‘Poor Merrily.’ Like a white, woolly terrier, Dermot Child followed her into the lobby of the village hall. ‘Can I walk you back to the Swan?’
Merrily unhooked her coat from the peg. ‘You can walk with me. If you’re going that way.’
‘Well… yes.’ Child held open the metal door for her. ‘I thought I’d have a nightcap.’
Merrily locked up the hall. Double lock, big key. She had quite a bunch of these things in her bag; the vicar seemed to be responsible for the security of half the public buildings in the village. Maybe she could use a minder.
But not Mr Child. Oh no. He’d nearly become Dermot, but he was Child again now. Quite blatantly fancied her, but was not necessarily on her side. Bad combination.
‘Rod and Terry cleared off pretty rapidly, Vicar.’ Wry smile as they crossed the car park.
True enough. Rod Powell heading for the Ox, round the corner, Cassidy striding rapidly up towards the lights of the square and his restaurant, to regale Caroline with the juicy details of their dilemma.
‘A lot to talk about, I suppose,’ Merrily said.
‘Oh yes.’ Dermot Child fairly bounced along, his springy, white hair flopping. One of those volatile characters who thrives on discord, was energized by controversy. Fun to have around, but you wouldn’t trust him to the end of the street.
‘All right.’ Plunging her hands down the pockets of her new but even cheaper fake Barbour. ‘What did you mean, poor Merrily?’
‘Well…’ He gazed up the dark street, into the future. ‘Going to get the blame, aren’t you?’
‘For what?’
‘For whatever you decide. Yes or no to a witch trial in the church. You’ll be either the trendy, radical priest who cares nothing for local sensibilities or just another reactionary who doesn’t want to muddy the waters or offend the nobs. Either way, your congregation suffers. Must be hell, being a vicar.’
‘Hang on. What makes you all so sure it’s going to be me who makes the decision?’
‘Oh, really!’ Dermot Child stopped, leaned back against the railings of a white, Georgian village house, base of Kent Asprey, the jogging doc. ‘You were there when they decided)’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Well, Bull-Davies buggered off – for reasons which will soon become very apparent. Then Rod Powell advised you to examine your conscience. And finally the appalling Cassidy told you very politely and sympathetically that he rather thought it was going to be your decision. How firm d’you want it? They’ve all officially copped out! Tossed the hot potato into your lap and run like hell. When it makes the papers – which it surely will – it’ll be Vicar Bans Top Writer!
‘And if I don’t? If I don’t block it?’
‘Then you’ll get – I don’t know – Vicar Backs Poof Playwright Against Local Protests… Well, not that, obviously, but you get the idea.’
‘I see,’ Merrily said. ‘You’re saying that, whatever happens, I’m stuffed.’
‘Burden of village life, my dear. This was some suburban parish in London or Birmingham, you’d have a small flurry of controversy and then it would all be forgotten. Here… Well, don’t be fooled by appearances. All right, post-modern… state of the art… the New Countryside of rich commuters, hi-tech home business people, oak beams and the Internet…’
He motioned to a half-lit shop window. MARCHES MEDIA: Fax, photocopying, computer supplies.
‘Illusion. Surface glitter, Merrily. And only the surface changes. Underneath, the structure’s as rigid as an old iron bedframe.’
‘You seem to like it here, all the same.’ She knew he’d been a music teacher at some London college, had links with a small record label specializing in modern choral works. Suspected he’d left at least one ex-wife somewhere.
‘I know my way around, Vicar. May not sound like it, but I’m a local boy. We go back three generations. Not many, compared to your Powells and your Bull-Davieses, but it’ll do. Born here, and I suppose I’ll die here, sooner or later. As for that big, sloppy lump of life in the middle, skipping round London, Paris, Milan… that was just time spent finding out that, in the end, it’s really better the hell you know…’
‘Hell?’
He didn’t respond. There were eight or nine cars parked on the square, clustered under a black-stemmed electrified gas lamp. The cars included two BMWs, a Jaguar and a Range Rover. People dining at Cassidy’s or the Black Swan. The village centre, also quietly lit by uncurtained windows and the stars, looked, if not exactly smug, quite settled in its prosperity.
‘When d’you move into the vicarage, Merrily?’
‘Could be next week.’
‘Terrific. Mind you… big old place.’
They could see, on the edge of the church close, the end gable of the vicarage and its chimneys, rising above most of the others.
