charles the Second. Yes, Traherne could perhaps have helped him, had the charges quashed. But Williams didn’t seek Traherne’s help. Why? I see that question as crucial’

Merrily said tentatively, ‘It seems incredible to me that a minister of the Church could find himself accused of witchcraft, even then. I know that was a fairly paranoid period, but ...’

Coffey glanced at her, twitched a smile.

Merrily said, ‘You’re going to say he was fitted up, aren’t you, Mr Coffey?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘On what basis?’ Bull-Davies said sullenly.

‘Well,’ Coffey eased from his case a photocopied document. ‘Let’s look at the evidence. In September 1670, Williams was accused of “consorting with sprites”. What do we mean by sprites?’

Silence.

‘Spirits of the dead?’ Child offered finally. ‘Evil spirits?’

‘I think not,’ Coffey said. ‘The only specific evidence handed down to us is a statement by one Silas Monks, a tanner—’

‘The only evidence that remains,’ Bull-Davies said. His eyes were hard.

‘—who tells us that, while returning to his holding from the inn one night, he saw Williams in the orchard next to the churchyard, cavorting under the fruit-laden trees with an unspecified number of “vague and slender persons ... whose forms shone palely in the moonlight”.’

He paused, presumably to allow everyone to draw individual conclusions about this. Merrily thought of what Jane had said about the seventeenth-century equivalent of a dirty video, and a slippery, silvery image floated into her mind. She felt herself blush.

‘Well, good for him.’ Dermot Child laughed lightly, as if to dispel what Merrily sensed was a thickening fog of discomfort around the table.

‘But it wasn’t, was it?’ Coffey said. ‘On the alleged evidence of this presumably drunken tanner, and the resulting rumours, Wil Williams was visited and formally accused of witchcraft by a delegation including a Justice of the Peace, the local schoolmaster and, ah ...’

A chair’s metal legs scraped on the wooden floor. James Bull-Davies stood up, eyes reduced to black slits in a big, darkened face.

‘I’m leaving. I’ll be in the pub. Call me back when you’ve heard enough of this shit.’

‘James ...’ Cassidy coming to his feet in a panic.

Bull-Davies didn’t look back.

8 The After-hours Social Club

‘IT’S LIKE I’VE walked in on her and she’s having sex or something, you know? I’m like, Ooops, sorry. Backing out of the room, kind of all gooeyed-up inside. And then she tries to talk to me about it, which makes it worse.’

Jane was sweating. She drank some more cider to cool herself down. The cider was quite sweet and very soft. Never had it before. Amazing. You could actually taste apples.

‘Can’t handle it,’ she said. ‘Talk about a cross to bear. Just embarrasses me to bits.’

It was really dark in the Ox. Dark like a church. And hazy, so that the red and green and orange lights in the old slot-machines hung in the gloom like the small panes in the corners of stained-glass windows. Which was what had reminded her, brought up the awful image of Mum wearing out the knees of her tights.

Colette was unimpressed. ‘At least praying’s quiet. My mother shouts a lot now. Shouts at my old man, shouts at the cleaner and the cook and the waitresses. I don’t mean bollocking them, just being loud. Asserting herself. It’s one of her new words. Assertive. She went on this course for it. Kind of menopause training – when you start to lose your looks, make sure you get on top in bed kind of stuff.’

Jane didn’t contest the issue. Everybody knew Colette’s parents were a first-division pain.

‘You just have to accept,’ Colette said, ‘that one way or the other they’re going to embarrass the piss out of you. It’s what they’re for. At least yours is youngish.’

‘And paranoid. She’s convinced I’m gonna make the same mistake. Like get pregnant before I’m twenty. Doesn’t realize how everything’s changed. Like with condoms. Her day, you had to sneak into chemist shops wearing a false beard or something. Now they’re hanging on Christmas trees. Anyway, I’m never going to get pregnant. Nobody with any sense of responsibility these days wants to dump another kid on the heap.’

‘You should get her to put a condom machine in the church porch,’ Colette said. ‘That’s where it all happens.’

‘Yeah. And have them handed out with the prayer books!’

And they both broke up laughing and clutched at each other, and Jane thought, Hey, this woman is really OK, you should never judge people by their parents.

‘Another one.’ Colette stood up. ‘You got anymore money?’

Jane found the last fiver in her jacket pocket. Colette was getting the drinks because she looked the older, at least twenty-five, although she was only a few months older than Jane, coming up to sixteen and able to do It legally – be no fun any more, she reckoned. Woman of the world.

And one day ... Jane leaned back against the scratched oak settle, which was kind of like a pew. Feeling pretty dreamy actually.

But aware that some of the guys at the bar were sneaking little glances at her. Even if one of them was this oozing gumboil, Dean Wall, a year over her at the high school. Dean and his mates played three-card-brag on the bus, big men. When they’d sidled over once tonight, Colette had taken no crap at all, told them to piss off back to their homework, and they’d slunk off, laughing, although you could tell they were really feeling stupid. One of them said something to Colette now, as she turned away from the bar with the drinks, white dress rucked up to her thighs, and she turned and raised a contemptuous middle finger and the boy laughed, but he was blushing too, under the sweat.

‘Virgins.’ Colette put down their ciders. ‘Got virgin written all over them.’ Except for the ones who’ve done it with sheep.’

‘That’s not really true, is it?’ Jane drank some cider. ‘I mean you hear all these jokes—’

‘Of course it’s true! This is the country. You only have to look at that Dean Wall, his eyes all wide apart. Even looks like a sheep.’

‘Maybe his mother was a sheep.’

Jane looked over at Dean Wall, and his eyes were actually quite a long way apart and also his upper lip seemed to overhang the other one, like a sheep’s did. She spluttered over her drink. Couldn’t remember how many they’d had; must be the fourth, good job it was only sweet cider. She mopped her mouth and then the table with her handkerchief. The table seemed quite a long way below her and wobbling, and she kept missing the puddles.

She remembered something important. ‘Hey, what did that bloke say to you this afternoon?’

‘What bloke?’

‘In the sports car?’

‘Oh, yeah, right. Not bad, was he? Bit old. He just said was it too late to get some lunch, and I said it was and he said maybe he’d come back for dinner, would I be there, the way guys do. What were you doing with little Lol?’

‘Oh. Just, like ... checking out the shop. Weird.’

‘Sad. Lol’s mega-sad. Lucy doesn’t need anybody to look after the shop on a Saturday, she’s just trying to bring him out, introduce him into the community. Gives him nice poetry to read.’

‘Huh?’

‘Like with mental patients? They don’t lock them away any more, they let them out on the streets. The way there used to be village idiots?’

‘You’re saying he’s mental?’

‘Sort of. He had a breakdown. Actually, he used to be a sort of pop star, way back. Well, very minor. I mean, like, tiny.’

‘Pop star ...?’

‘Like, he was in this band and he wrote songs for other people.’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know, do I? It’s way back. I’m not interested. I only listen to dance music’

‘Why’d he have a breakdown?’

‘I don’t know. He lost his girlfriend, but I’m not sure whether that was before or after or maybe the reason she walked out on him. They never looked right together, she was taller than Lol for a start. And then she left him for ... Oh ... in fact, for him.’

Colette nodded towards a big guy in a tweed jacket, with leather patches, and khaki-coloured trousers. Jane recognized him at once, course she did. Why, it was ... it was ... Jesus, what was up with her?

‘James,’ Colette said. ‘The anachronism. Hey, anachronism. Not bad after six glasses.’

Six? ‘What?’

‘Bull-Davies. He’s this kind of throwback. Family used to be lords of the manor. They say he’s got a seventeen-inch ...’

‘What?’

‘Maybe it was seven. Oh, shit. He’s on the bloody festival committee, isn’t he?’

Jane blinked blankly.

‘Means they’re out, Jane. Yes? Got it? Committee-meeting over? Reverend Mumsie on the loose?’

‘God, wazza time?’ Where was the clock? Didn’t seem to have one at the Ox. Hadn’t been here that long, had they? Then again, it seemed like hours, days ... ‘Oh, shit. This is the problem when you have to share a suite with your mother. Can’t sneak in, can’t sneak out. We’d berrer go.’

‘Finish your drink first. You paid for it.’

Jane didn’t really feel like it, but at least it was only cider and went down quite easily. Trouble was that when she stood up, she couldn’t. Well, couldn’t stay up. Sank back into the settle and didn’t want to move again. All the little red and green and orange lights dancing like the fairies on wires in Ledwardine Lore.

‘Oh no,’ Colette said. ‘I can’t believe it.’

‘Wassup?’ Over the other side of the bar she saw Dean Wall and his mates nudging each other in a kind of soupy haze.

Colette wore a big, ice-cream grin. ‘You are completely pissed.’

‘I’m not! You can’t get pished on cider.’

‘I can’t believe it. You poor little sod. Come on, Janey, we’ll make a discreet exit. Just like hold on to my arm.’

Jane raised herself up again and Colette threw a surprisingly capable arm around her waist. She was already a good mate, Colette. You needed a good mate in a new place.

‘Don’t look at Jimmy Bull, Jane. Don’t look at anybody. And for Christ’s sake don’t throw up on me.’

Silence hung over the four of them for quite a while. The festival chairman, the musician, the councillor, the new vicar.

‘Well,’ Garrod Powell said slowly. ‘If he wasn’t a witch, what was he?’

He looked genuinely puzzled.

Richard Coffey opened out his hands. ‘I shall let you deliberate at your leisure. Suspect I’m overdue for an early night. Country air rather hits one after a couple of weeks in town. I’d ask you, of course, to keep the details to yourselves until we’re ready for the publicity.’

‘Of course. Thank you for coming, Richard.’ Cassidy’s face was glazed. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow, if I may.’

‘Make it Monday.’

‘Of course.’

‘Well,’ Dermot Child said when they heard Coffey’s tyres spinning brusquely on the gravel. ‘It’s quite funny, really.’

‘Is it?’ Cassidy said weakly, covering his eyes with the fingers of both hands. ‘Is it funny, Dermot? I don’t think it is. I think it’s going to cause a lot of trouble. I think it’s going to split the village and I don’t see what we can do about it.’

James Bull-Davies had not returned. Perhaps, Merrily thought, that was as well.

‘He could, of course, be right,’ she said hesitantly. ‘About Wil Williams. It makes a lot of sense.’

‘It makes perfect sense,’ Dermot said. ‘But it doesn’t make it into a happier story with which to climax the festival and put Ledwardine on the national tourism map.’

‘I suppose it might become more of a ... a sort of shrine. To a certain kind of martyr. If you see what I mean.’

‘And how would the Church take that, Vicar?’

Merrily shrugged uncertainly. ‘These days, no problem. I suppose. It’s politically correct. Plus, it removes the ancient stain of Satanism or whatever.’

‘Just, just ...’ Councillor Garrod Powell beat a small, agitated tattoo on the tabletop, ‘just let me get this absolutely right. What our friend Mr Coffey is suggesting is that he uses the church for a performance featuring his ... companion ... Mr Stephen ...’

