Midwinter of the Spirit (10 page)

‘It’s kind of fascist,’ Rowenna said.

‘Let’s face it, almost any kind of spiritual activity is more fun than going to church.’

‘I wouldn’t argue with that.’

And then, as usual, it was suddenly gone.

Sometimes you were left floating on a cushion of peace; occasionally there was an aching void. This time only silence coloured by the placid images of the Cathedral and the Wye Bridge in the small stained-glass window just above her head.

Merrily stood up shakily in the intimacy of Bishop Stanbury’s exquisite chantry. She stood with her arms by her sides, breathing slowly. It was like sex: sublime at the time but what, if anything, had it altered? What progression was there?

Outside, in the main body of the Cathedral, the prayer was over and there was a communal rising and clattering. She stood quietly in the doorway of the chantry, her grey silk scarf dangling from her fingers.

‘Go away. Go
away
.’ A few yards away, a man’s voice rose impatiently. ‘I can’t possibly discuss this here.’

‘I don’t understand…’ A woman now, agitated. ‘What have I been doing wrong?’

‘Hush!’

A stuttering of footsteps. Merrily stepped out of the chantry, saw a woman, about sixty, who drew breath, stifled a cry, turned sharply and walked quickly away – across to the exit which led to the Cathedral giftshop. She wore a tweed coat and boots and a puffy velvet hat. She never looked back.

From the aisle to the left of the chantry, the man watched her go.

Merrily said, ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to—’

He wore a long overcoat. He glanced at her. ‘I think your party is over in the Lady Chapel.’

Then he saw her collar and she saw his, and the skirt of the cassock below his overcoat. And although she’d never seen him before, as soon as she discerned cold recognition in the pale eyes in that stone face – the face of some ancient, eroded graveyard archangel – she knew who he was.

And before she was aware of them the words were out. Possibly, under the circumstances, the stupidest words she could have uttered.

‘Is there anything I can do, Canon Dobbs?’

He looked at her for a long time. She couldn’t move.

Eventually, without any change of expression, he walked past her and left the Cathedral.

8

Beautiful Theory

F
OR MANY YEARS
, Dick Lyden had been something stressful in the City of London. Now he and his wife were private psychotherapists in Hereford. Dick was about thirty pounds heavier, pink-cheeked, income decidedly reduced, a much happier man.

‘And Moon – in her spiritual home at last?’ He beamed, feet on his desk. ‘How is Moon?’

‘Moon is…’ Lol hesitated. ‘Moon is what I wanted to see you about.’

Dick and Ruth lived and practised in half of a steep Edwardian terrace on the western side, not far from the old water-tower. Dick’s attic office had a view across the city to Dinedor Hill, to which Lol’s gaze was now inevitably being pulled. When Dick expansively opened up his hands, allowing him the floor, Lol turned his chair away from the window and told Dick about the crow which Moon claimed had mystically fallen dead at her feet.

Dick swivelled his feet from the desk, rubbed his forehead, pushing back slabs of battleship-grey hair. ‘And do you think it really did?’

‘I didn’t see it happen.’

‘So she may just have found it in the hedge and made the rest up.’

‘It’s possible,’ Lol said.

‘And the blood… she actually… That’s extraordinary.’ Dick rubbed his hands together, looking up at a plaster cornice above Lol’s head. ‘And yet, you know, while it might seem horrible to the likes of us, she’s spent quite a few years scrabbling about in the earth, ferreting out old skulls with worms in their eyes.’

‘This was a bit different, though.’

Yes, it was, Dick conceded. In fact, yes, what they were looking at here was really quite an elaborate fantasy structure, on the lines of one of those impossibly complicated computer games his son James used to play before he discovered rock music. Except this wasn’t dragons and demons; this was built on layers of actual history.

‘Let’s examine it. Let’s pull it apart.’ Dick dragged a foolscap pad towards him, began to draw circles and link them with lines.

‘What’ve we got? An extremely intelligent girl with a degree in archaeology, some years’ experience in the field… and this absorbing, fanatical interest in the Iron Age civilization, which became an obsession – the Celtic jewellery, the strange woollens. She still wear that awful sheepskin waistcoat thing?’

‘Not recently.’

