Early Monday evening, Uncle Ted took them back to the vicarage. Apart from the new sink and cupboards in the kitchen, square-pin sockets everywhere and a black hole where the monster electric fire had been stuffed into the inglenook, it wasn’t a lot different.
‘It’s still huge,’ Merrily said hopelessly.
‘Don’t worry, girl!’ Ted squeezed her arm. ‘You’ll grow into it in no time. You and Jane’ll fill this place in no time. In fact’ – he beamed – ‘the way you’ve held things together, you’ve already grown a hell of a lot over the past few weeks. In everyone’s estimation.’
‘That’s very nice of you, but it was just the honeymoon period.’
‘Nonsense.’ Ted chuckled. ‘Dermot dropped in last night to deplete my Scotch. He says you’re holding your own better than he’d imagined. Your Own Woman, he says. That’s good.’
Bloody Dermot. Bloody Ted. She wondered what else they’d discussed. Her delinquent daughter, product of a disastrous marriage to a crook?
She felt the vicarage looming behind her, huge and ancient and forbidding like someone else’s family seat.
‘Merrily,’ Ted said, ‘you’ll come to love it. I’ve been in some really awful, draughty old mausoleums, but this place has such a lovely, warm, enclosing sort of atmosphere that you’ll simply forget how big it is after a while. Especially when Jane has her Own Apartment. Eh?’
Jane grinned. Merrily said, ‘Well see.’
Ted vanished into Church Street, Merrily wondering when she would get to meet his widow. Jane disappeared eagerly into the vicarage. Merrily was about to follow her, somewhat less eagerly, when Gomer Parry appeared in the drive, blinking through his glasses, unlit cigarette wagging in his teeth. For a pensioner, Gomer had a surprising amount of half-suppressed energy.
‘Removals, Vicar. What you got planned?’
‘Erm…’ She’d given more thought to how they were going to spread the stuff around to make the vicarage look less like a derelict sixteenth-century warehouse than the method of actually getting it here.
‘Only, if you en’t made arrangements, see, you don’t wanner go botherin’ with no expensive removals firm when I got a very clean truck entirely at your disposal.’
When you thought about it, it was going to be a bit complicated. ‘It’s all around Cheltenham, you see. All over the place. Some bits in store, some at my mother’s house, some at-’
‘No problem, Vicar. Couple hours’ round trip. Piece o’ piss-cake. ‘Sides which’ – Gomer leaned closer, taking out his cigarette, confidential – ‘keeps the ole truck in business, know what I mean? Minnie, her says the place looks like a bloody scrapyard, I says you never know what you’re gonner need in life.’
‘How many vehicles have you got there, Gomer?’
‘Oh, no more’n four now. And Gwynneth, the digger.’
The mind boggled; it was only a bungalow with a garden.
‘Her’s given me three months to get ’em out, see. But Minnie’s a bit more, like, you know, religious than what I am. So I tells her, if this yere plant-hire equipment is in the service of the Lord… Get my point?’
‘Understood. Bless, you, Gomer. Look, I’ll pay you in advance-’
Gomer backed off, outraged.
‘All right, the petrol, at least the petrol. Diesel. Whatever. How many gallons – ten, twelve?’
‘Full tank in there already, Vicar.’ He looked up at the house. ‘Three floors, eh? Gonner take a bit o’ manoeuvring about. What I’ll do, I’ll get my nephew, Nev. Big lad. What day you want us? Any day but Thursday, which is Nev’s day for the cesspits. Oh, and tomorrow. Inquest tomorrow, see.’
‘Inquest?’
‘Edgar Powell. Opened back in January then adjourned. Took ’em long enough to get it sorted. Ole Edgar’ll be compost by now.’
‘You’re a witness, Gomer?’
‘Oh hell, aye. Me and about half a dozen others. Prob’ly drag on till flamin’ teatime. ‘Specially if it’s true Rod’s gonner get Doc Asprey to stand in the box and tell ’em his dad was halfway round the twist.’
‘Why would Rod want him to do that?’
