Midwinter of the Spirit (24 page)

‘That’s not good, is it?’

‘That’s not good at all,’ Merrily said. ‘Would she see me, do you think?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe if you weren’t wearing… you know?’

‘A dog-collar.’

‘And I introduced you as a friend.’

‘Sounds like a good idea.’

‘She’s working in the shop down below all week.’

‘Maybe I’ll call in on Monday, then,’ Merrily said. ‘I don’t know what time yet. I’ll be in the gatehouse if you want me – except mid-morning when I’m having discussions with my friend the Bishop.’

‘Pity you can’t see her house, really – a barn she’s leasing up on Dinedor Hill. She’s quite obsessive about the hill. It’s where she was born, where the family have lived since the Iron Age – or so she claims.’

‘This sounds awfully complicated, Lol.’ Merrily yawned and forced herself out of the chair. ‘Where’d I put my coat?’

‘All I can say is that she’s different when she’s up there. A different person – half… half somewhere else.’ He unhooked her waxed jacket from behind the door. ‘I don’t suppose… No, never mind.’

‘I hate it when anyone says that.’

‘Just that she left her bike here and I drove her home last night, because of the snow. So I have to pick her up on Monday morning, fetch her in to work.’

‘Early?’

‘Ish.’

‘If you could get me back to the gatehouse by eleven, I can come up with you. What’s my excuse, then?’

‘Your car wouldn’t start, so I’m giving you a lift somewhere? She’ll buy that. This is really good of you, Merrily.’

‘It’s my job. We’re told to work with shrinks. The Bishop would approve.’

‘The shrink doesn’t know,’ Lol said. ‘The shrink must
never
know.’

‘A non-believer, huh?’

‘Of the most intractable kind,’ Lol said. ‘You want me to drive you back now?’

‘No, Lol,’ Merrily annunciated carefully, ‘you’re – not – really – a – minicab – driver. That was for the benefit of the Bishop.’

She went smiling into the snow. She must be overtired.

At least the roads were no worse. Back in the vicarage just before five, she called the General Hospital. She gave them her name and they put her through to the ward. She just knew which one it was going to be – there was an ironic inevitability about it.

‘Reverend Watkins? Not the biggest surprise of the morning, to have you ring.’

‘What
was
the biggest?’

‘The biggest, to tell you the simple truth,’ Eileen Cullen said, ‘is that the auld feller’s still with us.’

‘Would that be an indication he might be coming through this?’

‘Ah, now, I wouldn’t go taking bets on that. He knows when you’re talking to him – his eyes’ll follow you around the room. But he’s not talking back yet.’

‘Mr Dobbs is not a big conversationalist, in my experience. The room? You haven’t got him—’

‘Christ no. We have this other wee side ward at the far end of the main ward. If Denzil was still with us, Mr Dobbs wouldn’t even be able to smell him.’

Merrily shuddered.

‘So, collapsed in the Cathedral, they say?’ Cullen said nonchalantly.

‘Yes, that’s what they say.’

‘Well, I’m off home in a while, but I’m sure they’ll keep you posted on any developments. I’ll mention it.’

‘Thanks.’

A pause, then Cullen said, ‘Funny, isn’t it, how things come around. Mr Dobbs arranging like that for you to have a mauling from Denzil in his death-throes, and now… You ever find out why he did that to you?’

‘I never did,’ Merrily said. ‘Maybe never will now.’

‘Well,’ Cullen said, ‘a patient’ll talk about all kinds of things, so he will – in the night, sometimes. I’ll keep my ears open.’

21

Chalk Circle

S
HE KNEW THE
words, of course she did,
she knew the words
. But they wouldn’t come. She bent close to him – his breath uneven, his eyes closed against her, like this was an act of will. She brought the chalice close to his stony face on the hospital pillow, white as a linen altar-cloth, and tipped her hand very slightly so that the wine rolled slowly down the silver vessel and trickled between his parted lips, a drop remaining on his lower lip, like blood.

Blood. Yes. Yes, of course.

‘The blood of our Lord, Jesus Christ, which was shed for you, preserve your body and soul into everlasting life. Drink this in remembrance that Christ’s blood was shed for you…’

Thomas Dobbs began to suck greedily at the wine. She was so grateful at having remembered the words that she tilted the chalice again, at a steeper angle, and wine flooded between his lips and filled his cheeks, and she began to murmur the Lord’s Prayer.