‘That’s one good thing. Anyway… suddenly she’s aware she can
explain
this obsession in the context of her own family history. She’s been told the family roots in that particular spot go back to the Dark Ages and before – which is probably complete nonsense, but that’s irrelevant. She forms the idea that this is what she was born to do, because of the
place
she was born – on the side of this Iron Age fort or whatever it is.’

Dick drew a crude hill with battlements.

‘Perhaps believing… that there’s some great
secret
here… that only she can recover. Some Holy Grail. But of course… what she
really
wants to find is a key… to her father’s suicide.’

Dick smiled happily at Lol. He loved finding cross-references.

‘Who knows, Laurence? Who knows what horrors lodged in the mind of a two-year-old child in circumstances like that? And Dinedor Hill never talked about, Denny going dark with anger if the subject of their father arises. So much
mystery
. Well, she doesn’t want to believe her old man topped himself because he messed up his finances. It’s got to be more profound than that.’

‘It’s profound enough,’ Lol said. ‘By losing the farm, he let down his family, and his ancestors. Scores of farmers have killed themselves in the past few years for similar reasons. And we’re talking about a very historic family.’

‘Absolutely. She’s bunched all that together into an epic personal quest, with all the pseudo-mystical and supernatural overtones of James’s trashy computer games.’

‘Is that a good thing, though, Dick? Moon living at the centre of a fantasy?’

‘I don’t see that it’s necessarily
bad
. And if it’s all going to be providing material for her book… Do we know what kind of book she has in mind?’

‘A history of Dinedor Hill seen through the eyes of the people who live there now—’

‘Splendid,’ Dick interrupted.

‘—and the people who lived there over two thousand years ago.’

‘Constructed from archaeological evidence and what she feels is her own instinctive knowledge of her ancestors? Well, that could be a very valid book, couldn’t it? One can certainly imagine a publisher going for that. I could talk to some people myself.’

‘I don’t know.’ Lol had been doubtful about this book from the start. A book wasn’t like a song; you couldn’t knock it out in a couple of hours when the inspiration was there. ‘She doesn’t seem organized enough for anything like that. For instance, Denny’s managing the shop for a few days while she gets the barn sorted – supposedly. But this morning virtually nothing had changed: everything still in boxes. Which was what Denny said it’d be like: chaos – and Moon living inside herself.’

Dick shrugged. ‘So after the excitement of the move, there’s a period of emotional exhaustion. Then she dusts herself off, starts to pick up the pieces. Then the rehab begins. I’ll give her a couple of days and then I’ll go and have a chat myself. Or we can both go, yes?’

‘OK.’

‘You don’t seem too sure. Is there something else?’

Dick’s hopeless, isn’t he? Dick’s a dead loss. He doesn’t believe in anything outside of textbook psychology
.

Moon had predicted that Dick would come up with a beautiful theory, and he had – without Lol even mentioning her story about seeing her father at the window.

You have to report back to Dick? You’ll tell him about this?

Dick tore off the top sheet of the pad and crumpled it up. ‘I think you’d better spit it out, Lol.’

Yes, he had to. There was a professional arrangement here. Dick had insisted Lol should be paid a retainer to keep an eye on Moon and report back once a week. It was complicated: at first Lol had been paying Dick for analysis; now Dick was paying Lol.

In his kindly way, Dick was devious. Lol was still not sure whether observing Moon was not supposed to be part of his own therapy.

Women had been Lol’s problem. Women and religion.

He’d wound up first consulting Dick Lyden during the summer, while still trying to sell his roses-round-the-door cottage on the edge of an orchard out at Ledwardine. To which he’d moved with a woman called Alison who he thought had rescued him from the past and the shadow of the psychiatric hospital. But Alison had her own reasons for coming to Ledwardine, and they didn’t include Lol.

The people who actually
had
tried to rescue him had come from the village itself. They included a brusque old biddy called Lucy Devenish, now dead. And also the parish priest-in-charge.

At this stage in Lol’s life, priests of any kind were to be avoided. His parents had been drawn into this awful evangelical-fundamentalist Christian church and had decided that Lol, with his strange songs and his dubious lifestyle, was no longer their son. At his mother’s graveside, Lol’s father had turned his back on him. Lol had henceforth been suspicious of everything in a dog-collar that was not a dog.