‘Stigma, Vicar. No way do he want his ole man put down as a suicide. So if they got evidence of Edgar bein’ three bales short of a full stack, it’s more likely he done it by accident, see?’
‘Right.’ She did, come to think of it, remember Alf saying Garrod Powell was insisting his father hadn’t taken his own life. And what are you going to tell the coroner, Gomer?’
“Pends what they ask me. All I can say is what I seen. Which is not a lot, on account my glasses got all bloodied up. But before that, I do recall as when the others put up their guns, Edgar, he just didn’t. Now make of that what you like.’
‘I suppose it’ll be a question of whether he just had a funny turn and got all confused, or…’
‘Or he had it all worked out. Gotter say that don’t ring true to me. He wasn’t no kind of show-off, farmers en’t, as a rule. You’d think if he wanted to do away with hisself, he’d do it in the barn. Yet… I dunno… He weren’t daft in any respect, ole Edgar. How ‘bout Wednesday?’
‘That would be brilliant. This is above and beyond, Gomer.’
Gomer slipped his cigarette into his grin. ‘You don’t owe me nothing, Vicar, never think that. But there may be one small thing one day, just one… How’s the kiddie, now?’
‘Oh God, does everybody know?’
‘Hell, Vicar, don’t go worryin’ about that. They all knows what that Cassidy girl’s like. Too promiscuous by half, Minnie reckons.’
‘I just hope she means precocious,’ Merrily said.
‘Aye,’ Gomer said. ‘That was prob’ly it.’
Jane stood on the first landing, looking up.
‘Hey, listen. Why don’t we just move in? Like tonight.’
Her voice echoing in the emptiness. She was still in her school uniform, the dark blue blazer, the pleated skirt. Merrily, at the foot of the stairs, felt a heart-pang of love and fear that she wouldn’t have been able to explain.
‘How can we do that? Even with Gomer’s help, it’ll be nearly the weekend before we can get all the stuff in and sorted out. Besides, with the Diocese paying for the hotel, it means we can get everything right, for once. Instead of being in the usual chaos.’
Going to be a disaster, she was thinking. You could get all their stuff, beds included, into two rooms; they’d be rattling around like two peas in a coffee tin.
‘We’ve got sleeping bags, Mum. We could spread them out in the drawing room. Get the feel of the place. Go on. It’d be fun.’
‘On those flags? Jane, you are joking.’
Jane stared down the stairs at her. ‘You don’t really want to move in at all, do you?’
‘That’s stupid,’ Merrily said uncomfortably.
All around her, doors. Above her, doors. All of them half open, to signify empty rooms. She wanted to rush from door to door, shepherding Jane before her, banging each one shut and then finally the front door, behind them, as they ran into the square and the sanctuary of the Black Swan.
‘I can tell by the way you talk about it,’ Jane said. ‘Always going on about how big it is. At the Swan it’s kind of temporary, like a holiday. In here you’ve got to face what you’re taking on. Like the full burden.’
God, the perceptiveness of this kid was frightening.
‘Come on, Mum, there’s no shame in admitting it.’
‘I just want to do it efficiently, I…’
Did it remind her of moving from the flat into the four-bedroomed – it seemed enormous at the time – suburban villa that Sean had suddenly acquired, at an amazingly modest price, from A Client? Somewhere for her to organize, decorate. Somewhere to keep her occupied while…
‘… I just want it all to be, you know, right,’ Merrily said.
Which, right now, seemed an impossible dream.
‘For a major-league Christian,’ Jane said, ‘you don’t half lie a lot.’
Merrily felt her face darken. The doorbell saved them both.
‘Heard you were finally taking up occupancy. Called to see if I could be of any help.’
No, you didn’t.
‘That’s kind,’ Merrily said. ‘But we’re just giving the place the once-over. We won’t be actually moving in for a couple of days yet.’
James Bull-Davies looked around the empty, dusty hall. Sniffed once, like a pointer on a heath. He’d obviously waited until Gomer Parry had gone. Damn. She’d as good as told him to leave it for a while; he was either dense or simply didn’t believe his family was obliged to bow to the wishes of anyone in Ledwardine.