‘Stefan Alder, Rod,’ Cassidy said through his fingers. ‘Alder, as Williams, will appear in the pulpit before a capacity congregation to formally defend himself against the charges of witchcraft levelled by his parishioners.’

‘The delegation of local bigwigs will lay out the various charges, one by one,’ Dermot Child said. ‘Witnesses will be called, including the drunken tanner, Silas ... Monk? Monks? And Williams will reject all the accusations of consorting with sprites, giving the simple explanation that, although he is a fully committed Christian and renounces the devil and all his works, he is also ...’

‘A homosexual,’ said Councillor Powell. His voice was flat. ‘That’s right, is it?’

Child sighed with mischievous pleasure. ‘Yes, it is, Rod.’

Councillor Powell thought about this for nearly half a minute before he said, ‘So what this play’s gonner be implying is that the people of our village – that’s our ancestors ... our ancestors, not Mr Coffey’s ancestors – drove this young man to his death ...’

‘... in a frenzy of post-Restoration queer-bashing,’ Child said. ‘Also – I wasn’t entirely sure about this, but the impression I gathered was that the slender persons shining palely in the moonlight will turn out to have been not necessarily local youths corrupted by Williams, as much as—’

‘Careful,’ Cassidy said.

‘Sorry, did I mean converted? Not so much having been converted by Williams, as having conspired together to display their bodies in his churchyard, thus tormenting the poor bloke beyond the point of human endurance, until he chased them into what is now your orchard, Rod, and—’

‘What I thought.’ Powell’s face had closed right up. ‘I think I’ve heard enough.’

Taking a stand at last, from which he’d not be swayed. Of course, Merrily realized, he was a magistrate. If it was happening today he’d be in that stern delegation of local bigwigs.

‘And I would have to say, as your elected local government representative, that, in my view, this is a very sick idea. Gonner rake up stuff as shouldn’t be raked up.’

‘Idea being the operative word, Rod,’ Child said. ‘Coffey’s using the Williams story to make a political point. In The Crucible, Arthur Miller employed the Salem witch trials as a parable reflecting McCarfhyism. Coffey’s turning Wil Williams into a gay icon. There’s really no evidence at all that Williams was gay.’

Merrily’s liberal instincts began to nudge her. ‘You’d rather he was a devil-worshipper?’

Dermot Child regarded her with a lopsided smile. ‘I do believe you’re starting to smoulder, Vicar.’

Merrily scowled.

‘What I would rather ...’ Rod Powell was on his feet. He made quite a distinguished figure, the only one of them in a suit and tie. ‘... is that this whole damn business went away.’

‘Well, it won’t,’ Cassidy said. ‘So let’s not get it out of proportion. At the end of the day, we’re being given the opportunity to present a significant work of art by a distinguished writer.’

‘With an axe to grind, Mr Chairman.’ Rod Powell thumped the table. ‘An axe to grind.’

‘Well, perhaps ... But isn’t that what worthwhile art is all about?’

‘Then let him grind it somewhere else, sir. Not in our church.’

‘I rather think that’s up to the Church itself to decide, don’t you?’

They all turned to Merrily.

‘Hey, don’t look at me, I’m only the vicar. I’ll have to consult ... somebody.’

‘And your conscience, Mrs Watkins.’ Rod Powell’s voice was low and quiet but somehow carried all the resonant menace of Dermot’s auld ciderrrrr.

The village hall went ominously quiet after this. Until Terrence Cassidy said gently, ‘Merrily, I rather think you may find, at the end of the day, that this will be your decision.’

Well, thank you, Mr Chairman. How was she supposed to react? Come over all spiritual and lofty, tell them she’d pray for guidance and hope they’d all do the same?

Garrod Powell looked distant, Terrence Cassidy anguished. Dermot Child gave his vicar a sympathetic smile, but his eyes were bright with anarchic glee.

‘Er ...’ Merrily reached for her bag. ‘Anybody mind if I have a cigarette?’

Before Colette pushed her out of the pub door, Jane glanced over her shoulder and saw the slug Dean Wall and his mates frantically gulping down their lagers.

‘Shit,’ Colette said. ‘Move, you silly cow. Listen. When we get outside, we go right. Got that?’

Jane’s legs felt like somebody else’s legs.

‘Jane ... You listening to me? I’m not dragging you up the street, past all the houses. Those low-lifes’ll be trailing after us, making smart remarks, and it’ll be all round the village before breakfast, and you’ll never get out at night again.’

‘Legless.’

‘What?’

‘Leg ...’ All the times she’d heard the term and never once thought about what it really meant, and now she knew.’... less. I’m leglesh!’

It was suddenly the funniest expression she’d ever heard.

‘Jesus wept,’ said Colette.

The spring night air was lovely and warm. Softly lit by a wrought-iron lamp over the pub entrance and overlooked by crooked black and white gable-ends, the cobbled alley was intimate and story-book romantic. Ledwardine by night: wonderful. Jane stood there, gazing up at the stars, feeling suddenly, amazingly, more absolutely at home than she’d felt anywhere they’d ever lived and that was a lot of places. Another lantern hung across the entrance of the alleyway, orangey, alluring, and she glided towards it.

‘Not that way. Right.’ Colette tugging her back across the cobbles. ‘Follow your nose.’

Meaning the horrible, acidy pong from the public toilets at the end of the alleyway. The proximity of the dirty-brick toilet-block spoiled the idyll, and the smell killed the atmosphere stone dead. Obstinately, Jane turned her back on it.

‘Why can’t we go—?’

‘Shut up!’ Colette’s hand came down over Jane’s mouth with a slap. ‘They’re coming out.’

Jane was shocked into silence. She swallowed, feeling unsteady inside. Colette took the hand away from her mouth and used it to haul her past the cracked gents sign, up some steps, on which Jane stumbled, and then it was soft underfoot and suddenly really dark.

‘The old bowling green, all right?’ Colette said. ‘We cut across here, over to the footpath, round by the churchyard, out of the church close and we’re back on the square.’

‘Ingeniush,’ Jane said thickly. She looked up. The sky was brilliant, the stars huge and blotchy like Van Gogh stars. Actually, everything was bigger and blotchier.

‘All right?’ Cocky voice from just a few yards behind them. ‘Need any help, do we, ladies?’

‘Shit.’ Colette pulled Jane across the grass. ‘Duck.’ Branches grazing her head. ‘Not a word.’ Colette tugged her down behind the trees. She fell back into the grass, lovely and soft at first. Closed her eyes and everything turned into a big, waltzing fairground ride, which wasn’t so pleasant, so she opened her eyes and sat up, feeling kind of damp and clammy and wishing she was in bed in the Black Swan.

‘You all right, girls?’

‘Danny Gittoes,’ Colette hissed into her ear. ‘If he knew where we were he wouldn’t keep shouting.’

‘He’s not so bad.’ Jane recalled a lanky, slow-moving character who played the trombone in the school orchestra.

‘Keep your bloody voice down. Not so bad sober. Not so bad on his own. Bunch of them at closing time, you don’t get involved. Bad news. I got caught once, never again.’

‘Thought you were a woman of the world.’

‘You do it on your terms, Jane. Not theirs. Never theirs. Besides, if Gittoes was mine, you’d get Wall. Up against the back of the toilets. Fancy that, do you?’

‘Yuk.’

‘Right. So shut up. Come on, on your feet. There’s a path. We get to the churchyard we’re all right.’

‘You wanner come to a party, girls?’ Danny Gittoes called out, further away now.

Colette sniffed. ‘Very small party, I reckon. Hold on to my arm, Jane, this bit’s muddy.’

Danny Gittoes bawled out, ‘Bring your mother, you wanner.’

The ground was harder underfoot; they’d found the path. Danny Gittoes was lumbering about, a good twenty-five yards behind.

‘Give ‘er some holy communion, I would. Any day o’ the bloody week.’

‘I rest my case,’ Colette murmured. ‘Scumbag?’

‘Scumbag. Least he’s on his own.’

‘Yeah, but that worries me a bit.’

Jane felt cold now. She was glad to see the big, black hulk of the church thrusting through the trees and bushes like a liner on a dark ocean, stars drifting around the steeple. Another hundred yards and they’d be out on the square and the only problem then would be slipping quietly into the Black Swan and looking like she’d just been for a meditative stroll. Best thing, before going up to the suite, would be to pop into the downstairs Ladies’, slap some cold water on her face. Although the chances were Mum would be too stressed up over tomorrow’s sermon to notice much.

‘Wow.’ Jane leaned into the rough stones of the church wall. She felt like they’d walked miles. ‘I think I got cider a bit wrong.’ When she closed her eyes it felt like she was falling through the wall. ‘Jesus.’

‘Yeah, well, we all have to learn.’ Colette patted her shoulder. ‘Come on, Janey.’

‘Sorry.’ Jane blinked a few times and straightened up. ‘I ... you know ... I just ...’

Becoming aware that Colette’s hand hadn’t left her shoulder. In fact it had gone into a grip.

‘Shit,’ Colette said. Jane turned quickly; the sudden motion made her queasy.

‘Evening, girls.’

He was leaning up against the wooden lych-gate. Dean Wall. The sheep-shagger.

‘Very clever,’ Colette said in a bored voice. ‘Do they call that a pincer movement?’

‘Told ’em about the party.’ Danny Gittoes came up behind. ‘At the club.’

‘What you on about?’ Dean said. ‘Oh. Right. The ole after-hours social club.’

The only good light was pooled around one lamp on the corner of the close, where it met the square. She saw two other boys skirting the light. There was nobody else about, no cars. The olde worlde, time-warped magic of Ledwardine late at night.

The two other boys slouched into the close to join Danny and Dean, the four of them forming a rough circle around Colette and Jane. God. Big boys. Men, really. In the same way that Colette was a woman.

So why did Jane feel like a little girl? Wanting to be up in the big, safe hotel suite, warm in the glow from two bedside lamps, Mum bent over her sermon pad.

Another figure walked over from the square. ‘What’s all this, then?’

It was Lloyd Powell, the councillor’s son. He was a few years older than the others, a working farmer. Lloyd was good-looking, drove a white American truck and was considered intensely cool by some of the girls at school, possibly because he was always so aloof.

‘What you got yere, Dean?’

‘No problem, Lloyd.’

‘You girls all right? This lot bothering you?’ Like his old man, Lloyd was an old-fashioned gentleman. Pretty boring, in some ways.

Colette said lazily, ‘Like he said, no problem.’ Jane, who was starting to feel sick, was annoyed with her. Lloyd Powell could’ve stopped this, let them get home.

‘You sure?’ Lloyd said.

‘Yeah,’ said Colette. ‘The day I can’t handle hairballs like this is the day I enter a fucking closed order.’

Lloyd shrugged and strolled back to the market place. Jane suspected there were going to be times when she wished Colette’s sass-quotient was not so far off the local scale.

