A Crown of Lights (30 page)

Eirion said calmly, ‘So how are you now, Eirion? How’s the whiplash? Is there any chance your car isn’t a complete write-off?’

‘Ah.’ Jane sat down at the desk. ‘Right. Sorry, Irene. You have to understand that self-pity is, like, my most instinctive and dominant emotion.’

‘You OK?’

‘Yeah, slept a lot. Still feel a bit heavy when I first get up, but no headaches or anything. No scars at all. Like I said, some things I can’t remember too clearly. About that programme and stuff. But... yeah. Yeah, I’m OK.’

‘My stepmother spoke to your mother. I’ve been feeling I ought to ring her, too. Do you think she’d be OK about that?’

‘With you she’d be fatally charming. So
is
it a write-off?’

‘Interesting you should ask about the car before asking about me.’

‘I know
you’re
OK. Your stepmother told Mum you were OK.’

‘I might have subsequently suffered a brain haemorrhage in the night.’

‘Did you?’

Eirion paused. ‘Yes, it
is
a write-off. A car that old, if you break a headlamp, it’s a write-off.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I loved that car. I worked all summer at a lousy supermarket for that little Nova. I should get just about enough on the insurance to replace it with a mountain bike.’

‘Irene, I’m really, really sorry.’ Jane felt tears coming. ‘It’s all my fault. Everything I touch these days I screw up. I don’t
suppose you want to see me ever again, but one day – I swear this on my mother’s... altar – I’ll get you another car.’

‘What, you mean in fifteen years’ time I’ll come home one day in my Porsche and find a thirty-year-old Vauxhall Nova outside my penthouse?’

‘In my scenario,’ Jane said, ‘you’re actually trudging home to your squat.’

‘Let’s forget the car,’ Eirion said. ‘You can sleep with me or something instead.’

‘OK.’

Silence.

Eirion said, ‘Listen, I’m sorry. That just came out. That was a joke.’

‘I said it was OK.’

‘You don’t understand,’ Eirion said. ‘I don’t want it to be like that.’

‘You don’t want to sleep with me?’

‘I mean, I don’t want it to be like... like you shag first and then you decide if you want to know the person better. I don’t want it to be like that. It never lasts. Most of the time that’s where it all ends.’

‘You’ve done a lot of this?’

‘Well... erm, I was in a band. You get around, meet lots of people, hear lots of stories. It’s just not how I want it to be with us, OK?’

‘Wow. You don’t mess around on the phone, do you?’

‘Yeah, I’m good on the phone,’ Eirion said. ‘Listen... It’s been weird. I can’t stop thinking about that stuff. I’ve just been walking round the grounds and turning it all over and over—’

‘Oh, the
grounds
...’

‘I can’t help my deprived upbringing. No, I was thinking how close we came to being like—’

‘Dead?’

‘Well... yeah, it really bloody shakes you up when you start thinking about it.’

‘Brings your life into hard focus. Unless you’ve had concussion, when it seems to do the opposite most of the time.’

‘I started thinking about your mum, what that would’ve done to her, with both her husband and her daughter – and it doesn’t matter what kind of shit he was, he was still her husband and your dad – like, both her husband and her daughter wiped out on the same bit of road. And maybe her, too, if she hadn’t stopped in time – these pile-ups can just go on and on in a fog. And... I don’t know what I’m trying to say, Jane...’

‘I do. It was like when I said to you in the car – I remember this because it was just before it happened. I said, do you never lie in bed and think about where we are and how we relate to the big picture?’

‘I just don’t lie in bed and think about it, I tramp around the grounds and the hills and think about it.’

‘That’s cool,’ Jane said.

‘And I was thinking how, when we were talking to Gerry earlier... you remember Gerry, the researcher?’

‘Gerry and... Maurice?’

‘That’s right. You remember Gerry saying, before the show started, that he wouldn’t be surprised if one of them – one of the pagans in the studio – tried some spooky stuff, just to show they could make things happen?’

‘He said that?’

‘He said
spooky
stuff. And I said, “What? What would they do?” And Gerry said a spell or something, just to prove they could make things happen. It was just after he was going on about your mum, and how your dad was killed and maybe she felt guilty—’

‘Oh
yeah
– the bastard.’