‘Interesting sermon of yours, yesterday, Mrs Watkins. Wrote that after the meeting, I suppose.’
‘Didn’t write it at all,’ Merrily said brusquely. ‘Came off the top of my head, more or less. Sometimes you have to busk it.’
‘Really. Don’t recall Hayden “busking".’
‘Perhaps he was just better at it than me,’ she said sweetly. ‘Er, I think I can cobble together a mug of tea, if you have the time. Can’t do any better than that at the moment.’
He looked down at her with suspicion. Perhaps wondering if she’d heard about him being rolling drunk in the square on Saturday night, offering to lay his concubine on the cobbles. She walked through to the kitchen, which had fitted units now but still some of the old formicaed shelves and white tiles. She wrinkled her nose. Not yet her kind of kitchen.
James Bull-Davies shuffled awkwardly in the middle of the flagged floor. She was clearly not his kind of vicar. He didn’t know what to do with her. He wasn’t even happy looking at her, preferred the ceiling.
‘Used to be two rooms, this, as I recall. When I was a boy. That section over there used to be a pantry or buttery or something.’
‘Did you come here often?’ Someone had left a tiny kettle for the Aga; Merrily filled it over the open sink, with all the pipework visible underneath. ‘I mean recently.’
‘Only when there was business to deal with. Parish business.’
Don’t offend anyone called Bull-Davies, Ted had said. The church would be rubble but for them. Strange how things changed; from what she’d heard, Upper Hall was closer to rubble these days. Not a great deal left from the old days. His divorce, presumably, had not helped. Were there children, or was that another source of pressure, the inheritance factor?
Perhaps, after the parish business had been dealt with, he’d have discussed some of his problems with Alf. As his priest, his padre. The way a man like James would never be able to do with a woman because women were mothers or aunts or sisters or you fucked them.
Merrily set the kettle on the stove. Perhaps she was wrong. ‘Sorry, there’s nowhere to sit. We’ll have to lean on the Aga.’
It occurred to her that this was the first time they’d been alone together, the squire and the parsoness he didn’t want in his village. She hoped Jane would stay out.
James Bull-Davies propped himself stiffly against one end of the big stove’s chromium bar, leaving a good two feet between them. A woman in a cassock? Perverse, surely.
Or did it secretly turn him on, like, say, the matron at his public school? Merrily suspected she would never know.
‘That sermon…’ She squeezed the warm bar. ‘I suppose I was just stalling for time.’
‘Message seemed to be that you were going to lay the whole vexed issue before the Almighty, let him sort it out.’
‘If you want to look at it that way, yes, I suppose that’s what I’m going to do. In the end.’
‘Way I look at it,’ he said, ‘it has bugger-all to do with God. Question of honour. And responsibility.’
‘Meaning your honour, my responsibility?’
Merrily looked sideways at him, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes, stared across the kitchen, his full lips in a kind of pout. A surprisingly powerful shaft of evening sunlight brutally exposed his bald patch and put a shine on his tightly shaven jaw – he’d shaved again, before coming here?
‘Why did you walk out the other night, Mr Davies? I’d’ve thought you’d have wanted to stay and confront the enemy.’
He lowered his gaze to the stained flags. ‘Perhaps I couldn’t trust myself not to smash his smug face in.’
‘Oh, I think you could. Disciplined, military chap like you.’
He exhaled a short laugh.
‘I mean, I can see your point,’ Merrily said. ‘If he’s got to make a statement about the treatment of gay people, why use a real character who might not, in fact, have been-’
‘It’s personal. It’s political’
‘Yes. Obviously.’
‘Oh, I don’t mean poo/politics. Though obviously that’s the other chip on his shoulder. Coffey fell in love, if you like, with the village, the area. Wanted the keeper’s lodge, bottom of my drive. Wasn’t for sale, but it was empty – had to dispense with the keeper’s services year or two ago, matter of cash flow. But that’s the nearest dwelling to Upper Hall and I wasn’t letting it go for peanuts. Made him pay. Made him pay.’
‘And he resents that, does he?’
