Midwinter of the Spirit (34 page)

She wondered if Rowenna was outside in
her
garden, too. The problem was that there were doubtless other houses overlooking that one, and Rowenna had younger brothers who would just take the piss, so she was probably now in her room – searching for the same moon.

Jane looked up, cleared her throat almost nervously. Probably Mum felt like this in the pulpit.
Don’t think about Mum. This is nothing to do with her
.

She drew in a long, chilled breath, imagining moonbeams – unfortunately there weren’t any – also being drawn down, filling her with silken, silvery light. And then she called out – not
too
loud, as villages had ears.

‘Hail to Thee, Lady Moon
,

‘Whose light reflects our most secret hopes
.

‘Hail to Thee from the abodes of darkness.’

Something about that
abodes of darkness
making it more thrilling than the sun thing in the morning. Especially in this fog.

And it did work, this cycle of spiritual salutation. It put the whole day into a natural sequence. It deepened your awareness of the connectedness of everything, and your role as part of the great perceiving mechanism that was humanity.

Jane felt seriously calm by now and not at all cold – like she was generating her own inner heat. Or
something
was. She looked up into the sky again, just as this really miraculous thing began to happen.

The moon appeared.

First as just a grey imprint on the cloud-tapestry. Then as this kind of smoke-wreathed silver figurine: the goddess gathering the folds of her cloud-robes around her.

And finally… as a core of brilliant white fire at the heart of the fog.

Winter glory.

Oh, wow! She heard me
.

Jane just stood there and shivered in amazement and delight, like totally transported.

Cool!

Like really, really,
really
cool.

* * *

‘Visiting time’s not for another hour,’ Sister Miller said. ‘It’s teatime and the patients have to eat. You’ll need to come back.’

Sister Miller was all nurse: tough and ageless. Merrily concentrated on her seasoned face, because the view along Watkins Ward was dizzying and oppressive. It would have been hard to come up here alone tonight, any night.

She told Sister Miller that Sister Cullen had said visiting hours were less strict if the patient was in a side ward.

‘Which one?’

‘Canon Dobbs.’

‘That old man?’ said Sister Miller. ‘Are you relatives?’

‘I’m a… colleague.’

‘Because my view is that he doesn’t need to be here now, no matter what Dr Bradley says. Why can’t someone look after him at home? He’s just taking up a bed.’

‘You mean he’s recovering?’

‘Of course he’s recovering. I’ve been in nursing for nearly forty years. Mr Dobbs was walking perfectly well this morning. He can also feed himself. I believe he could also talk, if he wanted to.’ Sister Miller turned on Lol. ‘Have
you
any idea why he’s refusing to talk?’

Lol thought about it. ‘Perhaps he’s just impatient with routine questions like “How are we today?”.’

‘You have ten minutes and no longer,’ said Sister Miller.

It was like praying over a tomb. He lay on his back, as still as an effigy. Eyes shut. You were not aware of him breathing. He looked dead.

Just a short prayer, then. Nothing clever. Someone else having seen to all the smart stuff. Afterwards, Merrily brushed her knees and sat in the bedside chair.

‘Hello, Mr Dobbs.’

He didn’t move. He was like stone. Could he possibly be awake?

‘We haven’t spoken before, as such. I’m Merrily Watkins.’ Keeping her voice low and even. ‘I’ve come to say goodbye.’

On the other side of the door’s glass square, Lol smiled. OK, that was not the most tactful thing to say in a hospital.

‘By which I mean that I’ve now decided not to accept the Deliverance… role. I just wanted you to know that. We never met formally, and now there’s no reason we ever should.’

The side ward enclosing Dobbs was like a drab chapel. A faintly mouldy smell came from him – not organic, more like the miasma of old books in a damp warehouse.

‘I’m sorry that you’re in here. I’m sorry we didn’t get to you sooner in the Cathedral.’ She half-rose to pull the bedside chair a little closer and lowered her voice to below prayer level. ‘I’m even sorrier you didn’t feel able to tell any of us what you were doing there.’

