Merrily had a recurring dream. She’d read somewhere that it was really quite a common dream, with obvious symbolism.
By recurring… well, she’d have it maybe once every few months, or the gaps might be even longer nowadays.
There was a period, not long before Sean died, when it came almost nightly. Or even, in that intense and suffocating period, twice or three times the same night – she’d close her eyes and the dream would be waiting there like an empty train by a deserted platform. Sometimes it was merely puzzling, sometimes it seemed to open up exciting possibilities. Occasionally, it was very frightening and she awoke shredded with dread.
What happened… she was in a house. Not always the same house, but it was her own house, and she’d lived there quite some time without realizing. Or sometimes she’d just forgotten, she’d gone on living there, possibly for years, without registering that the house had… a third floor.
It was clear that she’d lived quite comfortably in this house, which was often bright and pleasant, and that she must have passed the extra staircase thousands of times, either unaware of it or because there was simply no reason to go up there.
In the dream, however, she had to go up. With varying amounts of anticipation or cold dread. Because something up there had made its presence known to her.
She’d nearly always awaken before she made it to the top of the stairs. Either disappointed or trembling with relief. Just occasionally, before her eyes opened, she would glimpse a gloomy, airless landing with a row of grey doors.
In reality, if you excluded flats, she had never lived in a three-storey house.
Now, however…
‘Jesus,’ Merrily said. ‘We can’t live in this.’
‘Yes, I suppose it is big,’ Uncle Ted conceded. ‘Didn’t think about that. Never a problem for Alf Hayden. Six kids, endless grandchildren…’
It was big, all right. Seventeenth century, timber-framed, black and white. Seven bedrooms. Absolutely bloody huge if there was just the two of you. Very quaint, but also unexpectedly, depressingly grotty; nothing seemed to have altered since about the 1950s.
‘Of course, it’s church policy these days to flog off these draughty old vicarages,’ Uncle Ted said. ‘Replace them with nice, modern boxes. Worth a lot of money, your old black and whites. Well
… not this one, at present, not in the state it’s in after thirty-odd years of Alf and Betty.’
There was quaint, Merrily thought, and there was horribly old-fashioned. Like the steel-grey four-bar electric fire blocking up the inglenook. Like a kitchen the size of a small abattoir with no real cupboards but endless open shelves and all the pipes coiled under the sink like a nest of cobras.
‘Besides,’ Ted said, ‘we haven’t got any nice, modern boxes to spare. Three applications for housing estates’ve been turned down in as many years. Not in keeping.’ He frowned. ‘Conservation’s a fine idea, but not when it turns a nice, old village into an enclave of the elite.’
In his habitual cardigan and slippers, Ted Clowes, two years retired, didn’t look at all like a lawyer any more. His face had gone ruddy, like a farmer’s, and his body had thickened. He looked as seasoned and solid as one of the oak pillars holding up the vicarage walls.
As senior church warden, Ted had made himself responsible for getting the vicarage into some kind of shape. Negotiating with builders and plumbers and decorators. But, well into April, the work had hardly begun; it looked as though Merrily was going to have to spend the first month of her ministry in a bed-and-breakfast.
She was relieved, in a way. A place this size – it was ridiculous. And an unoccupied third floor, full of dust and echoes.
She stood on the first-floor landing, miserably looking up. ‘All these staircases.’
‘Yeah,’ Jane said thoughtfully. ‘This puts a whole new perspective on the entire scenario.’
‘It does?’
Merrily watched warily as the kid took off up the stairs to the third storey. She’d been sulking, on and off, for three days. She’d quite enjoyed the two years in Birmingham while Merrily was at college, loved the time in Liverpool when Merrily was a curate. Big-city woman now. On the way here, she’d said that if Cheltenham was an old people’s home, rural Herefordshire looked like premature burial.
‘Yes.’ Jane paused halfway up, looking around.
‘You like this?’
‘At least we’ve cleared all those rooms now,’ Ted said. ‘Alf and Betty were generous enough to leave us a quarter of a century’s worth of junk. Yellowing newspapers with pictures of the first moon-landing.’