‘Look…’ Bull-Davies levered himself from the stove. ‘He wanted the lodge. I wasn’t touting. Never told him he wouldn’t have to spend a substantial amount of money on the place.’
‘Oh.’
‘Didn’t need that much to make it perfectly habitable. Of course, to turn it into the kind of perfumed brothel he wanted – I mean, the water supply was perfectly fine – nobody has to have a… a whirlpool bath.’
Merrily tried not to smile. His father would probably have said the same about hot water. ‘So it’s a personal vendetta because of what you’ve cost him. That’s what you’re saying?’
‘I think it’s a probability you should consider.’
‘That he’s written a whole play to get back at you?’
‘Hardly a whole play… Vicar.’
‘I’m a bit lost here,’ Merrily said. ‘I don’t even know for sure why this would hurt you so much. I know your family’s well-embedded in the village, but, I mean, was one of your ancestors seriously involved in the persecution of Williams?’
Bull-Davies didn’t answer. He looked down at the flagstones and bit his upper lip with his lower teeth, which made him look momentarily feral, and it was at that moment that dear little Jane decided to stroll airily in.
‘Mum, I…’ As if she hadn’t been listening outside the door. As if she’d had no idea there was a visitor. ‘Oh, hello.’
Bull-Davies looked at the kid and nodded. Merrily said, thinking fast, ‘Jane, if we’re going to spend the evening here, we need to eat. Why don’t you get some money out of my bag and pop over to the chip shop?’
‘They won’t be open.’
‘Yes,’ Merrily said grimly. ‘They will.’
Jane’s eyes had the mutinous look of one who’d been stitched up; she shrugged. ‘OK, then. Can I have a pickled egg?’
‘Get two.’
When the front door slammed, with a vaultlike echo, Merrily turned and faced the Squire. ‘I think we have enough time before she gets back for you to tell me what all this is really about.’
The wooden clock in the fish-and-chip shop window indicated that it wouldn’t be open for another quarter of an hour, so she’d lied again. Mum lied all the time. Like vicars had some kind of special dispensation.
The chip shop was on the corner of Old Barn Lane and the Hereford road. On the edge of the village and therefore outside the main conservation area, which probably explained why it was allowed to exist. It was still a dull-looking joint, denied the brilliantly greasy illuminated signs you found on chippies in Liverpool. Jane turned away and strolled back towards the village centre, wondering if there’d be time to nip into the Black Swan and ditch the uniform.
Circumstances dictated otherwise. As she emerged into Church Street, Colette Cassidy was walking down from the square.
Colette seemed to be studying the texture of the cobbles, and neither of them acknowledged the other until they were about to collide.
‘Hi,’ Jane said, kind of throwaway.
‘How’s it going?’ Colette wore jeans and a black scoop-necked top under a studded leather jacket. But no make-up, no nose-stud. She carried a small brown-paper bag.
‘OK,’ Jane said. ‘I suppose.’
‘Get much hassle?’
‘Bit. You?’
‘They do the motions. Uh…’ Colette proffered the bag. ‘I got you this.’
‘Oh.’ She took the bag, surprised. It felt like a CD.
‘You were asking about Lol Robinson. That’s his last album, reissued. Well, his band, from way back. One of the guys at school bought one after she read in some magazine how this guy out of Radiohead likes them. When I saw what it was called, I thought you’d
… Anyway, it was the last copy.’
‘Oh. Wow.’ This was unexpectedly touching. ‘That’s amazing. I mean
… thanks.’
‘It was only mid-price,’ Colette said. ‘Don’t take it out of the bag, or people’ll think we’re really sad. Listen, I’m having this kind of a birthday party. My sixteenth. Friday after next. Just guys from school and one or two marginally cool people. And Dr Samedi – this DJ, who’s like really cool. Dr Samedi’s Mojomix? Heavy voodoo, Taney.’
‘Sounds excellent,’ Jane said. ‘Where’s it going to be?’
‘They’re letting me have the restaurant. Big gesture. They’ve promised to go out and stay out.’
‘Are they mad?’
