They went to look at Hereford Cathedral – because it was raining, and because Jane had decided she liked churches.
As distinct, of course, from the Church, which was still the last refuge of tossers, no-hopers and sad gits who liked dressing up.
Jane wandered around in her vintage Radiohead sweatshirt, arms hanging loose, hands opened out. Despite the presence of all these vacuous, dog-collared losers, you could still sometimes pick up an essence of real spirituality in these old sacred buildings, the kid reckoned. This was because of where they’d been built, on ancient sacred sites. Plus the resonance of gothic architecture.
Merrily followed her discreetly, hands in pockets, head down, and didn’t argue; a row was looming, but this was not the place and not the time. And anyway she had her own thoughts, her own decision to make. She wondered about consulting St Thomas, and was pleased to see Jane heading for the North Transept, where the old guy lay. Kind of.
They passed the central altar, with its suspended corona like a giant gold and silver cake-ruff. On Saturdays, even in October, there were usually parties of tourists around the Cathedral and its precincts, checking out the usual exhibits: the Mappa Mundi, the Chained Library, the John Piper tapestries, the medieval shrine of…
‘Oh.’
In the North Transept, Merrily came up against a barrier of new wooden partitioning, with chains and padlocks. It was screening off the end wall and the foot of the huge stained-glass window full of Christs and angels and reds and blues.
Jane said, ‘So, like, what’s wrong, Reverend Mum?’ She put an eye to the crack in the padlocked partition door. ‘Looks like a building site. They turning it into public lavatories or something?’
‘I forgot. They’re dismantling the shrine.’
‘What for?’ Jane looked interested.
‘Renovation. Big job. Expensive. Twenty grand plus. Got to look after your saint.’
‘Saint?’ Jane said. ‘Do me a favour. Guy was just a heavy-duty politician.’
‘Well, he was, but-’
‘Thomas Cantilupe, 1218 to 1282,’ Jane recited. ‘Former Chancellor of England. Came from a family of wealthy Norman barons. He really didn’t have to try very hard, did he?’
Well, yes, he did, Merrily wanted to say. When he became Bishop of Hereford, he tried to put all that behind him. Wore a hair shirt. And, as a lover of rich food, once had a great pie made with his favourite lampreys from the Severn, took a single succulent bite, and gave the rest away.
‘Must have had something going for him, flower. About three hundred miracles were credited to this shrine.’
‘Look.’ Jane pushed her dark brown hair behind her ears. ‘It’s the power of place. If you’d erected a burger-bar here, people would still have been cured. It’s all about the confluence of energies. Nothing to do with the fancy tomb of some overprivileged, corrupt…’
She stopped. A willowy young guy in a Cathedral sweatshirt was strolling over.
‘It’s Mrs Watkins, right?’
‘Hello,’ Merrily said uncertainly. Was she supposed to recognize him? She was discovering that what you needed more than anything in this job was a massive database memory.
‘Er, you don’t know me, Mrs Watkins. I saw you with the archdeacon once. Neil Cooper – I’m kind of helping with the project. It’s just… I’ve got a key if you want to have a look.’
While Merrily hesitated, Jane looked Neil Cooper over, from his blond hair to his dusty, tight jeans.
‘Right,’ Jane said. ‘Cool. Let’s do it.’
Under the window, a fourteenth-century bishop slept on, his marble mitre like a nightcap. But the tomb of his saintly predecessor, Thomas Cantilupe, was in pieces – stone sections laid out, Merrily thought, like a display of postmodern garden ornaments.
There were over thirty pieces, Neil told them, all carefully numbered by the stonemasons. Neil was an archaeology student who came in most weekends. It was, he said, a unique opportunity to examine a famous and fascinating medieval tomb.
Jane stood amongst the rubble and the workbenches, peering around and lifting dustcloths.
‘So, like, where are the bones?’
An elderly woman glanced in through the door, then backed quickly away as if dust from the freshly exposed tomb might carry some ancient disease.