Jane had a forefinger placed pensively on her chin. ‘Far more rooms than you’d need, Mum, right?’
‘Mmm… yes.’
‘Even for all your Bible classes and parish meetings and visiting evangelists from Nigeria.’
‘Ye… es. Unless, of course, they’re travelling with their extended families.’
‘So this whole storey is, in effect, going spare.’
‘Conceivably.’
Her daughter was starting to operate like a slick barrister. (The barrister Merrily might have become had it not been for God’s unexpected little blessing. Would she still eventually have wound up in the Church if Jane hadn’t come along?)
‘Don’t look at me like that, Mum. All I’m saying is I could have a kind of group of rooms up here. Like a suite. Because… because… if you think about it, those back stairs come off a separate entrance
… a third door, right?’
Ted chuckled. He knew all about daughters.
‘Right,’ Merrily said. ‘And?’
‘So it would be kind of my own entrance. It would be… in fact
… like my own flat.’
‘Oh. I see.’
The third door with its own illuminated bell and a card under perspex: Flat One. Ms Jane Watkins. She was fifteen.
‘And you’d pay the heating bills for this, er, suite, would you?’
‘Oh God.’ Jane glared down over the oak banister. ‘Here we go. Mrs bloody Negative.’
‘Or maybe you could sub-let a couple of rooms.’
Jane scowled and flounced off along the short passage. Oak floorboards creaked, a door rattled open. That empty sound.
‘Could be a double-bluff,’ Merrily said, her daughter pacing bare boards overhead, probably working out where to put her stereo speakers for optimum sound. ‘The picture she’s feeding me is that she’s going to be so bored here she’ll have to invite half the young farmers’ club over for wild parties. All these rural Romeos popping pills on the back stairs.’
Ted laughed. ‘Young farmers aren’t pill-popping yet. Well… none that I know of. Pressure job, now, though. Diminishing returns, EC on your back, quotas for this, quotas for that, a hundred forms to fill in, mad cow disease. Suicide figures are already… Sorry. Bad memories.’
‘What? Oh.’
‘I seem to remember saying, “If you want an informal picture of village life, why not pop along to this wassailing thing?” Not quite what I had in mind. Awfully sorry, Merrily.’
She looked through the landing window, down into a small, square rose garden, where the pink and orange of the soil seemed more exotic than the flowers. Over a hedge lay the churchyard with its cosy, sandstone graves.
Oddly, that awful, public death hadn’t given her a single nightmare. In her memory it was all too surreal. As though violent death had been an optional climax to the wassailing and, as the oldest shooter in the pack, Edgar Powell had felt obliged to take it.
‘You know, standing in that orchard, covered with that poor old bloke’s blood, that was when I decided to go for it. I clearly remember thinking that nothing so immediate and so utterly shocking ever happened quite that close to me in Liverpool. That maybe, in some ways, this village could actually be the sharp end. I thought, am I going to wash off his blood and walk away?’
‘It always affects you more in the country.’ Ted came to stand beside her at the window. ‘Everything that happens. Because you know everybody. Everybody. And you’ll find, as minister, that you’re regarded as more of a… a key person. Births and deaths, you really have to be there. Even if nobody from the family’s been to a church service since the war.’
‘That’s fair enough. Far as I’m concerned, belonging to the Church doesn’t have to involve coming to services.’
‘And you’ll find that hills and meadows are far more claustrophobic than housing estates. You see somebody coming across a twelve-acre field towards you, you can’t dodge into a bus shelter.’
‘Fine.’
Ted raised a dubious eyebrow. ‘And everybody gossips,’ he said. ‘For instance, they’ll all tell you Edgar Powell’d been handling that shotgun since for ever.’
‘Making it suicide?’
‘What it looks like, but they haven’t got a motive. Money worries? No more than the average farmer. Isolation? Hardly – not living on the edge of the village. Depression? Hard to say. Perhaps he’d just had enough. Or perhaps he simply wanted to ruin the Cassidys’ olde English soiree. Been a spiteful old bugger in his time.’
