‘Thank you, Merrily.’
Brian nodding as she left him with the chocolates. Not displaying much conviction, though, that virulent hospital infections could be neutralised by prayer.
The word ‘prayer’ will, in turn, reflect memories of something quaint and rather childish. The nightlight on the bedside table. Something grown out of.
‘Sod off, Stooke!’
Merrily stopped in the lane. Had she actually said that out loud? She was furious at herself for letting this get to her. There was no earthly reason…
And yet there was. She kept forgetting this — Stooke’s wife coming on to Jane like that, asking too many questions. That was a reason. She’d even Googled Leonora Winterson, finding next to nothing. No picture, anyway; Lensi took pictures rather than appeared in them — and certainly not with her husband. In fact, Google Images had only one shot of him — the ubiquitous Charles Manson pose. His website said he didn’t do TV, and cameras were banned from his bookshop signings.
I’m not a personality, just an investigative journalist who investigated a god and found two thousand years of lies, fabrication, abuse, corruption, hypocrisy…
Couldn’t get rid of him. Like he was her nemesis or something. Merrily splashed angrily through a chain of puddles into the churchyard, arriving at the modest grave of Lucy Devenish.
It had come to this.
‘I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here, Lucy. I’m supposed to minister to the living.’
Standing in the grey-brown rain with her bare hands on the rounded stone, remembering the first time she’d encountered the indomitable Miss Devenish, on an ill-fated night of wassailing in the orchard. Lucy with her hooked Red Indian’s nose, wearing her trademark poncho and a sense of unease.
Amply justified that night. During the traditional loosing of shotguns through the branches, to promote a good year of apples, old Edgar Powell had blown his own head off. They used to say — kids, mainly — that Edgar haunted the orchard, and if you looked up into the branches of the Apple Tree Man, the oldest tree, you might see him. The tree had been chopped down. A mistake, Jane had said; old Edgar could appear anywhere in the orchard now, smiling through the branches and the blood. It didn’t scare pagan Jane.
You know what, Lucy? Merrily’s grip tightening on the head-stone. I think I’m losing it. Thought it was going all right. The regular congregations weren’t exactly huge, but the Sunday-evening meditation… word was spreading and we were getting people actually interested in searching for something inside themselves. I was finally beginning to see what you meant by the orb.
Orb was a word Lucy had borrowed from Traherne, the 17th-century poet, drunk on Herefordshire. Lucy using it to describe the ambience of Ledwardine, the confluence of tradition, custom, history and spirit. The orb was an apple, shiny and wholesome.
Who’s poisoning the apple, Lucy?
Blinking back tears, she turned away. This was Jane’s place. Jane did the dead. Jane, who felt herself so far from death as to be able to deal with it almost lovingly. Merrily walked away, following the route Jane had identified as a coffin path, a spirit road, into the lower orchard where Edgar Powell had died.
Haunted or not, the orchard in winter was a reminder of loss. The village had once been encircled by a density of cider-apple trees, nurtured, it was said, by the fairies whose lights could be seen glimmering at twilight among the branches.
If there were lights now, they were corpse candles. The trees were slowly dying off, gradually getting cremated on cosmetic open fires in the Black Swan.
A village of smoke and ghosts. The recently dead and the long, long dead.
Curiously, she was feeling calmer now. Standing on the path inside a rough circle of spidery, winter-bare apple trees, thinking about Lol who would sometimes play Nick Drake’s tragically prescient song ‘Fruit Tree’ which suggested that, for some people — for Nick, certainly — nothing would flourish before death.
Merrily looked up. With the trees gradually getting turned into scented ashes, the only active life forms here were the unearthly balls of mistletoe, suspended like alien craft high among the scabbed and blackened branches, always just out of reach.
Kisses for Christmas, out of reach. She walked on, knowing exactly what she was doing now, where she was going.
When you left behind what remained of the orchard, the fields opened up below you. One was Coleman’s Meadow with a temporary barbed-wire fence around it, a parking area marked out with orange tape, and something like a fairground on it now: a dark green tent, like an army canteen, two caravans, two Land Rovers and one of those cranes that they used for a cherry-picker TV camera. About a dozen people in waterproofs around a mini-JCB, laughter rising frailly through the rain. Cole Farm itself, served by a narrow lane, was wedged into a clearing in the trees ascending Cole Hill. But Cole Barn was exposed on the edge of a small field adjoining the meadow, with a pool of flood water in front, beginning to encroach on a tarmac parking area.
Well, it was called Cole Barn, but it had never been an actual barn, according to Gomer Parry, just an old tractor shed. So there was no glazed-over bay, like you usually found with barn conversions, just an ordinary front door, probably not very old.
From which a woman emerged. Turquoise waterproof, coppery hair. She came out quickly and ran through the squally rain to a new-looking black Mercedes 4×4 parked in a turning circle. Merrily stood on the edge of the dripping orchard, as the engine growled and the 4×4 spun, skidding and squirting gravel, into a dirt track full of puddles that led into the lane.
It was, she guessed, quite an angry exit. She herself could now make a discreet one, turning away and melting back among the geriatric apple trees.
Or she could go down, knock on the door and, if anyone was in, do the bumbling-vicar bit. Welcome to the parish, Mr Winterson.
You just wanner…
Before she could reconsider, she’d scrambled down to open up the field gate, and then she was crossing the strip of rough grass spiked with the skeletons of last year’s docks, to the front door of Cole Barn.
… See if he’s got little horns.
25
Outside the Box
‘Basically,’ Steve Furneaux said, ‘I liked Clem. He was like an old bulldog. Barked at you from a distance and then he’d gradually come sniffing around, always suspicious, until you threw him a biscuit or two.’
Gilbies was in an alley behind High Town, the tower and spire of St Peter’s church pushing up suddenly behind it like a rocket on a pad. A bar, for the upwardly mobile. By the time Bliss had got there Steve had eaten; Bliss had bought coffees.
‘We coped with him,’ Steve said. ‘You couldn’t actually heave him out of the way, but, like I say, you found ways of getting round him.’
Bliss figured Steve Furneaux was about his own age, but with better hair. A middle-ranking official in the planning department at Herefordshire Council. Londoner. Crisp, dapper, sandy-looking feller. No shit on his shoes.
‘Because we’re all quite excited about Hereforward, Francis. It’s a new concept, experimental, and we don’t want it to crash.’
‘Well, I’m just a thick copper. Perhaps you could you explain it to me very simply. As to a child with learning difficulties?’
‘I’ll explain it as I would to a new councillor,’ Steve said. ‘Which is pretty much the same thing.’