‘Our Father, Who…’

There was a cracking sound, like splintering stone, and his eyes flicked open, shocking her. Dobbs’s eyes were grey and white and, when he saw who hovered behind the sacrament, they blurred and foamed like a stream over rocks in winter.

‘Hallowed be…’

Dobbs’s shoulders began to quake.

‘Thy kingdom…’

She watched him rising up in the metal bed, his cheeks expanding. She could not move; this was her job. She kept on murmuring the prayer. When, eyes bulging in fury, he coughed the consecrated wine in a great spout into her face, it was indeed as warm as fresh blood, and she felt its rivulets down her cheeks.

This was her job; she could not move.

His hand snaked from under the bedclothes, and when it gripped her wrist like a monkey-wrench, the green tubes were ejected from his nose with a soft popping.

She didn’t scream. She was a priest. She just woke up with a whimper, sweating – after a little over an hour’s sleep on the sofa, and half a minute before the alarm was due to go off.

‘You look awful,’ said Ted Clowes after morning service. As senior churchwarden and Merrily’s uncle, he was entitled to be insulting. ‘This damned Deliverance nonsense, I suppose. I’ve told you, I have an extreme aversion to
anything
evangelical.’

Uncle Ted, a retired solicitor, had read ‘widely’ (the
Daily Mail
) about the Toronto Blessing and certain churches in Greater London where parishioners with emotional problems were exorcized of their ‘devils’ in front of the entire congregation. He was monitoring all Merrily’s services for ‘danger signs’.

‘In addition, there’s all the time it seems to take up – time that should be spent in this parish, Merrily.’

‘Ted, I wouldn’t have been doing anything here in the parish in the early hours of this morning.’

‘But look at the state of you! Look at the shadows under your eyes. You look as if you’d been beaten up. I tell you, these things don’t go unnoticed in a village. Half of those old women are not listening to a word of your sermon; they’re examining you inch by inch for signs of disrepair. Anyway, I should get some sleep for an hour or two after lunch. Put that child of yours on telephone duty.’

Jane was sitting in Mum’s scullery-office, with Ethel on her knees and her one purchase from the psychic fair open on the desk: a secondhand copy of
A Treatise on Cosmic Fire
by Alice A. Bailey. So far, she couldn’t understand how a book with such a cool title could be so impenetrable. It sometimes read like one of those stereotype fantasy sagas she devoured as a kid – well, until about last year, actually – with all these references to The Sevenfold Lords and stuff like that. Except this was for real. But wasn’t there a
simpler
way to enlightenment?

In her pocket, she had the phone number Angela had given her.

Sorrel.

She took it out, then put it back. Instead she rang Lol. Mum had said very little about last night apart from Dobbs and his stroke – like, tough, but the old guy was plainly out of his tree, as well as being seriously outdated on the issue of women priests. If you had to have soul police – and no way
did
you – better someone decently liberal like Mum; Dobbs should have bowed out long ago and gone to tend his roses or something.

Jane scratched behind Ethel’s left ear until the black cat twisted her neck, purred luxuriously and faked an orgasm.

Lol wasn’t answering his phone. Mum said she’d had a cup of coffee with Lol, that was all. Not as good as getting completely soaked through, and having to take off all her clothes on Lol’s hearthrug, but a start.

Jane hung up, closed Alice A. Bailey, put Ethel on the carpet.

She took a long, long breath and got out the piece of paper.

Denny had upgraded his studio to 24-track. ‘This is it for me,’ he said. ‘
Finito
. I think we’ve all been getting too technoconscious. It’s not what rock and roll’s about. When I was a kid you had a two-track Grundig in somebody’s garage and you were bloody grateful.’

‘What on earth is a Grundig?’ asked James Lyden’s friend Eirion, unpacking his bass.

‘Forget it,’ Denny said.

The house was no more than half a mile from Dick’s place, about the same age but detached and with a longish drive. Just as well, with a studio underneath. However, Denny had also allowed for major soundproofing; the creation of an anteroom and homemade acoustic walls had reduced the main cellar to about two-thirds of its original size. Four of them now stood in the glass-screened control room, with Denny’s personalized mixing-board. It was a warm, secure little world.

‘This was the wine cellar?’ James enquired, presumably wondering what Denny had done with all his wine.

‘Coal cellar,’ Denny snapped.