Still, she did her best to sound cool.

‘So like where’s the After-hours Social Club?’

Colette Cassidy sighed. Dean Wall grinned. He really was huge and had big muscles. You saw him heaving around great sacks of potatoes and stuff at his father’s farm shop on the edge of the village.

‘I think he means the church porch,’ Colette said.

9 A Night in Suicide Orchard

‘POOR MERRILY.’ Like a white, woolly terrier, Dermot Child followed her into the lobby of the village hall. ‘Can I walk you back to the Swan?’

Merrily unhooked her coat from the peg. ‘You can walk with me. If you’re going that way.’

‘Well ... yes.’ Child held open the metal door for her. ‘I thought I’d have a nightcap.’

Merrily locked up the hall. Double lock, big key. She had quite a bunch of these things in her bag; the vicar seemed to be responsible for the security of half the public buildings in the village. Maybe she could use a minder.

But not Mr Child. Oh no. He’d nearly become Dermot, but he was Child again now. Quite blatantly fancied her, but was not necessarily on her side. Bad combination.

‘Rod and Terry cleared off pretty rapidly, Vicar.’ Wry smile as they crossed the car park.

True enough. Rod Powell heading for the Ox, round the corner, Cassidy striding rapidly up towards the lights of the square and his restaurant, to regale Caroline with the juicy details of their dilemma.

‘A lot to talk about, I suppose,’ Merrily said.

‘Oh yes.’ Dermot Child fairly bounced along, his springy, white hair flopping. One of those volatile characters who thrives on discord, was energized by controversy. Fun to have around, but you wouldn’t trust him to the end of the street.

‘All right.’ Plunging her hands down the pockets of her new but even cheaper fake Barbour. ‘What did you mean, poor Merrily?’

‘Well ...’ He gazed up the dark street, into the future. ‘Going to get the blame, aren’t you?’

‘For what?’

‘For whatever you decide. Yes or no to a witch trial in the church. You’ll be either the trendy, radical priest who cares nothing for local sensibilities or just another reactionary who doesn’t want to muddy the waters or offend the nobs. Either way, your congregation suffers. Must be hell, being a vicar.’

‘Hang on. What makes you all so sure it’s going to be me who makes the decision?’

‘Oh, really!’ Dermot Child stopped, leaned back against the railings of a white, Georgian village house, base of Kent Asprey, the jogging doc. ‘You were there when they decided.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Well, Bull-Davies buggered off – for reasons which will soon become very apparent. Then Rod Powell advised you to examine your conscience. And finally the appalling Cassidy told you very politely and sympathetically that he rather thought it was going to be your decision. How firm d’you want it? They’ve all officially copped out! Tossed the hot potato into your lap and run like hell. When it makes the papers – which it surely will – it’ll be Vicar Bans Top Writer!

‘And if I don’t? If I don’t block it?’

‘Then you’ll get – I don’t know – Vicar Backs Poof Playwright Against Local Protests ... Well, not that, obviously, but you get the idea.’

‘I see,’ Merrily said. ‘You’re saying that, whatever happens, I’m stuffed.’

‘Burden of village life, my dear. This was some suburban parish in London or Birmingham, you’d have a small flurry of controversy and then it would all be forgotten. Here ... Well, don’t be fooled by appearances. All right, post-modern ... state of the art ... the New Countryside of rich commuters, hi-tech home business people, oak beams and the Internet ...’

He motioned to a half-lit shop window. MARCHES MEDIA: Fax, photocopying, computer supplies.

‘Illusion. Surface glitter, Merrily. And only the surface changes. Underneath, the structure’s as rigid as an old iron bedframe.’

‘You seem to like it here, all the same.’ She knew he’d been a music teacher at some London college, had links with a small record label specializing in modern choral works. Suspected he’d left at least one ex-wife somewhere.

‘I know my way around, Vicar. May not sound like it, but I’m a local boy. We go back three generations. Not many, compared to your Powells and your Bull-Davieses, but it’ll do. Born here, and I suppose I’ll die here, sooner or later. As for that big, sloppy lump of life in the middle, skipping round London, Paris, Milan ... that was just time spent finding out that, in the end, it’s really better the hell you know ...’

‘Hell?’

He didn’t respond. There were eight or nine cars parked on the square, clustered under a black-stemmed electrified gas lamp. The cars included two BMWs, a Jaguar and a Range Rover. People dining at Cassidy’s or the Black Swan. The village centre, also quietly lit by uncurtained windows and the stars, looked, if not exactly smug, quite settled in its prosperity.

‘When d’you move into the vicarage, Merrily?’

‘Could be next week.’

‘Terrific. Mind you ... big old place.’

They could see, on the edge of the church close, the end gable of the vicarage and its chimneys, rising above most of the others.

‘I think I’d rather have a bungalow,’ Merrily said.

‘Oh no. God, no. That would never do. Has to be the official residence. Nice, roomy lawn for garden parties. Vicar – all right, priest-in-charge, but still an important figure in Ledwardine. Mind you, you do need a husband.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘Oh yes. Decent local man. Solid foundation. The WI will have it at the top of their agenda.’

‘Bloody nerve,’ Merrily said. ‘What is this, Jane Austen?’

‘Like I told you, the framework doesn’t change. What do you expect? You’re a very lovely young woman.’

‘Oh, please. Anyway, I’m an old widow.’

‘Ah yes.’ They’d stopped at the steps of the Black Swan. ‘Which rather got you out of a hole, I gather.’

Merrily froze.

Dermot Child dropped a hand on her shoulder. ‘Sorry, my dear. Am I being indiscreet?’

Merrily gazed across the square towards the vicarage.

‘Ted Clowes is a dead man,’ she said.

Of course, it was Colette they really wanted. The squashy lips, the provocative breasts in the white frock. Colette was the nymph, the real thing. Grown up.

This was very clear to Jane, if nothing else was. She could smell their sweat, and the heat source that brought it out was Colette.

Jane was feeling more and more queasy, and strangely separated from it all. Like they were the players and she was merely the audience. And she couldn’t alter what was happening because she was just ... well, just a kid. If she spoke, nobody would hear her. Bring your mother ... give ’er some holy communion ...

Her stomach felt horribly tight and distended. Something like liquid gas welled up in her throat and she gulped it back, clinging to the church wall. The stones felt damp and gritty. Slimy. The sweat smell was a disgusting haze.

‘Come on,’ one of them said. ‘We got a few bottles. And Mark’s brought some sweeties.’

‘Oh yeah?’ Colette said.

‘Es,’ this Mark said. ‘No rubbish, mind. Got ’em in Leominster.’

Colette looked at them, hands on her white-sheathed hips, shoulders against the church wall.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, doesn’t that just about show the mentality of you seed-suckers? Like we’re all going to get hyped-up in the church porch and put on our iPods and pretend it’s a major rave. Come back when you’re older, yeah?’

‘How old you like us to be?’ said the fourth boy, who’d come along with Mark who had the pills.

‘Old enough that you don’t have to hang around with kids any more,’ Colette said.

Jane was in awe of her. The boys were quiet for a moment. She could smell the beer on them, through the hot sweat. Their senses were surely too fuddled for clever repartee; maybe they’d slink off, spit a few insults from across the street then melt into the night like foxes.

But then Dean Wall said, all the humour gone, ‘Think we’re kids, is it?’

Danny Gittoes put a hand on his arm. ‘Let it go, Dean.’

Dean shook him off. ‘Fucked if I will.’

‘Please.’ Colette smiled thinly. ‘Don’t use words till you know what they mean.’

Dean took a couple of seconds to work this out, then he gave out a kind of strangled sob.

‘Right. Got some’ing to prove, do you?’

‘Not now, Dean,’ Danny said. ‘You blown it, I reckon.’

‘Come yere ...’ Dean moved apelike towards Colette. ‘Come yere, you fuckin’ clever bitch.’ Big hands clawing for Colette’s breasts. She sprang back like a cat, reared and spat.

‘Touch me once, mucus-sac, and I’ll tear your balls off!’

‘Wooooh!’ Danny Gittoes and Mark backed off in not-quite-mock terror.

But Dean didn’t. It was personal now. It had history.

‘Cathedral fucking School fucking snob. Not puttin’ out for the likes of us, eh? You’re just a slag, Cassidy. Stand outside your shitty cafe, tongue hangin’ out. You’re panting for it, you are.’

‘Well, maybe.’ Colette didn’t blink. ‘But unless you’ve brought along one of your old man’s best carrots—’

Like a sack of potatoes falling over, Dean Wall tumbled at Colette, who was spinning and hissing, too fast for him, but there were four of them, and in a second it had become a soggy blur and although Jane thought she heard a distant man’s voice shouting, ‘What’s going on down there?’ there was no sound of footsteps behind the squeals and grunts.

And so, feeling very ill, Jane went in scratching, nails raking the back of a leather jacket.

‘Nnnnnooooo!’ she screamed.

Aware, though, before it was half out, that it was going to be rather more than a scream.

That she was being sick.

Boy, was she being sick ...

‘Oh! Oh, shit! Oh, you fuckin’ little cow!’ Dean Wall was on his feet, flailing about, dripping. He no longer stank of sweat. ‘Oh, you fuckin’ disgustin’ little ...’

Dean had his jacket off and he was shaking it, gobbets of vomit flying through the air. Then he started slapping it against the church wall, screeching outrage, Danny and Mark laughing at him from a safe distance.

‘I’m sorry,’ Jane gasped, wiping her lips on her sleeve, mouth full of sourness. ‘Oh God, I—’

Then her left hand was snatched, her arm jerked savagely out in front of her and she had to start running to avoid falling over. All she could hear behind her, as she was dragged over something shin-scrapingly hard and wooden, were curses and oaths and the sound of the leather jacket being slapped repeatedly against the church wall.

‘No escape that way, you bitches.’ From a distance.

‘Up yours, slimeball!’ Colette shrieked, triumphant.

Halfway up the steps of the Black Swan, Merrily tensed.

‘What was that?’

‘Kids, I expect.’

‘In the churchyard?’ Happened every night in Liverpool; you didn’t expect it here.

‘They don’t have many places to go,’ Dermot Child said. ‘There was a plan for a big youth centre a couple of years ago. On the derelict bowling green behind the Ox. An influential lobby of local people – i.e. newcomers – managed to get it squashed. Not in keeping, you understand.’

‘Look, I think I’d better pop down to the church and see what’s happening.’

‘Merrily, look, if you were supposed to police the place, the bishop would’ve supplied you with a tazer.’ Dermot elbowed open the double doors at the top of the steps. ‘Come and have a drink.’

‘I don’t think I will, thanks. Got a sermon to go over. Dermot—’

He raised an eyebrow. She joined him on the top step, pulled the doors closed again.

‘What did Ted say about my marriage?’

He was unembarrassed. ‘Not a great deal. Don’t be too hard on Ted. I think he had your best interests at heart. Wanted us to know you weren’t just some new-broom, feminist theologian. That you’d had a bad time. Been through the mill’

‘So what, precisely, did he say?’