‘And you jumped down his—’

‘Sure. I mean, where
did
he get that stuff?’

‘He got it from that guy Ned Bain.’

‘Ned...? Oh, the really cool—’

‘The smooth-talking git,’ Eirion said. ‘But that whole thing was getting to me. Because they
didn’t
do anything, did they? There was no spell, no mumbo-jumbo, no pyrotechnics; they were all actually quite well behaved. But somehow Gerry had got it into
his head that they were going to pull some stunt. So, anyway, I rang him this morning. You know... how I’m that bloke who wants to be a TV journalist? So I’m writing a piece on my adventures in the
Livenight
gallery for the school magazine...’

‘You’re not!’

‘Of course I’m not. It’s just what I told Gerry to get him talking. I told him I was explaining in my piece how the programme researchers get their information, and there were things I didn’t have a chance to ask him there on the night.’

‘And where
do
they get it?’

‘Cuttings files, obviously. But they also talk to the guests beforehand. Like this Tania talked to your mum... and Gerry talked to Ned Bain and a few others. But Gerry reckoned it was Bain had provided all this detailed background on the Church of England’s first woman diocesan exorcist.’

‘Gerry just told you that?’

‘It took a bit of digging, actually, Jane. After which Gerry said how he thought I had a future in his profession; said to give him a call when I get through college.’

‘Wow, big time.’

‘Sod off.’

‘So he was genned up on Mum? Like
know thine enemy
?’

‘But is that sort of stuff about your dad going to be readily available from the
Hereford Times
or something?’

‘She won’t do interviews about herself.’

‘So where did he get it?’

‘It’s no big secret, Irene. Maybe it’s all floating around on the Internet.’

‘Exactly. I’m going to check it out, I think.’

‘Who told Gerry they were going to pull a stunt? That from Ned Bain too?’

‘Gerry claimed he’d never said that. He said I must’ve misunderstood. But he bloody
did
say it, Jane. He just didn’t want it going in a school magazine that they were happy for stuff like that to happen on a live programme.’

‘Stuff like what?’

‘I don’t know, it just—’

‘I mean, OK, let’s spell it out, bottom line. Are you suggesting the evil Ned Bain and his satanic cronies did some kind of black magic resulting in a fog pile-up which caused the deaths of several people? Is that what you’re saying?’

‘Not exactly that...’

‘What are you, some kind of fundamentalist Welsh Chapel bigot?’

‘Unfair, Jane.’

‘So what
are
you suggesting?’

‘I don’t know, I just... I mean no, it would be ridiculous to suggest that those tossers in fancy dress could do anything like that, even if they
were
evil, and I don’t think they are. Not evil, just totally irresponsible. They’re like, “Oh, can we work hand in hand with nature to make
good
things happen and save the Earth?” How the fuck can
they
know that what they’re going to make happen is going to be
good
necessarily?’

‘You sound like Mum.’

‘Well, maybe she’s right.’

‘Don’t meddle with anything metaphysical? Throw yourself on God’s mercy?’

‘Unless you know what you’re doing, maybe yes. And they don’t, they
can’t
know what they’re doing. How can they, Jane?’

‘It never occurred to you that by working on yourself for, like, years and years and studying and meditating, you can achieve wisdom and enlightenment?’

‘But most of those people haven’t, have they? It’s just, “Oh, let’s light a fire and take all our clothes off...” ’

‘That is a totally simplistic
News of the World
viewpoint.’ Jane’s head was suddenly full of a dark and fuzzy resentment. ‘You haven’t the faintest idea...’

‘At least I’m not naive about it.’

‘So I’m
naive
?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

There was a moment of true, sickening enlightenment. ‘You’ve been talking to her, haven’t you?’

‘Who?’

‘My esteemed parent, the Reverend Watkins. She didn’t just speak to your stepmother on the phone, she spoke to you as well, didn’t she?’

‘No. Well only at the hospital. I mean you were
there
some of the time.’

‘
That’s
why there’s been no big row. Why she hasn’t asked me what the hell I was doing on the M5 at midnight. Why she’s so laid-back about it.’

