Gomer ignited his roll-up, hands cupped around it.
‘We’re havin’ a cuppa with Lizzie afterwards when up comes this bloody great white BMW. Woman inside leanin’ on the horn till Felix goes out. Givin’ him hell, we could all of us year it. Folks in the next village’d likely year it – all this, what you doin’ yere when you oughter be up at Lady So-and-So’s? What you think you are, bloody registered charity?’
‘This is Mrs Barlow?’
‘Good-lookin’ woman, mind. But it en’t everythin’, is it?’
‘Erm … no. I suppose not.’
‘Barlow goes around helpin’ too many poor widows, where’s the next BMW comin’ from?’
‘You met the woman he’s with now?’
‘The hippie? Never met her, no, vicar.’ Gomer waved his ciggy. ‘Feller’s a bit alternative hisself, mind. Builder as en’t into cheating his clients, that’s alternative for a start, ennit?’
Merrily laughed.
‘Knows the job, too. Could be in an office, collar and tie, directin’ operations. But he knows that money en’t everythin’, no more’n a goodlookin’ woman is.’
‘She is a good-looking woman, as it happens.’
‘The hippie?’
‘And not much more than half his age.’
‘Oh well.’ Gomer shrugged, teeth crushing the ciggy. ‘Just cause a feller spends all his time shorin’ up ole buildings, don’t mean all his tools is obsolete.’
Merrily blinked.
Merrily didn’t know what M. R. James had looked like. The only face she could see in her mind was Huw’s, framed by hair like dried-out straw, mounted on an age-dulled dog-collar and settling into a complacent conjuror’s smile.
We must have offended somebody or something at Garway, I think.
‘I wondered why you were so anxious,’ Jane said, ‘to borrow the M. R. James.’
Always a danger with emails. She’d been on the computer in the scullery, researching some aspect of stone rows, when Huw’s mail had come through. She’d read it, looked up the references, been into the Ghosts and Scholars website.
‘You couldn’t make it up,’ Jane said, still sitting at the desk.
Impressed, excited. Merrily walked to the window. Oh hell.
‘Mr James could make it up, though, couldn’t he? I mean, that was what he did.’
‘Oh, Mum. It was a letter to his friend. Someone who obviously knew exactly what he was on about. He doesn’t spell it out, does he? He knows she understands his point of reference.’
‘Mmm. Possibly.’
Merrily read the rest of it.
Probably we took it too much for granted, in speaking of it, that we should be able to do exactly as we pleased. Next time we shall know better. There is no doubt it is a very rum place and needs careful handling.
No, the kid was right. You couldn’t make it up. She could see why Huw had insisted on emailing the whole page from the Ghosts and Scholars website. Something had happened to M. R. James at Garway. Either something faintly curious which James’s serpentine imagination had inflated into something disturbing. Or something seriously disturbing which James, in this otherwise routine letter to a female friend, was deliberately making light of.
The editor of the website had made a kind of pilgrimage to the area to track down the settings for the main Herefordshire story ‘A View from a Hill’. Although the story seemed to be set in the general area of Garway, the village itself didn’t appear to feature, even under a different name.
‘I love this guy.’ Jane was glowing. ‘Greatest ghost-story writer ever. Because he just … well, basically, he just … he didn’t do ghosts.’
‘What did he do, then?’
‘Entities. He did entities. Creeping things. Indefinable things, exuding … malevolence. In traditional settings, like old churches and deserted shores and places with burial mounds. According to the website, he once said there was no point at all in writing about the supernatural if it wasn’t evil.’
‘Doesn’t that kind of invalidate the Bible?’
‘He meant fiction, Mum.’
‘Wow,’ Merrily said, ‘there’s a step forward for you.’
‘I mean complete fiction. Anyway, he wasn’t exactly anti-religious. His old man was a vicar, in Suffolk. He was brought up in the Church. He might even have gone that way himself if he hadn’t got into academic research and teaching and stuff.’
‘And did you know he came to this area?’
‘Well, no! I just didn’t! It’s incredible.’
‘But you’ve read all the stories.’
‘Erm …’ Jane fiddled with the mouse. ‘Not all of them, to be completely honest.’
‘You totally love him, but you haven’t read all his stories.’
‘OK … mainly, I’ve just seen the TV versions.’
‘I don’t remember us watching them.’
Remembered them being on. Usually around Christmas, and mostly before Jane had been born.
‘Erm … I didn’t mean us.’ Jane’s face had clouded. ‘I saw them at Irene … Eirion’s. His dad had a complete set of the videos, and we watched most of them one night, one after the other. It was … it was pretty good. We were on our own and we scared ourselves silly.’
‘That must’ve been a long night. Watching them all.’
‘Not that long.’ Jane looked away. ‘They only lasted half an hour each. Or a bit longer.’
Oh, Jane, Jane …
Merrily guessing they’d watched them tucked up together in Eirion’s bed, when his parents were out.
‘Anyway,’ Jane said. ‘The TV versions were obviously set in East Anglia or somewhere. To be honest, I bought the book but I only got round to reading a couple. And I didn’t read the foreword, otherwise I’d’ve known about him coming here. Obviously, I’m now going to read everything. I’m going to find a biography. It’s amazing.’
‘Mmm.’
It was certainly a complication. Did Fuchsia know M. R. James had been to Garway? It was not unlikely.
‘So …’ Jane sat back, hands behind her head. ‘What’s your angle on this, Mum?’
‘Oh, it … it’s just somebody else who scared themselves silly.’
‘In a house belonging to Prince Charles?’
‘Did I tell you that?’
‘Not directly, but I just happened to click on history …’
‘And found the Duchy of Cornwall website.’ Merrily nodded, resigned. ‘Right.’
‘Didn’t mean to snoop, but this one was interesting. And you know it never goes any further, with me. Not any more.’
‘I’d’ve told you all about it, if you’d asked.’
‘I know, but … Anyway. Sorry. So, like, the house is at Garway, then. With the Knights Templar church. How did you get on to M. R. James?’
‘Because … there’s a mention of a Templar preceptory in one of his stories – “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”.’
‘That one is really scary. In the TV version, this professor, he’s not what you’d call sociable and he just goes around kind of mumbling to himself on this grey beach, and then he—’
‘Do you know of any more? Any more stories mentioning the Knights Templar?’
‘No, but I could email this website and ask this Rosemary Pardoe, who obviously knows, like, everything about M. R.’
‘OK,’ Merrily said. ‘Why not?
Whatever had happened to M. R. James at Garway, he didn’t appear to have used it in a story, but perhaps he had, in some less obvious way. If he’d been at Garway in 1917, it would have to be one of the later ones.