‘Who are they?’
Ben steered Jane back into the porch. ‘Some kind of gun club. Think they can safely ignore me because I’ll be gone soon, like all the others. When it all goes down, when we’re declared bankrupt. It’s what this area does, you see, Jane. Ruins you eventually. Nothing creative ever thrives, because it’s a wilderness, a hunting ground. That’s what it’s always been, it’s the way they like it. But they don’t know me, Jane.’
‘They go out shooting in these conditions?’ She hadn’t heard about his row with the gun club.
‘I think they just saw the lights, the cars. It’s a gesture – you don’t interfere with us, we’ll leave you alone. They think I’m soft. Effete. Some arty bastard from London, here today, gone...’ Ben pushed his fingers through his wet hair, wiping his shoes on the sodden carpet. ‘They don’t bother me, why should they? Half of them aren’t even locals. Yobs, Jane. Thick, barbaric yobs. No subtlety.’ He suddenly flashed a big grin. ‘Where I come from, we have real hard bastards.’
‘Where’s that, exactly?’
‘Oh... the city. Country people think they’re tough because they can pull lambs out of ewes and have to walk further for the bus. Because they can shoot things and watch foxes get torn to bits without feeling pity. Is that tough, Jane? Is that what you’d call tough?’
Jane wrinkled her nose. ‘I think hunting’s totally psychotic, and a waste of time and money. But then, so do a lot of country people, on the quiet.’
‘Do they?’ Ben was either surprised or disappointed.
‘Nobody really likes having their land churned up and their cats killed, like, by mistake. Most of them keep it to themselves, because hunt people can turn nasty when they’re threatened. And country people don’t like confrontation.’
Ben did, though. Ben was into drama. And although he didn’t seem to be aggressive in a violent way, you got the idea that he actually needed to feel a lot of people were against him – needed this to fire him up, maintain his energy level. Needs to succeed against the odds, Amber had said.
Which, when you thought about it, made him a dangerous sort of person to be living here on the Border. Like actually on the actual Border. Jane had theories about the Border and what it meant, what it really was. This excited her most of the time, but now her cheap maid’s outfit was blotting up the wet, and she was clammy-cold and starting to shiver and actually wish she was in her apartment back at the vicarage – how wimpish was that?
‘You’re a smart girl,’ Ben said. ‘I’m awfully glad we’ve got you here. Amber’s a hugely talented woman and very... very decent. But she needs support. And because we can only afford part-time staff, you and Natalie, you’re...’
He didn’t finish. He smiled and turned away, opening the main door for Jane, who noticed the rain coming into the glass porch through the gaps in the putty.
‘They were very close last night,’ Jane said.
‘Who were?’
‘The gun club. There was one shot... sounded like it was just outside the window.’
‘Really,’ Ben said.
3
What Consultants Are For
ON THURSDAY MORNING in the church, the Holy Ghost was waiting.
Alice Meek, from the chip shop in Old Barn Lane, was doing the flowers on the altar. Dusty pillars of white light were dropping from the upper windows and Alice’s voice was carrying like a crow’s across the chancel.
‘My niece, the one in Solihull, she did one of them Alpha courses at her church, did I tell you? After the decree nisi come through, this was – big gap in her life, usual story.’ Alice was smoothing out the altar cloth, replacing the candlesticks. ‘This Alpha, she reckoned it d’creep up on you somehow. It don’t seem like much at first, but near the end of it she felt the Holy Spirit was in her heart like a big white bird, and you could feel its wings fluttering. That’s what she said, vicar. As if this big bird was trying to escape from her breast and’ – Alice spread her arms wide – ‘fill the whole world with love and healing.’
‘That’s nice.’ Merrily went on dusting the choir stalls, wondering where this was going. It was the first time she’d encountered Alice since the Prossers had told her about Ann-Marie.
‘But we prevents it happening, see.’ Alice came back to the chancel steps for the pewter vase that she’d filled with flowers. ‘We don’t let it out. It’s the way we are. We’re all scared to open up, so we keeps him in his cage, the poor old Holy Spirit. I never quite got that before, see.’ She scuttled back and set the pewter vase on the altar. ‘Nothing like freesias, is there? You en’t thought of having one of them Alpha courses yere, Vicar?’
‘Well, it’s—’
‘No. You’re dead right. It’s not necessary.’ Alice came stomping back down the chancel steps, a fierce-faced little woman in a pink nylon overall. ‘I yeard as how Jenny Driscoll, God rest her poor soul, used to say there was angelic light around Ledwardine Church, and now I know exac’ly what she meant. It’s crept up on all of us, it has. Like me – I only come to your Sunday night service because somebody said there wasn’t no hymns. Voice like mine, you don’t wanner do no singing if you can help it, do you? Scare the bloody angels off the roof.’
Alice cackled. Was there a new energy about her, or was that imagination? Merrily sat down in one of the choir stalls. As with most parishes nowadays, there hadn’t been a choir here for years. Some ministers even liked to condense their congregations into the stalls now. More intimate.
Alice came to sit next to her.
‘I’ll be honest, Vicar, some of us wasn’t too sure about you at first. Bit too nervous in the pulpit. Like you wasn’t too certain of what you was trying to say. But it en’t all about preaching, is it? And it en’t all about singin’ the same ole hymns and not hearing none of the words no more. It’s the quiet times, ennit? It’s the quiet times when things starts to happen.’
‘Things?’ Merrily grew nervous.
Alice winked, like there was a great secret floating in the dusty air between them. Brenda Prosser’s voice seemed to echo in the void: Alice said she lost track of time. She said she felt as if everybody there was together... and they were part of something that was, you know, bigger.
‘It’s prayer,’ Merrily said, ‘that’s all.’
‘Whatever you wanner call it’s all right with me,’ Alice said. ‘It’s like you being the exorcist. We wasn’t sure about that either at first. But when I was talking to Mrs Hitchin, works in the library at Leominster, she says it’s all part of the same thing.’
‘Oh.’
‘So anyway,’ Alice said, ‘I was planning to have a word with you about my nephew, works at the tyre place in Hereford.’
Merrily looked at her.
‘Asthma,’ Alice said.
Later, when the Ledwardine GP, Kent Asprey, phoned about next year’s village marathon, Merrily knew he wanted something else. This was how things were done in the sticks.
She took the call in the scullery, sitting at her desk next to the window overlooking the sodden, grey garden.
‘I see from my list that you haven’t entered your name,’ Asprey said.
‘It’s next April, isn’t it? Anyway, you wouldn’t either, if you had legs as short as mine.’ Merrily lit a cigarette. ‘But you could put me down to be one of the people who pushes drinks at the runners.’
‘Righto,’ he said. She could hear him writing.
She waited, looking across the lawn to the ancient apple orchard which was creeping back into the churchyard so that the church and the vicarage were enmeshed again, in a skein of hoary branches. Apple trees were not graceful and not pretty once the fruit was gone. In the old days, the cider would have been made and stored by now. The cider would see the village through the winter. The cider and the church.