Jane was prepared to risk it. She knelt and stroked one of the oblong side-slabs, closing her eyes as though emanations were coming through to her, the faint echo of Gregorian chant. Jane liked to feel she was in touch with other spheres of existence. Nothing religious, you understand.
‘Sorry,’ said Neil. ‘There aren’t any.’
‘No bones?’
Hands still moving sensuously over the stone, Jane opened her eyes and gazed up at Neil. He looked about twenty. An older man; Jane thought older men were cool, and only older men. It was beginning to perturb Merrily that the kid hadn’t found any kind of steady boyfriend her own age, since they’d arrived in Herefordshire.
Neil glanced at Jane only briefly. ‘What happened, Mrs Watkins, is some of the bones were probably taken away for safekeeping at the time of the Reformation. And some were apparently carried around the city during the plague in the hope they might bring some relief, and I expect a few of those didn’t come back. So he’s widely scattered, although part of the skull’s supposed to be back in Hereford, with the monks over at Belmont Abbey.’
Jane stood up. ‘So it was like completely empty when you opened it, yeah?’
‘Lot of dust,’ said Neil.
The side-slab was divided into six sections; on each a knight in armour had been carved, their swords and shields and helmets and even chain-mail fingers crisply discernible, but all the faces gone – flattened, pulped. It didn’t look as if time was entirely responsible.
‘So, in fact,’ Jane said, ‘this great historic, holy artefact is like an empty shell.’
‘It’s a shrine,’ Merrily said.
‘Of course, that’s one of the continuing problems with the Anglican Church.’ Jane smiled slyly, before sliding out the punchline. ‘So much of it’s just a hollow shell.’
Merrily was careful not to react. ‘We’re delaying you,’ she said to Neil Cooper. ‘It was good of you to let us in.’
‘No problem, Mrs Watkins. Drop in any time.’ He smiled at Merrily, ignoring Jane.
Jane scowled.
‘I expect you’ll be around quite often,’ Neil said. ‘I gather they’re giving you an office in the cloisters.’
‘Nothing’s fixed yet,’ Merrily said, too sharply. ‘And, anyway, I’d only be here one-and-a-half days a week. I have a parish to run as well.’ God, she thought, does everybody know about this? So much for low-profile, so much for discretion.
‘Look in anytime,’ Neil repeated. ‘Always nice to see you.’
‘The trouble with older men,’ said Jane, as they left the Cathedral, ‘is that the cretins seem to fancy even older women.’
As they walked into Broad Street, the rain dying off but the sky threatening more, Merrily noticed that Jane seemed taller. A little taller than Merrily in fact, which was not saying much but was momentarily alarming. As though this significant spurt had occurred during the few days they’d been apart: Merrily experiencing weirdness in Wales, Jane staying with trusty villagers Gomer and Minnie, but returning to the vicarage twice a day to feed Ethel the cat.
Merrily felt disoriented. So much had altered in the ten days since she’d last been to the Cathedral. Ten days which – because the past week had been such a strange period – seemed so much longer, even part of a different time-frame.
She felt a quiver of insecurity, glanced back at the ancient edifice of myriad browns and pinks. It seemed to have shrunk. From most parts of the city centre, the spires of All Saints and St Peter’s were more dominant. The Cathedral had long since lost its own spire, and sat almost modestly in a secluded corner between the River Wye and the Castle Green and a nest of quiet streets with no shops in them.
‘Tea?’ Merrily said desperately.
‘Whatever.’
The late-afternoon sky was a smoky kind of orange. Merrily peered around for cafes, snackbars. She felt like a stranger, needing to ground herself.
‘The Green Dragon? They must do afternoon tea.’
Jane shrugged. They crossed towards Hereford’s biggest hotel, nineteenth-century and the longest facade on Broad Street.
‘So you’ve learned about Thomas Cantilupe at school?’
‘Only in passing. He didn’t figure much nationally. Nothing that happened in Hereford seems to have made much of a difference to anything in the big world.’
Useless arguing with Jane in this mood. The kid had consented to come shopping, a big sacrifice on a Saturday; it was now Merrily’s task to tease out of her what was wrong, and Jane wasn’t going to assist. Tiresome, timehonoured ritual.