She leaned her face forward to within six inches of his. They’d kept him shaved, but stubble had sprouted under his chin like a patch of sparse grass on a rockface.

‘It doesn’t matter to me now – not professionally. I’m out of it, feeling a little humiliated, rather slighted. I
know
Jesus Christ was the first exorcist, but also that half the world’s population is female, and rather more than half the people with problems of psychic disturbance – or so it seems to me – are female too. I believe that one day there
will
be a female exorcist in this diocese, without the fires of hell burning in High Town. I just wanted you to know that too.’

No reaction. Yet he could apparently walk and feed himself. She felt angry.

‘I probably felt less insulted, but more puzzled, when I heard you’d been avoiding
all
women. Dumping your housekeeper – that wasn’t a terribly kind thing to do. Why are you scared of women?’

Her hand went instinctively to her throat. She still wasn’t wearing the dog-collar.

‘I don’t know what makes you tick, Canon Dobbs. I’ve been trying to forgive you for setting me up for that final session with Denzil Joy.’

She felt tainted just uttering the name, particularly here. Too much like an invocation?

‘If you wanted to scare me off, show me how unpleasant it could be, you very nearly succeeded. But that wasn’t, in the end, why I decided to quit.’

She stood up. On his bedside table she placed two pounds of seedless grapes and two bottles of Malvern water.

‘Maybe you could share these with Huw Owen – next time he comes with his candles, and his holy water, and his magic chalk.’

She waited. Not a movement. She took a last look at him, but he remained like a fossil.

When she reached the door, she stopped, noticing that Lol’s eyes had widened. She resisted the urge to spin around.

Once out of the door, she turned left towards the ward entrance, refusing even to glance back along Watkins to the top side ward where Denzil Joy’s spirit had left his body.

And gone where?

The sudden shudder ripped up her spine like a razor-blade.

‘OK, he opened his eyes,’ Lol informed her, outside the hospital. ‘As soon as you turned your back and walked away, his eyes snapped open. Then closed again when he saw me standing on the other side of the glass.’

Merrily’s Volvo was parked in a small bay near a little park. By the path to the Victoria footbridge over the Wye. They leaned against it.

‘He heard it all, then?’ she said.

‘Every word. His eyes were very bright, fully aware – and mad as hell when he saw me.’

‘Good. My God!’

‘Mmm.’ Those eyes had spooked Lol. They were burning with the hard, wary intelligence of an old tiger. But the effect of this news on Merrily he found exciting.

The cold had lost its bite and the fog had thinned. He could see the three-quarter moon as through a lace curtain.

Merrily said, ‘Could we go for a short walk? I need to clear my head.’

It was
very
short. He followed her through the patch of parkland to a kind of viewing platform overlooking the still dark Wye and the suspension footbridge.

‘Last time I stood here, Inspector Annie Howe was showing me where a body had been found.’

‘What exciting times you have, Merrily. Such drama.’

‘Too much drama.’ She stood with her back to the river, beside an ornate lamp standard. ‘Well, this suggests Dobbs was an active participant in Huw’s ritual, doesn’t it? Or maybe even directing it?’

‘You’re the expert.’

‘Obviously not, or I’d know what this was about.’

‘And this Huw going behind your back, that’s the reason you resigned?’

She shrugged.

‘I still don’t see it.’

‘Lol, he was my course tutor: the Deliverance man. He’s the nearest I’ve had or wanted to have to a spiritual adviser. I rated the guy. I really
liked
him.’

‘I see.’

‘No, you don’t. A father-figure, just about. But, more important, the person you trust to guide you through the… through the hinterland of Hell, if you like. But what if there’s something iffy about what they were both doing?’

‘Iffy?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘And you want to?’

‘Yeah.’ Her dark hair shone in the lamplight.

‘More than a professional interest?’

‘I don’t
have
a professional interest any more. I am just so angry. That
shit
.’

‘Excellent.’

‘Huh?’

