‘It is well recorded that those left behind often do experience feelings of closeness to their dead loved ones during the months immediately after their loss.’
1
Into the Loop
‘NO – PLEASE – I want to understand this,’ Siân said. ‘You’re telling us that you yourself have seen one.’
Her pewter hair hung like a warlord’s helmet. She’d found her way to the head of the table, and she was sitting there in judgement. Her expression was like, Say it… say that word again.
The word that Merrily was realizing should be avoided.
‘I once had an experience, that’s the only way I can describe it,’ she said. ‘A series of experiences, if you like, that I couldn’t rationally explain.’
In the vault-like vicarage kitchen, beeswax candles burned low in their saucers, and the empty ashtray mocked her. She’d been trying to tell herself she’d guessed it was likely to turn out this bad, but the truth was, no, not in her worst dreams.
‘And so I went to the Church for advice, and the Church wasn’t exactly helpful. Felt I was being treated like some kind of hysterical loony.’
Siân’s grey eyes blinked once, like the steel shutters on the little windows of a police cell. Merrily stared into them. Sorry – I meant, like some kind of emotionally dysfunctional person with advanced learning difficulties.
‘And where exactly did you have this… series of experiences, Merrily?’
‘Here. At the vicarage. Upstairs. Just after we moved in, a couple of years ago.’
‘This is rather a big house,’ Nigel Saltash said.
‘Huge – certainly compared with anything I’d lived in before.’
‘Just you and your daughter?’
Saltash tilted his head fractionally, as though he needed this slight motion to activate his enormous brain. It also turned his smile on. He had an all-purpose smile: questioning, explaining, sympathizing, patronizing. For many years, he’d been a psychiatrist; some things didn’t change.
‘Just the two of us, yes,’ Merrily said. ‘Me and Jane. Like now.’
‘So, if I were to humbly suggest – and you could say I’m simply playing devil’s advocate, if you like – that you were feeling terribly insecure at the time… a stranger in the village, not yet fully licensed or formally installed as vicar… and you’d been thrown into this enormous, ancient, echoing… rather spooky old house…’
‘Plus, I was not that many years widowed. And we had very little money. Also like now.’
‘And have the experiences stopped now?’
In the candle-glow, Nigel Saltash’s face was taut and tanned from skiing somewhere. His light grey hair was cropped tight and fitted flush into his beard. He was long and lithe and living proof that seventy was the new fifty.
‘Yes, it was all over very quickly,’ Merrily said. ‘Once we’d got certain things sorted out.’
‘You’re playing into my rationalist’s hands, Mrs Watkins. Deliberately, perhaps?’
‘Well, I suppose I’m making the point that someone like you can turn anyone’s circumstances to your professional advantage.’
‘But am I necessarily wrong?’
Merrily shrugged. ‘I’m always going to say “I know what I saw,” and you’re always going to say “But you didn’t really see it at all.” ’
‘And that way, surely, we arrive at something approximating to the truth,’ Siân Callaghan-Clarke said.
‘Do we?’
‘Nine times out of ten, yes.’
‘Anyway,’ Merrily said, ‘that was the main reason why, when I was offered the post of exorcist – Deliverance Consultant – I would have found it hard to say no.’
‘I still cannot believe you’ve been allowed to go on for so long… alone.’ Siân was shaking her head. ‘The danger you’ve been in…’
‘Sorry?’
One of the candles sputtered out, and Merrily ran a forefinger nervously around the rim of her dog collar.
She’d been naive; she’d misread the signs.
Huw Owen had told her at the start what she’d be up against. If women priests were seen as soft plaster patching up the already crumbling walls of the Church, a woman exorcist—
Might as well just paint a great big bull’s-eye between your tits, Huw had said memorably.
A month or two ago, when the Bishop, Bernie Dunmore, had said, I’m afraid that, once again, I’ve been asked what you’re doing about establishing a Deliverance advisory panel, she’d shrugged it off.
Realizing that, OK, sooner or later there was going to have to be a support group within the diocese, but it had to involve the right people, didn’t it? People who were sympathetic, who didn’t have an agenda, political or otherwise.
Only, the ones she’d thought of as the right people hadn’t wanted to know – Simon St John, vicar of Knight’s Frome, backing away in mock terror when she’d asked him, making the sign of the cross with both hands. But the point was, she knew that he would always be there for her, like the wise old owls outside the diocese, Huw Owen and Llewellyn Jeavons. It just wasn’t official; some of these people didn’t do official.
Whereas people like Siân Callaghan-Clarke and Nigel Saltash didn’t do anything else.
Saltash was a good friend of the Dean, and giving his professional services free – no better reason for the Dean to take him to meet the Bishop and the Bishop to introduce him to Merrily. In any modern Deliverance circle, a qualified psychiatrist was now fundamental. A free one was a godsend.
Thank you, God. Thank you so much.
‘You mean I’m in spiritual danger?’ Merrily said. ‘As a woman in a male tradition?’
Now Siân was staring at her, leaning back in her chair like Merrily must be deliberately winding her up. Siân’s mother was a New Labour baroness; she wore her feminist credentials like defiant tattoos. Within five years she’d either be a bishop or out of the Church. Spiritual danger, political danger – all the same to her.
‘I meant, like, the first exorcist having been Jesus himself,’ Merrily said lamely.
She let the silence hang, recalling the reported mutterings of her predecessor, Thomas Dobbs, as he’d prowled the cathedral cloisters trying to engineer her resignation. At the time, she’d been probably the first – certainly the youngest – woman diocesan exorcist in Britain, operating under the customized title Deliverance Consultant. Appointed, it later became evident, largely because the former Bishop of Hereford had wanted to get into her cassock. Siân Callaghan-Clarke, already a well-placed minister in the diocese, would have heard the rumours and stored them away.
Payback time for bimbo priest?
Martin Longbeach carefully relit the candle with a taper. Martin, tubby and camp, wore an alb and an outsize pectoral cross and was known to covet the south Herefordshire parish of Hoarwithy because of its exotic Italianate church. It had been his idea that they should light candles tonight, to ‘aid concentration’.
‘By danger,’ Siân said, ‘I meant the danger of being compromised and exploited… and of having to make instant decisions that you’re perhaps not…’
… qualified to make, experienced enough to handle.
Siân left this unsaid. Merrily sat in the candlelight, images of the past couple of years encircling her like pale smoke – fears, anxieties, faltering hopes, tentative joys. And also the most bewildering and stimulating years of her life.