James didn’t have a Stratocaster. He had a Gibson Les Paul copy – a good one; you had to look hard to be sure. He gazed around. ‘I’ve got a
rough
idea how this set-up operates, but perhaps you could stick around for an hour or two, before you let us get on with it.’

Lol blinked. They expected Denny to leave them here alone with his gear? But Denny wasn’t listening. He was underneath the mainboard now, with a hand lamp, messing with something. Lol wondered if James actually had got the wrong idea about this, or whether he was just trying it on. He looked like the kind of kid who would always try for more.

With a fair chance of success, Lol figured. The boy looked austere and kind of patrician, and tall – a good six inches taller than Dick. A good bit slimmer than Dick, too – who would have ceased to be James’s role model many years ago. Like when James was about six.

‘I used to rather like those Hazey Jane albums,’ he said to Lol. ‘You were a pretty good songwriter. You had that melancholy feel of… what was his name? I can’t remember… Mum had an album of his.’

‘Nick Drake?’ Through the glass, Lol could see the two nonsongwriting band members erecting a drum kit down on the studio floor.

‘Oh, I know… James Taylor.’

‘
That’s
interesting,’ Lol said.

James nodded knowledgeably. His mother, as a therapist, would have told him about the young James Taylor’s psychiatric problems. Which would be why he’d made the comparison. Letting Lol know he knew the history.

He smiled compassionately down at Lol. ‘You did absolutely the right thing, in my view. I mean packing in when you did. If everybody stopped recording at their peak, we’d have a hell of a lot less dross to wade through, in my view. Like, someone should’ve shot Lennon ten years earlier.’

‘That’s what you think?’

‘They should have shot McCartney first,’ said Eirion. He was from Cardiff – one of those wealthy, Welsh-speaking families – but Eirion spoke English with an accent straight out of Hampstead or somewhere.

‘Eirion reckons twenty-five,’ James said. ‘I say twenty-seven, giving them the benefit of the doubt.’

‘Compulsory retirement age for rock musicians,’ Eirion explained. ‘We argue about it a lot.’

‘Personally, I think semi-voluntary euthanasia’s probably the best answer,’ Lol said. ‘When they stop playing, their health goes or they take too many drugs and become a burden on the state.’

Eirion considered this. ‘They could surely afford BUPA or something, couldn’t they?’

Lol heard rumbles from underneath the mixing-board. Detected sounds resembling
fucking
,
little
and
shits
. He was beginning to enjoy this. In fact, he felt much better today about… well, most of it. This morning the disparate pieces of a song which had been lying around for most of a month had fallen exquisitely into place.

‘So how many songs you actually got, James?’

‘How many, Eirion? Twenty, twenty-two?’

‘Well, yes, but some of them are fairly embarrassing now, actually – things we did over a year ago.’

‘That old, huh?’ said Lol.

James looked sullen. ‘Dad says he’s only paying for four. But he can cock off. That would be a pure waste of time and manpower. Besides, we’ve worked seriously hard and we’re pretty fucking efficient. It wouldn’t take that much longer to lay down the other six.’

‘An album in fact?’

‘Anything less isn’t worth the hassle,’ said James, ‘don’t you think?’

‘We’ll see how it goes,’ Lol said. ‘It’s this bloke’s studio.’

Denny came up, red-faced, from underneath the board, his big earring swinging furiously. ‘Sorted,’ he announced.

‘Oh, I get it.’ James tucked his rugby shirt into his jeans, and strapped on his guitar. ‘You’re the engineer, too.’

‘And the cleaner,’ Denny said menacingly. ‘And the teaboy.’

‘No, I mean… to be tactful about this, we don’t mind you guys hanging around. We do want to be produced, but we need space to experiment, yeah? We’re only into being… guided, up to a point. I mean, you know, I don’t want to sound arrogant or anything.’

‘Perish the thought,’ Lol said.

He kept wondering how he would be feeling now if, instead of meeting Merrily Watkins again, he’d spent last night in Moon’s barn – in Moon’s futon.

But it hadn’t worked out like that, and he was so glad.

Merrily lay awake, tasting the formless dregs of a dream. With the feeling of something wrong – of loneliness. And the recurrent domestic agoraphobia of two small women sharing seven bedrooms.

You’re never really alone, you know
. How often had she said that to a bereaved parishioner? Whichever way you looked at Him, God was never another warm body in a cold bed on a winter’s night.