She was like an elderly bushbaby in some ankle-length mohair thing in dark brown. She was waiting for him in the residents’ lounge, where they were now alone – all the others at church, she said, ‘bargaining for an afterlife’. She did not want to know anything about him.
‘Waste of time at my age, Robinson; it’s all forgotten by lunchtime.’
Lol didn’t think so. Her eyes were diamond-bright behind round glasses a bit like his own.
‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I prefer to make up my own mind.’ And she peered at him, eyes unfocusing. ‘ Oh, what a confused boy you are. So confused, aren’t you? And blocked, too. There’s a blockage in your life. I should like to study you at length, but you haven’t the time, have you? Not today. You’re in a frightful hurry.’
Lol nodded, bemused.
‘Slow down,’ she said. ‘Think things out, or you’ll land in trouble. Especially dealing with the Purefoys. Do you understand me?’
‘Not yet.’ Presumably Sorrel Podmore had given her the background over the phone. Which was good: it saved time.
She’d collected all the cushions from the other chairs and had them piled up around her. She was like a tiny, exotic dowager.
‘What do you know about the Purefoys?’
‘Virtually nothing.’
‘That’s a good place from which to start. It’s a very, very unpretty story.’
Jane had stood at the bedroom window for a long time, still feeling – in spite of everything – an urge to salute the Eternal Spiritual Sun.
Without this and the other exercises, without the Pod, there was a large spiritual hole in her life. She wasn’t sure she was ready for Mum’s God. Although part of her wanted to go to morning service, if only to show penitence and solidarity, another part of her felt it would be an empty gesture – hypocrisy.
And, anyway, she was, like, burning up with anger, and if the Eternal Spiritual Sun – wherever the bastard was these days – could add fuel to that, this was OK by Mystic Jane.
While Mum was conducting her morning service, Jane pulled on the humble duffel and walked into still-frozen Ledwardine, across the market square where, at close to midday, the cobbles were still white and lethal. She moved quickly, did not slip, fury making her surefooted. Rage at what they were trying to do to Mum – and what they’d already done.
They? Who? Who, apart from Rowenna?
With whom there was unfinished business.
Jane walked down to the unfashionable end of the village, where long-untreated timbers sagged and the black and white buildings looked grey with neglect.
She and Mum had sat up until nearly two a.m., hunched over this big, comfort fire of coal sweetened with apple logs. Like old times together, except it wasn’t – because Mum was dead worried, and you could understand it. She’d talked – frankly, maybe for the first time – about the dilemmas constantly thrown up by Deliverance. The need to believe and also disbelieve; and the knowledge that you were completely on your own – especially with a self-serving, hypocritical bastard of a bishop like Mick Hunter.
But she wasn’t alone now, oh no.
Jane stopped outside the Ox. The pulsing oranges and greens of gaming machines through the windows were brighter than the pub sign outside. This was as near as Ledwardine came to Las Vegas.
Jane went in. She was pretty sure they would be here. They’d been coming here since they were about thirteen, and they’d be coming till they were old and bald and never had a life.
There was just one bar: not big, but already half full. Most of the men in there were under thirty, most of the women under twenty, dregs of the Saturday-night crowd. Though the pub was old and timbered, the lighting was garish. A jukebox was playing Pearl Jam. It was loud enough, but the voice from halfway down the room was louder.
‘WATKINS!’
Right.
Wall and Gittoes were at a table by the jukebox, hugging pints of cider. Jane strolled over to the fat, swollen-mouthed slimeball and the bony, spotty loser who had once, she recalled, expressed a wish to have unholy communion with her mother.
‘I want to talk to you, Danny – outside.’
Danny Gittoes looked up slowly and blinked. ‘I’m drinking. And it’s cold out there.’
Jane took a chance. She’d gone to sleep thinking about this and she’d woken up thinking about it. If she was wrong, well… she just didn’t bloody deserve to be wrong.
‘Must have been cold in the church, too,’ she said.
‘What are you on about, Watkins?’ Gittoes had this narrow face, dopey eyes.
Dean Wall rose and tucked his belly into his belt. ‘If the lady wants to go outside, let’s do it.’
‘Siddown, Wall,’ Jane snarled, indicated Gittoes. ‘Just… that.’
‘Got no secrets from Dean,’ Gittoes said.
‘I believe you.’ Jane put on her grimmest smile. ‘Rowenna and I, we don’t have secrets either. For Christmas, I’m buying her a whole case of extra-strength mouthwash.’
