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Just when you very much needed to talk to your daughter…
MUM. EIRION’S COMING THROUGH EARLY. WILL PICK ME UP. WE NEEDED TO TALK. E. WILL GIVE ME LIFT TO SCHOOL. SEE U TONITE.
LOVE, J.
Seven-thirty, Merrily had come stumbling downstairs in her towelling robe and the note was on the kitchen table, suspiciously close to where she’d left her own message yesterday for Jane.
Eirion and Jane needed to talk? We need to talk. Do you want to talk about this? What an ominous cliche talk had become, thanks to TV soaps. It meant cracks, it meant falling apart.
Not that Merrily hadn’t been conscious of a reduced intensity in the Jane/Eirion department. Not so long ago, one of them would phone every night, maybe in the morning, too – on the landline from home, Jane having gone off mobiles because they fried your brain and texting was for little kids.
That was something else: of late, Jane had become kind of Luddite about certain aspects of modern life. A year before leaving school, feeling threatened by change and destruction – was Lol right about that?
And the biggest change was the one affecting her relationship with Eirion – a year ahead of her and about to become a student. Big gap between a university student and a schoolkid. The gap between a child and an adult.
Nearly a year ago, Eirion had been sitting at this very kitchen table, on a summer morning like this, humbly confessing to Merrily that he and her daughter had had sex the night before. Both of them virgins. It had been almost touching.
Merrily put the kettle on, made some toast. Hard not to like Eirion, but liking your daughter’s boyfriend was a sure sign, everybody said, that it wouldn’t last. In an ideal world, Jane would have met Eirion in a few years’ time, when she’d been around a little. But society wasn’t programmed to construct happy endings. Relationships were assembled like furniture kits, and everybody knew how long they lasted.
The sun was swelling in the weepy mist over Cole Hill, evaporating the dew on the meadow. The mystical ley recharging. But Jane was stepping off it, moving safely out of shot.
‘Oh, come on, Jane!’
Eirion lowering the digital camera. A Nikon, naturally. He’d shot the view from the top of Cole Hill and the low mound on the way to the church, the hummock that Jane was convinced was an unexcavated Bronze Age round barrow. And then they’d walked another half-mile and crossed a couple of fields to find the prehistoric standing stone, half-hidden by a hedge and only three feet high but that was as good as you got in this part of the county. Fair play, he’d taken pictures of them all and he hadn’t moaned. Until now.
‘ No.’ Jane flung an arm across her face. ‘For the last time, this is not about me, it’s about-’
‘Yeah, yeah, the balance and harmony of the village and the perpetuation of the legacy of the greatest man ever to come out of Hereford. But I have to tell you, Jane – speaking as a person only a few short years away from a glittering career in the media – that a shot of you, with your firm young breasts straining that flimsy summer-weight school blouse, will be worth at least a thousand extra hits.’
‘You disgust me, Lewis.’
Jane stepped behind a beech tree beside the bottom gate. A mature beech tree, full of fresh, light green life. One of several that would soon be slaughtered in the course of an efficient chainsaw massacre to accommodate twenty-four luxury executive homes.
Eirion tramped towards the tree, along the ley. Stocky, dependable Irene, his Cathedral-school jacket undone, the strap of his camera bag sliding down his arm.
‘Jane, listen, I’m serious. A view means nothing, basically. Just a field with a church steeple in the background? It needs a figure to suggest the line of sight. I’m not kidding. We have to persuade the various earth-mysteries organizations to run this on their sites.’
Eirion had reasoned that, if it was speed she was after, a website was probably not the answer at this stage. What they needed – a whole lot cheaper – was an initial explanatory document which could be emailed to interested parties and influential on-line journals.
Made sense. On that basis, if he shot the pictures this morning, he could have it laid out by late tonight, email her a copy for approval and by this time tomorrow they’d be up and running: the full horror of Coleman’s Meadow disclosed to the world before the weekend. Scores of people – possibly hundreds of people – lodging complaints with Hereford Council. Hundreds of New Age cranks and old hippies telling them exactly where they could put their acceptable infill.
Eirion stood watching her, keeping his distance.
‘What?’ Jane said
‘You clenched your fists. You looked positively homicidal. What have I said now?’
‘Irene, it’s not-’
Jane shook herself. Oh hell. To fit in this shoot, he must’ve been up at five, driving over from Abergavenny about ninety minutes earlier than usual. Face it: how many other guys would do that for you? She felt totally messed up again, her emotions all over the place, hormones in flood. For a moment she felt she just wanted to take him into a corner of the still-dewy meadow and…
… What would it be like making love on a ley? What kind of extra buzz would that produce?