‘I think I’d rather have a bungalow,’ Merrily said.
‘Oh no. God, no. That would never do. Has to be the official residence. Nice, roomy lawn for garden parties. Vicar – all right, priest-in-charge, but still an important figure in Ledwardine. Mind you, you do need a husband.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘Oh yes. Decent local man. Solid foundation. The WI will have it at the top of their agenda.’
‘Bloody nerve,’ Merrily said. ‘What is this, Jane Austen?’
‘Like I told you, the framework doesn’t change. What do you expect? You’re a very lovely young woman.’
‘Oh, please. Anyway, I’m an old widow.’
‘Ah yes.’ They’d stopped at the steps of the Black Swan. ‘Which rather got you out of a hole, I gather.’
Merrily froze.
Dermot Child dropped a hand on her shoulder. ‘Sorry, my dear. Am I being indiscreet?’
Merrily gazed across the square towards the vicarage.
‘Ted Clowes is a dead man,’ she said.
Of course, it was Colette they really wanted. The squashy lips, the provocative breasts in the white frock. Colette was the nymph, the real thing. Grown up.
This was very clear to Jane, if nothing else was. She could smell their sweat, and the heat source that brought it out was Colette.
Jane was feeling more and more queasy, and strangely separated from it all. Like they were the players and she was merely the audience. And she couldn’t alter what was happening because she was just… well, just a kid. If she spoke, nobody would hear her. Bring your mother… give ’er some holy communion…
Her stomach felt horribly tight and distended. Something like liquid gas welled up in her throat and she gulped it back, clinging to the church wall. The stones felt damp and gritty. Slimy. The sweat smell was a disgusting haze.
‘Come on,’ one of them said. ‘We got a few bottles. And Mark’s brought some sweeties.’
‘Oh yeah?’ Colette said.
‘Es,’ this Mark said. ‘No rubbish, mind. Got ’em in Leominster.’
Colette looked at them, hands on her white-sheathed hips, shoulders against the church wall.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, doesn’t that just about show the mentality of you seed-suckers? Like we’re all going to get hyped-up in the church porch and put on our iPods and pretend it’s a major rave. Come back when you’re older, yeah?’
‘How old you like us to be?’ said the fourth boy, who’d come along with Mark who had the pills.
‘Old enough that you don’t have to hang around with kids any more,’ Colette said.
Jane was in awe of her. The boys were quiet for a moment. She could smell the beer on them, through the hot sweat. Their senses were surely too fuddled for clever repartee; maybe they’d slink off, spit a few insults from across the street then melt into the night like foxes.
But then Dean Wall said, all the humour gone, ‘Think we’re kids, is it?’
Danny Gittoes put a hand on his arm. ‘Let it go, Dean.’
Dean shook him off. ‘Fucked if I will.’
‘Please.’ Colette smiled thinly. ‘Don’t use words till you know what they mean.’
Dean took a couple of seconds to work this out, then he gave out a kind of strangled sob.
‘Right. Got some’ing to prove, do you?’
‘Not now, Dean,’ Danny said. ‘You blown it, I reckon.’
‘Come yere…’ Dean moved apelike towards Colette. ‘Come yere, you fuckin’ clever bitch.’ Big hands clawing for Colette’s breasts. She sprang back like a cat, reared and spat.
‘Touch me once, mucus-sac, and I’ll tear your balls off!’
‘Wooooh!’ Danny Gittoes and Mark backed off in not-quite-mock terror.
But Dean didn’t. It was personal now. It had history.
‘Cathedral fucking School fucking snob. Not puttin’ out for the likes of us, eh? You’re just a slag, Cassidy. Stand outside your shitty cafe, tongue hangin’ out. You’re panting for it, you are.’
‘Well, maybe.’ Colette didn’t blink. ‘But unless you’ve brought along one of your old man’s best carrots-’
Like a sack of potatoes falling over, Dean Wall tumbled at Colette, who was spinning and hissing, too fast for him, but there were four of them, and in a second it had become a soggy blur and although Jane thought she heard a distant man’s voice shouting, ‘What’s going on down there?’ there was no sound of footsteps behind the squeals and grunts.
And so, feeling very ill, Jane went in scratching, nails raking the back of a leather jacket.
‘Nnnnnooooo!’ she screamed.
Aware, though, before it was half out, that it was going to be rather more than a scream.
That she was being sick.