‘Well, Barry the manager’ll be in charge, but he’s relatively OK. Also, it’s got to be invitation only, no riffraff, no lowlife.’ Colette smiled cynically.
‘Cool,’ Jane said. ‘If I tell Mum it’s at the Country Kitchen, no problem.’
‘Good,’ Colette said. ‘Listen. I mean, thanks for not grassing me up about what happened. Like, it was pretty shitty of me, all that Edgar Powell stuff. I was feeling moderately pissed off by then, with those tossers and everything. So, like, thanks.’
‘No problem.’
‘So you gonna tell me?’
‘Huh?’
‘What happened. Weird scenes, Janey. I thought you’d gone.’
‘Gone where?’
‘Like dead. Then suddenly opening your eyes, rambling about these kind of little lights. And then you’ve like, gone again. Coma-stuff.’
Jane felt strange. She looked behind Colette and along Old Barn Street. There was a couple of women with a pram heading down from the Market Cross, no one else in sight. She felt strange, like she wasn’t here at all.
Colette’s eyes flashed. ‘Oh, come on, Janey. Don’t tell me you don’t remember. Don’t shit me.’
‘I don’t.’
‘What did Devenish say then?’
‘She just brought me back. She was just like… cool about it. I don’t even know how she came to be there.’
‘Lol phoned her. Any crisis, he calls Lucy. She’s like his therapist, poor little sod. He was really shit scared. Wouldn’t go in that big, old orchard in the dark without Lucy to protect him. Well, he wouldn’t go in with me. I think he’s even scared of me. You imagine that?’
Jane didn’t say anything. Colette was trying to recapture ground, saying Lol was scared of her. She decided not to tell Colette about what she’d heard under Lol’s window. Maybe the person to tell was Miss Devenish. Really needed to see the old girl, like soon.
‘I don’t know why the fuck I bothered,’ Colette said bitterly.
On the way back to the chip shop, Jane took the CD out of its paper bag. When she saw what it was called, she gasped.
‘People don’t understand. Think we’re simply stuff-shirted shits. Hunting, shooting and fishing, lording it over the peasants.’
James Bull-Davies stood up straight and still very much the army officer.
‘We merely serve,’ he said. ‘We serve our country. We serve the countryside. Wasn’t for us, the traditional landowners, place just wouldn’t look the same, wouldn’t have the same atmosphere, the same beauty, the same harmony. We’re the stewards. The custodians. We don’t have power. We have responsibility.’
It sounded very noble. It didn’t, however, sound like the man who liked to call his mistress a slinky whore while she called him My Lord. Unless, of course, that was all down to Alison and her feminine wiles, bringing out the feudalist in him.
‘I’m an army man. Understand the army. Well-oiled machine. Puts human relations, dealing with people, into some form of order. You know who you are, what you are. Most chaps like me, when they come out, go on calling themselves Colonel, as though they still have some sort of authority, as though the commoners should salute. Look in the local phone book: Colonel this, Colonel that. Pointless. Meaningless affectation. No time for it. I’m Mr Bull-Davies, now. James, to chaps I wish I’d had in the army, knock off some of the damn pretentions.’
Like Terrence Cassidy, presumably. Merrily smiled to herself.
‘I’ve no illusions.’ James paced the kitchen. ‘Wasn’t expecting it to happen when it did, wasn’t expecting the old man to keel over for another twenty years. But no getting out of it. When the time comes, you have to shoulder the responsibility and that’s that. No arguments. And you become someone else. In the army you’re what you are. No complications. Here – no getting away from it – you’re what your family is. What your family was. You have a responsibility not only to the living – the living people, the living countryside – but also to the dead. You see where I’m heading, Mrs Watkins?’
Merrily stirred the tea in the pot. ‘Army-strength?’
‘Not too strong. Civilian now. Do you know what Cassidy said to me? Came to see me yesterday. Dithering. “But, James,” he said, “this was a long time ago." You credit that? Man’s an arsehole. Shows the state of Britain that the rural economy’s now increasingly reliant on specimens like this – bloody caterers.’
His eyes met Merrily’s for the first time. They were pale blue and showed a surprising insecurity.
