To Dream of the Dead (20 page)

That
was how much of a socialist Morrell was. Right now, curled up on the rescued sofa in a corner of the sixth-form leisure suite, Jane just couldn’t wait to leave this lousy place for good.

‘You thinking about sex again, Jane?’

Sweaty Rees Crawford chalking his snooker cue, getting in some final practise for this afternoon’s Big Match, the final of the Sixth Form Championship in which he was playing Jordan Hare – Ethan Williams taking bets on the outcome. Jane couldn’t decide.

‘Look,’ she snarled, as her mobile went off inside her airline bag. ‘Don’t you go projecting your sad fantasies on me, Crawford. You screw that thing around much faster, there won’t be any chalk left. Who’s this?’ Snapping into the phone.

‘You don’t sound too happy, Jane.’

‘Coops?’

‘Oh,
Coops
,’ Rees Crawford said, leering at her, and Jane gave him the finger.

‘It
is
OK to call you now, is it?’ Neil Cooper said. ‘Your lunch break, right?’

‘Sure.’ Not like it would matter anyway, the way she was feeling. ‘It’s fine.’

‘Only I said I’d keep you up to speed. It’s starting tomorrow.’

‘The dig?’ Jane gripping the phone tight. ‘The dig’s
happening
?’

‘Officially starting tomorrow.’

‘So Bill Blore . . .’

‘He’s here. Don’t say wow.
Please
do not say wow.’

‘He’s in the village?’

‘He’s actually been over a few times, doing geophysics, making sure we haven’t got it all wrong and what’s under there are concrete lamp-posts or something. You, er . . . want to meet him?’

‘Me?’ Jane lowered her feet to the floor. ‘You’re kidding, right?’

‘Actually,’ Coops said, ‘he wants to meet you.’

‘Stop taking the piss. I’m not in the mood.’

‘No, really. He’s meeting all the people involved with Coleman’s Meadow from the outset. You
were
the outset. What time’s your school bus get in – half-four? Should still be
some
light. So if you want to come over to the site when you get home?’

‘Wow, you
are
serious.’

‘All I’d say, Jane,’ Coops said, ‘is, don’t get carried away. Whatever he tells you,
don’t
get carried away.’

‘You know me, Coops,’ Jane said, tingling. ‘Ms Cool.’

On a good day, Merrily would have been leaving the church nursing some new and unforeseen possibility, the softly gleaming ingot of an idea. Saved again.

Or at least not feeling sick with dread.

When she walked out, in Jane’s red wellies, under the dripping lych-gate, it was like Ledwardine was drifting away from her. All its colours washing out, daytime lights in the shops burning wanly behind the sepia screen of slanting rain. Gutted by the feeling that the village was getting bigger and, at the same time, more amorphous, more remote.

Like God?

All she’d seen, in meditation, were the small crises she’d failed to react to, the issues she’d back-burnered. All coming together like coalescing clouds, making darkness.

Crossing to the Eight Till Late, she saw a pale orange poster in one of the mullioned windows of the pub on the edge of the square.

Christmas Eve at The Black Swan Inn.

Ledwardine’s own

LOL ROBINSON

(‘The Baker’s Lament’)

in concert.

9 p.m.

All welcome.

God, Barry hadn’t wasted any time, had he?
All welcome
. Would that work? Already she could hear the background noise from the bars, people talking and laughing while Lol, bent over his guitar, murmured his tribute to Lucy Devenish whom most of the Swan’s clientele had either never known or considered mad.

From Brenda Prosser at the shop, she bought a box of All Gold for Sarah Clee.

‘They must be mad.’ Brenda apparently continuing a conversation she’d been having with the previous customer who’d already
left the store. ‘Merrily – pardon me for being nosy, but do you get properly recompensed? I mean for all these flowers and fruit and chocolates you keep buying for sick parishioners?’

‘Erm . . . no.
Who
must be mad?’

