‘Just came in to say that if there’s nobody I need to see, I think it might be best to go back to Wychehill. Get this over. Is that all right?’
‘Did Mr Bliss clarify things?’
‘Mr Bliss muddled things further, as Mr Bliss so loves to do.’
‘Merrily, three things … I resorted to the telephone, from which I learned that the Royal Oak used to be a favoured meeting place for rambling clubs because of its capacious car park and access to several footpaths. The Ramblers’ Association, needless to say, has lodged a complaint with the tourist authorities.’
‘It’s what they do. I don’t think I’m going to worry too much about the Royal Oak.’
‘I also checked with Worcester Deliverance. It appears that mysterious balls of light are not unknown in the Malverns. Usually connected with UFOs rather than anything psychic. Unexplained cyclists with lamps, however … that’s a new one.’
‘Oh, well. Thanks, Soph—’
‘And, thirdly, the Reverend Spicer rang. The public meeting in Wychehill planned for Wednesday … I’m sorry about this, Merrily.’
‘Called off? No, you wouldn’t be sorry about that, would you?’
‘Brought forward. To tomorrow evening.’
‘What?’
‘For reasons of discretion, according to Mr Spicer. They want to be sure there are no press people there. Or, indeed, employees of the local authorities or the tourist associations, who’ve been known to attend such meetings. He says it’s something that should be settled by local people … and you, of course.’
‘But I’ve got a christening in the afternoon!’
‘The part of the meeting relevant to you won’t start until eight-thirty.’
‘No, I mean, I still have people in Wychehill to see.’
Sophie sighed. ‘Sometimes I think you try too hard.’
‘You either do the job or you don’t. I’ll just have to go back tonight.’
‘Merrily…’ Sophie rocked back. ‘That’s ridiculous. You’ve been there twice already, you’ve been up since dawn … Have you even eaten?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Right,’ Sophie stood up. ‘I’ll take you.’
‘No, it’s—’
‘If you fall asleep at the wheel on the way back…’
‘I’ll ask Lol, OK? Give me a chance to see Jane before we go – I’m starting to feel like a part-time parent.’
Maybe it was what Bliss had suggested, about Jane and drugs. She rang Lol, and there was no answer.
11
Idyll Chipped
When Lol called back, Merrily was already in the car in the Bishop’s Palace courtyard. She switched off the engine. Lol was asking if she knew about Jane’s project.
Merrily sank back in her seat, twisting the rear-view mirror, smoothing out what could be a new line under her left eye.
Jane and project. Curious how sinister those words sounded together.
‘She said she was going to explain it all to you this morning,’ Lol said, ‘if you hadn’t had to dash off so early.’
‘If I hadn’t had to dash off so early, she’d have been at school, and she knows it.’ Merrily closed her eyes. ‘She’s never done that before. I don’t think.’
‘The exams are over…’
‘I don’t care, it’s a school day.’
‘Do you want to call in, if you get home earlyish?’
‘Thing is, I’m only coming home to change. I’ve got a job out near Malvern. For which I think I need to look like a minister of God.’
‘Oh. Well, she knows I’ll tell you. She just uses me as a filter. It’ll wait.’
‘No, it won’t,’ Merrily said. ‘I can tell it won’t.’ Bloody Jane. ‘Lol, I was wondering if you could come with me. Sophie wanted to drive … thinks I might fall asleep at the wheel. Actually, it’s a situation that might benefit from a second opinion, and I’m not sure Sophie’s would be the right one.’
‘I’m just a humble songwriter. Sure. Whatever.’
‘You undersell yourself. A humble songwriter who once did half a psychotherapy course. If you come over to the vicarage in, say, fifty-five minutes, I should be changed and ready to leave.’
Small silence. Through one of the Bishpal windows, she could see Gary, the Bishop’s West Highland terrier, standing on the back of a sofa waiting for the boss to come back from the cricket.
‘If I come round in, say, forty-five minutes,’ Lol said, ‘will you still be undressed?’
No time, of course, for that. Jane was home, anyway – quiet, obliging, and therefore suspicious. Sure, she’d get her own meal. No problem, you two get off to … wherever. Exhibiting no particular curiosity about what might be going down. Which meant that something was printed on her own agenda, in heavy type.
But worrying about Jane could eat up your life. And now, for the first time in many years, she was a problem shared … kind of. At least, Lol … well, at least they were officially an item at last, nothing clandestine any more.
On the road, Merrily driving the Volvo, he told her about Jane and Coleman’s Meadow. The ley line and the luxury executive homes. Something about all this seemed to bother him but, for once, Merrily couldn’t see a major problem.
‘Kid’s been involved in far worse things. I mean, I don’t like the idea of an ancient trackway to the top of Cole Hill being obliterated to accommodate luxury executive homes. We’ve had two new estates in eighteen months.’
‘Small starter homes would be OK?’ Lol said.
‘We need a few starter homes. I’m just not sure we need any more…’
‘Sedate, comfortable middle-class people?’
‘Let’s back away from that one for the moment. Whatever we need, there have to be better places to put them. OK, so Jane gets up a petition to the council. Fair enough. She’s seventeen. Next year she gets the vote.’
Lol polished the lenses of his brass-rimmed glasses on the bottom of his T-shirt.
‘Far be it from me, as a failed psychotherapist, to try to tell you about your daughter, but, like … do you think maybe it goes deeper? Bored with A levels, not lit-up by the idea of university, because everybody does that.’
‘You think she doesn’t want to leave home?’
‘Maybe she’s afraid to. Afraid that she’ll come back to find everything destroyed. Lost a lot, over the years. Her dad. Lucy…’
‘Mmm.’
Jane’s dad, her mother’s unfaithful husband. Dead in a car crash, but Jane had still been little then. When the formidable Lucy Devenish, the kid’s first real friend in Ledwardine, had been knocked off her moped and killed on the outskirts of the village, that was worse, an idyll badly chipped. Jane, town-raised, had bonded with the countryside very quickly, thanks to Lucy and her rural folklore and her – OK – possible paganism.
And it was in Lucy’s old shop, Ledwardine Lore, that Jane had been the first of them to encounter a damaged musician, trying to reassemble his life after a criminally unjust court conviction, a family breakdown, a bad time in a psychiatric hospital. So many daughters could barely tolerate their mothers’ boyfriends, but Jane had virtually engineered this relationship. Lol putting down a deposit on Lucy’s cottage in Church Street, just across from the vicarage … that was the final piece in Jane’s mosaic.
And Lucy Devenish was still a presence for all three of them.
Lucy’s primary raison d’être had been the defence of old Ledwardine against misguided incomers and the slashing scythe of crass development.