‘Fetch me a map,’ demanded Athena White. ‘There’s a stack of them in the hall. Fetch me an OS map of Hereford. I want to locate this Dinedor Hill.’
Miss White seemed much happier now she knew precisely what this was about. And what he was about. The process of knowing him – and where he’d been and what made him afraid – had taken all of ten minutes. It would take Dick Lyden maybe four full sessions to get this far.
Lol was impressed – also disturbed. He sensed she could be, well, malevolent, when she wanted to. There was something dangerously alien about Athena White: unmoving, sunk into her many cushions, but her mind was darting; picking up the urgency of this.
Telling her about Katherine Moon had been the right thing to do.
He brought her the map. ‘Spread it out on the floor,’ she commanded. ‘Move that perfectly awful table, there. Oh, dear, it’s what one misses most stuck out here. The seclusion, the study time, yes, but there are things going on that one misses. OK, Dinedor Hill. Why Dinedor Hill? Put your finger on it, Robinson. Can’t make out the damned map, but I can at least see your finger. Now give me your other hand.’
He found himself kneeling on the map, with the forefinger of one hand on Dinedor Hill, while she held his other hand, both of her small hands over his. They were frail and bony and very warm.
‘Look at it, Robinson, look at the hill… no, not on the map, you fool. Picture it in your mind. Feel yourself there. Feel the wind blow, feel the damp, the cold. Think about Moon being there. She’s coming towards you, isn’t she? Now, tell me what you’re seeing.’
‘I’m seeing the crow,’ he said at once. ‘Her hand inside the crow. We’re standing right at the end of the ramparts, with the city below us and the church spire aligned with the Cathedral tower.’
‘Good.’
In the moments of quiet, he could hear crockery clinking several rooms away. Footsteps clumped outside the door, the handle creaked and Athena White let out a piercing squeak. ‘Get away from that door! Go away!’
And the footsteps went away.
Miss White said, ‘She killed that crow, you know.’
‘I wondered about that.’
‘I think she would have brought the crow down and killed it.’
Brought it down how?
Crow Maiden, he thought. And the crows would come, Denny had said. Crows’d come right up to her.
Lol opened his eyes. Through the window, the Radnor hills were firming up as the mist receded; you could see the underside of the sun in the southern sky.
‘You see, it doesn’t really work unless the blood is still warm,’ Athena White explained.
Jane and Danny Gittoes stood in the alley alongside of the Ox. There were men’s toilets here, the foul-smelling kind, and she was starting to get pictures of Danny Gittoes and Rowenna.
‘Jane, I’m sorry, all right. I’m sorry about your mother’s church, but I didn’t take nothing, did I? And it was her idea, all of it.’
‘Yeah, tell that to the police. “I did it for a blowjob, officer.” Real mitigating-circumstances situation, that is. The magistrates will really like you for that, Gittoes.’
‘I’ll pay for it, all right? I’ll pay for the window.’
‘Tell me about the suit.’
‘What about it?’
‘What did she say about the suit?’
‘She said it was a joke – on you and your ma. I didn’t twig it. She had the suit in the back of her car, in one of them plastic suit-bags like you get from the cleaners, and I had to keep it inside the bag till I’d got it in the wardrobe – then take it out of the bag.’
‘Did she go in with you?’
‘She waited outside with the torch. She shone the torch in and she told me where to put the suit, and to make sure it was out of sight. Look, Watkins, this is between you and her, right? This en’t nothing-’
‘You’re going down for it, Gittoes.’
‘Nobody goes down for breaking a window.’
‘It gets in the paper, though, and then everybody knows how pitiful you are. Everybody sees this redhaired stunner, and then they look at you. It does kind of test the imagination, doesn’t it, Danny? It’ll like follow you around for years – Beauty and the Sad Git.’
‘What about her?’
‘You really think she cares what anybody thinks? Hey – wow, I forgot.’ Jane stepped away from him and began to smile. ‘Isn’t your stepfather up for a vacancy on the parish council?’
‘Fuck you, Watkins.’
‘Not even in your dreams.’
‘What do you want? What you want me to do?’
‘Tell me what happened when she first approached you. Was she on her own?’
‘Course she was on her own.’
‘I bet you thought she actually fancied you, didn’t you?’
Gittoes blushed.