‘You are kidding, aren’t you?’
‘Anyway, Garrod Powell’s insisting it was an accident. Came to consult me about it. He’ll be telling the coroner the old chap was simply going soft in the head. Can’t blame him. Who wants a family suicide? I suggested he have a word with young Asprey, get something medical. But it could even be an open verdict.’
‘What’s that mean exactly, Uncle Ted?’
Merrily turned to find Jane sitting on the top stair, elbows on knees, chin cupped in her hands.
‘Means they can’t be entirely sure what happened, Jane,’ Ted said.
‘Wish I’d been there.’
Merrily rolled her eyes. Having made a point of leaving Jane at her mother’s when she’d come to do her bit of undercover surveillance prior to applying – or not – for the post. The kid would’ve given them away in no time.
‘Do you get many suicides in the village?’ Jane asked.
‘Not with audience-participation,’ Ted said dryly.
Merrily was thinking, half-guiltily, how she’d scrubbed and scrubbed at her face that night and had to throw away the old fake Barbour.
They stayed the night at the Black Swan, sharing a room. On the third floor, as it happened, but it was different in a hotel. The Black Swan, like all the major buildings in Ledwardine – with the obvious exception of the vicarage – had been sensitively modernized; the room was ancient but luxurious.
Jane was asleep about thirty seconds after sliding into her bed. Jane could slip into untroubled sleep anywhere. She’d accepted her father’s death with an equanimity that was almost worrying. A blip. Sean had lived in the fast lane and that was precisely where he died. Bang. Gone.
Sadder about the girl in the car with him. She could have been Jane in a few years’ time. Or Merrily herself, ten years or so earlier.
Too many thoughts crowding in, Merrily upended the pillow behind her, leaned into it and lit the last cigarette of the day. Through the deep, oak-sunk window, the crooked, picture-book roofs of the village snuggled into a soft and woolly pale night sky.
Perfect. Too perfect, perhaps. If you actually lived here, with roses round the door, what was there left to dream of?
‘How are things financially, now?’ Ted had asked in the lounge bar, after dinner.
Jane had mooched off into the untypically warm April evening to check out the village. And the local totty, she’d added provocatively.
‘Oh’ – Merrily drank some lager – ‘we get by. Sean’s debts weren’t as awesome as we’d been led to believe. And a few of the debtors seem less eager to collect than they were at first. I think it was meeting me. In the dog collar. It was like… you know… dangling a sprig of garlic in front of Dracula. I’m glad I met them. I don’t feel so bad about it now I know what kind of semi-criminal creeps they are. Jesus, what am I saying, semi?’
‘I won’t ask. But I did think he was being a little overambitious setting up on his own. Why didn’t you both come to me for some advice?’
‘You know Sean. Knew. Anyway, I blame myself. If I hadn’t got pregnant instead of a degree, it was going to be Super-lawyer and Lois-thing, defending the poor, serving the cause of real justice. Zap. Pow. But… there you go. He was on his own, and with the responsibility of a kid and everything, he was floundering, and he got a little careless about the clients he took on. It’s a slippery slope. I wasn’t aware of the way things were going. Too busy being Mummy.’
‘You blame yourself for letting him get you pregnant?’ Ted raised helpless eyes to the ceiling. ‘Blame yourself for anything, won’t you, Merrily? Dangerous that, in a vicar.’
‘Priest-in-charge.’
‘Only a matter of time. Now Alf Hayden… he never accepted the blame for anything. Act of God. Providence. His favourite words. Had us tearing our hair. But you can’t get rid of a vicar, can you? Once they’re in, they’re in and that’s that.’
‘Not any more. My contract’s for five years.’
‘Red tape,’ Ted said. ‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘Please, Uncle Ted. Don’t do anything… anything else.’
‘You’re not feeling manipulated, are you?’
‘Of course not. Well… maybe. A little.’
