Midwinter of the Spirit (33 page)

If it is true that you have been appointed Exorcist then perhaps you should start by cleansing the Filthy Soul of Your Own Daughter.

It was unsigned. Quite expensively done, judged by the standards set by these creeps. Usually the paper was cheap and crumpled, and whereas most of them were pushed into a letterbox, either here or at the church, this one had come by post.

Surprising how many anonymous letters you got. Or perhaps male ministers didn’t get so many – quite a few of these letters muttered that you should stop pretending to be a priest and go out and get yourself a husband like ordinary, decent women did. One or two of them also offered to give her what ordinary, decent women were getting, but she evidently wasn’t. She picked these ones up by one corner and washed her hands afterwards.

Some of them she felt she ought to file, or give to the police in case other women were receiving similar messages and the sender ever got nicked. Some she really didn’t want to take to the police, in case anyone at the station suspected there was no smoke without fire.

But most of them got burned in the grate or the nearest ashtray.

Merrily flicked the Zippo. It would be true, of course. Jane had laid it on the line that altogether fateful afternoon in the coffee lounge at the Green Dragon.
The Church has always been on this kind of paternalistic power-trip, 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
.

Psychic fairs were where people went in search of ‘Real Practical Spirituality’. Merrily didn’t doubt that what the letter said was essentially true. It would explain a lot of things, not least the allure of Rowenna.

She knew the Devil’s Picturebook was the tarot – a doorway.

Et tu, flower
. She felt choked by acrid fog. Her head ached.

No option now.

She sent the Bishop his e-mail, walked out of the office and down the stone stairs.

PART THREE

PROJECTION

30

Self-pity

S
HE FELT COLD
, and dangerously light inside, as though a dead weight had rolled away, but releasing nothing. She stepped through a tide of pensioners, a coach party heading towards the Cathedral. The sky was overcast. Nobody seemed to be smiling any more. One of the old men looked a bit like Dobbs.

She should tell Dobbs that it was OK now. That he could go ahead and recover. She’d do that, yes. She’d go to the hospital at visiting time and tell him.
Jesus Christ was the first exorcist; the pattern is unbroken
. This would draw a final line under everything.

Unless Huw was there, the bastard, with his holy water and his candles.

Jesus!

The city swirled around her in the fog, undefined. She mustn’t look back at the Cathedral. It was no part of her life now. She should go back to her own parish and deal with the church break-in. Head Ted Clowes off at the pass. At Ledwardine – her home.

Or not?

Sweat sprang out on her forehead. She felt insubstantial, worthless. She had no home, no lover, no spiritual adviser, no…

Daughter?

Failed her. Too bound up in your own conceits. Sending her into the arms of New Age occult freaks, a reaction to living with a…

Pious bitch?

Her dead husband Sean had been the first to call her that. After a day quite like this, a headachy day, the desperate day when she’d found out just how bent he was, and screamed at him for his duplicity and his greed, and he’d screamed back:
I was doing it for you, you pious bitch
.

She hated that word. Don’t ever be
pious
. Smoke, curse, never be afraid to say
Jesus Christ!
in fury or astonishment – at least it keeps the name in circulation. Strive to be a good person, a good priest, never a
pious
priest.

Once, up in Liverpool, she’d conducted a youth service wearing a binliner instead of a cassock. It was half a generation too late; some of the kids were appalled, others sneered. Not so easy not being
pious
.

Merrily found herself back on the green, watching the Cathedral placidly swallowing the coach party. The fog was lifting, but the sky behind it was darkening. She had no idea which way to go next.

Suppose she’d backed away from the lamplit path and supported Sean, had said,
Let’s fight this together
? Would he have made the effort for her, found some fresh, uncorrupted friends, a new but much older secretary? Would he, in the end, have
survived
? Might she have saved his life by not following the Path of the Pious Bitch into the arms of God?

