December (80 page)

      
'A tenacious girl, you are,' Eddie said admiringly.
      
'Anyway, at just about ten o'clock,
I was asked to
leave
, could you
believe? The first cripple in history to be ejected from the W.I... . and for gossiping!
What's the W.I.
for,
except to
manufacture gossip?'

      
Meryl laughed, feeling really comfortable with other people
for the first time since she and the Lady Bluefoot had last prepared Martin's
dinner at Hall Farm.

      
'What it is, see,' Isabel said, 'the older ones, who've seen
it happen a few times, they know about the Abbey in their hearts of hearts. But
will they talk about it? No way. Not lucky. Tempting fate. Fate, see. It has to
be fate. Anything people can't explain, it's fate. This seven-year business ...
I doubt if anybody's really worked that out before.'
      
'Hard to believe,' Eddie said.

      
'No. It's not. Very stoical, country people, very
unquestioning. I tell you what I've noticed, though - and I never questioned it
either until I started talking to Simon and you. But when it's happened and
it's
not
a local person who's dead,
there's an enormous feeling of relief, a lightening of the atmosphere in Ystrad
Ddu.'

      
Vanessa was looking up at her from her fluffy pouffe. Isabel put
a hand on the girl's head.

      
'When Vanessa's mother died in that crash, I won't say there was
rejoicing. But a sense of relief you could feel.'

      
Vanessa smiled.

      
'She knows me,' Isabel said. 'We've never met before, but we
both nearly died at the Abbey, see. And we both came out ... damaged.'

      
Meryl was stunned. She stumbled to her feet. She had to get
out of the room to absorb this. 'More tea. I'll make more tea.'

      
She stood filling the kettle at the sink, watching the water tumble
from the tap until the kettle overflowed and the water ran over her wrists. After
a period of bewilderment, anger and incomprehension, a feeling of being
left out,
she seemed suddenly to be at
the centre of everything that was blessed and magical.

      
She turned off the tap, emptied some water from the kettle, put
it on to boil and drifted numbly back into the living-room to hear Isabel
saying,

      
'... one more, though, I got, before I was kicked out.'

      
'Good girl.' Eddie leaned forward eagerly in his chair.

      
'Nineteen forty-five, this is. Just after the war. Two cousins,
from ... Leeds, I think it was, or Sheffield ... had been evacuated to the
Grange Farm to stay with a Mrs Price, whose husband had died leaving her with
the farm to manage and no sons - this is when it
was
a farm, with stock, not like now. The boys would be in their
teens and most of their family were killed in the bombing. Sheffield, it must
have been. Anyway, the boys stayed on, and one died.'
      
'How?'

      
'I had to leave before I could find out. An accident, I think.
I do know the other one came to inherit the farm and owns it still, though he's
hardly ever here, hence the rundown state of the place. He lives in London now.
His name's Copeley ... Copesake ... ?'

      
Meryl said sharply, 'Say that again, the name.'

      
'Copesake?'

      
'I've heard it somewhere, recently. Oh my Lord, where was it?'
Meryl grabbed her head from either side. 'It's hardly a common name, is it?'

      
'Don't think too hard,' Eddie said. 'It'll come to you.'

      
'And that's about it,' Isabel said. 'Didn't I do well?'

      
'I don't know what to say, my love. A wonder, you are. What we
have to decide now is what to do with it. Should we tell
 
our friend Gwyn Arthur, do you think?'

      
'That copper?' Isabel was aghast.

      
'Don't dismiss Gwyn Arthur. He has a most unusual mind.'

      
'Yes, well, we have enough of those, Eddie. What we also have
is a situation where there are people we ... care about, in a place where all
the statistics show they could come to real harm within the next twenty-four
hours.'

      
'We should go over there now and tell them, you think?'

      
Isabel looked at him scornfully. 'You really think they don't
know
? Why else have they come?'

      
'Or we could go and ... be with them,' Meryl said tremulously.

      
'And what,' Eddie demanded, 'do you mean by that?'
      
Meryl hugged herself. 'I don't
know. I don't
know
.'

Moira found Dave and Tom in
the studio working on the Aelwyn arrangement.

      
'We're doing this tonight?'

      
Dave said, 'You ever feel you haven't got a choice?' He was tuning
his Martin with a new self-adhesive chromatic tuner you could stick on the
pick-guard and watch the flashing lights. 'I can't keep this instrument, you
know.'

      
'I thought we'd dealt with all that,' Moira said.

      
'It's too good for me.'

      
'It isn't.'

      
''Tis.'

      
"Tisn't... aw, Davey!'

      
Dave smiled. 'How are your ... legs, this morning?'

      
'Shapely as ever, if horribly disfigured.'

      
'Bollocks,' said Dave. 'Where's Simon?'

      
'He's gonna lay in his room a while. He's a wee bit knackered,
to be honest.'

      
'Not surprised,' said Tom. 'The boy done good last night, yeah?'

      
'Yeah, I was ... kind of proud of him,' Moira said.

      
'It's the right attitude,' said Tom. 'You gotta go in
fighting. Me, I'm shit scared, as ever, but it don't pay to show it. He showed
us all up for bleeding wimps. Don't you fink?'