‘Oh, he ... he said your husband was unfaithful. That a reconciliation was out of the question. That this unfortunately coincided with your decision to apply for theological college. When it must have occurred to you that ordination and divorce were still quite some way from being entirely compatible. And then, just when all seemed lost, your husband and his, er ...’

‘Secretary,’ Merrily said. ‘As corny as that.’

‘Piled into a viaduct on ... the M5, was it? Very quick, apparently. No one suffered.’

‘No.’

‘Except you, of course. Perverse kind of guilt.’

‘Ted was talkative,’ Merrily said grimly.

‘Agonizing over whether you’d wished it on him, to clear the way for your Calling. Ridiculous of course.’

‘Sean was a lawyer,’ Merrily said. ‘I was going to be one too. A barrister. We met at university. We were very idealistic. We were going to work for people who’d been dumped on but couldn’t afford proper representation. Batman and Robin in wigs.’

‘Very commendable.’

‘Sure, but most young lawyers start out like that. It doesn’t last. Certainly didn’t for Sean. He changed his mind, became a solicitor, joined a practice I didn’t care for, then went solo. As for me, I hadn’t even finished the first year before he got me pregnant. Sorry. Unchristian. Before I got pregnant.’

‘You could have resumed, though, couldn’t you? Something happened to turn you away from the law and, er, towards the Lord?’

‘Ted didn’t tell you about that?’

‘He didn’t tell me any of this. Look, let’s go in the lounge bar, get a couple of single malts, and—’

Merrily smiled and moved delicately past him through the double doors. ‘Goodnight, Dermot.’

Jane was aware of sitting in grass, in absolute darkness, wiping her mouth on a tissue she’d found in her jacket, her brain about six miles away and still travelling.

‘Oh God. Oh God. I’m dying.’

‘You ain’t felt nothin’ yet, honeychile.’ Colette’s smokey tone drifted comfortably out of the blackness at her side. ‘You wait till tomorrow.’

‘Where are we?’ Jane sat up.

‘Hey, nice one, Janey. Men these days are so particular about their clothing.’

‘I couldn’t help it.’

‘Don’t spoil it. Jesus, that was so funny.’

‘You could have been raped.’

‘Those hairballs couldn’t summon a decent hard-on with a year’s supply of Playboys and a splint.’

‘Well, messed about then. Oh yuk.’ Her mouth and throat felt rank.

‘Yeah,’ Colette conceded. ‘Maybe messed about.’ She sounded very high, not fully in control.

‘Where are we?’

‘Where they won’t come.’

Jane put out a hand. Touched something cold and knobbly. ‘Come on, where are we?’

‘Relax. It’s a good place.’

‘It’s Powells’ orchard, isn’t it?

Orchard ... apples ... cider. She felt sick and closed her eyes, leaning back against the scabby tree trunk. Never again, never, never, never.

‘Yeah,’ Colette said. ‘It’s the Powell orchard.’

Jane took a gulp of clean night air. ‘Why’s this a good place? Why won’t they come here?’

‘They won’t come in. They’re shit scared, Janey.’ Colette raised her voice. ‘Scared of ... old Edgar.’

A swish of bushes. Jane opened her eyes, looked up and couldn’t see any stars. She could make out the shape of Colette’s white dress now. Just the dress.

You see? They’re there, all right. Four brave country boys. You there, slimeball? But they won’t come any further. Because’ – her voice rising to a kind of whoop – ‘we ... are under Edgar Powell’s tree!’

Jane sat up rapidly, inched forward on her bottom, away from the tree trunk.

‘The Apple Tree Man,’ Colette said. ‘The old king of the orchard. I often come here.’

‘On your own?’

‘No, with the Cricket Club. Of course on my own!’

‘Aren’t you scared?’

‘You mean of the ghost of Edgar Powell? Well, actually— Hey, listen, all of you, listen – He’s been seen, OK? He has been seen. I heard some people whispering about it in the restaurant. Old Edgar Powell, the headless farmer. All aglow and hovering about nine inches off the ground.’

‘No. Stop it.’ Jane giggled and shuddered simultaneously. ‘You’re making that up.’

‘Sort of a grey light around him, from his feet to his neck. Situation is that his mind was going before it happened and he doesn’t know why he did it to himself. Doesn’t know he’s dead, probably. So he just walks around the orchard. He Walks. Plod. Plod. Plod.’

‘Colette,’ Jane said. ‘Shut up. Would you mind?’

‘You believe in ghosts, Janey?’

‘No.’

‘Does the Reverend Mummy?’

‘I don’t know. But I do know the Reverend Mummy’ll be out of her mind with worry if she gets back and I’m not there, so I think we should get moving.’

Colette laughed.

‘It’s not funny,’ Jane said. ‘It’s her big working day tomorrow, up at five-thirty. She’s going to kill me.’

Colette said, ‘This grey light, it’s from his feet to his neck, did I just say that? Just his neck. No head. Now where could his head be? I know. Look up. Look up, Janey!’

Jane looked down. She didn’t want to think about Edgar Powell. Instead, she found herself thinking of Wil Williams, poor lush Wil, coming out here on a lovely spring morning to hang himself. Oh God ... a night in Suicide Orchard. Goosebumps started forming on her arms.

Colette said slowly, ‘You look up ... into the branches ... and maybe there’s this wizened old face. Grinning. Gappy old grin. Eyes like grey holes. Most of his chin blown away, though. In these very branches, just over where we are.’

‘Shut up!’

‘Go on ... have a look.’

‘Sod off.’

‘Just a little glance, Janey.’

‘Don’t be stupid.’

‘You can look through your fingers if you want.’

‘I don’t want. I want to go home.’

‘I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts.’

‘Leave me alone.’

‘Don’t go all fractious on me, Jane. This is fun.’

‘It’s not.’ Jane hugged herself and tried to see the shapes of apple trees. Or anybody behind one. ‘They’re not here at all, are they? Dean Wall and Gittoes. They never followed us. They’ve gone to get cleaned up.’

‘I don’t know,’ Colette said. ‘Why don’t you take a chance on it? Get up and just walk away, and pray they don’t ... grab you!’

Jane screamed. Colette had seized her from behind. Her arms were very cold.

‘Go on, Janey! Edgar will protect you. He’ll put his old mac around your shoulders. Squeeze you tight.’

‘Stop it!’ Jane felt tears coming.

‘Look up. For me. Just look up, once. And then we’ll go.’

‘OK. There. Now can we—?’

‘You didn’t look up.’

‘I did!’

‘You didn’t, Janey,’ Colette said lightly.

‘All right!’

With Colette’s cold arms around her, Jane looked up.

10 Mistress

THE KNOCKING ON the door had Lol rolling on to his side on the rug, where he’d been reading Traherne’s Centuries. Bringing his knees up, like an embryo in the womb – he was aware of that and ashamed, but he didn’t move all the same.

But what about his breathing? If you put your ear right up to the thinly curtained glass you’d surely be able to hear the ragged, terrified pumping of Lol’s lungs. He tried to slow his breathing; it nearly threw him into a coughing fit. He choked weakly.

At least you couldn’t see much through the curtains. He’d been outside and tested it out, creeping like a burglar through his tangled front garden. All you could see was the glow of the lamp, and that was OK, because people often left lamps on when they were out, for security. So he could be out, could be down the pub drinking with his mates. Except that if you knew Lol, you’d know he wouldn’t have any mates and was too shy to go in a pub on his own ... full of people he didn’t know ... but they all knew who he was. People laughing.

Thump. Rattle. Batter.

He didn’t move. Reciting Traherne in his head. You never enjoy the world aright till you so love the beauty of enjoying it that you are covetous and earnest to persuade others to enjoy it ...

If he let Karl in ...

Karl would have a bottle with him, maybe two, and they’d still be drinking when the sun came up on a new and ominous day.

... and so perfectly hate the abominable corruption of men in despising it, that you had rather suffer the flames of Hell than willingly be guilty of their error. There is so much blindness and ingratitude and damned folly ....

Batter, batter batter. Almost frantic. Someone losing it.

Karl wouldn’t do that. Not at this stage. Karl stoked his rages slowly, with finesse. Karl laid detonators, timed his explosions.

Not Karl? A cautious relief began to seep like warm oil into Lol’s clenched-up muscles.

‘Lol! For Christ’s sake!’ A woman’s voice, and batter, batter, crash.

He stood up shakily, shuffling into his sandals. In the hall, he switched on the bulkhead light on the outside wall before he opened the front door and Ethel the cat streaked in between his legs as though she’d absorbed some of the agitation radiating from ...

... Colette Cassidy.

‘For fuck’s sake ...’ Colette’s face was full of fury and reminded him of Alison. Except Colette was fifteen years old and she was on her own, in a skimpy white frock, and it was late at night. ‘What were you bloody doing, Lol?’

‘Sorry. I fell asleep on the rug. Is there something wrong?’

She stared at him in despair, a bit like the way Alison used to stare at him. Disappointed that he was all there was. He found that look, under the circumstances, almost comforting, but he didn’t want her here at night. He had to get rid of her.

‘You’ve got to help me,’ Colette said, and it was an instruction, not a plea. ‘She’s going on about little lights in the tree.’

Within five minutes, Merrily was back downstairs, edging into the lounge bar, peering over heads and into every corner. The low-beamed room was mellow with buttery lamplight and soft laughter. Well-dressed, well-off couples relaxing after dinner, not many locals.

Except, of course, for Dermot Child, on his own on a stool at the bar, accepting what must be his second Scotch from the morose manager, Roland, and brightening visibly when he spotted Merrily. She went right up to him, wasn’t going to tell the entire room.

‘Dermot, you haven’t seen Jane?’

‘Is she supposed to be here?’

‘Certainly not. She’s supposed to be in our suite, watching TV.’

‘Perhaps she’s just popped out for a walk.’

Merrily shook her head. ‘We have this agreement that she never goes out alone at night without I know precisely where and when.’

‘But this is Ledwardine, Merrily.’

‘That’s a pretty stupid thing to say. Didn’t a teenage girl go missing from Kingsland last year? Oh, look, I’m sorry, I’m just getting ...’

‘No, no.’ Dermot put down his glass. ‘You’re right, of course. No one can be too careful these days. Let’s go and find her.’

‘Sorry. Hysterical mother. It’s just that she knows I have to get to bed at a reasonable time on a Saturday night. She’s rarely intentionally thoughtless, if you see what—’

‘ We’ll find her.’ He took her left hand in both of his, pressed it. ‘Hold on to that malt for me, would you, Roland?’

‘I’ll be closing in twenty minutes, Mr Child.’

‘You drink it then.’ Dermot was on his feet. ‘Come along, Merrily.’ Steering her into the oak-panelled passageway. ‘Now, have you checked the residents’ lounge?’

‘And the public bar. And the snooker room. She’s definitely not in the building.’