‘Those archaeologists. All turning up this morning in their Land Rovers. And a TV camera team, too – what’s that programme . . .?

‘
Trench One
? They’ve arrived? I didn’t know that.’

‘And a big tall crane. We didn’t know there was going to be TV. What can they hope to do in this weather?’

‘I actually think they like it, in a way,’ Merrily said. ‘Makes it look more dramatic on TV if they’re fighting the elements and they’re all covered in mud. Makes archaeology look like . . . trench warfare?’

‘Rather them than me.’ Brenda shivered. ‘All the farmers have moved their sheep from within about half a mile of the river, did you know?’

‘Doesn’t surprise me.’

‘Give Sarah my love, will you?’ Brenda said.

Not possible, as it turned out. The rain had slowed, but there was no promise of brightness in the swollen sky when Merrily reached the age-warped cottage in Blackberry Lane, with its window boxes of yellow and purple winter pansies. Brian Clee, retired postman, had the front door open before she was through the garden gate.

‘
I’m
sorry, Merrily, should’ve rung you.’ He looked worn out, frazzled ‘She was only took in this morning, see. Another ward closure – some infection. Half the hip ops postponed.’

‘That means she’ll be in over Christmas?’

Merrily followed Brian Clee into the house, his white head bent under the bowed beams in the hall. She left Jane’s red wellies on the doormat, took off her coat and stayed for a cup of tea, listening to Brian’s opinion of the county hospital, its unfriendly, automated rip-off, too-small car park, its smoking ban in the grounds so you couldn’t even have a fag to calm your nerves.

‘She’ll be fine, Brian. We prayed for her last weekend, and we’ll do it again on Sunday.’

‘Thank you, Merrily.’

Brian nodding as she left him with the chocolates. Not displaying much conviction, though, that virulent hospital infections could be neutralised by prayer.

The word ‘prayer’ will, in turn, reflect memories of something quaint and rather childish. The nightlight on the bedside table. Something grown out of.

‘
Sod off, Stooke!
’

Merrily stopped in the lane. Had she actually said that out loud? She was furious at herself for letting this get to her. There was no earthly reason . . .

And yet there was. She kept forgetting this – Stooke’s wife coming on to Jane like that, asking too many questions.
That
was a reason. She’d even Googled Leonora Winterson, finding next to nothing. No picture, anyway; Lensi took pictures rather than appeared in them – and certainly not with her husband. In fact, Google Images had only one shot of him – the ubiquitous Charles Manson pose. His website said he didn’t do TV, and cameras were banned from his bookshop signings.

I’m not a personality, just an investigative journalist who investigated a god and found two thousand years of lies, fabrication, abuse, corruption, hypocrisy . . .

Couldn’t get rid of him. Like he was her nemesis or something. Merrily splashed angrily through a chain of puddles into the churchyard, arriving at the modest grave of Lucy Devenish.

It had come to this.

‘I don’t know what the hell
I’m
doing here, Lucy. I’m supposed to minister to the living.’

Standing in the grey-brown rain with her bare hands on the rounded stone, remembering the first time she’d encountered the indomitable Miss Devenish, on an ill-fated night of wassailing in the orchard. Lucy with her hooked Red Indian’s nose, wearing her trademark poncho and a sense of unease.

Amply justified that night. During the traditional loosing of shotguns through the branches, to promote a good year of apples, old Edgar Powell had blown his own head off. They used to say – kids, mainly – that Edgar haunted the orchard, and if you looked up into the branches of the Apple Tree Man, the oldest tree, you might see him. The tree had been chopped down. A mistake, Jane had said; old Edgar could appear anywhere in the orchard now, smiling through the branches and the blood. It didn’t scare pagan Jane.

You know what, Lucy?
Merrily’s grip tightening on the head-stone.
I think I’m losing it. Thought it was going all right. The regular congregations weren’t exactly huge, but the Sunday-evening meditation . . . word was spreading and we were getting people actually interested in searching for something inside themselves. I was finally beginning to see what you meant by the orb
.