‘I’m sorry if I speak crudely. You’re… Well. Never minced words with Hayden.’
‘My last parish was in a rundown part of Liverpool,’ Merrily said. ‘The only soldiers were squaddies back from Iraq. They tended to be the more refined parishioners.’
James barked a laugh.
‘I do understand,’ Merrily said, ‘that three centuries, in the history of a rural family like yours, is not so very long.’
‘I said to him’ – James’s lower lip jutted and curled – ‘Cassidy, I said, you’ve been here about two minutes. In the past three centuries, your family – what anyone can trace of it – has probably lived in a couple of dozen different houses in God knows how many different towns. However many generations it goes back, whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation, this is my family. In my village. How could I possibly condone some fatuous little pageant’ – he spat out the word like a pip – ‘which seeks to demean and ridicule my heritage? Yes, the local magistrate was Thomas Bull. Yes, he was one of the party who confronted Wil Williams. Yes, he was there when they found the body. And yes, he believed the evidence. Yes, he was convinced Williams was in league with the devil and should die for it. He was a man of his time. Homosexuality doesn’t come into it, and I won’t have his memory soiled by some sordid little queer in the name of so-called art and a few dozen visiting trendies paying London prices for fancy fodder at Cassidy’s Country bloody Kitchen.’
He came up to Merrily. The stove was hot against her bottom, but she didn’t move.
‘Went along with the wassailing fiasco last winter because that was at least an attempt at reinstating a tradition. But this festival’s in danger of going the wrong way and dragging my village along with it. Realize there’s going to be some change. Even if I disagree with it. Recognize that your presence here’s part of that change.’
‘And naturally you’re opposed to the ordination of women.’
James backed off a little. ‘There are some who say it strengthens the Church. Have my doubts about that, but there’s nothing I can do now. You’re here, and you at least seem like a reasonable sort of woman, head screwed on.’
‘Thank you very much,’ Merrily said acidly.
‘But you must understand my position, Mrs Watkins. Where my family stands. We have a role. That role, regardless of how we may feel as individuals, is to resist change. It’s what we do. We defend. And so I opposed your appointment, made no secret of it. Well, all right, that battle’s lost, it’s over. You’re here. Generally speaking, under most circumstances, you can now count on my support.’
Merrily said nothing.
‘So long,’ he said, ‘as you remain sensitive to the best interests of this village.’
‘I see. And if’ – Merrily prised herself painfully from the Aga – ‘on some significant and controversial issue, we don’t agree on what those best interests might be?’
‘I really don’t think,’ said James Bull-Davies, ‘that you would ever be so short-sighted.’
‘But say there was. Say there was an issue on which your idea of what was in the best interests of the village was in conflict with what I considered to be morally and spiritually right.’
He sighed. ‘You make it hard for me, Mrs Watkins. And perhaps for yourself.’
Merrily took a deep breath. ‘You haven’t answered my question. How would you react in a situation where we found it impossible to work out our differences?’
‘All right. Depending on the seriousness of the, er, matter under discussion, I should be obliged to use what influence I have. To get you out of the parish.’
Like your wretched ancestor did with Wil Williams? Merrily didn’t say it.
She didn’t say it.
‘Thank you for your honesty,’ she said.
He nodded to her and left before she could pour his tea.
When Jane came back with the fish and chips, she found her mother white-faced and furious, hands wrapped around the chrome bar of the Aga and twisting.
‘Mum…?’ Jane stood in the doorway, holding the hot paper package. ‘What…?’
‘Put them in the warming oven.’ Mum’s voice was a small, curled-up thing. ‘We’ll go and get the car.’
‘Car?’
‘And the sleeping bags, if you want.’
‘We’re staying the night?’
‘Yeah. We bloody are.’
‘Oh. What changed your mind? Something he said?’
‘We’re getting our feet under the bloody table. We’re letting the good folk of Ledwardine know we’ve arrived.’
Mum’s hands had stopped twisting on the bar. She was very, very still now.
‘No more shit.’ She’d never used that word to Jane before. ‘No more shit.’