Boy, was she being sick…
‘Oh! Oh, shit! Oh, you fuckin’ little cow!’ Dean Wall was on his feet, flailing about, dripping. He no longer stank of sweat. ‘Oh, you fuckin’ disgustin’ little…’
Dean had his jacket off and he was shaking it, gobbets of vomit flying through the air. Then he started slapping it against the church wall, screeching outrage, Danny and Mark laughing at him from a safe distance.
‘I’m sorry,’ Jane gasped, wiping her lips on her sleeve, mouth full of sourness. ‘Oh God, I-’
Then her left hand was snatched, her arm jerked savagely out in front of her and she had to start running to avoid falling over. All she could hear behind her, as she was dragged over something shin-scrapingly hard and wooden, were curses and oaths and the sound of the leather jacket being slapped repeatedly against the church wall.
‘No escape that way, you bitches.’ From a distance.
‘Up yours, slimeball!’ Colette shrieked, triumphant.
Halfway up the steps of the Black Swan, Merrily tensed.
‘What was that?’
‘Kids, I expect.’
‘In the churchyard?’ Happened every night in Liverpool; you didn’t expect it here.
‘They don’t have many places to go,’ Dermot Child said. ‘There was a plan for a big youth centre a couple of years ago. On the derelict bowling green behind the Ox. An influential lobby of local people – i.e. newcomers – managed to get it squashed. Not in keeping, you understand.’
‘Look, I think I’d better pop down to the church and see what’s happening.’
‘Merrily, look, if you were supposed to police the place, the bishop would’ve supplied you with a tazer.’ Dermot elbowed open the double doors at the top of the steps. ‘Come and have a drink.’
‘I don’t think I will, thanks. Got a sermon to go over. Dermot-’
He raised an eyebrow. She joined him on the top step, pulled the doors closed again.
‘What did Ted say about my marriage?’
He was unembarrassed. ‘Not a great deal. Don’t be too hard on Ted. I think he had your best interests at heart. Wanted us to know you weren’t just some new-broom, feminist theologian. That you’d had a bad time. Been through the mill’
‘So what, precisely, did he say?’
‘Oh, he… he said your husband was unfaithful. That a reconciliation was out of the question. That this unfortunately coincided with your decision to apply for theological college. When it must have occurred to you that ordination and divorce were still quite some way from being entirely compatible. And then, just when all seemed lost, your husband and his, er…’
‘Secretary,’ Merrily said. ‘As corny as that.’
‘Piled into a viaduct on… the M5, was it? Very quick, apparently. No one suffered.’
‘No.’
‘Except you, of course. Perverse kind of guilt.’
‘Ted was talkative,’ Merrily said grimly.
‘Agonizing over whether you’d wished it on him, to clear the way for your Calling. Ridiculous of course.’
‘Sean was a lawyer,’ Merrily said. ‘I was going to be one too. A barrister. We met at university. We were very idealistic. We were going to work for people who’d been dumped on but couldn’t afford proper representation. Batman and Robin in wigs.’
‘Very commendable.’
‘Sure, but most young lawyers start out like that. It doesn’t last. Certainly didn’t for Sean. He changed his mind, became a solicitor, joined a practice I didn’t care for, then went solo. As for me, I hadn’t even finished the first year before he got me pregnant. Sorry. Unchristian. Before I got pregnant.’
‘You could have resumed, though, couldn’t you? Something happened to turn you away from the law and, er, towards the Lord?’
‘Ted didn’t tell you about that?’
‘He didn’t tell me any of this. Look, let’s go in the lounge bar, get a couple of single malts, and-’
Merrily smiled and moved delicately past him through the double doors. ‘Goodnight, Dermot.’
Jane was aware of sitting in grass, in absolute darkness, wiping her mouth on a tissue she’d found in her jacket, her brain about six miles away and still travelling.
‘Oh God. Oh God. I’m dying.’
‘You ain’t felt nothin’ yet, honeychile.’ Colette’s smokey tone drifted comfortably out of the blackness at her side. ‘You wait till tomorrow.’
‘Where are we?’ Jane sat up.
‘Hey, nice one, Janey. Men these days are so particular about their clothing.’
‘I couldn’t help it.’
‘Don’t spoil it. Jesus, that was so funny.’
‘You could have been raped.’
‘Those hairballs couldn’t summon a decent hard-on with a year’s supply of Playboys and a splint.’