They found a window table in the Green Dragon, looking back out on to Broad Street, the Saturday crowds thinning now as the day closed down. Sometimes November could bring a last golden surge, but this one had seemed colourless and tensed for winter. Merrily was aware of a drab sense of transience and futility – nothing profound. Maybe just wishing she was Jane’s age again.
‘Cakes,’ she said brightly.
‘Just tea, thanks. Black.’
Merrily ordered two teas and a scone. ‘Worried about our weight, are we, flower?’
‘No.’
‘What are we worried about then?’
‘Did we say we were worried?’
The bored, half-closed eyes, the sardonic tuck at the corner of the mouth. It was pure Sean – as when Merrily was trying to quiz him about some dubious client. You don’t see your daughter for a week, and in the interim she’s readmitted her father’s soiled spirit.
Merrily tried again. ‘I, er… I missed you, flower.’
‘Really?’ Jane tilted her soft, pale face into a supportive hand, elbow on the table. ‘I’d have thought you had far too much to think about, poncing about in your robes and practising your Out, Demons, Out routine with the soul police.’
‘Ah.’
‘What?’
‘That’s what this is about – the soul police? You think I’m…’
What? An anachronism? A joke? Though Jane was basically spiritual, she just didn’t believe the Church of England was. Bad enough to have your own mother walking around in a dogcollar, never mind the holy water and the black bag now. Was that it?
That was probably too simple. Nothing about Jane was ever really simple.
A man striding up the street towards All Saints glanced through the window, blinked, paused, strode on. Oh God, not him, not now. Merrily turned away from the window, stared across the table at Jane.
The kid pushed back her tumbling hair. ‘OK, look…’
Yes? Merrily leaned forward. A crack, an opening? Yes…
Jane said, ‘I’m uncomfortable about what you’re doing, Merrily.’
‘I see.’
Jesus. Merrily? A major development. Now we are sixteen, time to dump this Mum nonsense. We are two grown women, equals.
This needed some thinking about.
‘I don’t think you do see,’ Jane said.
‘So tell me.’
‘They’re dragging you in, aren’t they?’
‘Who?’
‘The Church. It’s all political.’
‘Of course it is.’
‘All those fat, smug C-of-E gits, they’re worried about losing their power and their influence, so they’re appointing cool bishops: smooth, glossy people like Michael Hunter… Mick Hunter, for God’s sake.’
‘Bishops are still appointed by Downing Street.’
‘Yeah, well, exactly. Old mate of Tony Blair’s. I can just see them swapping chords for ancient Led Zeppelin riffs. Like, Mick’s superficially cool and different, but he’s really Establishment underneath.’
‘Phew,’ said Merrily theatrically. ‘Thank God, my daughter has finally become a revolutionary. I thought it was never going to happen.’
Jane glared at her.
‘You really don’t understand, do you?’
‘Sure. You think I’m a glossy, superficial bimbo who’s-’
‘More like a trainee storm-trooper, actually.’
‘What?’
‘Look…’ Jane’s eyes flashed. ‘It seemed really interesting at first when you said you were going to do this Deliverance training. I’m thinking, yeah, this is what it’s all about: the Church actually investigating the supernatural nitty-gritty instead of just spouting all this Bible crap. And this course and everything, it all seemed really mysterious. So, like… Wednesday night, I go back to the vicarage to feed Ethel. I think maybe I should check the answering machine, see if there’s anything urgent. So I go into your office and I find… hang on…’
From a pocket of her jeans, Jane dragged a compacted square of printed paper which she opened out on the tabletop.
‘And suddenly I saw what it was all really about.’
Merrily pulled towards her a Deliverance Study Group pamphlet heralding a forthcoming seminar entitled:
NEW AGE… OLD ENEMY.
She’d forgotten about it. It had come in a package from the DSG the morning she left for the Brecon Beacons.
‘I haven’t read it, flower.’
‘I bet.’