‘Can’t be far away. Not into badger-spotting or anything like that, I take it.’ Hustling her out into the porch.

‘Nor bats, nor owls. I don’t think...’

Down in the square, a couple got into a Range Rover and four youths played drunken football with a beer can on the cobbles. Dermot said, ‘She have a boyfriend?’

‘No one since we came here. Been a couple in the past. Nothing too intense. As far as you can ever tell.’

‘Must be a difficult age.’

‘Every age is a difficult age.’

‘Including yours? Sorry!’ Dermot clapped a hand to his head. ‘I’m sorry, Merrily. And please believe me, I didn’t mean to pry earlier. We just want you to be happy here. We know how lucky we are to have you. Old Alf ... I mean, he’d just been going through the motions for years. Just being there. Church is like the Royal Family. Needs more to survive these days than just being there. Needs motion.’

‘Motion?’ From the double-doorway of the porch, Merrily was scouring the square. Please, Jane ... ‘Don’t know about motion. Sometimes I think I’m struggling just to stay upright.’

‘You’re doing fine,’ Dermot Child whispered. ‘You have absolutely nothing to worry about.’

And she felt his arm around her waist.

‘We’ll keep you on your feet,’ he said.

She didn’t speak. She didn’t freeze. She was the vicar. He was the organist.

He was the best organist in the county, the presumptuous little bastard. She contemplated moving towards him, looking deep into his eyes. Then bringing up her right knee and turning his balls to paste.

Instead, she said, ‘Who’s that, Dermot?’ And walked steadily out on to the steps.

Dermot followed her but didn’t touch her again. ‘Wouldn’t you know it?’ he said.

James Bull-Davies walked out of Church Street on to the square. He walked almost delicately, like a wading bird, long legs rigid, neck extended.

‘Been in the Ox,’ Dermot said. ‘Drinks socially in the Swan, but when he’s serious about it, he’ll go to the Ox. He’ll stand at a corner of the bar, by himself, and hell sink one after another, cheapest whisky they’ve got, until his eyes glaze. Happens two or three times a year. He isn’t an alcoholic. Just needs to do it sometimes, to keep going.’

‘Keep going?’

‘He hates it here,’ Dermot murmured out of the side of his mouth. ‘Haven’t you realized that? Hates what he is. Or what he feels he has to be. Would’ve stayed in the army, the old man hadn’t keeled over. Probably be a brigadier by now, but like poor bloody Prince Charles, he’s got to keep going.’

Bull-Davies was in the centre of the square, looking over the parked cars, peering at each one individually, like a crazed traffic warden.

‘Coffey’s play brought this on?’ Merrily wished James would just go away; whatever his problems were, they weren’t as immediate as hers.

Dermot lowered his voice. ‘I don’t know many details of the Williams affair – mostly pure legend, anyway, I’d guess. But I’d be very surprised if, among that long-ago lynch mob at the vicarage, there wasn’t a Bull or a Davies.’

Oh God. Merrily stiffened. Remember poor ...

‘Never trust the Bulls,’ she whispered.

‘Who says that?’

‘Miss Devenish. On the night of the ... wassailing. Just after she had that row with the Cassidys.’

‘Didn’t go to that thing. Couldn’t face it. Too cold. What did Miss Devenish say?’

‘ “Never trust the Bulls. Remember poor ... poor ... Wil.” Of course.’

‘Old gypsy’s warning, eh?’

‘Never thought about it from that moment to this. I suppose what happened a few minutes later rather ...’

‘Woman’s insane, of course,’ he said. ‘Never forget that.’

‘Oh?’

‘Bonkers. And embittered. Used to write children’s books, but nobody’ll publish them any more. Roald Dahl, she wasn’t.’

Enjoying himself again. Trying to work his way up to another arm around the waist. She’d have to do something, couldn’t put up with months, years of this. She could deal with it. Would deal with it. If she could just find Jane.

‘Also feels threatened,’ Dermot said. ‘Mostly by the Cassidys because they want her shop to extend their restaurant. Well, partly that and partly because Caroline feels the Devenish emporium’s cheap and tacky and not in keeping with the sophisticated image they’re after. Every so often they’ll make the old girl an offer. How she can afford to keep refusing is beyond me, because that little shop’s doing next to nothing.’

‘That’s sad.’ Merrily moved as far away from him as she could get without falling off the damned step. ‘Jane went in there today, she—’

She stopped because she didn’t want to explain why Jane had gone to the shop and also because James Bull-Davies had kicked over a litterbin.

‘Fuckers!’ he roared. ‘Bloody fuckers?’

He slipped and went down on one knee.

‘Fuckers,’ he said in a normal voice. Then laughed, picking himself up.

Evidently unaware of Merrily and Dermot Child, he leaned against the metal lamp-post beside the market cross and peered down Church Street, where the lights of a vehicle had appeared. The litterbin was still rolling along the cobbles.

‘Perhaps I should go down and talk to him,’ Merrily said. ‘This is my job, isn’t it?’

‘For what my opinion’s worth, Vicar, I’d seriously advise against it. He won’t be terribly civil, even if he recognizes you, and he won’t thank you for it in the morning.’

The vehicle stopped on the square, engine rattling. It was an old and muddy blue Land Rover. Alison Kinnersley jumped down. She wore tight jeans and a black shirt; her blonde hair shone like a brass helmet in the fake gaslight.

‘Come on then, my lord.’ She stood relaxed, legs apart, on the cobbles, the Land Rover snorting behind her like the stallion she rode around the village. ‘Let’s go home.’

Bull-Davies didn’t move from his lamp-post. ‘You whore. Who told you?’

‘Powell called.’

‘Good old saintly bloody Powell. Thought I saw his head come round the pub door.’

‘Let’s go home, Squire.’

‘Do you demand it?’ Bull-Davies grinned savagely. ‘D’you demand it, mistress?’

God, Merrily thought, she’s got him locked into some pathetic Brontë-esque sex play.

Alison seemed to shrug. Her breasts rather than her shoulders. Merrily felt Dermot Child quiver, and she shuddered and wanted to be almost anywhere else. But she also wanted to find Jane, and if Alison and James didn’t take their games home, she was going down there anyway.

‘Do it here, hey, my slinky, slinky whore?’ Bull-Davies rasped hoarsely. ‘Shag ourselves senseless on the bloody cobbles? Give the prissy bastards a show? Dent someone’s shiny Merc with your lovely arse?’

‘James, you’re pretty senseless already,’ Alison said coolly. ‘You’ve got ten seconds to get in before I leave you to sleep it off in the gutter.’

‘Whore.’ Bull-Davies detached himself from the lamppost.

‘Get in the truck, James. There’s a good boy. We have your reputation to look after.’ Alison sounding as if she knew they had an audience, of which James remained oblivious.

‘Reputation? Wassat going to be worth when that scented arse-bandit shafts me? You tell me, mistress. You bloody tell me.’

He walked unsteadily towards the Land Rover, mumbling morosely to the cobbles about the little, shirt-lifting, socialist scum, squatting at the bottom of the drive with his odious catamite.

‘You sold it, darling,’ Alison said wearily, as though they’d gone through all this many times before. ‘It isn’t yours any more.’

‘Man’s a piece of shit.’

‘Whatever. Do get in, Jamie.’

The Land Rover door was slammed. The chassis groaned, the engine spluttered and gagged and the battered vehicle was reversed, illegally, into the alley leading to Cassidy’s Country Kitchen and Ledwardine Lore.

‘Well,’ Dermot said after a moment. ‘I did warn you, didn’t I? The way it would go.’

But Merrily wasn’t listening; she was already stumbling down the steps.

Through the dirty wool of exhaust in the diesel-stinking air, she could see them bringing Jane along Church Street.

11 Pious Cow

‘AND IT’S A really terrifying situation to be in. I mean, you know, what on earth do we do? How can we – ordinary, fallible human beings – even contemplate making a decision which we know is going – whichever way we turn – to offend somebody?’

Pause. Merrily took a step back from the edge of the pulpit. She felt awful. The light sizzled harshly in the stained-glass windows, yellows and reds glaring out, florid and sickly. Something they never told you at college: you needed to be fit for this job.

‘What’s the first thing we usually do? We panic, of course. We just want to run away. That’s always the first instinct, isn’t it? Why me? What have I done to get landed with this one?’

You always asked them questions. You were conversational about it. Just having a chat. OK, I’m up here, you’re down there, but we’re all in the same boat really. Sometimes, you found yourself hoping one of them would stand up, join in, help you out a bit. Yeah, I take your point, Vicar, but the way I see it ... God knew, she could use some help from the punters: maybe she should hold a parish referendum: Wil Williams – Yes or No?

Coward’s way out. She swallowed. Her mouth felt like a sandpit. It was a warm, sunny, good-to-be-alive morning. She felt cold in her stomach. She hadn’t eaten, hardly slept.

‘But you know, in your heart of hearts, that running away isn’t the answer to anything ... ever. Sooner or later you’re going to have to face up to it.’

Pitching her voice at the rafters; she knew what they meant about the warm acoustic. She’d never needed it more.

Packed house, of course. Well, it would be, wouldn’t it? Sod’s Law. They were all here this morning. The twenty or so regulars, including Councillor Garrod Powell and his son Lloyd, both of them sober, dark-suited, expressionless, deeply local. Plus the occasionals – a resentful-looking Gomer Parry with his comfortable wife, Minnie. And Miss Lucy Devenish, who, according to Ted, would often walk out if the hymns were tuneless or the sermon insufficiently compelling.

Also the very occasionals, like Terrence and Caroline Cassidy (‘Sunday’s such a busy day, now – lunches and dinners, which effectively rules out both services, but we do often pop in during the week for a few minutes of quiet time’).

In addition, the never-seen-here-befores: Richard Coffey in a light brown velvet suit, with his wafery friend Stefan Alder, flop-haired and sulky-eyed, in jeans.

And the totally unexpected-under-the-circumstances: James Bull-Davies, frozen-faced and solitary in the old family pew. Well. Merrily leaned over the pulpit, hands clasped. This one’s for you ... Jamie.

‘So what do you do? The pressure’s building up. You’re starting to feel a bit beleaguered.’

Two messages had been on the answering machine she’d fixed up in the room; must have come in while she was out there trying to locate Jane. Terrence Cassidy: ‘Perhaps we could arrange a small chat, Merrily. Would you call me?’ Councillor Garrod Powell: ‘A word or two might be in order, Vicar, if you can spare the time. I’ll be in church as usual tomorrow.’

Bull-Davies wasn’t looking at her. He had his arms folded and his legs stretched out as far as they would go in the confining space between pews. He faced the door which led to the belfry. Just about the last place he’d want to go if the inside of his head was in the condition it deserved to be after last night.

‘Rule One: don’t give in to pressure. Rule Two: collect all the information you can get, listen to all the arguments, seek out independent people who might have an opinion or a point of view you hadn’t thought about. Try to step back and see it from a different angle.’

