She didn’t want to go into the burning of garments, and no way was she going to tell them about the essential advice which had come not from Huw but from an old woman who’d lived in a care home and who’d been surrounded by some very dubious books. Wouldn’t help anybody. Although it had helped her.
Maybe seeing she was floundering, Huw stood up.
‘The point being,’ he said, ‘that it might’ve been years before Merrily encountered owt as extreme as that – if ever. Make or break, and Dobbs is expecting break. I’d still say that were irresponsible of him.’
Heads turned at a slow creaking sound from outside, some distance away but ominous.
‘Another tree coming down,’ Huw said. ‘Nowt we can do.’
‘It’s like a series of doors,’ Merrily said. ‘You start off opening the psychological door, and sometimes that’s as far as you need to go, and it ends with prayers and a blessing. But quite often, several doors down the line, you’ll come to one that a psychologist wouldn’t go through.’
She drank some water.
‘I don’t know, to this day, whether Mr Joy was afflicted with some violent sexual anomaly which had more or less eaten away his humanity. Or whether that had opened him up to something else. But you don’t have to. That’s why we have the rituals and the liturgy. To an extent… just do it. Without it, you’d be off the rails.’
The posh girl – did the card say Bethany? – had her hand up.
‘What happened finally? Were you there when he-?’
The wind had started up again but now it was less ferocious, as if slightly dismayed at what it had done. The big gust which had brought down the tree had also driven clouds away from the moon. It flared suddenly in the lowest window and lit the face of the man at the back. Briefly, before he slid into the adjacent chair.
The man at the back of the chapel had flat, grey hair and his eyes still looked like they’d been sewn on. No bags, no wrinkles. A soft-toy’s eyes.
Bloody hell.
‘He died that night,’ Merrily said. ‘I was there, yes. Nurses will often tell you stories about the dying being… helped over. Claiming they can see the faces of people they’ve known. Parents, old friends, grannies. Brain chemicals, if you like, comfort visions. Lots of rational explanations, but it keeps happening. Someone to beckon you over.’
‘And was there someone waiting for Mr Joy?’
‘At the end, he was conspicuously disturbed. As if he could see something which… didn’t seem like his granny.’
‘Did you see anything?’
‘No. And I came away, as I’ve implied, with a quite acute sense of failure. Sat and smoked a cigarette with the ward sister. Both of us fairly shattered after watching an old man who’d scared us all… go out in a state of abject terror.’
Shona said, ‘And when, subsequently, you felt that something of this man hadnae gone away… do you think this sense of failure might’ve been a contributory factor?’
‘Haunted by my own inadequacy?’
Nobody followed up on this. Merrily glanced at Huw, sitting with his eyes half-closed. She had that sense of being set up, manoeuvred into place, as surely as she had with the late Canon Dobbs.
‘Were you afraid,’ the girl, Bethany, said, ‘when you thought something was coming for him?’
‘Hard not to be. He was.’
‘Afraid for your immortal soul? Or afraid that you weren’t going to be able to handle the job?’
‘Mmm.’
‘And what did you do about that?’
‘I don’t know,’ Merrily said. ‘It’s never gone away.’
Huw was nodding.
‘You’re always afraid?’ Bethany said. ‘Whenever you’re asked to deal with…’ Her face, at last, showing dismay.
‘Pretty much,’ Merrily said.
Glancing towards the guy at the back, half expecting to see a spiral of smoke. Remembering a summer afternoon in a big church in the Malvern Hills, the vicar there finishing off his cigarette, leaving little cylinders of ash at the foot of the lectern. Remembering what he’d said that day.
Not a lot frightens me. I can deal with most physical pain, emotional pain, stress.
He’d probably done his training up here in the Beacons, and the exercises prior to selection. It was said they had to run up to fifty miles with an eighty-pound pack and when they took their boots off their socks were thick with blood. I can achieve separation from the weakness of the body, he’d said that day in his church.
It was fairly clear now that he hadn’t been expecting to see her here. Maybe hoping to slide away quietly when the session had ended, so they wouldn’t have to meet? The moon had screwed that.
He looked up at last, and their eyes met, and his were small and almost flat to his head like a teddy bear’s, and his smile was tentative, wary.
7
Fallen trees had restructured the landscape. Two of them were down on the hillside below the chapel, the biggest near the bottom of the track, just before it joined the main road. A crackling, skeletal mesh in the blurred moonlight.
Huw Owen was standing on a crag with a lambing lamp. Like one of Holman Hunt’s rejected sketches for The Light of the World, Merrily thought. Below him, a bunch of the deliverance students stood staring dumbly at the tangle of branches, like this was an act of God. Huw smiling thinly, as if he knew that it was.
Not that it would affect the students. They’d all walked up from the pub and the guest houses and B amp; Bs in the village, Huw from his rectory. Only someone who’d arrived late enough to have to park her old Volvo right outside the sodding chapel…
Bugger.
‘What this probably means,’ Merrily said, ‘is that I won’t get home tonight.’
The wind had died back to a murmur, like distant traffic. Huw came down from his crag.
‘Couple of lads’ll be up wi’ chainsaws, I expect.’
‘When?’
‘Soon as it’s light. I’ll make you a bed up. Won’t be silk sheets or owt, mind.’
She followed him across the rough and sodden grass, popping the studs on her waxed coat, not liking to think what kind of damage there might be back home in Ledwardine. Huw stopped and looked back at her.
‘Country life. Like town life, wi’ extra shite.’
‘Don’t like Jane being on her own in the vicarage. I know she’s eighteen, but in my mind she’s ten.’
‘She’s got Robinson just across the street.’ Huw came to a wooden stile, waited, patting Merrily on the shoulder as she drew level. ‘You did bloody well tonight. Wouldn’t’ve worked the same coming from me.’
He balanced his lambing light on one of the stile’s posts and climbed over. She called after him.
‘You’re a bastard, Huw.’
Huw picked up the lamp, and the lamp picked up a razored track leading down towards the stone rectory, a grey boulder with a scree of crumbling outbuildings. Merrily scrambled up on the stile, the wind whipping at her hair. This was nothing – an hour ago she’d’ve been on hands and knees.
‘You didn’t tell me Syd Spicer was on the course.’
After the session was over, she hadn’t gone looking for the man with teddy-bear eyes, she’d waited for him to approach her. But he never had. She hadn’t seen him leave. Old skills.
‘He rang me up. Asking if he could sit in for one day.’
Merrily looked down at him from the top of the stile.
‘When was this?’
‘At the weekend.’
‘He say why?’
‘Not in any detail.’
‘Would I be right in thinking…’ Merrily climbed over and sat down on the step of the stile ‘… that Syd no more expected to see me here than I expected to see him?’
Huw stood gazing out, beyond the rectory, to where the moon had pewtered the hills.
‘I didn’t tell him I’d asked you to come, no. I figured… since you worked with him last year, I figured he’d trust what you had to say.’