In a corner of the bar at the Swan, Gomer Parry sniffed suspiciously into his poncy glass. Not that he was any kind of connoisseur, see, but there was something…
‘Stop that,’ Minnie hissed down his ear. ‘It’s not French wine, you know. You’ll be showing us up.’
‘En’t right, somehow.’ Gomer shuffled uncomfortably inside what he’d always thought of as his laying-out suit. ‘Nothing wrong with it, like, but it en’t right.’
‘The rubbish you talk, Gomer. Can’t you just drink it?’
There was a free glass of the so-called Wine of Angels for everybody attending the string quartet concert – recital, Minnie kept stressing, I think it’s a recital, Gomer – served in thin champagne glasses. Bottles of the stuff, with the picture of the church on the label, were set out on a special table, Emrys, the wine waiter, doing the honours to make everybody think this was a real privilege, like. ‘Fermented in the bottle,’ he kept telling the arty buggers from Off, whose Land Rover Discoveries were clogging up the market place – not that there was many of them, but a few of that sort went a long way, in Gomer’s view.
On account of the tickets not going as well as they’d figured, Dermot Child’s festival flunkeys had been doing the rounds, offering half-price seats to locals and finally fetching up at Gomer and Minnie’s bungalow, the bastards. ‘Oughter be called off, I reckon, in respect of poor Lucy,’ Gomer had mumbled, but Minnie had shelled out for the tickets straight off, though neither of fhem’d know a string quartet from a dustcart crew.
There were other people you wouldn’t expect to see at this kind of do. Brenda Prosser, from the Eight till Late shop, and Bernard and Norma Putley, from the garage, putting a brave face on it ‘spite of their boy being grilled by the Law over drugs. Oh, and Bull-Davies with his blonde floozie.
No sign of the vicar, mind. Gomer was worried about that little lady. Needed friends, she did, and all that was happening was folk getting turned against her. Too many mischief-makers. Life was boring in the country now, for folk born and raised locally. No jobs worth getting up for, less they moved away, the telly always showing them what they were missing, the Sun telling them they ought to be having dynamite sex twice a night and different partners at weekends, drug dealers showing enterprising youngsters like Mark Putley how they could earn enough for a smart motorbike.
And no characters any more. Gomer fiddled in a pocket of his stiff, blue jacket for a cigarette he daren’t bring out. No characters, now poor Lucy was gone. All gloss and no soul. The string quartet was made up of professional musicians from London with weekend cottages hereabouts.
And the so-called Wine of Angels, even that had no character. All this talk about the Pharisees Red and it tasted like supermarket cider. Whatever the old recipe was, the Powells had lost it.
‘En’t right,’ Gomer mumbled, following Minnie into the big dining room, done out as a concert hall. ‘Artificial’ That was the word. Whole village was artificial nowadays, but the cider, that needed checking out.
‘Here for the concert, Reverend?’ asked the fifty-something man at the hand dryer. Bank-manager type.
‘Yes, I er… I’m staying with friends in Hereford.’ Try and project your voice more. Always sound confident. ‘I gather the Queen’s Arms Quartet are building up quite a reputation.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ the bank manager said. ‘I believe they are. Well
… enjoy it’
As the toilet door wheezed into place, the face of Sandy Locke came up in the mirror. The Reverend Sandy Locke. Whose parish was in Hampshire, who was spending a couple of weeks with some old college friends in the cathedral city and who, this evening, was indulging his fondness for chamber music.
In the mirror, the Rev. Sandy Locke produced a surprisingly encouraging smile. It scared him how plausible he looked. How confident, how relaxed. He actually wouldn’t have recognized himself. A natural vicar’s face, Merrily had told him. Kind of fresh and innocent.
God forbid.
The ponytail had had to go. It was quite reasonable for a vicar to have long hair these days, Merrily said, but in Ledwardine it would make some people look again. Jane had cut his hair, finishing off with nail scissors so that it looked neat and groomed. Merrily had produced the black jacket and black cord jeans, the black T-shirt thing and the dog collar, all out of her own wardrobe. Everything was very tight. The jacket buttoned the wrong way, but it wouldn’t button anyway.
