Been a while since he was here last, but it might as well have been yesterday. Nothing changed, see. A new bungalow here, a fancy conservatory there. A few new faces that started out bright and shiny and open… and gradually closed in, grew cloudy-eyed and worried.
Like this boy in the pub. Londoner, sounded like. Gomer had seen it before. They came with their catering certificates and visions of taking over the village inn and turning it into a swish restaurant with fiddly little meals and vintage wine, fifty quid a time. Year or so later, it was back to the ole steak pie and oven chips and a pint of lager — three diners a night if they was lucky, at a fiver apiece.
Gomer sucked the top off his pint of Guinness. Ole Hindwell, he thought, where city dreams comes to die.
‘Not seen you around before,’ the London boy said.
‘That’s on account you en’t been around yourself more’n a week or two,’ Gomer told him.
‘Two years, actually. Two years in March.’ The boy had dandruffy hair, receding a bit, greying a bit. You could tell those two years had felt to him like half a lifetime. He’d be about forty years old; time to start getting anxious.
‘Bought the place off Ronnie Pugh, is it?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Ar.’ Gomer nodded, spying the creeping damp, already blackening walls they must have rewhitewashed when they moved in. ‘Tryin’ to get rid for six year or more, ole Ronnie.’
‘So it appears,’ the boy said, regrets showing through like blisters.
As well they might. Never fashionable, the Forest. No real old money, see. Radnorshire always was a poor county: six times as many sheep as people, and you could count off the mansions on one hand. Not much new money, neither: the real rich folk — film stars, pop stars, stockbrokers, retired drug dealers and the like — went to the Cotswolds, and the medium-rich bought theirselves some rambling black and white over in Herefordshire.
While Radnorshire — no swish shops, no public schools, no general hospital, no towns with much over 3,000 people — collected the pioneer-types. Trading in the semi in Croydon or Solihull for two scrubby acres, a dozen sheep and a crumbly old farmhouse with rotting timbers, loose slates and stone-lice.
And the pensioners. Radnorshire got them too, by the thousand. Couples like Minnie and Frank, buying up the old farm cottages and the cheap bungalows. And then one of them dies and the other’s stuck, all alone in the middle of nowhere, on account of Radnorshire property prices don’t rise much year to year, and the poor buggers can’t afford to move away.
‘Not going up the funeral?’ the boy said. Though the car park was full, there was only himself and Gomer in the Black Lion. Mourners for Menna Weal had parked up outside, stopped in for one drink, and trailed off to the village hall. Funny old setup, doing church services at the village hall. But that was Radnorshire — lose your church and you makes do.
Gomer shook his head. ‘Well, I never knowed her that well, see.’ Truth was, with Min only days in the ground, he couldn’t face it, could he? Good to help the little vicar, but he realized the vicar was only giving him something to do to take his mind off his own loss; she wouldn’t want him attending no funeral.
‘Nor me,’ the boy said. ‘Mrs Weal never came in here. Her husband comes in occasionally.’
‘Picks up his business in the pub, what I yeard. Folks from Off. Friendly local lawyer, sort o’ thing.’ Gomer had heard this from a few people. He didn’t say much, Big Weal, played his cards close, but he put himself about in all the right places.
The boy came over bashful. ‘He picked us up, actually. He was in here when we were looking over the place. Knew the agent, wound up doing the conveyancing.’ He laughed, a bit uncomfortably. ‘Bloke’s so big you don’t feel you dare refuse, know what I mean?’
‘Likely it was the same with poor Mrs Weal,’ Gomer said.
He’d gathered a fair bit of background about Menna from Danny Thomas, the rock-and-roll farmer at Kinnerton who, it turned out, was a distant cousin. Danny had fancied her himself at one time, but Merv Thomas kept her out of the way of men. Selfish bastard, old Merv, especially after his wife passed on; he had to have another woman around doing the things women had been put on God’s earth to do.