Until the Vicar of Ledwardine.

Who in the end had been the reason for him leaving the village. The Vicar was, after all, a very busy and respected person, and Lol was this pathetic little sometimes-songwriter living on hackwork and royalties from before the fall. He wasn’t sure she realized how he felt. He
was
sure she didn’t need this.

So he left her his black cat and moved to Hereford, putting his bits of furniture in store and lodging for a while in a pub just down the street from Dick Lyden. Dick’s local, as it happened – also Denny Moon’s. Which had led to several sessions in Denny’s recording studio and a few consultation sessions with Dick, because Lol still couldn’t rely on his own mental equilibrium.

Christ
, Dick had said one afternoon,
you know more about this bloody trade than I do
. Fascinated by Lol’s extensive knowledge of psychiatry – absorbed over hours, then weeks and months spent in the medical library at a lax and decaying loony-bin in Oxfordshire.
Apart from a general self-esteem deficit, this is probably your principal problem – you’re a kind of mental hypochondriac. Perhaps you need to help diagnose other people for a while, to take your mind off it
.

Loonies taking over the practice. The idea had really appealed to Dick: the idea of Lol keeping an experienced eye on another of his clients – twenty-something, gorgeous, weird. Dick loved it when clients could help each other, his practice becoming a big family. It was still small, this city; he liked the way relationships and associations developed an organic life, spread like creeper on a wall, and therefore strengthened his own latent roots in Hereford.

Thus, Lol had been introduced to Katherine Moon – and perhaps also because Dick couldn’t quite get a handle on Moon.

‘Her father’s ghost,’ Dick said calmly.

‘Twice.’

‘Right.’ Dick hunched intently forward. ‘Now, think carefully about this, Lol. What effect did this alleged manifestation have on her? What kind of an experience was it? Soothing? Frightening? Cathartic?’

‘Not frightening.’

‘So, a man’s face at the window at dead of night. A young woman all alone in a still-strange dwelling… and she’s not frightened. What does that tell us?’

‘She said she had the impression he was more scared than she was. Disturbed and confused. She thought he didn’t recognize her. Didn’t know who she was.’

‘Interesting.’

‘She said she wanted to tell him it was OK.’

Dick spread his hands. ‘Moon as healer.’

‘She wants him to find peace.’

‘And when he does, she will too,’ Dick said. ‘I really don’t see a problem there. Seems to be all bubbling away quite satisfactorily in Moon’s subconscious. She finds a dead crow and inflicts upon the poor bird all of her not inconsiderable knowledge of Celtic crow-lore. The crow’s been sent by the ancestors to give her
the sight
. So what’s she going to see first?’

‘That’s very good, Dick.’

‘It makes sense, my boy. It’s about
belonging
, isn’t it? Look at me. I do feel I’ve found my spiritual home here in this city – so tiny after London, and
knowable
. Ruth tells me I’m continually pulling this town to my bosom. But a hill… a hill’s much more embraceable, isn’t it?’ Dick leaned over to the window to scan the horizon. ‘You know, I’m not even sure I know which one it is.’

‘The one with all the trees.’

In the afternoon sunshine, the woods were a golden crust on the long, shallow loaf.

‘Hmm,’ Dick turned away, ‘not particularly imposing, is it? And this was where the first settled community was? This hill is what you might call the
mother
of Hereford, I suppose.’

‘The holy hill.’

‘Super,’ Dick said with firm satisfaction. ‘One must feel a weight of responsibility to one’s ancestors if one was born on a holy hill. And her father’s suicide… a ready-made open wound for her to heal?’

Lol felt unhappy. He didn’t like the way Dick seemed to assume that once you’d made a neat psychological package out of something, that was it. Sorted. In Lol’s experience, real life was endlessly messy.

Dick leaned back in his leather swivel-rocker, hands comfortably enfolded over his lightbulb gut. ‘The way we create our destiny on an epic, computer-game scale – would that it was as simple for all of us. Do you know, I rather suspect there’s a paper in this. Let’s go and see her. What are you doing tomorrow morning?’

‘So you think it was a dream?’ Lol said.