As if having a woman priest in the family wasn’t enough, her mother, from the safety of suburban Cheltenham, had been out of her mind when Merrily had gone as a curate to inner-city Liverpool, all concrete and drugs and domestic violence. Running youth clubs and refuges for prozzies and rent boys. Terrific, Jane had thought. Cathartic, Merrily had found.
While her mother was putting out feelers.
Good old Ted had come up with the goods inside a year. The vicar of Ledwardine was retiring. Beautiful Ledwardine, only an hour or so’s drive from Cheltenham. And Ted was not only senior church warden but used to be the bishop’s solicitor. No string-pulling, of course; she’d only get the job if she was considered up to it and the other candidates were weak… which, at less than fifteen grand a year, they almost certainly would be.
‘You’ve had a stressful time,’ Ted said. He’d never asked her why she’d abandoned the law for the Church. It was evidently taken for granted that this was some kind of reaction against Sean going bent. ‘But you do feel right about this place now?’
‘I think so. And listen, don’t imagine I’ll be giving you an easy time.’
‘Ha. Alf was always far too apathetic to sustain a decent dispute. What did you have in mind?’
‘Well, you need toilets in that church for a start. I don’t care if it is Grade One listed with five stars, a lot of people won’t come to a place where they’re scared of being taken short. Especially on winter mornings.’
‘Shouldn’t be too much of a problem. If you can raise the money.’
‘I’m also into more streamlined services. No, streamlined’s not the word exactly. Shorter and more… intense. Fewer hymns. Less meaningless ritual. I mean, we won’t be kicking people out afterwards. There’ll be tea and biscuits and all that, though I won’t ask for the espresso machine until I’ve been around for a while.’
‘What about the prayer book?’
‘Oh, strictly Book of Common Prayer. And no happy-clappy. Well, not much, anyway. Not for the grown-ups.’
Ted Clowes twisted his brandy glass around, as if contemplating something. ‘I shouldn’t really be saying this, but a few people were a little wary about you at first. Big parish for… for…’
‘For a woman?’
‘Well, yes.’ He looked uncomfortable. ‘But there were other considerations. It’s a mightily useful church, you see. Big. And with quite remarkable acoustics. Best concert hall for a good many miles.’
‘So I gather.’
‘And no shortage of people who recognize its qualities. People who’ve moved into the area. Dermot Child, the composer and early-music expert and your organist, of course. And Richard Coffey, the playwright.’
‘He lives here?’
‘Well, some of the time. With his young friend. An actor, not one you’d have heard of. And the Cassidys are very, er, cultured. Well, that’s just the core of it, but there are lesser figures and acolytes and followers. And you have to take notice of these people because they bring bodies – and money – into the church. Into the diocese. And a certain… cultural cachet. Can’t be cynical about this sort of thing, Merrily.’
‘Has the Church ever been?’
‘Perhaps not. And most of us realize the Church needs a kick up the backside, and if it’s delivered by a more prettily shod foot, fair enough. Alf was always a bit of an old woman, time for a young one. But, naturally, we have our traditionalists. People who may have tried to block the way.’
‘Ah,’ Merrily said. ‘Would it help if I knew who they were?’
Ted didn’t hesitate. ‘Well, James Bull-Davies. He’s the only one counts for anything. Funny sort of chap, James. Career army officer. Then his marriage breaks up and his father dies quite unexpectedly from some sort of embolism following a routine op. James has to give up his career, come back and take over the estate. Catapulted into the situation really.’
‘What situation’s that?’
‘Weight of tradition, I suppose. Had to sell land and property to cover death duties and what have you, in addition to whatever it cost him to pay Sarah off. Left him with Upper Hall. And the burden of tradition. Soldier mentality, you see. Taken on the role of the squire in a way his father never did. Feels it’s his function to stop the slide of country values. Keep the modern world at arm’s length.’
‘I see,’ Merrily said. ‘And that includes… what’s her name? Alison?’
‘Oh, well, nobody knows what goes on there. Power of the flesh, I’m afraid. Anyway, women in the boudoir, that’s one thing. Women in the pulpit of the church housing the bones of one’s ancestors is something else entirely.’