      
'Well,' Moira said guardedly. 'Maybe. But I think whether we
go for Aelwyn tonight, that should be a general agreement. A vote.'

      
Dave looked up from his tuning. 'You mean you'd vote against?'

      
'I don't know, Davey. It's kind of your big number, how do
you
feel?'

      
Dave laid the guitar gently on the carpet. 'Like I said, I don't
think we have a choice. Aelwyn brought it to a head last time. This time we're
on our own. Nobody like ... well, like Debbie. You know what I mean.'

      
'No need to tread eggshells, Dave,' said Tom. 'I can talk
about it. You mean it's, like, us and them, and no ...'

      
'Innocent bystanders,' Dave said. 'But Aelwyn's at the core of
it.'

      
'Aye,' Moira said. 'I guess that's right.'

      
'I don't think 1 understood him last time. What he represented.
I mean, I
know
I didn't.'
      
'And you do now?'

      
'No. But ... I dunno, I think it can
come
to you. Like Simon last night, with Holy Light. A complete
reworking, right? He reworked it in the light of his experience. And in the end
it wasn't holy light at all, quite the reverse. And now we know. And you know
what I think?'

      
Dave walked into the centre of the studio. 'I think this place
probably the oldest recording studio in the world. Cemented in blood? You remember
they said that about the stones?'

      
He moved over to a painted stone wall. 'Whitewash. But it's
darker underneath. Last night, Simon brought the truth out of the stones.'

      
And the bloody stones
didn't like that one bit
, Moira thought.

      
Tom said, 'We used to fink this was holy ground, right, back
in 'eighty. We was trusting. We fought we was protected. We was bleeding
stupid. And now we know.'

      
But do you
? Moira
thought.
Do you really?

      
'I was pretty fazed, gotta admit,' Tom said, 'when I seen
Simon in his dog-collar the first time. But he's learned fings, ain't he? He
was just this classical geezer, before, the one who knew what all the notes was
called and what you could do wiv a treble clef. But he was really firing from
the hip last night. And he hit the target, dead centre.'

      
'Aye,' said Moira, feeling the deepest trepidation, 'didn't he
just.'

I

Spirit

It takes a while to find it
in the dark, even with a hand lamp, for so much has changed.

      
For instance, the line of the wood has altered, so the tree is
no longer on the edge - there are fourteen years' worth of untrimmed bushes to
get through now.

      
Once, apparently, when the Abbey was a hotel, everything up to
the woods was lawn. And then, when it was a hostel for antisocial kids, it was
a playing field.
      
When Max Goff created a studio
here, he let the grass grow a little, turning it into something approaching a
meadow, on the basis that prestige bands liked to think they were out in the
wilds but it wasn't so wild that a stroll after lunch would destroy your Calvin
Klein jeans.

      
But the tree's still here. The same tree, with the same view
through the lower branches to the lights of the Abbey. Not so many lights now,
because some of the rooms are still closed, due to the effects of damp and
cold, the ravages of fourteen years.

      
It was a mild night last time, but Dave was cold because he
was wearing only jeans and a T-shirt. Tonight he has on a sweater and his white
scarf and he reckons he feels about the same. Cold. There have been snow
flurries on the hills.

      
It was a mild night in New York too, on 8 December, 1980. Mild
for New Yorkers, anyway; it must have felt very cold to Mark David Chapman who
came all the way from sunny Hawaii, bringing darkness. Yeah, his middle name is
Dave; put that down on the charge sheet, too.

      
This tree - there's something different about it. Same
branches, same angles. But something's changed.

      
Dave doesn't know much about nature.

      
The reason he's come out here now, at close to six p.m., is that
he doesn't plan to return. No matter what happens tonight, what horrors
manifest, he is not going to run out on Simon and Tom and Moira. He will not
see this tree again.

      
Moira.

      
Things really haven't worked out, have they?

      
He remembers last month, being at Ma's bungalow in Hoylake,
writing the letter which will turn out to be his first ever fax. Remembers
wondering if it was still love, if it had ever been love or was maybe just a subconscious
plea for empathy.

      
No, he decides. It was love.

      
He doesn't ask himself if it's
still
love. He can't bear to give himself a formal reply, for the
record. It will only make him think of lonely shores and white sand, of wind
and spray.

      
And black bonnets.

      
He looks up at the tree. This tree is not the same.

      
Damn it, Reilly, why
can't you even admit to yourself why you came out here? You came here to be
alone and to consider what to do. Maybe seek some advice (you out here, John?).

      
Dave shuts his eyes and lets go of his thoughts.

      
And nothing happens, inside or outside.

      
He's not here. He was
never here. You've been inventing conversations with John Lennon for so long
that sometimes you just know what he's going to say before you can get around
to writing him a script
.

      
Dave touches the tree. What kind of tree are you, anyway, apart
from not being an oak?

      
This is the eighth of December. It's fourteen - twice seven years
since John Lennon was shot and Debbie died. He remembers - the most vibrantly
shocking memory of his life - Tom staggering from the wreckage, the sudden
explosion, the swollen black thing that was Debbie being thrown out of Tom's
arms as his sleeves ignited.