He froze momentarily when, on leaving the Gents’, he brushed against a woman who turned out to be Detective Inspector Annie Howe, severely youthful in her business suit. Howe glanced at him and they both smiled and he was terrified, but Howe moved on, and that was the clincher: the Rev. Sandy Locke bore no resemblance to the police picture of the young Lol Robinson, sex offender.
He went to the bar. He ordered a Perrier, carried it over to the window and stood there and watched the beautiful Alison Kinnersley, in a low-cut, wine-coloured velvet dress he didn’t recognize, flashing smiles across a table at her lover, and he felt no longing.
Where he’d thought he’d be feeling ridiculous, in fact he felt controlled. It was a strange and powerful sensation, everything now tightly wrapped around this deep and focused curiosity. Wild. Exhilarating. And, in the garb of a church minister, entirely and ironically unexpected.
He stood there, by the long, floral curtains, the opulent scene before him glimmering with artificial candlelight from the oak-pillared walls, and he looked at Alison Kinnersley, as though he was seeing her for the first time and saw that she was focused, too. Every smile she flung at Bull-Davies had a weight of history behind it. Or was he imagining that because of what he now knew?
He went on looking at Alison Kinnersley, whose name just happened to be the name of a straggling village in North Herefordshire which you might pick off a map and think how solid and convincing it would sound as a surname.
He went on looking at Alison Kinnersley but he thought about the Reverend Merrily Watkins.
Look. She’d held the dog collar to his throat. It’ll work. This is the only way. It’ll work.
She’d seemed exhilarated by it, fussing around, attending to details.
She was very lovely. He only wished she hadn’t seen Lol Robinson at his most pathetic.
Alison and Bull-Davies finished their drinks together and stood up together and walked together through a double doorway under a sign saying dining room.
In his strange, controlled way, the Rev. Sandy Locke followed them.
Where Lol Robinson would have hung around outside in the bar, hoping she’d need to go to the toilet, the Rev. Sandy Locke would take the seat right next to Alison.
Controlled?
Jesus, could it possibly last?
‘You are happy to discuss this in front of your little daughter?’ Richard Coffey said.
He wore a black leather waistcoat over a grandad vest. A rather good plaster facsimile of Michelangelo’s David flaunted itself on a plinth beside his chair. On the flock-papered walls were some artfully lit but fairly blatant black and white photos of naked men.
‘If there’s anything I don’t understand,’ Merrily said, ‘I’m sure she can explain it to me on the way home.’
Coffey didn’t smile. The truth was, she hadn’t been prepared to leave the kid alone in the vicarage. You might be able to lock Ethel the cat in the kitchen, but Jane disappeared too easily these days.
Jane sat on a cushion on a stone arm of the fireplace and gazed at Stefan Alder who shared the sofa with Coffey. Still young enough to think it just needed the right woman to come along to straighten him out. Merrily’s view, looking at Coffey’s bare, steely hawsered arms and his patchwork face, inclined more towards the right younger man. But to business.
‘Reason I wanted to see you, Mr Coffey, was the telephone call I had from The Sunday Times.’
‘Ah.’ Coffey leaned an arm along the back of the sofa, behind Stefan. ‘Dear Craig.’
‘I presumed he got his initial information from you.’
Coffey scowled. ‘He did not.’
The light in the lodge’s cubical sitting room was fading and dusty. The room was furnished with reproduction statuary and thousands of books. No TV, only a small, portable stereo. Nothing valuable because the house was left empty for long periods, Coffey had explained, and who wanted to steal books? Not that their despicable neighbour, Bull-Davies, would do anything to stop them.
‘If you’re looking for Craig’s informant,’ Coffey said, ‘I suggest you look no further than the festival committee. And I suspect that under the present circumstances one can rule out the unfortunate Cassidy.’
Merrily sat up even straighter than her pine Shaker-style chair demanded. ‘You mean Child?’
Controversy certainly attracts attention, Dermot had said, bemoaning the poor attendance, in real terms, on Day One. But this was the wrong kind of controversy.
Coffey pursed his thin lips and raised his tightly plucked eyebrows and said nothing.
‘For a quick blast of publicity for the festival?’ It made sense; if the festival flopped now that Dermot was in charge, after his frequent disparaging of Terrence Cassidy, there’d be enough egg on his face to whip up mayonnaise.
