The truth was, Jim had said, as they followed Merrily to the vicarage, that they didn’t want to talk to anyone else, didn’t want to answer all the obvious questions about Ann-Marie. They thought it was only right that the vicar should be the first to know.
This was the first time that either Jim or Brenda had been to the Sunday evening service. They’d been among those older parishioners who were huffily avoiding it because they’d heard it was all changed, had become a bit unconventional, a bit not for the likes of us.
‘I pray we’ll be forgiven for ever doubting what you were trying to do, Merrily,’ Brenda said now.
So much for the experiment in Mystery.
Evensong.
As in most parishes, the Sunday evening service had been killed a while ago, by falling congregations.
And then Merrily had suddenly brought it back. Sunday evening in the church. Everyone welcome. Just that. Nothing about a service.
The truth was that, after what had happened with Jenny Box, she’d been feeling guilty. Deliverance work had been separating her too often from her own parish, from the day-to-day cure of souls. She’d been too busy to notice the anomalous buds in the local flower bed until they were bursting into black blossom.
When she’d put this to the Bishop, he’d waved it away. Congregations were in free fall; it was a phase. Or it wasn’t a phase, but something truly sinister – the beginning of the end for organized Christianity. What about children? the Bishop asked; the new Archbishop of Canterbury was particularly worried about the absence of children in churches. Merrily had raised this issue with Jane, who seemed to have been a child like yesterday, and Jane had wrinkled her nose.
‘Who needs kids in church, anyway? Look at it this way – kids are not supposed to drink in pubs until they’re eighteen, so pubs are slightly mysterious... therefore cool. So like, obviously, the best way to invest in the future would be to ban the little sods from the church altogether. That way, they wouldn’t turn out like me.’
‘So the monthly Family Service, with kids doing readings, the quiz...’
‘Totally crap idea, I always said that. It just makes the Church look needy and pathetic. You have to cultivate the mystery. If you don’t bring back the mystery, you’re stuffed, Mum.’
It was worrying: increasingly these days the kid was making a disturbing kind of sense.
OK, then. When she brought back the service, she didn’t call it Evensong because there was no song. No hymns, no psalms. And no sermon, definitely no preaching. It was an experiment with Mystery.
She didn’t even call it a service. She didn’t wear the kit – no cassock, not even a dog collar after the first time – and she sat on a car cushion on the chancel steps. The heating, for what it was worth, would be on full, and pews were pulled out and angled into a semi-circle haloed by a wooden standard lamp that she’d liberated from the vestry. It was a quiet time, a low-key prelude to the working week. The first time, only four people had turned up, which partly dictated the form. Five weeks later, it was a congregation of around twenty, and growing, although congregation was hardly the word.
It would begin with tea and coffee and chat, turning into a discussion of people’s problems. Sometimes solutions were arrived at before the villagers went home. Small difficulties sorted: babysitters found, gardeners for old people. Sometimes it would quietly feed notions into the village, and issues would be resolved during the following week.
The church as forum, the church as catalyst. The polish-scented air as balm. How it should be.
And the Mystery.
As early as the third week, more personal issues had started to emerge. The ones you wouldn’t hear discussed on the street, certainly not by the people involved: marital problems, anxieties over illness and fears over kids and what they might be getting into. There was a surprising focus to these discussions, and when prayer came into it – as it usually did, in the end – it would happen spontaneously, rising like a ground mist in the nave.
Real prayer... and somehow this was a seal of confidentiality. None of the problems raised in the church and distilled into prayer had ever drifted back to Merrily as gossip.
She was elated. It had been cooking. What she didn’t need at this stage was anything boiling over into myth-making.
Jim and Brenda Prosser ran the Eight till Late in the centre of the village. Their daughter, Ann-Marie, who last summer had been painlessly divorced, had moved into the flat over the shop, helping out there at weekends before going off clubbing in Hereford, with her mates. Ann-Marie’s illness had been a rumour for some weeks. Pasted-on smiles at the checkout, whispers about tests. On a Sunday night two weeks ago, Alice Meek, who had the fish and chip shop in Old Barn Lane, had said, Brenda won’t talk about it, but it don’t look good. En’t there nothing we can do?
‘Alice,’ Brenda said now. ‘You know what Alice is like.’
‘Calls a spade a bloody ole shovel,’ Jim said.
‘We met Alice when we were coming back from Dr Kent’s house this afternoon, and she seemed to know.’
‘Only by your face, love,’ Jim said with affection.
The kettle began to hiss, and Merrily put tea in the pot. Brenda sat down at last. She was in her early sixties, had lost weight recently – no surprise there – and her bleach-blonde hair was fading back to white. Periodically, a hand trembled. Brenda folded both of them in her lap and stared across the refectory table at Merrily, like she was seeing the vicar in a strange new light.
‘Alice told us about the special prayers you had for Ann-Marie.’
‘Well, not—’ Merrily looked down at the table top. Of course it was special; all prayer should be special.
‘Alice said she lost track of time. She said she felt as if everybody there was together. United, you know? And that was also some of the newcomers she didn’t know. All united and they were part of something that was... bigger. Said she’d never known anything like that before. Alice said.’
Emotion had brought up the Welshness in Brenda’s voice. The Prossers had moved across from Brecon about fifteen years ago. Merrily felt flushed and uncertain. Happy, of course – happy for the Prossers and Ann-Marie. It was luminously wonderful, and she’d been conscious of reaching an unexpected level of conscious worship, but...
‘What did Dr Kent say exactly?’
‘He phoned for Ann-Marie just after lunch,’ Jim said. ‘He admitted he’d known since Friday, but he was afraid to say in case it was wrong. In case they’d somehow got the wrong medical records or whatever. He said he didn’t think it was possible the new tests had drawn a blank, couldn’t like get his head around it. So he was trying to get the consultant on the phone all of yesterday, and it wasn’t until this morning, see, when he managed to reach him at his home. Couldn’t believe it. Neither of them.’
‘He definitely confirmed that the scan was...’
‘Clear. Nothing there. And it was hers, no question of that. No mistake here, Merrily.’
‘What did the consultant say about it?’
Jim shrugged. ‘You know these fellers.’
‘Maybe they...’ Merrily bit her lip. Made a mistake the first time.