‘But, sure, I can guess what it’s about.’
She picked up the leaflet.
Meditation-groups, sweat-lodges, healing-circles… it may all seem innocuous, but so-called New Age pursuits are often the marijuana which leads to the heroin of hard-core Satanism. Introducing the discussion, Canon Stephen Rigbey will examine the allure of alternative spirituality and suggest ways of discouraging harmful experimentation.
Merrily said steadily, ‘You happen to notice the key word in this?’
‘Don’t try and talk all around it.’
‘It’s “discussion” – meaning debate.’
‘It’s bloody spiritual fascism,’ said Jane.
‘Oh, Jane, listen-’
‘ You listen, for once. The New Age is about… it’s about millions of people saying: I want to know more… I want an inner life… I want to commune with nature and the cosmos and things, find out about what we’re really doing here and who’s running the show, and like what part I can play in the Great Scheme of Things. Right?’
‘Pretty much like Christianity, in fact.’ Merrily lit a cigarette.
‘No, that’s bollocks.’ Jane shook her head furiously. ‘The Church is like: Oh, you don’t have to know anything; you just come along every Sunday and sing some crappy Victorian hymns and stuff and you’ll go to heaven.’
‘Jane, we’ve had this argument before. You just want to reduce it to-’
‘And anybody steps out of line, it’s: Oh, you’re evil, you’re a heretic, you’re an occultist and we’re gonna like burn you or something! Which was how you got the old witch-hunts, because the Church has always been on this kind of paternalistic power trip and doesn’t want people to search for the truth. Like it used to be science and Darwinism and stuff they were worried about, now it’s the New Age because that’s like real practical spirituality. And it’s come at a time when the Church is really feeble and pathetic, and the bishops and everybody are shit scared of it all going down the pan, so now we get this big Deliverance initiative, which is really just about… about suppression.’ Jane sat back in her chair with a bump.
‘Wow,’ Merrily said.
‘Don’t.’
‘What?’
‘You’re gonna say something patronizing. Don’t.’ Jane snatched back the leaflet and folded it up again. Evidence obviously. ‘I bet you were mega-flattered when Mick offered you the job, weren’t you? I bet it never entered your head that they want people like you because you’re quite young and attractive and everything, and like-’
‘It did, actually.’
‘Like you’re not going to come over as some crucifix-waving loony, what?’
‘It did occur to me.’ Merrily cupped both hands around her cigarette; she wasn’t sure if they allowed smoking in here. ‘Of course it did. It’s still occurring to me. Not your let’s-stamp-out-the-New-Age stuff, because I can’t quite believe that. But, yeah, I think he does want me for reasons other than that I’m obviously interested in… phenomena, whatever. Which is one reason I haven’t yet said yes to the job.’
Jane blinked once and they sat and stared at one another. Merrily thought about all the other questions that were occurring to her. And what Huw Owen had said to them all as they gathered outside the chapel in the last minutes of the course.
Maybe you should analyse your motives. Are you doing this out of a desire to help people cope with psychic distress? Or is it in a spirit of, shall we say, personal enquiry? Think how much deeper your faith would be if you had evidence of life after death. How much stronger your commitment to the calling if you had proof of the existence of supernatural evil. If that’s the way you’re thinking, you need to consider very carefully after you leave here. And then, for Christ’s sake, forget this. Do something else.
Merrily dragged raggedly on her cigarette.
‘You really want it, though, don’t you?’ Jane said. ‘You really, really want it.’
‘I don’t know,’ Merrily lied.
Jane smiled.
‘I have a lot of thinking to do,’ Merrily said.
‘You going to tell Mick you’re in two minds?’
‘I think I shall be avoiding the Bishop for a while.’
‘Ha.’ Jane was looking over her mother’s left shoulder.
Merrily said wearily, ‘He just came in, didn’t he?’
‘I think I’ll leave you to it. I’ll go and have a mooch around Waterstone’s and Andy’s. See you back at the car at six?’
The waitress arrived with the tea.
‘The Bishop can have mine if he likes,’ Jane said.