Frail, pale little person, Menna, it seemed. All right for washing and cleaning, but too frail for farming, definitely too frail for Merv Thomas’s farm. Sons was what Merv had needed, but never got. So now the Thomas farm had gone to folk from Off, the deal sorted by J.W. Weal who then married the profits. What a bloody waste, Danny Thomas had said, guitar on his knee in the barn, crunching Gomer’s eardrums with something called ‘Smoke on the Water’.
‘Like I said, he never brought her in here.’ The boy leaned over his bar, confidentially. ‘You never saw her round the village neither. We used to wonder if she had agoraphobia or somefing, but I never liked to ask.’
‘Ar.’ Wise attitude. Nobody liked a new landlord nosing into the affairs of local people. ‘Her never had no friends yere, then?’
‘Mrs Prosser, Councillor Prosser’s wife, she used to go there once or twice a week, apparently.’
Judy Prosser. This figured. Judy Prosser was born and raised the other side of the quarry, no more than half a mile from Merv Thomas’s farm. She’d have known the Thomas girls, likely Barbara better than Menna, being nearer her age. Judy Prosser would know the score. Smart girl that one; not much got past her, whereas most everything got past that dull bugger Gareth.
Well, Gomer had always got on well enough with Judy, in the days before Gareth bought his own digger. Likely he’d hang around here, see if she came in the pub after the funeral.
‘My missus went across there once,’ the boy continued.
‘To visit Menna?’
‘They’d be about the same age, near enough, and she reckoned maybe they could be friends. But she got short shrift. Never got further’n the doorstep.’
‘This is the ole rectory?’
‘Blooming great big place for just the two of them. Never seemed to have guests to stay or anyfing, even in the summer. Never went on holidays either.’
‘Solicitor, see,’ Gomer said. ‘Gotter have ’isself a big house. Status in the community. Plus, his ole man likely got a good deal on it when they ditched the church. You drinking…?’
‘Greg. Fanks very much,’ the boy said. ‘I’ll have a half. So you were from round here, originally, Mr-’
‘Gomer Parry Plant Hire,’ Gomer said. ‘Radnor Valley born an’ bred. Used to run a bunch o’ diggers and bulldozers. We done drainage, soakaways, put roads in, all over the valley. My nephew, Nev, he does it now, see.’
‘Oh, yeah, I know. He was filling in after the archaeological digs, yeah? Used to come in for a sandwich and a pint at lunchtime?’
‘Sure t’be.’
‘They were digging all over the place. We all got excited when it came out they’d found an old temple. We fought it was gonna be like Stonehenge and we’d get thousands of tourists. But all it was — it was just a few holes in the ground where there’d been like wooden posts what rotted away centuries ago. Noffing to see, apart from all the stone axe-heads and stuff they dug up. Terrible disappointment.’
‘Ar. Typical Radnorshire tourist attraction, that is.’ Gomer took out his tin to roll a ciggie. ‘Sounds good till you sees it.’
Crossing the Welsh border, you came, unexpectedly, out of darkness into light, Merrily thought, raising herself up in the passenger seat of Sophie’s Saab. The last English town, Kington, with its narrow streets and dark surrounding hills, had been more like a Welsh country town. The hills beyond were densely conifered until the trees thinned to reveal a rotting cathedral of fissured rocks.
And then, suddenly, the Radnor Valley opened up and the whole landscape was washed clean under a sandy sky, and Merrily sank back again, just wanting to go on being driven through the winter countryside, not having to make any decisions… not having to answer difficult questions with a boom-mic hanging over her like a club.
Sophie took a left, and the car began to burrow under high banks and high, naked hedges. As the lanes narrowed, Old Hindwell began to be signposted, but by now they might just as well have followed any vehicle on that road; every car and Land Rover seemed to contain people dressed in black.
‘One forgets,’ Sophie mused, ‘that rural funerals are such social events.’
The lanes seemed to have brought them in a loop, back into conifer country. The official Old Hindwell sign was small and muddied. Just beyond it, set back into a clearing, sat a well-built, stone Victorian house with a small, conical turret at one end. In most of its windows, curtains were drawn; the others probably didn’t have curtains.
‘The old rectory, do you think?’ Sophie said.
‘Weal’s house? You could be right. There’s obviously nobody about. If it is the rectory, we ought to be able to see the old church nearby.’