‘Well, messed about then. Oh yuk.’ Her mouth and throat felt rank.
‘Yeah,’ Colette conceded. ‘Maybe messed about.’ She sounded very high, not fully in control.
‘Where are we?’
‘Where they won’t come.’
Jane put out a hand. Touched something cold and knobbly. ‘Come on, where are we?’
‘Relax. It’s a good place.’
‘It’s Powells’ orchard, isn’t it?
Orchard… apples… cider. She felt sick and closed her eyes, leaning back against the scabby tree trunk. Never again, never, never, never.
‘Yeah,’ Colette said. ‘It’s the Powell orchard.’
Jane took a gulp of clean night air. ‘Why’s this a good place? Why won’t they come here?’
‘They won’t come in. They’re shit scared, Janey.’ Colette raised her voice. ‘Scared of… old Edgar.’
A swish of bushes. Jane opened her eyes, looked up and couldn’t see any stars. She could make out the shape of Colette’s white dress now. Just the dress.
You see? They’re there, all right. Four brave country boys. You there, slimeball? But they won’t come any further. Because’ – her voice rising to a kind of whoop – ‘we… are under Edgar Powell’s tree!’
Jane sat up rapidly, inched forward on her bottom, away from the tree trunk.
‘The Apple Tree Man,’ Colette said. ‘The old king of the orchard. I often come here.’
‘On your own?’
‘No, with the Cricket Club. Of course on my own!’
‘Aren’t you scared?’
‘You mean of the ghost of Edgar Powell? Well, actually- Hey, listen, all of you, listen – He’s been seen, OK? He has been seen. I heard some people whispering about it in the restaurant. Old Edgar Powell, the headless farmer. All aglow and hovering about nine inches off the ground.’
‘No. Stop it.’ Jane giggled and shuddered simultaneously. ‘You’re making that up.’
‘Sort of a grey light around him, from his feet to his neck. Situation is that his mind was going before it happened and he doesn’t know why he did it to himself. Doesn’t know he’s dead, probably. So he just walks around the orchard. He Walks. Plod. Plod. Plod.’
‘Colette,’ Jane said. ‘Shut up. Would you mind?’
‘You believe in ghosts, Janey?’
‘No.’
‘Does the Reverend Mummy?’
‘I don’t know. But I do know the Reverend Mummy’ll be out of her mind with worry if she gets back and I’m not there, so I think we should get moving.’
Colette laughed.
‘It’s not funny,’ Jane said. ‘It’s her big working day tomorrow, up at five-thirty. She’s going to kill me.’
Colette said, ‘This grey light, it’s from his feet to his neck, did I just say that? Just his neck. No head. Now where could his head be? I know. Look up. Look up, Janey!’
Jane looked down. She didn’t want to think about Edgar Powell. Instead, she found herself thinking of Wil Williams, poor lush Wil, coming out here on a lovely spring morning to hang himself. Oh God… a night in Suicide Orchard. Goosebumps started forming on her arms.
Colette said slowly, ‘You look up… into the branches… and maybe there’s this wizened old face. Grinning. Gappy old grin. Eyes like grey holes. Most of his chin blown away, though. In these very branches, just over where we are.’
‘Shut up!’
‘Go on… have a look.’
‘Sod off.’
‘Just a little glance, Janey.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘You can look through your fingers if you want.’
‘I don’t want. I want to go home.’
‘I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts.’
‘Leave me alone.’
‘Don’t go all fractious on me, Jane. This is fun.’
‘It’s not.’ Jane hugged herself and tried to see the shapes of apple trees. Or anybody behind one. ‘They’re not here at all, are they? Dean Wall and Gittoes. They never followed us. They’ve gone to get cleaned up.’
‘I don’t know,’ Colette said. ‘Why don’t you take a chance on it? Get up and just walk away, and pray they don’t… grab you!’
Jane screamed. Colette had seized her from behind. Her arms were very cold.
‘Go on, Janey! Edgar will protect you. He’ll put his old mac around your shoulders. Squeeze you tight.’
‘Stop it!’ Jane felt tears coming.
‘Look up. For me. Just look up, once. And then we’ll go.’
‘OK. There. Now can we-?’
‘You didn’t look up.’
‘I did!’
‘You didn’t, Janey,’ Colette said lightly.
‘All right!’
With Colette’s cold arms around her, Jane looked up.