Fabric of Sin (2 page)

Merrily unlocked the car.

‘It’s an empty house. If anything’s happening, nobody has to live with it day-to-day. So we’re looking at … probably, prayers, a room-by-room blessing. Or, if a particular and persistent personality is identified, maybe a Requiem Eucharist involving the people most closely involved, present and – where possible – past. Nine times out of ten, this is
enough to restore a kind of calm. Adam, why’s it called the Master House?’

‘If anybody was able to explain that,’ Eastgate said, ‘they didn’t want to. Maybe the main house when there were subsidiary farms. Or the local schoolmaster used to live there?’

‘Mmm.’

She had a last look at the hill, where isolated white lights had appeared, its big sisters, the Skirrid and the Sugarloaf fading, uninhabited, into the dried-blood sky.

Adam Eastgate said, ‘Ever get scared yourself, Merrily?’

‘Me?’

Merrily laughed, an unconvincing hollow sound in the stillness. An early owl picked it up, or seemed to, and flew with it as she got into the car.

‘T
HEN HE WAS
back on the phone,’ Merrily told Lol in the pub. ‘Soon as I got in. Barely had time to put the kettle on.’

‘The Duchy guy?’

‘No, the
Bishop
. Must’ve rung several times already. I don’t think I’ve ever known him this jumpy. I just … I don’t get it.’

She took a drink. Serious decadence: a house-white spritzer in the Black Swan – oak beams, low lights – with one’s paramour. How long had it been before she’d felt able to do this comfortably? Six months? A year?

Seemed stupid now; nobody glanced at them twice – although this was probably because almost nobody knew them. Thursday night, and most of the drinkers in the lounge bar were from outside the village, having drifted in for dinner. Some probably responding to the dispiriting
Daily Telegraph
travel feature identifying Ledwardine as the black-and-white, timber-ribbed heart of the New Cotswolds.

Like, when did
that
happen? Couple of years ago, the village was still on the rim of the wilderness. Now there was talk of the Black Swan chasing a Michelin star.

‘The Cotswolds are coming.’ Merrily listened to the brittle laughter at the bar. ‘Ominous. Like a melting ice cap. Rural warming. Feels suddenly claustrophobic, or is that just me?’

Final confirmation of the county’s new economic status: the major investment in Herefordshire by the old Cotswolds’ most distinguished resident.

Charles Windsor, Highgrove.

‘Does
he
know about this?’ Lol said.

‘Well, that’s what
I
asked. Didn’t get an answer.’

‘He’d probably be fascinated. Has his other-worldly side.’

‘Only, he keeps quieter about it these days.’ Merrily looked around, making sure nobody could overhear them in their corner, well back from the bar. ‘Since the tabloids labelled him as a loony who talks to plants. Maybe they’ve been advised not to tell him, just get it quietly disposed of. As for the Bishop …’

‘You can see his problem. This is the guy next in line for head of the Church of England.’

‘That didn’t escape me. I suppose it’s as good a reason as any to play it by the book.’

No reason, however, for the Bishop to go adding extra, entirely gratuitous chapters.
Full attention, I think, Merrily. We’ll need to get you a locum for at least a week. Move you over there
.

And she’d gone, ‘What?’

Like …
what
? Sounding like Jane, probably.

‘Lol, I don’t
want
to go and stay in Garway for a week. I just … I don’t see the point.’

‘In which case …’ Orange sparks from the electric candles on the walls were agitating in Lol’s glasses ‘… why not just tell the Bishop to, you know, piss off?’

‘Because he’s a friend. Because I owe him. Because …’

Merrily shook her head, helpless. Lol leaned back. He was looking good, actually. Old denim jacket over a
Baker’s Lament
T-shirt, which he wore like a medal but always keeping the motif at least partly covered up, as if he could still only half-believe what was finally happening to him. He put down his lager, thoughtful.

‘Suppose I come with you.’

‘You’re touring.’

‘It’s only three gigs next week, just the one night away. I could reschedule … or cancel.’

‘That is not a word we use, Lol. You give anybody the slightest reason to think you’re slipping back …’

A year ago, the thought of three gigs – three
solo
gigs – would have given him palpitations, night sweats.