Merrily slowly shook her head.
‘It isn’t you, my dear,’ Ted assured her. ‘It’s the principle. The tradition. However, to his chagrin, he’s found that, in what was once a little world where the squire was a demigod, there are now other influential parties. Notably the affluent, articulate incomers, most of whom were rather keen on the idea of a lady cleric. Question of image, you see.’
‘Image? Somebody said that?’
‘They tolerated Alf, of course. Fat, scruffy old cove. Not very ambitious, not terribly bright. Always a bit of egg-yolk on the old cassock. But what the parish needs at this stage of the village’s development is someone more sophisticated, more attuned to the, ah… is Zeitgeist the word I’m looking for?’
‘They’d prefer a woman priest because it’s cool and state-of-the-art? Jesus.’
‘Not merely a woman.’ Ted shuffled about a bit. ‘I mean, when they saw you at the wassailing and somebody put two and two together…’
‘What?’
‘Oh, Merrily, don’t make me spell it out. You’re young and you rather, as someone said, rather smoulder… in black.’
‘Oh no. Oh, hell. Who said that?’
‘Not going to say. Told you I shouldn’t have said anything.’
‘Bloody hell, Ted.’
Merrily awoke just as it was growing light. Above the timbered gables, a wooded hill had formed.
She was brightening with the sky. What had been outrageous last night seemed quite funny now. Smoulder. Who’d said that? And where? Hopefully, not at the bishop’s palace. Things really had changed, hadn’t they? Used to be schoolgirls falling for the new curate.
Merrily smiled, feeling younger than she had in quite a while. She looked across at Jane, who was still asleep. Hey, what the hell? If she wanted to set up some kind of apartment under the eaves, why not? The kid had given up enough these past years: two changes of school, becoming single-parented, coping with a mother who spent whole nights fuming about some of the crap they threw at you in theological college.
And, for Merrily – she glanced at the thick-beamed ceiling – it would take away the irrational, background stress connected with an empty third storey.
She went to the window which was set into a wall divided into irregular, white rectangles by huge varicose veins of Tudor oak. Jane, who was into fine art these days, said those white areas were just crying out for something interesting with acrylics. Oh dear.
Merrily gazed out over the inn-sign, across to the intimate market square with the squat, crablike, oak-legged shelter they called the market hall or cross. Overhung with shape-shifting black and white houses, every crooked beam and truss preserved and presented with pride.
The village wore its past like a row of glittering horse-brasses over an inglenook fireplace. Defined by its past, shaped by invaders. The Norman church with Saxon origins at the end of a Roman road. The cramped, cobbled alleyway where the gutters had once overflowed with pig-blood and piss, now a bijou arcade, soon to be scented with fountains of flowers from a score of hanging baskets.
For the new invaders, the Cassidys of this world, were here not to pillage or desecrate or change, but only to preserve, preserve, preserve. And wallow. Preserve and wallow.
Merrily looked down into the still-shadowed street, saw Dr Kent Asprey, heart-throb GP and fitness-freak leading his jogging party of sweating matrons past the new tourist information office. Saw Gomer Parry, the retired digger-driver, kick a stone into the road and stand on the kerb, hands rammed deep into his pockets, cigarette jammed between his lips. He looked aimless. What, after all, was there to do in this village but stand and stare, appreciate, absorb, be enriched?
Ideal, her mother had said. After what you’ve been through, you need somewhere quiet with no stress and no drug addicts and homeless people to make you feel guilty. Somewhere you can sit back a bit and take stock.
Merrily knelt before the window to pray. She thought, No need for homeless people to make me feel guilty.
According to dream analysts, the one about the realization of a third storey was an indication of a whole new area of yourself which remained unexplored. A higher consciousness.
‘Dear God,’ Merrily whispered, her palms together, angled on the rising sun.
From behind her, she heard the squeak of Jane’s bed as the kid sat up.
‘Oh shit,’ her daughter muttered, sleepy and cross. ‘Do you really have to do that in here?’