‘Look, Jane, I’m not saying Gwennan didn’t also fill her in on some of the details, but I’ve never even—’

‘I’ve been really, really stupid, haven’t I? It really
must
have destroyed some of my brain cells. While I’m sleeping it off, you’re all having a good chat.
You
told her how I’d rigged the whole trip, making you think she knew all about us going. Then she’s like, “Oh, you have to understand Jane found it hard coming to terms with me being a priest, has to go her own way.” This cosy vicar-to-cathedral-school-choirboy tête-à-tête. Gosh, what are we going to
do
about that girl?’

‘Jane, that is totally—’

‘And you’re like, “Oh, I’m trying to understand her too, Mrs Watkins. If you think I’m just one of those reprehensible youths who only want to get inside her pants, let me assure you—” ’

‘For Christ’s sake, Jane—’

‘That is just
so
demeaning.’

‘It would be if it—’

‘You are fucking well dead in the water, Irene.’

‘J—’

M
ERRILY PULLED THE
old Volvo up against the hedge.

‘I’m sure
that
wasn’t there on Saturday.’

A cross standing in a garden.

‘Mabbe not,’ Gomer said.

It wasn’t any big deal, no more than the kind of rustic pole available from garden centres everywhere, with a section of another pole nailed on as a horizontal. It had been sunk into a flowerbed behind a picket fence in the garden of a neat, roadside bungalow about half a mile out of Walton, on the road leading to Old Hindwell. There were three other bungalows but this was the only one with a cross. Although it was no more than five feet high, there was a white light behind it, leaking through a rip in the clouds, and the fact that it was out of context made you suddenly and breathlessly aware of what a powerful symbol this was.

The bungalow looked empty, no smoke from the chimney. Merrily drove on. ‘You know who lives there?’

‘Retired folk from Off, I reckon.’

‘Mmm.’ Retired incomers were always useful for topping up your congregation. If the affable local minister turned up to welcome them, just when they were wondering if they were going to be happy here among strangers, they would feel obliged to return the favour, even if it was only for the next few Sundays. But if the friendly minister was the Reverend Nicholas Ellis,
drifting away after a month or so could be more complicated.

This was what Bernie Dunmore had been afraid of. She’d received a briefing on the phone from Sophie before they left.

Apparently there was something of a record turn-out at the village hall yesterday. The bishop understands that a number of people were out delivering printed circulars last night, and bulletins were posted on Christian websites, warning of pagan infestation. Today there’s to be what’s been described as ‘a Demonstration of Faith’, which the bishop finds more than a little ominous.

‘I wonder what he said to them in his sermon. You know any regular churchgoers in the village, Gomer?’

‘We’ll find somebody for you, vicar, no problem.’

The bishop’s in conference all day...

Unsurprisingly.

... but what he wants you to do initially, Merrily, is to offer advice and support to the Reverend Mr Ellis. By which I understand him to mean restraint.

What was she supposed to do exactly? Put him under clerical arrest?

But if Merrily felt a seeping trepidation about this exercise, it clearly wasn’t shared by Gomer, who was hunched eagerly forward in the passenger seat, chewing on an unlit ciggy, his white hair on end like a mat of antennae. Describing him to someone once, Jane had said: ‘You need to start by imagining Bart Simpson as an old man.’

The lane dipped, darkening, into a channel between lines of forestry. The old rectory appeared on the left, in its clearing. Merrily kept her eyes on the narrowing road. How would she have reacted if she’d turned then and seen a pale movement in a window? She gripped the wheel, forestalling a shudder.

‘Not a soul, vicar,’ Gomer observed ambivalently.

‘Right.’ Her voice was huskier than she would have liked. The towering conifers were oppressive. ‘This must be the only part of Britain where you plunge into the trees when you
leave
the Forest.’

‘Ar, we all growed up never thinkin’ a forest had much to do with trees.’

Merrily slowed at the mud-flecked Old Hindwell sign. A grey poster with white lettering had been attached to its stem.

‘Christ is the Light!’

That hadn’t been there on Saturday either. She accelerated for the hill up to the village. Halfway up, to the right, the tower of the old church suddenly filled a gap in the horizon of pines. It was like a grey figure standing there.

The manifestation of a truly insidious evil in our midst
.

A seriously inflammatory thing to say – Ellis playing it for all it was worth.