Dermot Child, thankfully, was out of view from the pulpit. He’d be smiling to himself on the organ-stool, half-concealed from the congregation, the only one of them who knew just how little time she must have had to put this one together.

‘And then ...’ Merrily said. ‘Well, you know what I’m going to say next, don’t you? You’re thinking what else can she say, in her position?’

She focused on Miss Devenish, who fearlessly met her eyes.

‘Because of what I am, I’m going to tell you there’s only one place you can go for help. But I’m also saying it because, to me, it makes perfect sense. You could take your dilemma to the United Nations, the House of Lords, the European Court of Human Rights, wherever ... and all you’d wind up with is a whole stack of reports and lists of precedents and Green Papers and White Papers. Bumph, in other words. Take you a couple of months to wade through it, and you’d be no wiser at all, just a whole lot more confused. And the decision would still be yours.’

Miss Devenish smiled, the old witch doctor’s face crinkling, the side of the mouth tilting wryly up to the eagle nose.

‘So why not put it all on Him. That’s what He’s there for. The best advice it’s possible to get. And absolutely free. Go into a quiet place ... the middle of a field, your bathroom – or come in here, if you like. Sit down, you don’t have to kneel, or you can walk about if you want to. However you feel relaxed. But put that question. Tell Him it’s urgent. Tell Him you’d like an answer as quickly as possible.’

Merrily gathered her props together: Bible, Prayer Book, clipboard, felt-tip pen.

‘And I’m prepared to guarantee,’ she said crisply, ‘that you’ll get one.’

Outside, when it was all over, nobody mentioned the sermon. To most of them it would have been routine stuff. But, during the ritual shaking of hands by the porch, there were discreet approaches from those who ought to know what it was about.

Councillor Garrod Powell mumbled, ‘Got my message, did you, Vicar?’

James Bull-Davies coughed. ‘Need to talk, Mrs Watkins. Problem is, never know where to find you.’

Caroline Cassidy, dark-suited and pearled, turned imploring eyes on Merrily, took both her hands, whispered, ‘I’m so, so sorry about what happened last night. Girls of that age ... We must talk this over, as parents. Soon.’

Merrily put them all off. Explaining that it would be a bit chaotic this week because they were moving, at last, into the vicarage. So if whatever it was could possibly wait, she’d be delighted to offer them coffee there – once she had a table to put the cups on.

Buying time.

But not from Miss Devenish, thoughtful enough to make sure she was the last to emerge from the church. She wore a wide-brimmed straw hat and her summer poncho, Aztec zigzags.

‘So what are you doing this afternoon?’ Merrily murmured.

‘Go for a walk, shall we, Mrs Watkins?’

‘Whatever suits you.’

‘Two stiles on the edge of the churchyard, yes? Not the orchard one, the other one. Three o’clock?’

‘Fine,’ Merrily said. It would give her a couple of hours for that long, meaningful mother-daughter discussion.

‘Oh, and don’t bring the child, will you?’ Miss Devenish said. From behind her, Richard Coffey honoured Merrily with a distant smile and a minimal nod.

Jane looked up.

‘I was just a bit tired.’

‘You bloody well deserve it. And the headache. And the nausea.’

Jane rose abruptly from the corner of the bed, staring angrily out of the window at the sun-splashed square.

‘Did I say I had a headache? Did I say I felt sick?’

‘You threw up enough last night. I could smell it.’

‘That’s not fair.’

‘Jane,’ Merrily said, ‘do me the courtesy of not trying to bluff it out.’

It wasn’t meant to be like this. Returning from morning service, Merrily had made a point of changing out of her cassock, dispensing with the collar, putting on jeans. It was going to be one-to-one. Mother and daughter. Friends, even. The long, meaningful chat dealing frankly with important, practical subjects.

Like (i) cider. A few facts: it was unexpectedly cheap, went down very easily but was also usually over seven per cent proof, which was approximately twice the alcohol content of beer. Bottom line: cider gets you pissed before you know it.

And like (ii) Colette Cassidy: a difficult, spoiled girl, with a weak father and a neurotic mother. Appeared sophisticated – probably been wearing make-up since the age often – but it was all superficial. According to Ted, who had a friend who taught at the Hereford Cathedral School, Colette’s worldliness was not balanced by any great intellect.

So the message to Jane, who only yesterday had loftily professed herself more mature than her contemporaries at the high school, was: don’t think you can learn anything from Colette Cassidy. Be your own woman.

And don’t get pissed again.

She’d left Jane to sleep through the morning undisturbed, asking Roland, the manager, to hold off the chambermaid until tomorrow because the poor kid was ill. No, nothing to worry about, just a mild stomach upset.

And what should have been a shattering hangover.

So where was the damned hangover?

Christ, she needed Jane to feel bloody awful for the whole of Sunday. It was part of the lesson: you got drunk, you went through hell next day, you were chastened. Time-honoured pattern.

The great, wonderful pang of anger and relief last night, when she’d discovered what had happened. When Jane had appeared in Church Street, supported by Miss Devenish and a smallish, long-haired guy she hadn’t seen before, with the guilty party, Colette Cassidy, trailing sullenly behind. All right, it wasn’t convenient, it had lost Merrily most of a night’s sleep, but it was one of those things which had to happen one day. God – her first time with excess alcohol had been much worse; it had involved boys, and she’d been lucky not to ...

Anyway. Calm yourself, woman. People react differently, that’s all.

She turned back to the bed. ‘What about some lunch?’

‘I’m not hungry,’ Jane said tonelessly.

Well, fair enough. Merrily could remember a whole day of hugging the pillow, between Paracetamols.

But it wasn’t like that, was it? The kid was lying on her bed quite relaxed, almost serene in her white nightdress. Which she must have changed into this morning, because she’d gone to bed in that old Pulp T-shirt.

‘Cup of tea?’ Merrily offered desperately.

‘No, thanks. I might get myself one later.’

‘Jane ...’ She sat down again on a corner of the bed. ‘I’m sorry to labour the point, but you’re sure there were no men ... no boys ... with you?’

‘I told you, we got rid of them.’

‘They didn’t follow you? They weren’t around when you ... lost consciousness?’

‘Oh, Mother ...’ Jane closed her eyes. ‘Your generation thinks everything has to do with sex. I had too much to drink, I went to sleep—’

‘You passed out!’

‘Yeah, all right. But when I woke up I felt ... well, good, actually. Yeah, good. But nobody touched me. They couldn’t ... get near.’

Jane looked faintly puzzled, then it passed.

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry about this, but I’m really OK.’

Merrily breathed in, counted slowly, lips tight. One ... two ... three ... four ... five.

‘I have to go out again,’ she said.

Jane stood at the window, watching bloody Mum cross the bloody square, heading towards the bloody church, where bloody else, the pious cow?

She walked experimentally around the room. She didn’t fall down. Legs felt like her own legs again. She felt good. She hadn’t been bluffing, hadn’t been taking the piss. She’d had a good night’s sleep.

She shrugged.

She had a swift shower, towelled her hair and got dressed.

She still felt fine.

She padded down the oak staircase and out into the square without, thank God, meeting anyone who might accuse her of having a drink problem. The only problem was she couldn’t recall very much of what had happened. The last she remembered with any clarity was being on the right track for losing her virginity to bloody Dean Wall or one of his spotty mates in the church porch.

Colette had got them out of that, although she couldn’t quite remember how.

Good old Colette.

Jane slipped into the cobbled alley. Cassidy’s Country Kitchen was closed after the Sunday lunch crowd. There was no sign of Colette. Jane wandered down to Ledwardine Lore, which was also closed. She stood at the window, looking in at all the apple curios. It seemed like months since she’d gone in there and the very odd but quite nice Lol Robinson had asked her to mind the store because of the guy he wanted to avoid. Weird. And then there was the story of Wil Williams who’d hanged himself and was buried in the orchard.

The orchard! Jane pressed her forehead into the cool glass, Colette’s voice drawling in her head.

Old Edgar Powell, the headless farmer. All aglow and hovering about nine inches off the ground.

Oh God, yes. She remembered running away from the Wall gang and then she was lying in some grass under branches and

... gappy old grin. Eyes like grey holes ... these very branches ... Look up, Janey ....

Colette was taunting her, just like she’d taunted the boys. Colette’s voice harsh and sly. Sassy, superior Colette.

Look up.

And had she? Had she looked up, with Colette and then Dean Wall and Danny Gittoes and somebody called Mark coming out of the bushes to stand around and laugh themselves sick?

Good old Colette? Bollocks.

Feeling really hot and embarrassed now, she glared resentfully at the shuttered facade of Cassidy’s Country Kitchen, seriously bloody glad now that Colette wasn’t there. In fact, she never, never, never wanted to see that bitch again.

She turned and ran out of the alley and into the square and stood there panting, confusion giving way to a sense of being horribly stupid and, worst of all, really, really young.

Luckily it was Sunday. Soporific Sunday afternoon, and nobody to laugh at her humiliation. Even the Black Swan closed its bars on Sunday afternoons, and there were only a couple of cars parked on the square. Jane stood in the middle of the road, at the top of Church Street, staring at her shadow on the cobbles.

Wondering how she could ever have felt at home here.

The yellow Toyota sports car came out of nowhere – well, in fact, out of Great Barn Street, which linked Church Street to the B-road to Hereford – and had to swerve to avoid splattering Jane all over the market cross.

Brakes went on, a window glided down. ‘Tired of life, are we, darlin’?’

Jane sniffed, put on a smile. ‘Sorry.’

‘Ah ...’ She saw a beard enclosing a very white smile. ‘It’s you again.’

It was the man from the shop. The man who was not dealing drugs, who accidentally crushed fairies and frightened Lol. Yellow Toyota – of course.

He said, ‘So you don’t know anyone called Lol Robinson, huh?’

‘Oh,’ Jane said. ‘Well, I do now. I just didn’t know his name at the time. I’m quite new around here. I know who he is now.’

‘I described him to you, sweetheart, and it still meant nothing. How do you ...? Oh, never mind. Would I be chancing my arm if I were to ask you where Blackberry Lane is?’

‘It’s up there. See that funny little building in the square? Just go up the side, to the left, and it’s this really narrow little lane. You’ll have to go a lot slower than you did when you came round that corner or you’ll wind up under a tractor or something.’

‘Thanks.’

The window went up; Jane watched the car move off. She hadn’t really wanted to help him, but he would have found out anyway. She supposed Lol lived up there, and now he’d get a nasty surprise.

He had a breakdown. Actually, he used to be a sort of pop star, way back. Well, very minor. I mean, like, tiny.

She’d forgotten that. And Colette saying Lol was megasad. And ... and ...

And she’d seen him again. She’d been in his arms. Carried in his arms. Oh God, he’d brought her home last night!

And now she’d shopped him to this bastard.

The Reverend Mum was right, as usual. She’d got pissed and left a trail of disaster. She had a lot of apologizing to do.