She stood at the barrier preventing cars turning into Church Street. She was panting, thoughts racing again. Wasn’t it true that having women in the priesthood was creating a new divide between the sexes – because men could love both God and their wives, but no truly heterosexual woman could love both God and a man with sufficient intensity to make both relationships potent? Was it all a sham? Was it true that all she was searching for in God were those qualities lacking in ordinary men? Or, at least, in Sean.

Oh
Christ
. Merrily flattened herself against a brick wall facing the side of the Cathedral. The headache had gone; she wished it was back, she wanted pain. Fumbling at her dogcollar, she took it off and put it in her bag. A cold breeze seemed to leap immediately to her throat, like a stab of admonishment.

She zipped up her coat, holding its collar together, turned her back on the Cathedral and walked quickly into Church Street.

Lol saw Merrily from his window, through the drifting fog: gliding almost drunkenly along the street, peering unseeingly into shop windows newly edged with Christmas glitter.

He ran downstairs, past the bike, past Nico’s sepulchral drone and the very interested gaze of Big Viv.

‘Merrily?’ Close up, she seemed limp, drained.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Hi.’ And he was shocked because she looked as vague as Moon had often been, but that was just him, wasn’t it – his paranoia?

But paranoia hadn’t created the shadows and creases, the dark hair all mussed, dark eyes moist, make-up escaping.

He looked around. Not the flat now – it had been too awkward there the other night, as if foreshadowed by the death of Moon.

She let him steer her into the corner café where he and Jane had eaten chocolate fudge cake.

There was no one else in the back room. A brown pot of tea between them. On the wall above them was a framed Cézanne poster – baked furrowed earth under a heat haze.

The letter lay folded on the table, held down by the sugar bowl, revealing only the words ‘known that such events attract members of Occult Groups in search of converts’.

‘But surely,’ he said, ‘they mainly just attract ordinary people who read their daily horoscopes. It doesn’t mean she’s sacrificing babies.’

But he thought of seeing Jane and the other girl coming out of Pod’s last night, long after it was closed. And Jane pretending, for the first time ever, not to have seen him.

‘If this was London,’ she said, ‘I could get away with it. Or if Jane was grown-up and living somewhere else. If she’d even been up-front about it, I could have—’

‘Merrily, it means nothing. I can’t believe you’ve just quit because of this. It’s the Bishop, isn’t it?’

‘Sorry?’

‘He made another move on you, right?’

‘No.’ She smiled. ‘He’s been… fine. And anyway I might have taken that the wrong way: late at night, very tired. No, I’m just… paranoid.’ She held up her half-smoked cigarette as though using it as a measure of something. ‘Also I have filthy habits and a deep reservoir of self-pity.’

He nodded at the cigarette. ‘What are the others, then?’

Merrily tipped it into the ashtray. He saw she was blushing. She had no filthy habits.

‘Just… tell me to pull myself together, OK?’

‘I like you being untogether. It makes me feel responsible and kind of protective – sort of like a real bloke.’

She smiled.

‘So what are you going to do now?’

‘Go back to my flock and try to be a good little shepherd. The Deliverance ministry was a wrong move. I thought it was something you could pick up as you went along. I didn’t realize… I’m a fraud, Lol. I don’t know what I’m doing, let too many people down. I even let you down. I said I’d go and see your friend, Moon…’ She looked vague. ‘Was that yesterday?’

‘Mmm.’

‘I mean, I could still see her. I’m still a minister, of sorts.’

‘She’s not there now,’ he said too quietly.

‘Lol?’ She looked directly at him for the first time since sitting down at the table.

‘She died.’

Her face froze up behind the smoke.

‘No!’ He put up his hands. ‘She was dead long before you could’ve got there. There was nothing you could have done.’

And he told her about it: about the Iron Age sword… about the old newspaper report… why Denny had concealed the truth – why Denny
said
he’d concealed the truth… why Dick thought they should let it lie.

She kept shaking her head, lips parted. He was relieved at the way outrage had lifted her again.

