‘I’m thirty-nine.’
The guy laughing and slapping him on the shoulder, telling him that America didn’t have an ageism problem on anywhere near the scale of Britain’s and, anyway, Lol looked younger, and the Sin guys loved his music. Adding, with unmoving eyes, ‘You may never get a time like this again. You know what I mean by a time? When the right people know your songs?
Lol hadn’t told Merrily. Whatever she really felt, she’d be twisting his arm to go for it. Fifteen years ago, if he hadn’t, at the time, been a guest of the psychiatric health system, he’d have signed the contract before he left the capital.
Now he thought only about the wearying cycle of soundchecks and encores curtailed because the audience had paid to see the act that came next. Bars and towns, towns and bars that all looked the same, clapboard motels with sunken beds and rusty showers.
Plus, there was a message on his answering machine from Barry at the Black Swan. Need an answer today, Lol. Before lunchtime, preferably. I can get posters done in a couple of hours, but I need to know.
Unnerved, Lol rolled out of bed, went to the window.
He was panting.
He looked across the narrowing street to the matching black and white timber-framed 17th-century terrace with its winter-empty window boxes and the holly wreaths on its front doors and a few lights still on, more than usual because half of the houses were holiday homes now, coming alive for Christmas.
Lol turned, his face against the wet glass, to see the front garden of the vicarage and…
… Merrily, in jeans and a big sweater, looking up and down the dripping street in the half-light, as if she’d lost something. Her face soft and pale, hair over her eyes.
Lol just wanted to run down and hold her.
The condensation was cold on his cheek.
Merrily. Merrily and the songs. Nothing else. OK, maybe occasional gigs to keep your hand in and your mortgage payments met, your professional confidence afloat.
You only had one life and his was half gone and if he couldn’t spend all of the rest of it with the woman who’d really turned him around, what was the point?
You know what I mean by a time? When the right people know your songs?
Lol looked up at the oak beam. How old? Four hundred years? Longer, maybe twice as long, because it had been a tree, born into red Welsh Border soil.
The guy had been wrong.
The right people didn’t know his songs.
He’d toured a wide area of western Britain, but not within ten miles of this village. All the times Barry at the Black Swan had invited him to do a gig, and Lol had backed off.
Because, apart from Barry, nobody who lived here had ever acknowledged what he did. None of the locals, none of the incomers. He doubted anyone in Ledwardine had ever bought his solo album and certainly not anything he’d done years ago with Hazey Jane.
A cold audience. He’d played twice, in the past year, to cold audiences. He’d played in bars where they carried on drinking and chatting amongst themselves. He’d played one pub where a dozen people had carried their drinks outside because they couldn’t hear themselves laugh. It hadn’t mattered that much; he just wouldn’t go back there again.
But this… was where he lived. In Lucy’s old house — there should be a blue plaque outside. This was where he wrote the songs that were so much a part of who he was. That, in some ways, were all that he was. If he said no to Barry, it was cowardice. Ledwardine would have good reason to despise him.
But if he said yes, and Ledwardine despised him…
Lol saw Merrily looking down the street directly towards this window, and pulled his face away, stood clutching the wooden sill with both hands while the west wind rattled the panes as if it was trying to shake some sense into him.
The whining of the wind seeming to echo Councillor Pierce.
Grow or die.
9
Where the Dead Walk
Two women in a graveyard before dawn… this was not the kind of encounter you could easily walk away from. A sense of déjà vu had thrown Jane off balance, but she kept on walking along the side of the church, the woman and the wind keeping pace with her.
‘Been out every morning for about a week or something,’ the woman said, ‘and there hasn’t been anything much in the way of decent light at all. Rather hoping today was going to be the breakthrough. No chance.’
Jane’s lamplight had found the costly lustre of a big camera with a fat lens, the kind of kit that made Eirion’s prized SLR look like a budget disposable from Tesco.
‘Yeah.’ She looked up; the sky was paler, but there were none of the pastel streaks that preceded an actual sunrise. ‘We get a clear night, and then it all closes in again.’
‘What are you, a poacher?’
‘Do I look like a poacher?’
‘Dunno. Too dark to see. I was thinking, the lamp? Don’t poachers lamp things?’
‘So I believe,’ Jane said. ‘But, like, not often at a quarter to seven in the morning.’
Incomers: what could you say?
Be a bit rude to lamp her directly, but the haze on the edge of the beam had revealed bushy red-gold hair, and the posh, musky voice suggested fairly young — probably a bit younger than Mum, maybe early thirties? Still sexy, anyway, and aware of it.
The déjà vu had explained itself — Jane recalling meeting another photographer, from the Guardian, one afternoon last summer when they’d been trying to get publicity for the campaign. This had also followed a visit to Lucy’s grave. It was like Lucy was the catalyst, her grave a live place. The idea made Jane feel happier. She asked the woman where she was from and got a vague arm-wave towards the orchard.
‘Oh… down there.’
‘No, I mean who are you with? Which paper?’
‘Oh, I see. Freelance. Observer, Independent on Sunday… magazines. I write the words, too, sometimes.’
Jane nodded. Wasn’t as if hacks and snappers were scarce in Ledwardine, not since the village had been identified as the principal centre of the — retch — New Cotswolds.
‘Lensi.’
‘Sorry?’
‘People call me Lensi. Used to be Lenni, but now it’s Lensi — L-EN-S-I. For obvious reasons.’
She had what Jane was starting to think of as a New Cotswold accent. Posh, but a trace of London. And… jolly. The only word for it. Super-confident, no sense of intruding.
‘Right,’ Jane said. ‘Cool.’
‘And you are?’
‘Jane.’
They’d come through the small gate at the top of the churchyard and out onto the still-deserted square, where the fake gaslamps exposed a biggish woman in light-blue Gore-Tex, gleamingly new. Wide face, wide mouth, lovely even, white teeth. Also sapphire earrings and Ugg boots — Chelsea wellies.
‘Well,’ Jane said. ‘I’d better be—’
‘So who is Lucy? I mean, you haven’t got a dog or anything with you?’
God.
‘She was a friend.’
‘Was?’
‘The graveyard? Flat stones with, like, names carved into them?’
Jane stopped by the unlit Christmas tree, over twice her height and swaying in the wind. She could see lights in the vicarage. Should be getting back. Mum had a funeral; she wouldn’t be in the best of moods by now.
‘Her name was Lucy Devenish. Used to have a shop just over there, called Ledwardine Lore. Got knocked off her moped. Killed. On the bypass.’