12 Sympathetic Magic

A WISPY BREEZE plucking at her poncho, Miss Devenish climbed, without much effort, to the top of the knoll. With her back to the sun, the big hat pulled down, she loomed over Merrily like some ancient warrior chieftain.

‘You’re never alone in the countryside, Mrs Watkins. It’s the most intimate place. The poet Traherne knew that. When he walked out here, Traherne knew he was inside the mind of God.’

Below them, nearly a mile away down the long, wooded valley, the village of Ledwardine lay like an antique sundial in an old and luxuriant garden.

‘The core of the apple,’ Miss Devenish said. ‘The orb. Traherne was always talking about orbs and spheres. Understanding that he was at the very centre of creation.’

‘Suppose he’d lived in some filthy city.’ Merrily looked down on the lushness of it all. ‘Or a desert somewhere.’

‘Wouldn’t have mattered. The man was a natural visionary. He instinctively picked up the pattern, the design. Before Wordsworth, before Blake, he stood here and he saw.’

Merrily sat down on the edge of the green knoll, her legs dangling over a mini-cliff of rich, red soil. ‘How do you know he stood precisely here?’

‘I don’t.’ Miss Devenish smiled enigmatically. ‘And yet I do. He would’ve walked here with his friend Williams, to see the best view of the village.’

Because of the hedges, freshly greened, you couldn’t see the roads; you couldn’t see the cars and vans and tractors, only hear their buzzing.

‘So much country,’ Merrily mused. ‘Even inside the village.’

‘Still, thank God, an organic community. In spite of the best efforts of those who’d turn it into a museum full of horse-brasses and warming pans. And supposedly authentic ceremonies’ – darkness entered Miss Devenish’s voice – ‘which belong elsewhere.’

Merrily looked towards the church. The sandstone steeple stood proud, like the gnomon of the sundial, but the graves were all hidden by trees and bushes. The churchyard, more egg-shaped than circular, was partly enclosed by the orchard which, from here, had a deceptive density. Had the church once been entirely surrounded by apple trees?

‘Indeed. The heart, Mrs Watkins. And the blood it pumped was cider.’

Along the hidden road, a heavy lorry rumbled, the landscape seemed to tremble and her mind replayed the deepened voice of Dermot Child. Auld ciderrrrrrrrrrr ...

‘Yes.’ Merrily pulled herself together. ‘And talking of cider ...’

‘I can’t tell you what happened to the child.’ The old girl scrambled gracelessly down from the top of the knoll and came to sit beside Merrily. ‘And if I tell you what I think might have happened, I’m afraid our embryonic relationship might well be aborted.’

‘Don’t like the sound of that.’

‘Laurence phoned me,’ Miss Devenish said. ‘The Cassidy girl had arrived at his door.’

‘That’s ... Lol?’

‘I do so hate slovenly abbreviations. Gaz. Chuck. Appalling. Laurence Robinson helps me in the shop. His is the nearest cottage to that end of the orchard. The Cassidy girl was somewhat distressed – well, as close to distress as that madam’s capable of getting. Told Laurence your daughter had drunk too much and passed out in the orchard. The two of them brought her back to the cottage. Which was where I first saw her.’

‘She was conscious by then?’

‘I wonder,’ said Miss Devenish, ‘if she had ever been, in the strictest sense, unconscious.’

‘Meaning?’

‘She’d apparently been sick. Before she apparently passed out. My distant memories of such things tell me it’s usually the other way about.’

‘Was she coherent?’

‘Perhaps.’

Merrily took a deep breath. ‘Miss Devenish, she’s fifteen years old. She has no father, she’s had to change schools rather a lot, and ... well, she’s very intelligent, but rather less sophisticated than she thinks she is. Last night she was with a girl who seems to me to have been ...’

‘Been around. Yes.’

‘They seem to have been ... pursued ... by some boys. What I’m trying to get at is, when you found them, did you see any suggestion of ... of ...?’

‘Hanky-panky? No, Mrs Watkins. I don’t think you need worry on that score.’

‘Thank you. Next question. I don’t know how much cider she drank, but it was enough to knock her over. The first time I got drunk – not that much older than Jane – I spent most of the following day wanting to die. Jane slept like a baby and woke up with absolutely no trace of a hangover. So I wondered ... I mean, the word is, Miss Devenish, that you know a thing or two about herbal medicines. And things. I just wanted—’

‘My assessment of the situation tells me,’ said Miss Devenish, ‘that you wanted her to suffer.’

‘Well ...’ Merrily averted her eyes. ‘Let’s say I wanted her to regret it.’

‘Well, of course,’ said Miss Devenish, ‘you’re a Christian, and Christians are reluctant to believe that any significant lesson can be learned without suffering.’

‘And what are you, Miss Devenish?’

‘Labels!’ The old girl glared at her. ‘Why should one always have to be a something? Traherne was a Christian, but with the perceptions ... the antennae ... of a pagan. But I’ll not be drawn into that sort of argument. I’d prefer us to remain on speaking terms. You want to know how your daughter could get horribly inebriated on copious draughts of rough cider and come out of it without a king-size hangover, and I’m trying to give you a possible explanation without offending your religious sensibilities.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Merrily lay back against the knoll. ‘I’m not some fundamentalist bigot, honestly. Go on.’

‘What we used to call sympathetic magic. You’ll probably think this whimsical.’

‘I’ll try not to.’

‘All right. Like cures like. If you’re drunk on cider, what better place to sleep it off than an apple orchard? Crawl into the centre of the orb and curl up. Let nature do the rest.’

‘You’re right. That is whimsical.’

‘Wouldn’t work for everyone. The orchard’s a risky place, an entity in itself, a sphere. And this is a very old orchard. So it tells you – or rather it tells me – something about your daughter.’

‘I’m sorry, but what does it tell you about my daughter?’

‘I really don’t want us to fall out,’ Miss Devenish said. ‘But you would do well to trust the child.’

Wearily, Lol opened his front door.

In the brightness of the afternoon, the willow tree in the front garden dusted with gold, it was almost a relief to see Karl Windling there on the step. In person, in his denims, beaming through his beard. A moment of ridiculous anticlimax. No surprise; Karl would know Dennis would have warned Lol.

‘How the hell are you, son?’

‘I’m all right,’ Lol said tentatively. ‘How are you?’

‘Pretty good,’ Karl said seriously. ‘Pretty ... fucking ... good.’

And looked it. It was nine years since they’d last been face-to-face. Karl’s beard was evenly clipped like a hairbrush. It was probably concealing a double chin; he’d put on some weight, but only the kind of weight you needed to make work-out sessions worthwhile. He looked fitter, in fact, than he had fifteen years ago when he used to remind Lol of Bluto in the old Popeye cartoons. The difference being, course, that there was never any real, lasting harm in Bluto.

‘Hey, this is cute.’ Karl stepped back on to the lawn. He wasn’t actually that big, when you saw him. Only huge in the memory. ‘This is picture postcard. How long you been here now, son?’

‘A year. Something like that.’ Lol felt numb, anaesthetized by the new acceptance that no matter where he went, how he lived, he was never going to have the balls to control his own life.

‘Quaint.’ Karl fingered the rotting trellis. ‘Sweet little cottage at the end of a country lane. Little garden, little porch. Retirement home. Lovely.’

Lol nodded. He didn’t have to rise to it, or hide. Only let Karl see him as he really was: a small, spent force, a loser. And then Karl would leave him alone.

‘But you’re writing a bit, I hear. Few lyrics for Gary Kennedy?’

Lol shrugged. ‘He sends me tapes.’

‘You can do better than that, son. Gary’s long gone.’

‘Still writes good tunes.’

‘He’s gone, son. Washed up.’ Karl prodded a cracked plantpot with his desert boot; they must be back in fashion. ‘Look, we just enjoying the lovely country air, or are you gonna invite me in to meet your lady?’

‘There is no lady,’ Lol said.

Karl grinned in disbelief. In the old days, one of his more socially dubious pastimes had been poaching women from his friends and colleagues. He’d screw them once, rarely more than that, then give them back. To varying degrees, the friends and colleagues had found this irritating, but there was no record of retaliation.

‘You’re shitting me, son. You were always so popular with ladies. That air of helplessness brings out the universal mothering instinct. Made us all very, very jealous.’

‘That was then,’ Lol said.

‘So Dennis got it wrong.’

‘There was somebody,’ Lol said. ‘She left.’

‘Ah.’ Karl peered over Lol’s shoulder into the hall. ‘So you’re on your own.’

Lol stepped back to let Karl into the cottage. It felt like holding out your wrists for the handcuffs, baring your belly for the knife.

‘I don’t want to fall out with anyone.’ Merrily nibbled a stem of grass. She was finding Miss Devenish disturbingly easy to talk to. ‘I’m the new kid on the block, trying not to put my foot in it. But something tells me I’m on the edge of a minefield.’

‘Ah,’ said Miss Devenish. ‘Methinks the Reverend Wil Williams rears his pretty head.’

‘Perhaps, under the present circumstances, we ought to avoid words like “pretty”. Who told you about it?’

‘Anyone residing within a few hundred yards of Cassidy’s restaurant this morning would have heard the appalling Terrence beating his sunken breast. But I got the full details from Colette, as no one else seemed to be talking to her after last night. Don’t agonize about it, my dear. That’s my advice, for what it’s worth.’

‘It’s my job to agonize.’ Merrily sat up, reached for her bag. ‘Would you mind if I had a cigarette?’

‘Feel free to be human.’

‘Thanks.’ Merrily gratefully extracted the Silk Cut.

‘Agonizing.’ Miss Devenish regarded her intently as she lit up. ‘The need to agonize. That’s very interesting. I wonder, would your predecessor have said the same?’

‘Alf Hayden?’

‘Faced with any moral challenge, the dreadful Hayden would simply erect the screen of buffoonery and vacuous twittering that’s sustained the Anglican clerical tradition for the past fifty years.’

Merrily laughed, the smoke softening her up, the sun warm on her face and arms. ‘You’re a cynic, Miss Devenish.’

‘So perhaps the ordination of women will be the salvation of the Church. Women listen. Women worry. Call me Lucy. Listen, my advice, for what it’s worth, is to let it happen. Let the awful Coffey have his play.’

The face was shaded by the big hat and the eyes were invisible. The hands lay placidly where the hem of the poncho met a baggy frock splattered with sunflowers.

Merrily was cautious. ‘Why do you say that? I mean, Cassidy, for one, would be glad to hear you say it, but—’

‘Good heavens, whichever way it goes, Cassidy’s screwed, isn’t he? The festival needs Coffey for artistic credibility, but it needs Bull-Davies ... well, not for money any more, obviously, but certainly for the use of land for marquees and car parking. And also, more importantly, because Bull-Davies is the voice of the county set, and those buggers still stick together – more than ever, in adversity. Cause offence in that quarter and all kinds of barriers are erected. No, I shall enjoy watching Cassidy squirm. May even poke him with the occasional twig.’

Under the shadow of the hat, the lips twisted with a happy malice.