Coffey leaned his head on his arm. ‘Merrily, as I think I told you, I’m a thorough sort of chap, and I don’t do business with unknowns. I had them all checked out, with particular reference to precisely what they were doing before they came to Ledwardine… or came back, in Child’s case. Cassidy? Small beer, a polytechnic poseur who inherited his father’s house and decided on a new start. Child. Hmm. Well. Stefan calls him the Goblin, don’t you, Steffie?’
‘Goblins being the entities that enter your house at night and mess up your possessions,’ Stefan said. He’d looked quite pleased to see them when he first opened the door. As though there was tension between Coffey and him.
‘He’s a failure, basically,’ Coffey said. ‘Started out as a music teacher at some comprehensive school, then decided his talents were worth more. Worked with an early-music ensemble and composed, in the loosest sense, the music for a television costume drama which was so awful they screened it around midnight. Been trading on it ever since, with diminishing returns. Child’s a loser.’
‘But a rather poor loser, I’m afraid,’ Stefan said.
‘A poisonous loser. Man’s so embittered he doesn’t care who goes down. So, if you’re looking for the designer, if not the actual distributor, of, for example, certain posters branding you a person of satanic bent, you might begin by checking out the equipment at the festival office.’
Merrily was shocked. ‘I can’t believe that.’
‘Of course you can’t, he’s a charming little man.’
Jane said, ‘Posters?’
‘Juvenile trivia, flower.’
‘Only, Dean Wall and Gittoes and those hairballs were coming out with all that Satanism stuff at Colette’s party.’
‘Who?’ said Coffey.
‘Just some yobs from Jane’s school’
‘Ah, well, schoolboys can be terribly useful,’ Coffey said, with a certain insouciance. ‘They always need money. And it doesn’t have to be a great deal.’
Stefan glared at him.
‘But why would he?’ Merrily said. ‘What have I ever done to him?’
‘I really wouldn’t know. Perhaps not enough. Who can say?’
‘Christ,’ Merrily said.
She couldn’t look at any of them and stared out of the window, across a few semi-wooded fields to the village. Between the lodge’s Victorian Gothic mullions, smudges of evening cloud had blunted the church steeple.
After no more than about seventy-five minutes, the Queen’s Arms Quartet were showing signs of strain, and the tubby, beaming guy – Dermot Child? – arose to lead a standing ovation. Seriously undeserved, Lol thought, having detected more than a few bum notes. Still, it was at this moment – when they all stood up, with an assortment of creaks from an assortment of chairs – that Alison glanced, for the first time, directly to her left and met the eyes of the Rev. Sandy Locke.
It was worth it. For a second, her face was frozen tight, before it imploded into a gasp. Another first. Maybe the gasp was even a tiny scream, but it was lost among the spurious applause, like a leaf in a gale.
Lol clapped harder so that he swayed against Alison. He put his cheek next to hers and in his jolly vicar voice he said, ‘Alison Young, as I live and breathe.’
Stefan Alder began to look excited, leaned eagerly towards Merrily. ‘So what are you proposing?’
It was quite dark now, but Coffey had not put on a lamp.
‘I don’t quite know,’ Merrily said. ‘It all seems to go deeper than I can say. Or you, I suspect.’
‘It couldn’t go any deeper with me,’ Stefan said, and Coffey frowned.
‘In the village, I meant.’ Merrily thought of her afternoon with Lucy, who’d said she wanted the play to go on in the church so that the truth would come out. When the ditch-waters are stirred, the turds often surface. ‘I think I want whatever’s bubbling under there to come to the surface. Is that what you want?’
‘It’s all I want,’ Stefan said humbly, without even a glance at Coffey.
‘What I don’t want, though,’ Merrily said, ‘and what I don’t think the village deserves, is for it to happen in the middle of a media circus. I don’t want’ – a sideways glance at Coffey – ‘to play Dermot’s game.’
Coffey said from the shadows, ‘Don’t try to be clever, Mrs Watkins. Spell it out.’