‘I’m happy you’re mad. When I first saw you in Church Street you were about as animated as Mr Dobbs back there. I worry easily.’

She smiled, shaking her head. ‘Lol…’

‘Mmm?’

‘I said some stupid things, all right? Things that weren’t necessarily true.’

‘Which in particular?’

‘You choose,’ Merrily said. Her face seemed flushed.

He thought for a moment. ‘OK, I’ve chosen.’

‘Don’t tell me.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because…’

‘Because little Jane doesn’t know where you are?’

‘Little Jane doesn’t bloody care.’

‘I think she does, Merrily. And it’s not my place to say so to a professional good person, but if you take this out on her before you’ve gone into it properly, you might regret it.’

‘You mean I should take steps to find out what she’s doing – and who with?’

‘I can… help maybe, if you want.’

‘Why are you doing this, Lol?’

‘A number of possible reasons.’ Lol stood close to her but looked across the river to the haze of misted lights on the fringe of the city. ‘You choose.’

Merrily sighed. ‘I can’t go to bed with you, you know.’ And, naturally, she looked soft-focus beautiful under the lamp. ‘Not the way things are.’

‘God,’ Lol said sadly. ‘He has a lot to answer for.’

‘It isn’t God,’ Merrily said.

‘Oh.’ He wanted to roll over the rail into the black river. ‘That means somebody else.’

‘Yes.’

She turned away from him and from the light. In the moment before she did, he saw her eyes and he thought he saw a flash of fear there, and he thought there was a shudder of revulsion.

But he
was
paranoid. Official!

‘I’ll take you back now,’ Merrily said.

32

Fantasy World

J
ANE THREW OPEN
the bedroom window, and the damned fog came in and she started to cough. It was like being with Mum in the scullery-office on a heavy Silk Cut night.

Down on the lawn the last rags of snow had gone. Snow was clean, bright, refreshing. Fog was misery. It was December today, so only three weeks to Midwinter, the great solstice when the year had the first gleam of spring in its eye.

Always darkest before the dawn. This, Jane thought, was like a midwinter of the spirit. She cleared her throat.

‘Hail to Thee, Eternal Spiritual Sun
.

‘Whose visible symbol now rises from the Heavens.’

That was a bloody laugh.

‘Hail unto Thee from the Abodes of Morning.’

It had been so brilliant last night out in the garden. Maybe she was a night person. Maybe a moon person. And yet the bedtime exercise had not gone too well, the great rewinding of the day.

Before you go to sleep, make a journey back through the day. Starting with the very last thing you did or said or thought, then going back through every small event, every action, every perception, as though you were rewinding a sensory videotape of your day. Consider each occurrence impartially, as though it were happening to someone else, and notice how one thing led to another. Thus will you learn about cause and effect. This reverse procedure also de-conditions your mind from thinking sequentially – past, present and future – and demolishes the web of falsehood you habitually weave to excuse your wrong behaviour
.

It was impossible to stay with it. You got sidetracked. You thought of something interesting and followed it through. Or something bad, like Mum being ill, which could plunge you without warning into some awful Stalinist scenario at Gran’s in Cheltenham:
As long as your mother is in hospital, Jane, you are under my roof, and a young lady does not go out looking like THAT
. Or you remembered seeing some cool male person and, despite what Angela had foretold, you were into the old dyinga-virgin angst. Rowenna never seemed prey to these fears; had she
no
hormones?

Gratefully, Jane closed the window. Mum had not looked too bad last night. Quiet, though: pensive.

‘You’re not OK! You’re not! You look like sh—’

‘Don’t say it, all right?’

‘It’s true.’

And, Jesus, it
was
true. That ratty old dressing-gown, the cig drooping from the corner of her mouth. A vicar? Standing on the stairs, she looked like some ageing hooker.

‘It’s the weather,’ Mum said.

‘It so is
not
the weather! Maybe you should see a doctor. I don’t know about exorcist; you look like completely bloody
possessed
.’