‘Lol, I’ve never heard anything so… There is something deeply, deeply wrong here, don’t you think?’

‘But what can you do about it? We can’t bring her back. And we can’t find out what was in her mind.’

‘What about this book she was supposed to be writing?’

‘Supposed to be, but I don’t think she’d written a word. But if there is anything lying around, Denny will find it. And if it says anything he doesn’t like, he’ll destroy it without telling anyone.’

‘Will you be called as a witness at the inquest?’

‘I expect so. I was the first to… the first to enter the bathroom.’

‘And what will you say?’

‘I’ll just answer their questions. That should cover about
half
of the truth.’

‘And the rest of it
can’t
be the truth, because it has no rationality.’ She looked down into her cup as if there might be a message for her in the tea-leaves. ‘I’m so sorry, Lol.’

The point at which people say,
Ah well, one of those things
. Except this wasn’t.

After a while, she said, ‘What if all your working life is concerned with things that three-quarters of the civilized world now consider irrational?’

‘That could be stressful,’ he said. There were lights on in the café now, but they didn’t seem to reach Merrily.
What
was she not telling him?

She said, ‘You know why some vicars busy themselves constantly with youth work and stuff like that? It’s so that if, at any point, they realize there’s no God, they can think:
Well, at least I haven’t been wasting my time
.’

‘Cynical.’

‘Rational. For the same reasons, some Deliverance ministers prefer to think of themselves as Christian psychologists.’

‘Psychology is wonderful,’ Lol said grimly. ‘Look how much it helped Moon.’

‘Perhaps she had the wrong therapist.’

‘We must get her a better one next time. I think
you
could have helped Moon. I wish to God I’d told you about her earlier. And I think… I think there must be a lot of other people you could help.’

‘Thanks, but you’re being kind.’ She dropped the cigarettes and lighter into her bag, then folded up the anonymous letter very tightly.

This was not good: nothing had been resolved. He sensed that when she returned to her flock she would be different: a sad shepherd exiled, unfulfilled, into a community that wasn’t a community any more. None of them were; village life, like he’d said in his song, was no more than a sweet watercolour memory. She’d grow old and lined, and end up hating God.

‘Listen.’ Lol lowered his voice to an urgent whisper. ‘My life is pathetic. I’m a failed performer, a mediocre songwriter, an ex-mental patient who can’t keep a woman. My sole function on this earth at the present time appears to be producing an album for a semi-talented, obnoxious little git who’s blackmailing his father. Three days ago, a woman I couldn’t love but needed to help just… shut me out in the snow. And then slashed both her wrists. Now somebody who I care about is holding out on me in exactly the same way. What does this tell me?’

Mega self-pity
, he thought as she sat down again.
Occasionally it works
.

Merrily said, looking down at the table, ‘Sometimes I think you’re the only friend I have left.’

‘Friend,’ he repeated sadly.

She met his eyes. ‘It’s a big word, Lol.’

He nodded, although he knew there were bigger ones.

Outside, it was already going dark, and the fog had never really lifted.

31

Old Tiger

J
ANE STOOD ON
the vicarage lawn, Ethel the cat watching her from inside the kitchen window. There was fog still around, but a paler patch almost directly overhead; the moon was probably just there, behind layer upon layer of steamy cloud.

Right, then.

She’d been told that it was OK to do this from the inside of the house, but she didn’t feel quite right about that. Not with the moon, somehow. And it
was
a vicarage. Whereas the garden bordered the old and sinister orchard which, though it belonged to the Church, had been here, in essence, far longer. Pre-Christian almost certainly.

The night was young but silent around Jane. You could usually hear some sounds from the marketplace or the Black Swan, but not many people seemed to have ventured out tonight. Also, the fog itself created this lovely padded hush. It lined the hills and blocked in the spaces between the trees in the dense woods above Ledwardine, as if the whole valley had acquired these deep, resonant walls like a vast auditorium.