Lol looked into his glass, obviously knowing she was right, and Merrily watched him across the oak table, through this haze of love and pride blurred by fatigue. Very happy for him, if concerned that he might just be feeling he didn’t deserve it. Ominously, when she’d gone over to the cottage to drag him out to the pub, she’d heard the voice of his long-dead muse, Nick Drake, from the stereo. Worst of all, it was ‘Black-Eyed Dog’, Nick’s voice pitched high in bleak and terminal despair. Lol had turned it off before he opened the door, Merrily staring at him in alarm but finding no despair in his eyes, just this sense of puzzlement.

‘Besides,’ she said, ‘I’m supposed to be staying with the local priest. They haven’t got a vicar in the Garway cluster at present, so a retired guy’s taking services meanwhile. He and his wife do B. & B. I turn up there with a boyfriend, how’s that going to look?’

‘What about Jane?’

‘Jane stays here. Can’t miss any school at this stage. Woman curate called Ruth Wisdom’s lined up to mind the parish. Work experience. She’s OK. And Jane’s less likely to drive her to self-mutilation than at one time, and she—’

Merrily looked up. A woman was standing behind Lol’s chair.

‘Excuse me. You just have to be Lol Robinson?’

She was tall and very slender. She’d been with a group of women in their twenties, with fancy cocktails, their backs to the bar. All of them now looking at Lol, hands over smiles.

‘Nobody
has
to be anybody,’ Lol said.

Mr Enigmatic. The woman was leaning over him now, her glossy black dress like oil on a dipstick, one small breast almost touching his cheek.

‘Lol, I just wanted to say, we all went to see
The Baker’s Lament
at the Flicks in the Sticks special preview, and it was … absolutely enchanting. Especially the music, obviously. But, listen, when I went to buy the CD in Hereford they hadn’t even
got
it? Nobody had?’

‘Well, it … it all takes time,’ Lol said.

‘And I’m like, for Christ’s sake, this guy’s
local
? And the manager guy, he eventually admitted they’d had about fifteen orders just that day?
Fifteen orders in one morning? This tells me you need to get a better recording company, Mr Robinson. I couldn’t even find a download?’

‘Well, it’s kind of caught them on the hop,’ Lol said. ‘All of us, really. We didn’t actually—’

‘Well,
I
have to say I just totally love it. Hope you don’t mind me coming over?’

‘Er, no,’ Lol said. ‘No, not at all. Thank you.’

The young woman straightened up. As did her conspicuous nipples. She looked across at Merrily and smiled at her.

Merrily felt small and dowdy and old.

‘He’s lovely, isn’t he?’ the woman said.

Walking back across the village square, Lol avoided the creamy light of the fake gaslamps; Merrily was a pace behind him.

‘Fifteen orders? In one morning?’

‘She was probably exaggerating.’

‘Why would she?’ Merrily pulled on her woollen beret, zipped up her fraying fleece. ‘She doesn’t know you. Although she’ll probably be telling people she does, now.’

‘One small song in one small film?’

‘Not so small now. And you know what? People will remember the song when they’ve half-forgotten the film. Because it’s somehow caught the mood. The
zeitgeist
… whatever. You have become a cool person, Laurence.’

‘It’s not real.’ Lol was shaking his head, as if to clear it after his two halves of lager. ‘It’s a freak accident.’

Sometimes you wanted to encircle his neck with your hands and …

Over a year now since this young guy, Liam Brown, not long out of film school, had written to Lol, telling him about his self-financed rural love story. How badly, after hearing it on Lol’s album,
Alien
, he wanted ‘The Baker’s Lament’ on the soundtrack, only wasn’t sure he could afford it. Just take it, Lol had told him, the way Lol would, sending him three versions of the song, including an unreleased instrumental track, and forgetting all about it. Not even mentioning it to Merrily until the middle of July, when the first DVD arrived.

The Baker’s Lament
. There on the label, with a bread knife stuck into a country cob. The guy had named the movie after the song.

Shooting the picture with unknown actors who’d formed some kind of workers’ cooperative. Lol and Merrily had watched it together at the vicarage: the tragicomic story of a young couple setting up a village bakery on the Welsh border in the 1960s when the supermarkets were starting to starve small shopkeepers out of business. Following through to the new millennium when the couple were played – and not badly, either – by the actors’ own parents and the village had turned into something like contemporary Ledwardine, the bakery now a twee delicatessen.