Merrily sighed. ‘So you think the play’s going to be valid.’

‘What?’ The hat came off to reveal a steel-grey plait in a tight coil and a fierce cobalt glare. ‘Valid? I think the whole concept is absolute cock.’

‘Then I don’t understand.’

‘Frolicking in the orchard with naked youths? Utter tosh. And yet the poor man was misjudged, I’m sure of that. Friend of Traherne’s, you see. Not a poet, unfortunately, but were his perceptions any less keen for that?’

‘So what are you saying? Was Williams a witch?’

‘Was Traherne a witch?’

‘Of course he wasn’t.’

‘Really? You’re sure of that?’

This was getting silly. ‘I wouldn’t claim to know much about him, but people who do tell me he saw God in everything.’

‘Quite.’ Lucy Devenish stood up, jammed on her hat.

Merrily followed her as she stalked down the footpath, across the sloping field towards the village. ‘You still haven’t explained ...’

Lucy carried on walking, with long strides.

‘... why you think the play should go ahead in the church,’ Merrily said, out of breath now.

‘Why? For the truth, of course. Nobody cares about truth any more. Coffey doesn’t care – he just wants to mangle history for his own purposes. Cassidy doesn’t care – he sees the past as a marketing tool. Bull-Davies cares, of course, but only about his personal heritage, his reputation. His family have doubtless been distorting the truth for generations.’

‘But we don’t know what the truth is.’

‘No.’ The old girl stopped. They were on low ground now. Ledwardine had sunk into the trees so that only the steeple was visible, like a rocket waiting to be launched. ‘But when the ditchwaters are stirred, the turds often surface.’

‘Just don’t tell me,’ Karl said, ‘that you don’t miss it.’

A pigeon, disturbed, battered its way out of the hedge and flew up past the open window.

Lol was silent. Sitting in the blue chair with the cat on his knees. Being himself. A sad person.

‘Well, then?’ Karl looked around the room again, at the few cheap things in it. ‘Well?’

‘I’m doing what you said,’ Lol said desperately. ‘Not telling you I don’t miss it.’

‘Nah. You’re not being honest with yourself, son.’

Karl was leaning back in Ethel the cat’s chair, with one of the three cans of half-frozen lager Lol had found at the back of the fridge. He had his tobacco tin on the arm of the chair, the tin which had upset Dennis Clarke because it was not the drug of choice in his part of Chippenham. As he relaxed, another drug – California – had drifted into Karl’s accent.

‘This guy in LA, right? I hadn’t been there very long, and he was another Brit. Ex-para. Bodyguard to the stars now. Big bucks. We get pissed one night. I’m saying, So this is living, right? He gives me a funny look. Sour. He says, This is cruisin’, man, living it ain’t. He says, You wanna know the last time I was really alive? Port Stanley, he says. Or it might’ve been Goose Green. Back in the Falklands War, anyway. The last time his senses were really buzzing. I didn’t believe it. But like I say, I hadn’t been in Hollywood very long.’

Karl drained the can, crushed it with feeling.

‘What am I saying, son? I’ll tell you. His time in the Falklands was like our times on the road, gigging. The buzz, right? On stage, a little pissed, high on your own music, and the thought of—’

‘No! Bollocks.’

‘Listen, a year ago, I played bass for two nights with a band called APB, from Santa Monica. I was older than any of those guys, by a good twelve years. But it was still there, son. By Christ, it was there. Afterwards ...’

Afterwards. Was that what Dennis Clarke’s letter was saying in its cautious, accountantly way? Was that what had really offended the neat, suburban Mrs Gillian Clarke – Karl going on about the good old days of hot nights and tender young flesh? Lol tried to switch off Karl’s voice, summoning Traherne. Your enjoyment of the world is never right till you awake in heaven, till you ... till you look upon the earth ... no ... till you look upon the skies, the earth and the air as celestial joys ...

‘... tell you, I coulda gone on all night. Incredible. Left my brains all over the bedroom ceiling, yeah?’

Lol’s fingers tightening on Ethel’s scruff; Ethel purred. You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars ... and ... and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world ... and ...

‘... stayed in Hereford last night. This morning, I’m in Andy’s, browsing through the albums, and – I’m not kidding, son, this was like a mystical experience – these two young girls, sixteen, seventeen, black stockings, skirts up to here. Combing the racks – obviously not got a bundle to spend – pick one up, study it, put it back, have arguments. Finally, they come up with one CD. One says, Look, it’s midprice, too. Guess what it was ... Guess—’

The world ... the world is a mirror of infinite beauty yet no man sees it. It is a Temple of Majesty, yet no man ...no man regards it. It is a region of Light and Peace ... it is ... it is ... it is ...

‘The reissue. I just wanted to kiss their little feet. Christ, if this wasn’t a sign ... They probably weren’t even born when we did that album. Their mothers had safety pins through their nipples and thought we were soft shit. Now, after all these years, we are becoming warm. Our time has come, son. It’s all turned around. Our ... time ... has ... fucking come. And I will not be deprived of it by someone whose balls are made of blancmange. You follow?’

Jane moved a little closer to the open window. Thanks to Lol’s inactivity in the garden, she was sure she wasn’t visible from the lane, but, Jesus, she’d nearly fainted when that pigeon crashed out of the hedge.

Her left leg had gone numb from crouching between the hedge and the window, but you couldn’t have prised her out of there now.

‘Just listen to me,’ Lol said. ‘Please. I can’t do it any more. I can write lyrics for other people, but I have to have that degree of separation. I can’t write them for me. I can’t marry up the tunes. I start to imagine being on stage again, I start shaking. I wasn’t any good even then. All I ever did was try and be Nick Drake.’

‘But he wasn’t appreciated then, was he? Plus he was dead anyway. Now he’s a bleedin’ icon. And you could be. We could be. Don’t even have to die.’

Karl was laughing. Lol had a distinct memory of Karl kicking his guitar over. Can’t you write anything but this wimpy shit? When’re your fucking balls gonna drop?

‘All I’m saying’ – Karl giving the crushed can an extra squeeze until it was the shape of an apple core – ‘is you give it some thought. We don’t have to go on the road. I know how that messed you up. I know we had problems.’

Problems? Problems? Oh Jesus, he was losing it. The cat, alarmed, jumping off his knee. ‘My parents didn’t speak to me after that. Ever again. My devout, God-fearing parents. Three years later, my mum died not having spoken a word to me, and my dad ... at the funeral, my dad turned his back.’

‘Listen.’ Karl didn’t want to hear this shit. ‘We’re looking at real money. And we’re older. We know how it works. I know how it works. I’ll see you don’t get shafted. Look, we do an album first. Give me six new songs, and we’ll recycle some of the old stuff. Maybe even do a couple of Drake’s.’

Lol was shaking his head so hard his ponytail was banging his nose.

‘What you got to lose?’ Karl waving a hand around the room, at the two old chairs, the table, the woodstove and the guitar. ‘The bitch obviously took you to the cleaners. Left you with the rubbish and the cat.’

‘No. She only took her clothes and a few other things. The rest I ... just got rid of.’

‘Why you do that?’

Lol shook his head. How could he explain about Traherne, the need for simplicity, the need to appreciate the real moon, the actual stars?

‘Old people do that.’ Karl’s face was an open sneer. ‘When they know they don’t have long. Tidying up. Unloading all their junk, giving away their prized possessions. Finally having to admit they can’t take it with them. Bad sign, when you start tidying up. Ominous.’

Prodding Lol, like he used to do physically when they couldn’t agree about a song or what to do after the gig. Using the word ominous. Talking earlier about a sign. No coincidence; he’d remembered that these were always Lol’s words, that Lol was deeply superstitious. Little Mr Ominous, they called him.

‘You have something in mind, son?’

Lol shook his head, too quickly.

‘Shit.’ Karl’s eyes lit up. ‘You’ve thought about it, haven’t you?’

‘Hasn’t everybody?’

‘Only you. Only you would say that. Look ...’

Karl stood up. Lol shrank back into his chair.

‘... I’ll go, all right? I’ll leave you to think about it, and I’ll try not to worry, ‘cause if you were gonna do it you’d’ve done it by now. Kurt Cobain, fair enough, he was mega, now he’s a legend. But Drake, he did it too soon. And you – you’re just ... I mean, who’d notice? Who’d give a shit? Who’d put flowers on your grave?’

A short while later, Jane crept away, wrapped in a clammy confusion of emotions.

‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ Merrily said, as they walked back into the village, the footpath fringing the orchard. ‘It goes back to, you know, that night.’

‘Ah,’ Lucy Devenish said. ‘Twelfth Night. What a disturbing introduction that must have been to our little community.’

‘After it happened, when we were all deeply shocked and uncomprehending, I heard you whispering, I knew it, I knew it.’

‘You have good ears.’

‘Not specially. What did you know?’

‘Only that someone was going to die.’

‘On that particular night?’

‘I thought it might have been sooner, but when autumn turned into winter and it didn’t happen, I began to suspect it might be something rather extraordinary. The orchard had told me, you see.’

‘Right,’ Merrily said calmly. ‘I see.’

‘Of course you don’t, and who could expect you to? I’ve been close to apples and orchards, and particularly that orchard, all my life. The apple’s the fruit of Herefordshire, its colours glow from the earth, its spirit shines out of the land. And the apples are terribly sensitive, the apples know.’

‘Know when someone’s going to die?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘I see.’

Miss Devenish threw her a glance.

‘Sorry.’

‘What you have to watch out for, Merrily, is uncharacteristic behaviour. Unseasonal phenomena.’

Several apple trees were overhanging the path, although not in a graceful way, Merrily thought. The apple was an ungainly little tree, spiky and irregular.

‘They’re going to be laden with blossom this year,’ Lucy observed.

‘That a good sign?’

Lucy sniffed. ‘Implies a big crop, but nothing’s certain about the apple. Especially this particular species, the Pharisees Red.’

‘Why do they call it that?’

Lucy smiled. ‘You asked me how I knew there was death in the wind. It’s because last autumn there was blossom. Out of season.’

‘Ah,’ Merrily said. ‘An old country omen.’

‘A bloom on the tree when the apples are ripe I is a sure termination of somebody’s life! pronounced Miss Lucy Devenish.

‘Classy piece of rhyming,’ Merrily said. ‘So there was blossom in the orchard last autumn.’

‘As late as November,’ Lucy said. ‘But only on one tree.’

Merrily turned away from the orchard, annoyed with herself, as a minister of God, for shuddering.

‘Before we part, my dear ...’

‘Yes?’

‘I want you to know, whatever you may have heard about me, that I have your best interests close to my heart. And if anything disturbs you ... anything frightens you ...’

‘Like what?’ Merrily saw that the old girl was no longer smiling.

‘Oh, I think I’ll wait for your specific questions. I don’t want to ...’

‘Quarrel, huh?’ Merrily said.

‘And don’t dismiss the orchard. It still surrounds the village.’