But Fuchsia?
If Felix was right, something had brought Fuchsia back here yesterday. Fuchsia, who wanted to be blessed in the old-fashioned way. Watch over her, in the name of all the angels and saints in heaven. Keep guard over her soul day and night.
Fuchsia, newly blessed, had returned to a place she’d judged to be full of death. Nothing here was suggesting why.
Jane headed for the top of the half-spiral stairs, and Merrily followed her down, unsatisfied, mildly annoyed. The stone steps were worn smooth at the edges, slippery, some shored up underneath with bricks. Pointless doing a room-to-room prayer cycle; she didn’t know enough of the history to have any kind of focus, and all she could feel in the air was the criss-crossing of private agendas. It was an unwelcoming old house, soured by neglect, and that was probably the extent of it.
Back in the big room, the light seemed stronger, but that would be just her eyes adjusting. She looked around, walked around the ingrained lino and then stepped inside the inglenook. Ducking, although there was no need to, under the vast beam.
The inglenook was almost a small chamber in itself. A separate place. In the sooty dimness, she found the remains of what must have been a bread oven, empty, and a matted tangle of grey bones, all that was left of a bird, behind the fire-basket. She looked up the chimney: glimmerings of light, but something blocking it – nests maybe.
‘Nothing much here, Jane.’
‘Sorry, Mum?’
Jane’s voice coming from the other side of the room.
‘I’m sorry,’ Merrily said, ‘I thought you—’
The sentence guillotined by the thought that if it hadn’t been Jane who was with her in the inglenook …
‘… Sort of passage, leading to a back door,’ Jane called out. ‘Kind of a washroom?’
Standing very still and fully upright, her back flat to the rear wall, Merrily let in a long, thin river of breath.
‘… An old sink.’ Jane’s voice further away. ‘Cupboards …’
‘Jane, get—’
Merrily’s throat spasm-blocked, her headache back, like spikes, like a crown of thorns, twisting in. The iron fire-basket gaped up at her like an open gin-trap while she scrabbled in the pockets of her mind for prayer. Christ be … Be, for God’s sake, calm. Pushing back a sudden amazing panic, vile as a migraine, she closed her eyes, but it was like when you made yourself dizzy as child, and she felt sick, feeling the crumbling house turning slowly around her, grinding on the axis of its origins.
‘Christ be wi—’
‘… with …’
Only half-hearing the words – St Patrick’s Breastplate, the old armour – but her lips were cold and flaccid and wouldn’t shape them. There was a solid, substantial resistance, a flat, hard-edged no, and a rubbery numbness in her hands when she tried to clasp them together. And although the prayer was sounding in her head, it was distant, someone else’s whispers, and she tried to turn up the volume, envisioning bright brass bells clanging in a high tower, but the sound was harsh and industrial.
Christ behind me, Christ before me …
A muted crackling down there: bird bones crunching under her shoes. When she opened her eyes in revulsion, there was a face in the high corner of the inglenook and it had stubby horns and a worm squirming from its blackened mouth, and Merrily recoiled.
‘Mum?’
Jane’s footsteps sounded on the ingrained lino. But she mustn’t …
‘Mum, look, I don’t want to worry you or anything, but it’s getting dark, and you’ve got your meditation in just over an hour? And I think we’ve both had enough of this place.’
Merrily wouldn’t move. Or try to speak because, if Jane knew where she was, Jane would join her.
18
Listen
WHAT LOL LIKED best about the gigging was the coming home. Home to the mosaic of coloured-lit windows in the black and white houses, the fake gas lamps ambering the cobbles, sometimes the scent of applewood smoke.
He parked the Animal under the lamp on the edge of the square, well back from the cars and SUVs of the Sunday-evening diners in the Black Swan.
The truck had been Gomer’s idea, watching Lol loading two guitars and an amp awkwardly into the Astra, together with all the one-man-band gadgets which contrived the drumming and the toots and whirrs and storm noises that audiences loved for the apparent chaos of it all.
Gomer had remembered that his sidekick Danny Thomas knew a reliable bloke who was selling his Mitsubishi L200. Animal, it said on the side. Gomer seemed to find this funny. He and Danny had converted the truck, building a watertight compartment into the box to accommodate the gear, fitting a metal roll-top cover you could lock, and Gomer had taken Lol’s old Astra to recondition for himself: Waste not, want not, Lol, boy.
Lol climbed down, walked round the Animal in the late twilight and pushed back the roll-top under the lights, uncovering the case of the lovely Boswell guitar, handmade by Al Boswell, the Romani, in the Frome Valley, two harmonicas, shining like ingots in a black velvet tray, and the plastic thing that could make your voice sound like an oboe. Audiences everywhere – Hello Hartlepool, Good Evening, Godalming – seemed to warm to the homespun, the cobbled-together. They actually wanted to like you.
Taken him a long time to realize that. Nick Drake never had. Nick who, for God’s sake, was so much better, all he’d felt was a paralysing isolation which had sometimes left him playing with his back half-turned away from the crowd.
Lol opened the case that held the Boswell. Paranoia, he knew, but he was always worried that the vibration of the truck might have damaged it. Many different kinds of wood had gone into its mandolin soundbox. It wasn’t the kind of guitar you took out on the road, but he felt it was his talisman – receiving it from Al Boswell when his life was turning round, the songs coming through and Merrily, miraculously warm in his bed.
The guitar seemed fine. But, across the street, over the corner of the square, the vicarage had no lights.
Not how it should be. Before Merrily left the house to do the evening meditation, she’d always put on the globular lamp over the door. Always. Symbolic. Place of sanctuary. For Lol more than anybody. He pulled back the roll-top, locked it quickly, ran across the square to the vicarage gate. No visible lights in the house. No Volvo in the drive. Garage doors shut and bolted.
Lol felt the inner freeze of dislocation. She wasn’t there, and she hadn’t told him. He felt, for cold moments, like a stranger here again. Without Merrily, he would be a stranger, snatching moments of warmth only from his hard-earned applause, a furnace door opening and closing.
Stupid. Not as if they were married.
Maybe she’d left him a message on the answering machine? He ran back across the square to the terraced cottage in Church Street, unlocked his front door.
A haze of street light on the desk under the front window. Silence. No bleeps. Lol looked out into the street, up and down at the windows of Ledwardine, the mosaic of coloured squares now as unwelcoming as the ash in the hearth.
There would be a simple explanation. He was becoming neurotic, over-possessive.
Not as if they were married.
Yet, so often, with the nature of what she did, when he’d felt a wrongness there had been … something wrong.