What it would produce would be a golden memory.
‘Jane, are you all right? I mean you’re not ill…?’
‘Sure. I mean, I’m fine.’
Jane clasped her hands together, driving back the tears. It was no use, she had a battle to fight, against slimy Lyndon Pierce and the chino guys and lofty, patronizing Cliff and the thin woman from Education. The mindless, philistine Establishment.
She sniffed and stepped out from behind the tree and walked back on to the ley, her head lowered.
‘How do you want me to stand?’
‘You’re perfect the way you are.’ Eirion smiled his glowingly honest, unstaged Eirion smile. ‘Just don’t look at me.’
Sophie displaying emotion was a rare phenomenon. When it happened it tended to be minimal: slender smiles, never a belly laugh. Disapproval, rather than…
‘Merrily, that is quite disgusting. It dishonours him.’
Sophie was looking out of the gatehouse window, towards the Cathedral green. There might even have been tears in her eyes.
‘It dishonours all of us.’
It was like you’d vandalized a grave. Spray-painted the headstone, trampled the flowers.
‘He lived in this city for nine years, at the height of his fame. Even after he’d left, he’d come back for the Three Choirs Festival, when it was held here… as it is this year.’
Sophie swung round, her soft white hair close to disarrangement.
‘Do you really want to besmirch that, Merrily?’
‘Me?’
‘I’m sorry, but this is giving credibility to something very sordid.’
She meant the road accidents. Merrily hadn’t even mentioned Hannah Bradley. Just as well, really.
‘Involving the Church in a campaign which might be laudable in itself but is extremely questionable in its execution is… I realize it’s not your fault, but you can stop it going any further.’
‘I didn’t expect you to be quite so… protective?’
‘I’m a former Cathedral chorister, I’m proud of my county’s link with Elgar. His homes at Birchwood and then here in the city. His many connections and friendships at the Cathedral-’
‘I know.’
Embarrassed by her ignorance, Merrily had picked up a slim guide to Elgar’s Herefordshire, skimming through it before Sophie came in. It was a start.
‘So what are you going to do about it?’ Sophie said. ‘May one ask?’
‘Well, with your help, as an Elgar enthusiast and a Cathedral chorister for… how many years…?’
‘Fourteen.’
‘… I want to look at it sensibly. Because whatever your misgivings about the idea of Elgar’s ghost, my instinct is that there is something.’
Sophie scowled.
‘Please? I’ve a christening this afternoon, and then I’m supposed to go to this parish meeting. Or not.’
Sophie went to sit at her own desk, waved a limp hand.
‘Go on…’
‘I need to know enough to be able to discount crap, but I have to be prepared for the possibility of it not being crap. Which would leave two options: an imprint or what Huw Owen would describe as an insomniac.’
‘A restless spirit.’
‘In this case, an angry spirit, disturbed – much as you are – over the invasion of the Malverns by the hoodies and bling element. Which is a potentially sensitive issue because of… well…’
‘Racism. Always the weapon used against us. As if appalling behaviour and criminal acts should be protected for so-called cultural reasons.’
‘Lol reckons that, with Elgar, it wasn’t so much political patriotism as a pure love of the countryside – the landscape itself. That in fact he even developed a bit of a distaste for “Land of Hope and Glory”? That true?’
‘I suppose he had misgivings about the jingoism in the words. He was a lifelong Conservative, however, Merrily, never forget that.’
‘Although, unless I’m wrong -’ Merrily remembering something else from Elgar – A Hereford Guide ‘- a good friend of lifelong socialist George Bernard Shaw?’
‘No, you’re not wrong,’ Sophie said, maybe through her teeth. ‘What point are you making?’
‘Just trying to form an opinion on whether, in theory, the raging essence of Edward Elgar might be summoned, like King Arthur from his cave, by a blast of trip-hop over his sacred hills. If something’s happening, then something must have set it off.’
‘You don’t believe that for one minute.’
‘Open mind, Sophie. It’s what this job’s about.’
‘And what’s the alternative?’
‘The alternative, if we’re accepting the possibility of a paranormal element, is an imprint. Spicer says Elgar used to bike through Wychehill, maybe stopping for a pint of cider at the Royal Oak.’
‘Possibly when he was exploring the location of his cantata Caractacus, in the 1890s. Its main setting is Herefordshire Beacon.’
‘It’s about the last stand of the Celts against the Romans?’