‘All right.’ She looked down to the village, where lights were coming on. ‘I heard Stefan and your friends Martin and Mira discussing the idea of involving the community in the drama by having a few local people virtually take on the roles of their ancestors. So you’d have Wil Williams defending himself from the pulpit, explaining his… situation. And perhaps some reaction, whether it’s surprise or dismay or sympathy. Who’d play Thomas Bull?’
‘We’d have an actor,’ Coffey said guardedly. ‘I even considered doing it myself.’
Merrily said, before she could stop herself, ‘You do like to live dangerously, don’t you?’
A cold silence from Coffey’s corner.
‘We would hardly expect Bull-Davies to be there,’ Stefan said.
‘Don’t underestimate him.’
‘And don’t underestimate me, Mrs Watkins.’ Richard Coffey inclined his head to her. ‘Don’t push me too hard. There are other churches. There’s even a cathedral’
‘No!’ Stefan cried. Merrily raised a palm.
‘I’m not pushing anybody. I’m just suggesting that if you want the local people on your side and no embarrassing interruptions, then you might like to try a private run-through with a private, local audience. Unpublicized. Word of mouth. I can guarantee an audience.’
‘And Child would guarantee a television crew or two.’
‘I think not,’ Merrily said icily.
‘And when were you thinking we might do this?’
‘Tomorrow night?’
She heard Jane gasp. Two or three seconds of incredulous silence followed, before Coffey’s forced laughter and Merrily interrupting it.
‘Why not? It’s all written, isn’t it? Stefan’s well into the role.’
‘Mrs Watkins, your ignorance of the demands of a theatrical production I find-’
‘But we’re not talking about a theatrical production! We’re talking about… I don’t know what we re talking about… A confrontation. A dialogue. A dialogue with the past. The village facing up to its most shameful episode, seeking redemption. Looking into its own soul and groping for the truth after three centuries of ignorance. Trying to find the light.’
‘The beginnings of a pretty soliloquy,’ said Coffey. ‘Who would you play, Mrs Watkins?’
‘I understand what you’re worried about. You’re afraid of a shambles. Of word getting out that it was a disaster. Maybe Dermot Child shafting you. Well, all right, I can buy that. But this would be a village thing – the sort of thing churches were intended for.’
‘She might be right.’ Stefan Alder was on his feet, his back to the window, looking out over the lights of Ledwardine. ‘We know everything about the village,’ he said to Merrily. ‘We’ve a great, thick file of information. Richard paid a chap who used to work for the local paper to collect stories and memories from local people.’
‘Shut up, Steffie.’
‘This chap was marvellous. He hung out in the Ox and places, he talked to a meeting of the WI. They all thought he was collecting information for one of those local history books. Nobody knew it was for us. We can use all that. Well surprise everybody with how much we know, how much a part of this village we’ve become in such a short time. She’s right, Richard, we can bond with these people, we can win them over, prove beyond all doubt that we’re the right people to do this, to tell the truth.’
‘She might very well be right, Steffie, but what she’s suggesting is utterly impossible. Why tomorrow night anyway? Why not in a couple of months’ time, when we know where we’re going with this?’
‘Because I don’t know where I’m going with it, Mr Coffey. It keeps coming up in front of me. I keep telling myself it’s only a bloody play, but…’
‘It isn’t,’ Stefan said. ‘It’s a public redemption.’
‘Yes. Whatever. Anyway, those are my terms. You want to do it somewhere else, you go ahead. You know my number.’ Merrily stood up. ‘Come on, Jane.’
‘All right.’ Stefan Alder turned towards them, a shadow, even his ash-blond hair black against the blue-grey window. ‘We’ll do it. We’ll do it tomorrow night. Bring who you want. Fill the church.’
‘Stefan, don’t be a bloody fool’ Coffey sprang up, his face pulsing. ‘Leave us, Mrs Watkins.’
‘Sure. Flower?’
Jane crept quietly away from the empty hearth. They let themselves out. In the dark room behind them, they heard Richard Coffey snarl, ‘You stupid little shit. It’s my play.’
‘I’ll see he’s there,’ Stefan called after them, his voice high and tremulously theatrical. ‘I’ll have him there.’
‘It’s my play!’
‘Not you,’ Stefan sang out, with stinging contempt. ‘Wil. It’s Wil’s play.’