Orb
was a word Lucy had borrowed from Traherne, the 17th-century poet, drunk on Herefordshire. Lucy using it to describe the ambience of Ledwardine, the confluence of tradition, custom, history and spirit. The orb was an apple, shiny and wholesome.

Who’s poisoning the apple, Lucy?

Blinking back tears, she turned away. This was Jane’s place. Jane did the dead. Jane, who felt herself so far from death as to be able to deal with it almost lovingly. Merrily walked away, following the route Jane had identified as a coffin path, a spirit road, into the lower orchard where Edgar Powell had died.

Haunted or not, the orchard in winter was a reminder of loss. The village had once been encircled by a density of cider-apple trees, nurtured, it was said, by the fairies whose lights could be seen glimmering at twilight among the branches.

If there were lights now, they were corpse candles. The trees were slowly dying off, gradually getting cremated on cosmetic open fires in the Black Swan.

A village of smoke and ghosts. The recently dead and the long, long dead.

Curiously, she was feeling calmer now. Standing on the path inside a rough circle of spidery, winter-bare apple trees, thinking about Lol who would sometimes play Nick Drake’s tragically
prescient song ‘Fruit Tree’ which suggested that, for some people – for Nick, certainly – nothing would flourish before death.

Merrily looked up. With the trees gradually getting turned into scented ashes, the only active life forms here were the unearthly balls of mistletoe, suspended like alien craft high among the scabbed and blackened branches, always just out of reach.

Kisses for Christmas, out of reach. She walked on, knowing exactly what she was doing now, where she was going.

When you left behind what remained of the orchard, the fields opened up below you. One was Coleman’s Meadow with a temporary barbed-wire fence around it, a parking area marked out with orange tape, and something like a fairground on it now: a dark green tent, like an army canteen, two caravans, two Land Rovers and one of those cranes that they used for a cherry-picker TV camera. About a dozen people in waterproofs around a mini-JCB, laughter rising frailly through the rain. Cole Farm itself, served by a narrow lane, was wedged into a clearing in the trees ascending Cole Hill. But Cole Barn was exposed on the edge of a small field adjoining the meadow, with a pool of flood water in front, beginning to encroach on a tarmac parking area.

Well, it was
called
Cole Barn, but it had never been an actual barn, according to Gomer Parry, just an old tractor shed. So there was no glazed-over bay, like you usually found with barn conversions, just an ordinary front door, probably not very old.

From which a woman emerged. Turquoise waterproof, coppery hair. She came out quickly and ran through the squally rain to a new-looking black Mercedes 4×4 parked in a turning circle. Merrily stood on the edge of the dripping orchard, as the engine growled and the 4×4 spun, skidding and squirting gravel, into a dirt track full of puddles that led into the lane.

It was, she guessed, quite an angry exit. She herself could now make a discreet one, turning away and melting back among the geriatric apple trees.

Or she could go down, knock on the door and, if anyone was in, do the bumbling-vicar bit. Welcome to the parish, Mr Winterson.

You just wanner
. . .

Before she could reconsider, she’d scrambled down to open up
the field gate, and then she was crossing the strip of rough grass spiked with the skeletons of last year’s docks, to the front door of Cole Barn.

. . .
See if he’s got little horns
.

‘B
ASICALLY,’
S
TEVE
F
URNEAUX
said, ‘I liked Clem. He was like an old bulldog. Barked at you from a distance and then he’d gradually come sniffing around, always suspicious, until you threw him a biscuit or two.’

Gilbies was in an alley behind High Town, the tower and spire of St Peter’s church pushing up suddenly behind it like a rocket on a pad. A bar, for the upwardly mobile. By the time Bliss had got there Steve had eaten; Bliss had bought coffees.

‘We coped with him,’ Steve said. ‘You couldn’t actually heave him out of the way, but, like I say, you found ways of getting round him.’