‘Don’t worry, she’s good at that,’ Jane said. ‘Come on, don’t stand there like a bloody half-peeled prawn. Talk to me.’
‘I dunno what you want!’
‘What do you know about her?’
‘She’s your friend!’
‘Cooperate,’ Jane hissed, ‘or the first thing that happens – like tonight – is word gets to reach your stepfather.’
‘ Please… what you wanner know? You wanner know where she goes when you en’t with her? You wanner know who her real boyfriend is? Cause I followed her – all right? – on the motorbike. Yeah, I thought I was in with a chance – how sad is that? I followed her around. I can give you stuff to, like, even the score… if you’ll leave me alone.’
‘Keep talking, hairball,’ Jane said.
For quite a long time, Miss White continued, she did not really understand what a Satanist was. For a start, nobody would ever admit to being one. You had this absurd American self-publicist, La Vey, with his Church of Satan, following a poor variation of Crowley’s Do What Thou Wilt philosophy. But that was a misnomer: there wasn’t that quality of pure, naked hate which Satanism implied.
Black magic? Ah, not quite the same thing. Black magic was simply the use of magic to do harm. And, yes, Miss White had been tempted, too – was often tempted. Aware, of course, of the easy slope from mischief to malignity, but she had done worse things without the need for magic – hadn’t everyone?
Miss White had practised ritual magic for a number of years before the robes and the swords and the chalices had begun to seem rather unnecessary and faintly absurd. It was during this period that she first encountered Anna Purefoy, or Anna Bateman as she was then.
‘We were both civil servants at the time. Anna worked at the Defence Ministry – secretary to an under-secretary, quite a highly paid post for a girl her age. She never hid her interest in the occult – neither did I. There are a surprising number of senior civil servants practising the dark arts – by which, of course, I do not mean Satanism. To the vast, vast majority of ritual magicians, the idea of worshipping a vulgar creature with horns and halitosis is absolute anathema.’
The change came with Anna’s persecution by Christians in the person of a junior Defence minister with a rigid Presbyterian background. A far more senior civil servant had been linked by a Sunday newspaper to an offshoot of Aleister Crowley’s magical foundation, the OTO. In the resulting purge, Anna’s resignation had been sought and bitterly given.
‘I suppose her resentment and loathing of the Christian Church began there,’ Miss White said, ‘but it really developed when she met Tim.’
Timothy Purefoy: already a rich man and getting richer.
‘Tim, like Anna, was blond and rather beautiful. Terribly charming and infinitely solicitous. Especially to elderly ladies in the area of Oxfordshire where he plied his trade. For in Tim’s hands it was indeed a trade.’
‘What did he do?’ Lol asked.
‘He was a minister of the Church of England, of course. First a curate and then a rector. I think he’d risen to Rural Dean by the time he was thirty. A throwback in many ways: what they used to call a “hunting parson”: field sports and dinner parties, frightfully well connected, etc. And so he often got named – along with the Church itself, of course – in the published wills of wealthy widows. This is common practice, and the Church seldom bats an eyelid as long as it gets its share as well. Timothy was always terribly careful like that. Probably be a bishop by now, if he hadn’t become fatally attracted to Anna, then reduced to a comparatively lowly post with Oxfordshire County Council.’
Miss White assumed that by this time Anna’s bitter resentment of the Church, its prejudices, and the hold it retained on the British establishment had almost certainly become obsessively bound up with her continuing magical studies. The Church had destroyed her promising career, so she felt driven to wound the Church at every opportunity.
Lol was picturing the gentle, sweet-faced woman with flour on her apron in that mellow farmhouse kitchen. Then, later, dabbing her eyes at Moon’s funeral.
‘The destruction, humiliation or corruption of a priest is a great satanic triumph,’ Miss White said. ‘Everyone knows that. But the greatest triumph, the ultimate prize, is the defection, the turning, of an ordained minister.’
‘Does that really happen?’ He thought of big, bluff, jovial Tim Purefoy in his shiny new Barbour and cap. Come to the farmhouse… have a coffee.
‘I don’t know how often it actually happens,’ said Miss White. ‘Perhaps some of them remain ministers while practising their secret arts. How many churches have been clandestinely dedicated to the Devil – how can anyone know? What I do know is how very, very much it must have appealed to Anna, as an ex-MOD person – the idea of turning Tim. The Cold War was at its height, former British agents like Philby flaunted by the Soviets, so how wonderful, how prestigious – among her circle – to convert a priest to Satan? Especially such a recognizably establishment figure as Tim Purefoy.’
