‘See, to be frank, Merrily, I’ve never been what you’d call a real churchgoer,’ Jim said. ‘I’m a local shopkeeper, struggling to stay in business. Sometimes I’ve come because it seemed to be expected.’
Brenda sat up. ‘Jim!’
‘No, let me say this. I want to. It’s like being a social drinker. I was a... how would you put it?’
‘Social worshipper?’ Merrily smiled. ‘That’s perilously close to martyrdom, Jim.’
‘What I’m trying to say...’ He’d reddened at last. ‘Well, if this isn’t a bloody miracle, Merrily, I wouldn’t recognize one, that’s all.’
Merrily tried to hold the smile. ‘Big word.’
Brenda said quickly, ‘Alice said you also prayed for Percy Joyce’s arthritis and—’
‘Yes, but that—’
‘And now he’s come off the steroids. You’re healing people, Merrily.’
The words echoed once, clearly in her head as the kettle began to scream and shake, and the kitchen lights seemed too bright.
‘I...’ Merrily ground her cigarette into the ashtray, twisting it from side to side. ‘Sometimes, God heals people.’
Sometimes. It was a crucial word, because most times people were not healed.
Big Jim said gently, ‘We understands that. But He do need asking the right way, don’t He? What I’m saying, Merrily... something happened during that service, to concentrate people’s minds on it. Something a bit powerful, sort of thing. It’s a new kind of service, and you’re a new kind of vicar. Not what we was used to. Alice is telling—’
Everybody, probably.
‘Where’s Ann-Marie now?’
Brenda smiled. ‘In the pub, I expect, with her friends. She’ll be coming to thank you, have no doubts about—’
‘No... look...’ Merrily stood up. ‘I’m really, really happy for her and for you, and it does seem like a miracle. But the body’s a wonderful thing, and sometimes... I’d just be really glad if you didn’t say too much about that aspect of it, for the moment. For the time being. Until—’
Until when, exactly?
‘We’ll go now,’ Jim said.
‘You haven’t had your tea. I’m sorry...’
‘We never wanted to embarrass you, Merrily,’ Brenda said.
Most weeks, Lol would pull the property section out of Prof’s Hereford Times and toss it on the pile of papers they kept for lighting the stoves.
Wood-burners in a recording studio? Prof had been unsure about this, but the punters liked it. When the sound of a log collapsing into ash had filtered like a sigh into the mix of the final acoustic song that the guitar legend Tom Storey had recorded here last week, Tom had refused to lose it. Tom, who’d left yesterday, was superstitious about these things.
Tonight, Prof would be working in here, tinkering with Tom’s music perhaps until dawn. About eight p.m., Lol went out to the wood-shelter and packed a pile of blocks into a big basket, brought the basket into the stable that now housed the studio and bent to build a fire in the second stove.
Sometimes his work here amounted to little more than domestic chores and working on his own material. Prof didn’t seem to mind that, but Lol did.
He was crumpling the property pages to take the kindling when he noticed a small photograph of a tiny, tilting house with a white door. He stood up and carried the paper to the light over the mixing desk.
LEDWARDINE
Church Street – exquisite small, terraced
house, Grade Two listed, close to the centre
of this sought-after village. Beamed
living room, kitchen, two bedrooms and
bathroom. Open green area and orchards
to rear. Must be viewed.
He stood for a while by the mixing desk, then he tore out the page, folded it and pushed it into a back pocket of his jeans. While he was packing the rest of the property section into the stove and adding twigs, he saw himself walking in through that white door. Draped over the post at the foot of the stairs was an old woollen poncho, then you went through into the low-beamed parlour. You sat down at Lucy’s desk in the window overlooking Church Street, with two lamps switched on. You heard a movement, looked over your shoulder and saw Jane Watkins, fifteen, standing in the doorway, and Jane said, desolately, I thought she would be here. I really didn’t think she’d left us for ever.
Lucy Devenish: honorary aunt to Jane, mentor to Lol. Lucy had introduced him to the inspirational seventeenth-century Herefordshire poet, Thomas Traherne, and, indirectly, to Jane’s mother, the Rev. Watkins.
Lucy in her poncho, face like an old Red Indian, voice like a duchess: You have to learn to open up. Let the world flow into you again.
He could still see Jane standing in the doorway that night at Lucy’s – Lucy not yet buried after dying in the road, hit and run. Jane standing in the doorway, confused, and a pink moon hanging outside. Jane talking about her mother: She does like you. I can tell. I think, the way things turned out, you probably did the best thing not actually sleeping with her. It will stand you in good stead.
Getting to sleep with Merrily had taken more than a year. A year in which Lol had turned away from music, taken a course in psychotherapy and then turned away in disgust from psychotherapy and gone back to the music.
But neither he nor Merrily was all that young any more. They lived over half an hour apart and their lives were very different, but every day when he didn’t see her seemed like a wasted day, and there was nothing like the music business for teaching you about passing time.
Lol struck a match and put it to the paper. Ledwardine. He’d been living there when they’d first met, but circumstances had moved him away. Now he wanted to go back. He wanted that house and everything it once had promised.
When the Prossers had gone, Merrily lit a cigarette, feeling leaden and ungracious. She was thinking, miserably, about healing.
Thinking about the corrupted Bible Belt evangelism of the former Radnor Valley minister, Father Nick Ellis. About an event called the Big Bible Fest she’d attended with a crowd of other students at theological college, where there’d been speaking in tongues and calls to the disabled to have faith and rise up out of those wheelchairs. And if they didn’t rise up then their faith wasn’t strong enough. Tough.
She thought about a girl called Heather Redfern – seventeen, Jane’s age – who, despite prayers in at least six churches, had died of leukaemia less than a month after leading a twenty-mile sponsored walk around the black and white villages of North Herefordshire to raise money for Macmillan nurses.
And she thought about Ann-Marie Herdman – dizzy, superficial, often seen swaying across the square at one a.m., towing some bloke up to the flat over the Eight till Late. Some bloke who, in the morning, she probably wouldn’t even recognize. Ann-Marie: a woman for whom the church gate was just a convenient place to wait for your lift into Hereford.
Healing was like the bloody National Lottery; the good guys rarely hit the jackpot.
Merrily stood up and went, without thinking, into the scullery. Because what you did now, you phoned your spiritual director.
Or you would do that, if your spiritual director wasn’t wrestling with his own crisis in a place far away where no mobile phones were permitted – a primitive monastic community, not in the mid-Wales wilderness but on a concrete estate south of Manchester, where the police would raid flats and find guns, a place Huw Owen described as like an open wound turning septic. More suited to his condition, he said, than bare hills safe and sanitized by wind and rain.