She peered among the trees, an uneasy mixture of leafless, twisted oaks and dark, thrusting firs.
‘I suppose it must have occurred to you,’ Sophie said, ‘that the old church here might have been the one referred to by that woman on your TV programme.’
‘The pagan church, mmm?’ The road took them through a farm layout — windowless buildings on either side. ‘But let’s not worry about that until someone asks us to.’
The first grey-brown cottages appeared up ahead.
And the cars. The village was clogged with cars.
The pub car park was full, as was the yard in front of what had once been a school. Cars and Land Rovers also lined the two principal lanes, blocking driveways and entrances, until the roads became so narrow that another parked vehicle would have made them impassable. Could it possibly be like this every Sunday?
Sophie slowed for a drab posse of mourners. They crossed the road and filed into a tarmac track between two big leylandii.
‘The village hall,’ Merrily said, unnecessarily.
It stood on what she judged to be the western edge of the village, partly concealed a little way up a conifered hillside, and was accessed by a footpath and steps. Sophie wondered aloud how they got any wheelchairs up there, for all the disabled people who thought Nicholas Ellis’s prayers might cure them.
‘So it’s true then?’ Merrily said. ‘He does healing, too?’
‘I copied cuttings from the local papers onto your computer file.’ Sophie reversed into a field entrance to turn round again in the hope of finding a space. ‘I don’t suppose you had time to read them yet. I don’t know how many people he’s actually supposed to have healed.’
‘You don’t usually get statistics on it.’
Sophie frowned. ‘That sort of thing is just not Anglican, somehow.’
‘No? What about the shrine of St Thomas, in the cathedral?’
‘Not the same thing.’
‘What — because Ellis spent some time in the States?’
‘My information is that he learned his trade with the more extreme kind of Bible Belt evangelist.’ Sophie shuddered. ‘Would you like to borrow my coat? It may not be exactly funereal, but it’s at least…’
‘Respectable?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Sophie said. ‘I didn’t mean-’
‘Of course you didn’t.’ When Merrily smiled her face felt so stiff with fatigue that it hurt. ‘If anyone does notice me, I could pretend to be a poor single-parent whom Mr Weal defended on a shoplifting charge.’
When the strangers came in, Gomer was getting the local take on the planting of Menna Weal in the rectory garden.
‘Most people couldn’t equate it wiv him being a lawyer and into property,’ Greg said. ‘Who’s gonna wanna buy a house wiv a bleedin’ great tomb? They say he’ll leave it to his nephew who’s started in the firm, but would you wanna live in a house wiv your dead auntie in the garden?’
Gomer wondered how he’d feel if his Min was buried in the back garden, and decided it wouldn’t be right for either of them. In the churchyard she wasn’t alone, see. Not meaning the dead; it was the coming and going of the living.
‘But what I reckon…’ Greg said. ‘That building’s right down the bottom of the garden, OK? You could lop it off, make it separate. A little park, with a footpath to it. The Weal memorial garden. I reckon that’s what he’s got in mind.’
‘Nobody ask him?’
‘Blimey, you don’t ask him nothing. Not even the time — you’d get a bleedin’ bill. It’s like there’s a wall around him, wiv an admission charge. And no first names. It’s Mr Weal. Or J.W., if you’re a friend.’
‘He got many friends?’
‘He knows a lot of people. That’s the main fing in his profession.’ Greg turned to his two new customers. ‘Yes, gents…’
They wore suits — but not funeral suits. Both youngish fellows, in their thirties. One was a bit paunchy, with a half-grown beard; he ordered two pints.
‘Not here for the funeral?’ Greg said.
‘Ah, that’s what it is.’ The plump, bearded one paid for their drinks. ‘Must be somebody important, all those cars.’
‘Oh, that’s not unusual. There’s a mass of cars every Sunday. Popular man, our minister. You get people coming from fifty miles away.’
Gomer looked up, gobsmacked. Most of these folks were not here for Menna at all, but part of some travelling fan club for the rector? Bloody hell.
‘Hang on,’ the plump feller with the beard said. ‘Are there two churches, then?’
