27
Epiphany
When Jane got off the bus, the rain was lighter, and she didn’t mess around: throwing her airline bag over her shoulder and hurrying across the square, under the lych-gate and into the churchyard, where she stood for a moment with her hands either side of the curve of Lucy’s gravestone, feeling the energy coursing up both arms.
All things in their proper place, the verse concluded, My soul doth best embrace.
A place of energy, not death. She had a picture of Lucy’s grave up on the Coleman’s Meadow website now, alongside the only picture of Lucy because, whatever was being achieved here, this woman deserved the credit.
‘We’re in this together, right?’
Jane gave the headstone a final squeeze, for luck, and ran off through the churchyard and the wicket gate into the orchard. Leys should be travelled. Every time she came this way, with a purpose, she was reinforcing her links with the ancestors and the life-force of the village. The orchard had been the life-force and the church had been at the centre of the orchard, Lucy telling Jane, Which came first, I wouldn’t like to say, though I suspect the orchard. She’d said that perhaps there’d been a pre-Christian shrine where the church now stood. As if she’d felt it, or perhaps the presence of the buried stones, not so far away in Coleman’s Meadow. The way Jane had surely felt it on a summer night on Cole Hill.
Hurrying now along the slippery path through the ruins of the orchard, the light almost gone, the path obliterated by sodden dead leaves, but her feet knew the way. Her heart, too. When she’d got drunk, one long-ago night, on cider, Lucy had said, The cider’s the blood of the orchard. It’s in your blood now.
And although the orchard was looking derelict and moribund, the blood was pounding by the time Jane reached the edge of Coleman’s Meadow. Well out of breath, but the excitement fizzing up as soon as she saw all the vehicles.
Mainly 4×4s and a van with Capstone on its flank. All parked on the edge of the meadow in an area cordoned off with orange tape. They’d taken away the old stile and ripped down the brutal strands of barbed wire that Pierce had had put up to protect the proposed building site. There was now a less hostile green wire fence with rustic posts and a galvanised farm-gate, and it was open.
Walking through the new entrance, Jane saw that khaki-coloured tents had gone up and two portable lavatories between the two caravans, which had been there for a few days now. About a dozen people were wandering around and looking up at the charcoal sky.
And Jane… standing on the edge of the meadow her gaze inevitably drawn towards Cole Hill’s dark Iron Age ramparts behind naked trees, Jane was bathed in a moment of what James Joyce and those guys had called epiphany.
Like the long, heavy velvet curtains were going back to reveal the next, crucial stage of her life. This sense of pure joy. And she was fully aware of it. How often did that happen?
‘Got a pass, have we, my darling?’
The guy who’d come out of the smaller caravan wasn’t much older than Jane. He was wiry, had gelled hair and wore leather jeans and a security armband. Wandering over, kind of springy and officious, but Jane was too high to be brought down by some jobsworth.
‘Pass? Listen, I live here. What sort of—?’
‘Hey! Whoa! I dunno! They just told me to be sure and keep the riff-raff out.’
‘I look like riff-raff?’
‘I’m not sure. Don’t move.’ He came up close, smelling of something pungent in the way of aftershave. ‘Hmm.’ Putting on a thoughtful look and then breaking out a black-stubbled smile. ‘You could always bribe me. What you got on tonight?’
‘She’s feeding her bloody kids, what do you think?’ a guy in a suit said. ‘Probably doing her homework, Gregory. Back off, you randy oik.’
The security guy stepped back, put on this stiff, solemn face and saluted. ‘Whatever you say, Mr Blore, sir.’
‘Professor Blore, you little fuck!’
The security guy grinned, and Jane jumped back as the man in the suit turned and examined her, and — wow — it was. Hadn’t recognised him, not in the suit and tie, and with his hair brushed. His accent was posher, too, encased in a bigger and deeper voice. Resonant, Jane thought. Out of the earth.
She saw that Coops was with him, looking young, wispy and spare, because Bill Blore really was a big guy. Bigger than on TV. Well, certainly wider, built like Hadrian’s Wall or something. He’d grown his hair — like for the winter? — and it was swept back and tied in a ponytail, and you didn’t see many of those any more.
Coops said, ‘Bill, this is Jane Watkins.’
Maybe she blushed. She certainly felt like blushing. In fact, oh God, she felt like running away.
She didn’t move.
‘Jane.’
His face was just like on the box, good-looking in this kind of swarthy way, his eyes maybe just a bit more bulgy, his smile… fun. She’d seen that smile so many times, usually when he’d proved the geophysics guys wrong, taken a gamble and they’d found some Roman’s thigh bone in Trench One.
‘Hi,’ Jane said.
It came out like the smallest mouse-squeak.
‘Uh, it was Jane who…’ Coops giving Bill Blore an unsure kind of glance ‘… first got the idea there might be something here?’
‘Cooper, I know.’ Bill Blore bent, this big, callused hand coming out. ‘Jane, it’s a privilege to meet you.’ The hand closing around Jane’s like the bucket of a JCB as he turned to Coops. ‘Where’s Declan?’
‘I think he’s putting his gear away.’
‘Why does that bastard always go to earth when it goes dark? I like dark. We do have lights, don’t we?’
‘I think he’s put those away, too.’
‘Arse,’ Bill Blore said. ‘I was rather thinking we might shoot Jane.’
‘I think quite a lot of people would go along with that,’ Coops said.
Jane frowned, but Bill Blore didn’t get it. He looked up at the sky, then back at Jane.
‘All right. Tomorrow, then. What are you doing tomorrow, Jane?’
‘Erm, nothing. That is, like… whatever you want?’
‘What I want is to keep it in sequence.’ Bill Blore turned back to Coops. ‘If it starts with Jane, then that’s where we should start, before the site gets too mucked up.’
‘Right,’ Coops said.
‘How about ten o’clock? Ten a.m., Jane, that OK for you? We’ll shoot you at the top of the hill or something.’
‘You mean…’ The sodden ground below Jane’s muddied school shoes had become suddenly unsteady. ‘For, like… TV? For your programme?’
‘Well, it’s certainly not going to be for young Gregory’s private DVD collection.’
‘Wow,’ Jane said. ‘I mean… sure. I’ll be here. I mean, I didn’t really think you’d want to…’
‘We’ll get you on the hill, and you can take us through the story of how you found the stones, yah?’
‘Well, it wasn’t just me.’
‘Sweetheart…’ Bill Blore put his big hands on her shoulders, looked into her eyes, his own eyes brown as lubricating oil. ‘For the purposes of my film, it was just you.’ He looked up. ‘Look, excuse me, there’s a guy I need to grab…’
Spinning away, raising a hand to somebody, and Jane thought of something important.
‘But I can still help… can’t I?’