‘A legend now discredited. The final defeat of Caractacus was probably not, as once suggested, on the Beacon. Which wouldn’t have bothered Elgar too much. He simply loved the drama of it and… was fascinated, I’m afraid, by Druid ritual. Blood-sacrifices and prophecies in the oak groves.’
‘I should listen to it.’
‘Yes, you should, but you’ll find it essentially a patriotic work dedicated to Queen Victoria. Ending with what I expect you would call an imperialist rant – the British might have been defeated this time but would rise again, with an empire greater than Rome’s.’
‘I expect it was… of its time. And presumably – again – he didn’t write the words?’
‘Elgar told his publisher that he’d suggested the librettist should dabble in patriotism, but didn’t expect the man to “get naked and wallow in it.”’
Merrily smiled.
‘Actually,’ Sophie said, ‘thinking about this, his cycling phase might have begun later, although it certainly started at Birchwood. Possibly while he was completing his masterpiece, The Dream of Gerontius.’
‘That’s not set in the Malverns, though, is it?’
‘Merrily, your ignorance of great music astonishes me. It’s set in the afterlife.’
‘Erm… OK. But we can assume Elgar was familiar with Wychehill? Travelling that road – on his bike or on foot – drawing from the landscape and also projecting his imagination into it. Fitting the criteria for an imprint – a recurring image in a particular location. A recording on an atmospheric loop.’
Sophie’s face was expressionless. Merrily wondered sometimes if she believed any of this. Even for someone as unwaveringly High Church as Sophie, Christianity could still be a discipline rather than a journey of discovery.
‘He undoubtedly did draw from the landscape and always saw his music through nature. Even as a boy, sitting by the river, he said he wanted to write down what the reeds were saying. Much later he was to say that the air was full of music and you just took as much as you required.’
Interesting. Merrily made a note.
‘His principal biographer, Jerrold Northrop-Moore, an American, says the Cello Concerto projected to him – in America – an image of a landscape he’d never seen, and when he finally came over to Worcestershire it all seemed strangely familiar. He also suggests that Elgar’s pattern of composition reflects the physical rhythm of the Malvern Hills.’
‘And Lol said that when he was dying…’
‘Either he was being gently humorous in his final hours or he truly believed his spirit belonged in the hills. Does that fit your criteria for an imprint?’
‘Maybe more than that,’ Merrily said. ‘But let’s settle for an imprint for the moment.’
‘And is that necessarily bad? An animation that simply replays itself?’
The phone rang and then stopped as Sophie reached out a hand. She sat back and rearranged her glasses on their chain.
‘Linking Elgar with road-death, however, is abusive to the point of indecency.’
‘People are worried.’
‘And to allay their fears, you call upon God to banish the spirit of a genius?’
The phone rang again, and Sophie hooked it up. ‘Gatehouse.’ She covered the mouthpiece. ‘Might it not be appropriate to bring this whole issue to the attention of the Bishop?’
‘Not yet. Let’s see what happens tonight.’
So where did you go with this?
Perhaps you started by strolling across the Cathedral green to confront the compact, tidy gent in bronze, leaning…
… On his bike. Of course he was.
Mr Phoebus, if this was Mr Phoebus, didn’t have a lamp. But then his wheels didn’t have any spokes either.
It was, Merrily thought, essentially a modest, unobtrusive piece. Life-size, dapper: Elgar the bloke. She sat on the grass in the sunshine with an egg mayonnaise sandwich, contemplating him from a distance while finishing off Elgar – A Hereford Guide.
Finally, she wandered across.
Could you…? Keeping a respectful distance. Could you possibly help me, Sir Edward?
Look, this wasn’t stupid. Sometimes… call it intuition, call it divine inspiration, call it…
But Elgar had higher things on his mind. Overdressed for the weather, he was gazing at the Cathedral tower with its unsightly scaffolding. The Cathedral where he’d spent so many hours – even, in later years, recording some of his music there.
Look, I accept that I don’t know enough about your work. I’m sorry. I hope to deal with that.
No reaction.
No impressions. No guidance. Elgar was miles away, and music was Merrily’s blind spot. In church, anyway. All the trite Victorian hymns she’d been trying to edge out of services for the past two years.
Everything the sculpture had to say to her was written on its plinth. A quote which someone – maybe even a committee – had thought essential to an understanding of the man and his work.
But it was interesting.
‘THIS IS WHAT I GET EVERY DAY. T HE TREES ARE SINGING MY MUSIC – OR AM I SINGING THEIRS?’
Merrily walked around Elgar, looking over his shoulder, following his gaze.
‘You’re asking me?’