‘Kind of,’ Greg said. ‘Our minister uses the village hall for his services.’
‘But the old one, the old church — that’s disused, right?’
‘Long time ago. It’s a ruin.’
‘Can you still get to it?’
‘You probably can,’ Greg said, ‘but it’s on private land. It’s privately owned now.’
‘Only my mate wanted to take some pictures. With permission, of course. We don’t want to go sneaking about. Who would we ask? Who owns it?’
‘Well, it’s new people, actually — only been moved in a week or so. There’s a farmhouse, St Michael’s. If you go back along the lane, past the post office, and on out of the village, you’ll see a big farm, both sides of the road, then there’s a track off to your left. If you go over a little bridge and you get to the old rectory, on your right, you’ve gone too far.’
‘They all right, the people?’
‘Sure,’ Greg said. ‘Young couple. He’s American, an artist — book illustrator. Yeah, they’re fine.’
‘What’s the name?’
Gomer was suspicious by now. Gomer was always suspicious of fellers in suits asking questions. Not Greg, though; suspicious landlords didn’t sell many drinks.
‘Oh blimey, let me think. Goodfellow. Goodbody? Somefing like that.’
The paunchy bloke nodded. ‘Thanks, mate, we’ll go and knock on their door.’
‘You can take a picture of my pub, if you like,’ Greg said. ‘What is it, magazine, holiday guide?’
The two men looked at each other, swapping grins.
‘Something like that,’ said the one who did the talking.
The village hall was like one of those roadside garages built in the 1950s, with a grey-white facade and a stepped roof. From its summit projected a perspex cross which would obviously light up at night. Conifers crowded in on the building, so you had the feeling of a missionary chapel in the jungle.
It was coming up to 3.45 p.m., the sky turning brown, the air raw. As Sophie drove away, Merrily felt unexpectedly apprehensive. From inside, as she walked up the steps, came the sound of a hymn she didn’t recognize.
Below her, Old Hindwell was laid out in a V-shape. Beyond one arm arose the partly afforested hump which, Sophie had told her, was topped by the Iron Age hill fort, Burfa Camp. The northern horizon was broken by the shaven hills of Radnor Forest. The small, falling sun picked up the arc of a thin river around the boundary, like an eroded copper bangle.
Across the village, divided from it by a fuzz of bare trees, she could see the tower of the old church. She wondered if Nicholas Ellis would have made Old Hindwell his main base if that church had still been in use. Arguably not, since using the community hall was a good demonstration of his personal creed: the Church was people, ancient churches were museums.
The hymn she didn’t know, sung unaccompanied by organ or piano, came to an end, and then there was the sound of a communal subsidence into rickety chairs. Merrily pushed open the double doors and went in.
Into darkness. Into a theatre with the house lights down. But the stage — she stifled a gasp — was lit, as though for a Nativity play. Just not Anglican, somehow. Gently, she pulled the doors together behind her and stood under a cracked green exit sign.
There was a row of shadowed heads and shoulders no more than four feet in front of her. The chairs were arranged like theatre-in-the-round under the girdered ceiling. The industrial window blinds were all lowered.
It was alarmingly like the Livenight studio, and the audience must have been at least as big: maybe two hundred people, some on wooden benches pushed back to the walls. Spotlights in the ceiling lit the stage where stood a man in a white, monkish robe, head bowed, eyes cast down to hands loosely clasped on his stomach.
Merrily’s first, disappointing glimpse of the Reverend Nicholas Ellis was a definite so-what moment.
‘… is a particularly poignant occasion for me,’ she heard. ‘It’s only weeks since Menna came to me, with her loving husband, to be baptized again, to pledge herself to the Lord Jesus in the presence of the Holy Spirit. I wonder… if somehow… she knew.’
His face was bland and shining, his mouth wide, like a letter box. His light brown hair was brushed straight back, a modest ponytail disappearing into the folds of his monk’s cowl. Monastic gear was less unorthodox than it used to be for Church of England ministers, but in dazzling white this was hardly a sign of humility. Too messianic for Merrily. His words rang coldly in the factory acoustic.