The movie was simple and charming and unpretentious, a rural elegy with Lol’s music seeping through it like a bloodstream, carrying the sense of change and loss and a kind of resilience.

Liam Brown was even worse than Lol at self-promotion, and they hadn’t known it had been released – in a limited way, on the art-house circuit – until it was in the papers that an obscure British independent film had picked up some debut-director award at Cannes. Then the
who is this guy?
calls had started coming in to Lol’s producer, Prof Levin.

Change was coming. New Costwolds, new Lol.

They stopped on the edge of the cobbles, where they’d go their separate ways, Merrily to the vicarage, Lol to his terraced cottage in Church Street. When he took her hand, his felt cold.

‘Apparently, the next question they ask is, Is he still alive? Thinking maybe it’s a forgotten recording from the Sixties, by some contemporary of …’

‘Nick Drake?’

‘It should be him, Merrily. Not me.’

‘Lol, he’s dead. He died in 1974, after a mere five, six years of not being successful. You get to double that …
and
some.’

She pulled him under the oak-pillared village hall and – bugger it, if there were people watching, let them watch – clasped her hands in his hair and found his lips with her mouth and then unzipped her fleece and tucked one of his cold hands inside.

‘All this,’ she said, aware of the ambivalence, ‘is something overdue. Remember that.’

Trying to banish the image of the girl in the pub, showing him her implants out of a dress that must have cost something close to two weeks’ stipend.

Jane said, ‘You’re a soft touch, Mum. Always were. A doormat.’

‘Thanks.’

It was getting late, but it was Friday night and Merrily had lit a small log fire in the vicarage sitting room. The whole place was colder since they’d said goodbye to the oil-gobbling Aga. Which, while it had to be done, meant she wasn’t looking forward to winter.

‘And I don’t mean one of those rough, spiky doormats,’ Jane said.

‘You’ll
like
Ruth. She rides a motorbike.’

‘Jeez, if there’s anything worse than a trendy lesbian cleric in leathers with a vintage Harley between her legs … Like, maybe I could arrange to stay at Eirion’s …’

Jane’s voice dried up, and her face went blank. Eirion was away at university now, and she still hadn’t got used to that. OK, it was only Cardiff, and he came home to Abergavenny at weekends, but things, inevitably, had changed.

‘Ruth’s not a lesbian, Jane.’

‘Not a problem, anyway.’ Jane, on her knees on the hearthrug, stared into the desultory yellow flames. ‘I was thinking of giving girls a try for a while, actually.’

Shock tactic. Cry for help. Merrily pulled up an armchair.

‘He didn’t phone, then.’

‘Erm … no.’

‘How long?’

‘Ten days? No problem. I don’t think he was even able to get home last weekend, didn’t I mention that?’

‘No, but I kind of assumed that was why you suddenly had to work on your project.’

‘All that’s gone quiet, too. They may not even start the dig until the spring.’

‘Oh.’

Pity about that. Jane had been hyper for a while after her campaign
to stall council plans for
executive homes
in Coleman’s Meadow. Convinced that the field had once been crossed by an ancient trackway and, amazingly, she’d been right. They’d found prehistoric stones there, long buried by some superstitious farmer. Sensational archaeology, for a place like Ledwardine.

‘He’ll call,’ Merrily said. ‘He’s Eirion.’

‘I don’t care if he calls or not.’

‘Yes, you do.’

‘Like, it’s very demanding, university life.’ Jane didn’t look at her. ‘Lots of guys you’re obliged to get smashed with. Lots of girls to assist with their essays and stuff.’

‘Eirion was never like that.’

‘He was never at university before.’

University. Further education. This could be the time to talk about it again. Just over six months from her A levels, Jane needed to start applying to universities … like now. But Jane wasn’t interested, because that was what
everybody
did. She kept saying she could feel
The System
trying to
stereotype
her. And look at the cost. Tuition fees. Could they afford it? Was it really worth it? Especially as she hadn’t yet decided on a career. Like, you didn’t just do further education for the sake of having done it.

‘
You
went to uni,’ Jane said, looking down at the rug, ‘and got pregnant before you were into your second year.’

‘We were naïve in those days. Well … comparatively immature. Although I suppose every generation gets to say that.’