Disoriented, she looked up, following the steeple to the starless sky, puzzled because it was so bright up there, yet she couldn’t see a moon.
‘Oughter get home, vicar,’ Gomer Parry said. ‘Don’t bugger about n’more.’
He was leaning on his spade. It was an ordinary garden spade, not an axe, but could be nearly as deadly, she imagined, in the hands of the wiry little warrior in the flat cap and the bomber jacket. So glad it was Gomer, Merrily tried to smile, but her lips took a while to respond. She felt insubstantial, weightless as a butterfly, and just as transient. She gripped the rounded rim of the tombstone, needing gravity.
‘Wanner get some hot tea down you, girl.’ Gomer’s fingers were rolling a ciggy on the T-handle of the spade.
Now in semi-retirement from his long-time business of digging field drains and cesspits, Gomer saw to the graveyard, where his Minnie lay, and kept the church orchard pruned and tidy. Also, without making much of a thing out of it, he reckoned it was part of his function to look out for the vicar. This vicar, anyway. Been through some situations together, she and Gomer. But still she couldn’t tell him why she’d been in the church tonight or what had happened in there.
The colour of the sky alarmed her. It was streaked with orange cream, laying a strange glare on Gomer’s bottle glasses. Merrily pushed her fingers through her hair. It felt matted with dried sweat.
‘Time… time is it, Gomer?’
‘Time?’ He looked up at the sky behind the steeple. ‘All but five now, sure t’be.’
‘Five in the morning?’
Her knees felt numb. Strips of… of sun were alight between layers of cloud like Venetian blinds over the hills.
Gomer struck a match on a headstone. ‘That Mrs Griffiths, it was, phoned me. Her don’t sleep much n’more since her ol’ man snuffed it. Reckoned there was some bugger in the church, ennit? Bit of a glow up the east window, see. Vicar? What’s wrong?’
‘It can’t be.’ Merrily was shaking her head, frenziedly. Her face felt stiff. ‘It can’t be. I’ve only been—Gomer, I…’ She clutched his arm. ‘I went in there… maybe an hour ago. An hour and a half at the most. It was about ten o’clock… ten-thirty.’
And then the earth turned.
The molten copper of the dawn sent terrifying pulses into Merrily’s head.
Gomer patted her hand.
‘Young Jane… Her’s gone away, then?’
‘Huh?’
‘First time you been alone yere, I reckon, vicar.’
‘It was ten-thirty,’ she said faintly. ‘I swear to God, ten-thirty at the latest.’
She remembered then how far the candles had burned down. It couldn’t be.
Six hours? Those few minutes had become… hours?
Her hands were trembling. The penny dropped out of one and fell onto the tombstone where she’d been sitting.
She recalled a blurred Britannia on the coin. Tails.
Gomer lit his ciggy. ‘Needs a bit of a holiday yourself, you ask me, vicar. Pack a case, bugger off somewhere nobody knows you, or what you do. Don’t say no prayers for nobody for a week, I wouldn’t.’
She bent to pick up the coin. ‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry for dragging you out, Gomer. I really… Maybe I fell asleep or something.’
‘Sure t’be.’ Gomer Parry stood there nodding sagely, patient as a donkey.
She met his eyes. Both of them knew she didn’t believe she’d been asleep in the church, not for one minute of those six hours.
She invited Gomer back to the vicarage, but he wouldn’t come with her. ‘Strikes me you don’t need no chat, vicar,’ he said perceptively. ‘’Sides which, me and Nev got a pond to dig out, over at Almeley. Get an early start. Makes us look efficient, ennit?’
She walked back to the vicarage lucidly aware of every step, the warming of the air, the shapes of the cobbles on the square, the tension of the ancient black timbers holding Ledwardine together.
Back in the kitchen, she looked around the painted walls, as if walking into the room for the first time. Yes, she’d been away for a while, a night had passed. She put the kettle on and some food out for Ethel. The little black cat didn’t start to eat for quite a while, just sat on the kitchen flags and stared at her, olive-eyed, while she drank her tea.
‘I look different or something, puss?’
Ethel didn’t blink. Merrily went upstairs and had a shower hot enough to hurt. She was aching, but she wasn’t tired. She still felt light and unsteady, slightly drunk. But also strengthened, aware of a core of something flat and firm and quiet in her abdomen. Afterwards, she stood at the landing window, wrapped in a bath towel like someone out of a Badedas ad, and watched the morning sun shining like a new penny.
Lifted up or cracking up? State of grace or a state of crisis?
If she’d been seriously stressed-out last night, she could have understood what had happened: the collapse into the arms of God, the acceleration of time, the flooding of the senses.
Like being abducted by aliens.
She started to laugh and went to get dressed.
It wasn’t about stress. It was about the decision to toss a coin.
She put on the grey T-shirt and the dog collar and an off-white skirt. It was Monday, usually a quiet day in the parish. Meetings with the Bishop in Hereford were on Tuesdays.
With the decision to toss the coin she’d broken through something – probably her own resistance. She went quickly down the stairs and into the kitchen, its walls cross-hatched now with summer-morning light. The kitchen clock said nearly eight. Time still seemed to be moving faster than usual. She needed to ground herself. She needed another tombstone to sit on.
She went on into the scullery and sat behind the desk of scuffed and scratched mahogany. She didn’t plan to wait too long before she phoned the Shelbones. She’d ring just once, and if there was no answer she’d drive over there.
Knowing that this time she would get some straight answers.
She’d make the call at 8.45. She went back into the kitchen to make some breakfast, then decided she wasn’t hungry and cleaned the sink instead, scrubbing feverishly. She had energy to spare. Don’t question it. Don’t question anything about this.
Just after 8.35, as she was drying her hands, the phone summoned her back into the scullery.
‘Merrily,’ Sophie said quietly. ‘Can you come in, please – as early as possible.’
Not a question.
‘Problem?’
‘Yes,’ Sophie said. ‘I’m afraid there is.’
Merrily lit her first cigarette of the new day.
It was the usual battle getting into Hereford, with the hundreds of drivers who just wanted to get through Hereford… and the inevitable roadworks. Not half a mile from the Belmont roundabout, southern gateway to the city, lorries were feeding pre-cast concrete into what used to be Green Belt and would, when completed, apparently be known as the Barnchurch Trading Estate.
Merrily found herself winding up the car window in response to a sudden sensation of the air itself being polluted by human greed, like poison gas.
Don’t let’s get carried away, vicar…
The traffic started to move again, and this time she made it all the way to Greyfriars Bridge without a hold-up.
Hereford Cathedral sat at the bottom of Broad Street, snug rather than soaring. Behind it, the medieval Bishop’s Palace was concealed by an eighteenth-century and Victorian façade that made it look like a red-brick secondary school with Regency and Romanesque pretensions.