Noon : the dead moment in time. All the energy of the day sucked in. Sometimes, for a fraction of an instant, you can almost see it, like a photograph turned negative. Everything still. Everything — the road, the fields, the sky — belonging to the dead.
But these people clustered in the base of the bowl under the midday sun, they were not the dead.
The severely beautiful elderly woman, weeping, and the sharp-faced, white-haired man with an arm around her and the plump woman in a wheelchair and the leather-faced, crewcut man demanding an ambulance — surely somebody had a bloody mobile phone. And Lol, standing apart from the others, looking thoughtful.
And the pale, naked woman under the hop-frame, lying with the padded airline bag under her head. Not even she was dead.
Keep her here? Would that contain it? For how long? How long?
Merrily looked up at the sun.
Simon St John understood. ‘Get back. Please. Just a couple of yards, please.’ Simon was OK, he was in the clear — the woman was not dead, had not been dead when she walked under the wires. Simon was all right with this. Wasn’t he?
‘Yes,’ the woman agreed irritably, ‘Just keep back. I’m all right. I’ll be all right.’ She coughed, her head thrown back over the airline bag, a bubble of saliva and a half-masticated hop-petal in a corner of her slack mouth. ‘I’ll be with you in… just give me… give me a moment… give me a bloody minute.’
Merrily looked up at Simon. He nodded towards the woman. The hop-bine was still curled around her legs, yellowed petals crumbled into her pubic hair.
Simon said, ‘You know her?’
‘Oh, yes.’ Merrily knelt down, was immediately enclosed in a dense aura of sweat and hops. ‘Annie, listen to me — were you in the kiln? Were you in the kiln, just now?’
‘Cordon it off!’ The eyes were still blurred. ‘We… need the fire service. There’s probably-’
‘Yes,’ Merrily said.
‘Gases. An escape of gases.’
‘Or sulphur.’
‘I don’t… I got out of there, but I must have lost… Put somebody on the door. Don’t let anybody go back in there. It may be… I think I lost consciousness, just for a moment. You-’ She seemed to register Merrily for the first time. ‘What the hell are you-?’
‘I’m going back to the village,’ Charlie said. ‘We need an ambulance.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Annie Howe tried to sit up. ‘That’s-’
‘Who’s he?’ Simon demanded. The woman in the wheel-chair had made it from the path, breathing hard from her struggle across the baked ground. Simon was holding her hand.
‘Her father,’ Merrily told him. ‘Charlie, she’s right. Forget the ambulance. But-’ She met his eyes, his copper’s eyes now, hard as nuts. ‘There’s something else we need to do, and we need to do it now. I’m not kidding, Charlie, we’ve got a problem here, you must be able to see that.’
‘And possibly a solution,’ Simon St John said.
‘Dad?’ Annie Howe struggling to sit up. ‘What the hell are you-?’
‘Stay where you are, girl,’ Charlie said softly. ‘Everything’s all right.’ He looked down at Merrily. ‘She been attacked?’
‘Not in the way you think, no. In the way I think — do you know what I’m saying?’
‘I don’t know, Merrily, her clothes…’
Lol was there. ‘I think it’s pretty obvious she took them off herself, Charlie. The things we saw strewn across…?’
‘I’ll fetch them,’ Sally Boswell said.
Merrily came to her feet. ‘Charlie, I swear to God. I swear to you that this is not some scam. She was in the kiln just now — on her own. The wrong place at the wrong time. Charlie, it all comes down to that place.’
‘I was simply’ — Annie shook her ash-blonde head in irritation — ‘taking a final look round before we handed the keys back to…’ She looked vague for a moment. ‘Before we handed over the keys to S-Stock’s solicitors. Is there some water? If I can just have some water…’
Merrily said, ‘Charlie, I don’t have time to explain. You have got to-Please trust me.’
‘Look,’ Annie Howe said, ‘where’s the fucking car?’ She finally sat up. ‘Get these people-’
‘Stay where you are, Anne.’ Charlie’s jaw was working from side to side. ‘You’re naked, girl.’
‘What are you-?’ Annie Howe rose up suddenly, and Charlie Howe stepped to one side so that Annie was in the full sun.
There was a moment of silence, and then she started to scream, her head tossed back, eyes squeezed shut against the blast of light. Her spine arched in a spasm, her white breasts thrust towards the sun, her mouth opening into a big, hungry smile, as if-
In the instant that the screaming turned to laughter, Merrily was down by Annie’s side, both hands on her burning forehead. The eyes opened once, a flaring of panic and outrage under the sweat-soaked white-blonde hair.
It wasn’t all sweat, though. The top must finally have come off the flask inside, because the airline bag, where Annie’s head had lain, was soaked now with holy water.
Rebekah, Merrily said calmly, somewhere deep inside herself. Listen to me.
For an instant, hugging the Lady of the Bines, in all her persons, absorbing their coarse, racking sobs, she found the core — or maybe the core found her. The coin spun in the air and stayed in the air, caught in a confluence of sunbeams, and kept on spinning, bright new copper.
She could do this.
St Paul said: Put love first.
That simple: bypassing fear and revulsion, the heaving aside of a great concrete slab of personal resentment, ignoring even the stunning irony.
Behind her, Simon St John stood quietly, made the sign of the cross in the air above them.
Love is patient. Love is kind and envies no one. Love is never boastful, nor conceited. Love keeps no score of wrongs. There is no limit to its faith, its hope and its endurance.
Merrily felt her hands becoming very warm, warmer than the skin beneath. She was in a void, an emptiness that was infinitely vast and yet also movingly intimate. She didn’t understand. She didn’t have to understand. At some point, the words came automatically, from the final verse of the old Celtic anthemic prayer.
Let them not run from the love that you offer
But hold them safe from the forces of evil
On each of their dyings shed your light…