Of how it happened, Miss White had no specific knowledge.
‘But one can imagine the Rural Dean’s slow-burning obsession with the sensational blonde in the little cottage… those long, erotic Sunday interludes between Matins and Evensong. The subtler arts of sexual love come naturally to a magician,’ she said enigmatically.
‘But if he’d got such a good thing going, milking widows and being accepted by the county set, why would he give that all up?’
‘Well, he didn’t, of course – not voluntarily.’
Athena believed it was a new curate, some earnest evangelical practising an almost monastic self-denial, who blew the whistle on both of them. It was revealed that Anna had been giving regular tarot readings to villagers, in a cottage in the very shadow of Tim’s parish church. And also once – famously – at the parish fete. It was Anna who was driven out of the village first, by a hate campaign drawing support from fundamentalist Christians for miles around.
‘And meanwhile Tim was photographed leaving her cottage late at night. It rather escalated from there, but it never became a very big scandal, because the Church kept the lid on it. I don’t know whether Tim was dabbling in Satanism by then, or whether that came later – but it did come. By which time both held a considerable grievance against the “witchhunting” Church itself. And the annexing of his spiritual baggage, no matter how corrupted it already was, due to his weak and greedy character, must have been an enormous boost for her own influence among her peers.’
Through the window, Lol could see a platoon of elderly ladies advancing up the drive.
‘Damn,’ Athena said. ‘First they’ll head off to their rooms to freshen up, if that’s a suitable term, then they’ll all come twittering in.’
‘How did the Purefoys carry on making a living?’
‘When a minister defects, he is treated – just like Philby in Moscow – as a great celebrity. He is presented at Court, as you might say.’
‘What do you mean by “Court”?’
‘Oh, Robinson, even I don’t know who most of these people are. Very wealthy, very evil – actual criminals some of them. Certainly the narcotics trade, whatever they call it these days, has a very large satanic element, and has had for decades. The Purefoys had capital, they had contacts, they had a very English charm. With their patronage and advice, lucrative property deals followed, leading, for instance, to the purchase of that building in Bridge Street housing the Pod. I then simply could not continue working with that group any more, which was a great pity, as it did get me out of here once a week – they always sent a car for me. No, I knew what was going to happen, you see.’
‘What?’
‘They would use the Pod as – what do you call it? – a front. Anything from an innocent reception centre to a kind of spiritual brothel. Podmore already told me about your friend’s daughter – but I want to ask you something about that. This friend herself wouldn’t, by any chance, be Merrily Watkins?’
‘How did you know that?’
‘Ha! This clarifies certain small mysteries. Oh, what a target that woman must be for the Purefoys and their ilk. A female exorcist – and such a pretty girl.’
‘Yes.’ Lol began to fold the map.
‘Ah,’ said Athena calmly, ‘I see.’
‘Where’ve you been? I mean where have you been?’ The kid just staring back at her, and Merrily taking a deep breath, gripping the Aga rail. ‘I’m sorry. Christ, what am I saying?’
‘I don’t know, Mum.’
‘I close my eyes in church, I see that lime-green Fiesta reversing into our drive. I come back from church, and you’re not here. I’m sorry. There is no reason at all you have to be here all the time.’
‘No, you’re right,’ Jane said. ‘It was thoughtless of me.’
‘Ignore me, flower. I’m badly, badly paranoid. Previously, I see a stranger in the congregation, and I think: Yes. Wow. Another one! Now, when I glimpse an unfamiliar face, I’m watching for a little sneer at some key moment; I’m watching their lips when we say the Lord’s Prayer. I go round afterwards and sniff where they sat. Jesus, I shouldn’t be saying this to you – you’re only sixteen.’
‘Yes, I am,’ Jane said mildly. ‘And I’ve just been to see Danny Gittoes. Rowenna gave him, like, oral sex in return for breaking into the church and contaminating your cassock with Denzil Joy’s suit. Just thought you should know that.’
Merrily broke away from the Aga.
‘Also – and I’m not qualified to, like, evaluate the significance of this – but Rowenna’s been seeing – euphemism, OK? – seeing a young guy by the name of James Lyden. He goes to the Cathedral School and apparently tonight he’s going to be enthroned in the Cathedral as something called – vomit, vomit – Boy Bishop. Does this mean anything to you?’