‘I conducted the solemn but joyful service of rebaptism at their home. And on that day the very air was alive with hope and rejoicing, and these two souls were blessed beneath the wings of angels.’
From the shadows, someone, a man, cried out — involuntarily, it seemed, like a hiccup — ‘Praise God!’ As though the heavenly host had suddenly burst through the ceiling.
Nicholas Ellis was silent for a moment. Merrily couldn’t make out his expression because the spotlights in the ceiling were aimed not at him but at the uncovered coffin.
Lidless! In the American style, Menna Weal lay in an open casket. Wrapped in her shroud. Her face looked like marble under the lights. A curtain of shadows surrounded her.
Merrily didn’t like this, found it eerie. She looked for Barbara Buckingham in the congregation, but in this light it was hopeless. How could Barbara, wherever she was, stand this performance? How could any of them?
Eerie — what a funeral should never be.
Nicholas Ellis said, ‘And it is to that same loving home that, in a short time, Menna’s body will return. The final laying to rest of these earthly remains will be a small private ceremony which, in the context of that loving relationship, is as it should be.’
Merrily saw the seated figure of J.W. Weal, hunched like a big rock, gazing steadily at the body of his wife. Her thoughts were carried back to the county hospital, that first sight of him with his bowl of water and his cloth. An act of worship?
‘Let us thank God for love,’ Ellis said, ‘when the black dragon wings of evil beat above our heads and the night air carries the stench of Satan.’
Merrily wrinkled her nose.
‘… let us remember that only the strong light of love can bring us through the long hours of darkness. Now let us all rise and, with Menna and Jeffery together in our hearts, sing number two on our hymn sheet, “Take Me, Lord, To Your Golden Palace”.’
The lights blinked on, so that they could all read the words. Everyone rose, with a mass scraping of metal chair legs that was almost a shriek, and Merrily saw, at the front, one broad head thrust above all the others. J.W. looking down on the remains of his wife.
A statement of ownership, Barbara had said. Possession is nine points of the law.
Merrily found herself outside in the cold again, feeling slightly shocked.
She stopped about halfway down the steps, with her back to a Scots pine tree. The sand colour in the sky had all but disappeared, washed under the rapid, grey estuary of dusk. Below her, Old Hindwell settled into its umbered shadows. Merrily stood watching for the lights of Sophie’s Saab, listening for its engine.
Just not Anglican, somehow.
You could say that again. She sank her hands far into her coat pockets.
It had been a singalong, gospelly, country-and-western hymn. It was cloying, trite — no worse but certainly no better than the stilted Victorian hymns which Merrily had been trying for months to squeeze out of her services. She’d had no hymn sheet, but the dipping of the house lights told her when the last verse had finished. Then words that were not on the hymn sheet took over — when, in the darkness, the tune and the rhythm disappeared but the singing itself did not stop.
Merrily stood silent, not having been exposed for quite some years to this phenomenon: the language of the angels according to some evangelists. Nonsense words, bubbling and flowing and ululating between slackened jaws.
Tongues. The gift of. The sign that the Holy Spirit was here in Old Hindwell village hall.
Right now, she was in no position to dispute this. It wasn’t the hymn or its ghostly coda which had brought her out here, nor the sight of the silent, sombre Jeffery Weal, his gaze still fixed on his wife while the congregation summoned angels to waft her spirit into paradise.
It was just that, during the hymn, while the lights were on, she’d had an opportunity to investigate the congregation, row by row, and Barbara Buckingham was definitely not there. And while that meant she hadn’t had to listen to Ellis’s Gothic nonsense and stand in fuming silence while all around her sang themselves into a religious stupor, it did raise a possible problem.
Barbara was a determined woman. She had a serious grudge against this area, arising from a deprived childhood, which had become narrowed and focused into a hatred of the lumbering, sullen, slow-moving, single-minded Jeffery Weal.
Suppose she was already at Weal’s house? Outside somewhere, waiting for the mourners at the small private ceremony that would follow.
Merrily hurried down the rest of the steps. After what she’d seen in there, she too wanted very much to know how this was going to end.