Mum drove them slowly home in the Volvo with the Hazey Jane album playing quite loudly on the CD, a signal she didn’t want to talk. Maybe this was just as well, Jane was thinking. She’d only have said something really crass about Mum coming on, at last, like an actual catalyst.
It was like Lucy was in the back seat.
And what was so crazy about that? Jane looked out of the side window as they came into the village as if she might spot the lamp of the moped bobbing into the market place, a little golden light. What had they done with Lucy’s moped? Probably being examined by some police mechanical expert, who’d say the brakes were crap or something and the little bike was a death trap and why wasn’t she wearing a helmet?
Because it wouldn’t fit over her big hat, you cretins! You want Lucy Devenish to go out without her hat?
There was life after death. There had to be. Or there was no justice; no justice for good people like Lucy. Who nobody could replace; something had died with Lucy, a spirit. It was mega-depressing.
She glanced at Mum’s profile, the dark curls in need of a cut. Run with this, Vicar, don’t let her down. And then thought about Colette. Where was she tonight?
It’s like somebody cuts out a section of time and joins the ends together, second to second. Like with the dancing girl in Mrs Leather, maybe Colette will be visible occasionally in the little, green orchard.
The thought wasn’t scary; it was hopeful. It had been there on the back burner since she first read that story. If Colette was there, somebody should try and reach her.
The market place was still full of cars, but, at barely ten, people were already dribbling out of the Black Swan under the hanging lanterns. Not much of a gig, then. She wondered how Lol was getting on. It had just been so much fun making him look like a vicar, like traditional country vicars were supposed to look, kind of weedy and innocent. In the end he looked much more like one than Mum, but then Mum never really had.
Before they left for Coffey’s place, Mum had told her the whole story about Lol and Karl Windling and the young girls in the hotel – which she’d found so awful and so barely credible that she wanted to go and find these girls and their smug parents and tell them just what they’d done. As for that bastard Windling…
On the CD, Lol was singing, the low, breathy voice solo with acoustic guitar, about being alone in the city in a cold January rain but not wanting to go home.
It made such horrifying sense. It made her want to cry. It made her wish she was old enough to marry him or something.
A police car rolled out of Church Street. The awful Howe would be hoping now, like Bella, that Colette was dead, turning it into a big case for an area like this. Dreaming of picking up Lol and shoving him into a little grey-walled room, like on The Bill, her and that Mumford asking him kind of nonchalantly what he’d done with the body. Telling him they just wanted to help him. That was what the police always did, they told you they just wanted to help you. But they were just in it for themselves. Like everybody was.
Except Mum.
‘Suppose they’ve got him?’ she said as they pulled into the vicarage drive.
‘If they’d got him,’ Mum said calmly, switching off the engine and the stereo, ‘I think they’d be waiting for us, too. I don’t see anybody, do you?’
‘Lol wouldn’t finger us.’
‘No,’ Mum said. ‘I don’t think he would.’
Inside the vicarage, she seemed to collapse. No sleep, not much food for over a day. Running on empty for too long. She was trying to open a can of sardines for Ethel, but the metal key thing snapped, and she just stood there in the kitchen and started to weep.
Somehow, the vicarage did this to her. The vastness of it, the emptiness, was far worse for Mum than it was for Jane, who still thought a big house was cool. Not as if it was haunted or anything. It just seemed to do Mum’s brain in. She’d been dynamite at the Upper Hall Lodge, pushing even the scary Coffey into a corner, getting what she wanted. And now, here she was, sobbing her heart out in her own kitchen, and Jane just knew she was thinking about Dad and what a balls they’d made of their marriage and everything and how stupid she’d been to think she could manage a parish and all the other stuff that came down on you when were exhausted in a place you hated.
‘Go to bed, Mum. Please go to bed. I’ll look after everything.’
‘I can’t. What about Lol?’
‘I’ll wait up for him. Please go to bed.’
Mum wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her jumper. ‘Sorry.’
‘You’re overtired.’ Jane eased the sardine can out of her hands.
‘I gave him a key,’ Mum said. ‘Didn’t I?’
‘I think you did. Don’t worry. Sleep.’
Mum looked at her, just about finding the energy for suspicion.
‘I’ll go up too,’ Jane assured her. ‘I won’t go out again, I promise.’
Not tonight, anyway. Got to prepare. Got to get it right.
There was a lounge, for residents only, with a TV set tuned to a film about surfing, with the sound down. A waitress served cocoa to two elderly couples at a window table.
Lol took a seat by the door. One of the elderly ladies smiled at him, and Lol said, ‘Good evening,’ in his soft but resonant vicar’s voice and sat, composed, his fingers loosely entwined.
She would come. She’d directed him here. Smiling and nodding pleasantly for the thirty seconds she’d been speaking to the Rev. Locke, smiling for the benefit of James Bull-Davies, who’d been getting drinks at the time. An actress. Every move she made powered by this low-burning, high-octane fury.
He saw that now. The Rev. Sandy Locke, one step removed from it all, seemed able to see so many things concealed from screwed-up, introverted Lol Robinson.
‘Two eggs,’ one of the elderly men said. ‘Bacon, sausage, liver, onions, black pudding, chips. Nine ninety-five.’ He sat back, triumphant. ‘Inclusive of sweet.’
‘The toilets weren’t clean, though,’ his wife said. ‘At least the toilets are clean here. And what’s more, what I always think is important in a hotel-’
She broke off as Alison glided in, both elderly ladies looking rather shocked when this blonde in the revealing dress went to sit next to the clergyman, the old men looking pleased.
‘Hi.’ Lol smiled. ‘Where did you tell him you were going?’
‘Powder my nose. Evidently, I bumped into someone I knew in the Ladies’, you know what women are like.’
‘I’m kind of learning,’ Lol said. ‘At last.’
‘He’ll find someone’s ear to bend. Won’t notice I’m missing for a while. As to that’ – Alison gestured at his dog collar – ‘I’m not going to ask.’
‘A drink?’
‘No time.’
‘So you talk,’ Lol said. ‘And I’ll listen. I won’t interrupt.’ He felt like he was hovering, very steadily. Everything delicately balanced but, for the first time in his adult life, he was keeping the balance.
Alison shook her hair back. ‘I suppose Devenish told you, God rest her heathen soul’
‘No, it was insight.’
‘From you?’
He grinned. She couldn’t touch him tonight. He lowered his voice. He took this great leap in the dark.
‘I can’t help wondering what James would say, if he knew he’d been fucking his… what? Half-sister?’
She remained entirely calm. ‘You going to tell him?’
Jesus. It’s right.
‘Probably not,’ he said.
In the darkness of her too-big bedroom, Merrily knelt to pray by her too-big bed.
‘I, er… I don’t know what I’m asking for. Strength, certainly. Yeah. I’m not strong. But You know that.’
She went quiet. Receptive. Opening up a space in her heart. Wanting very much to receive something, if it was only an upsurge of blessed scepticism. She didn’t want to believe in bloody ghosts and fairies.
In the silence, there was no sense of blue or gold. Was that itself a sign? Was the lack of response, the sense of praying into a black void, an indication that she should harden herself against phoney mysticism, spurious superstition? She felt distantly angry at God for never giving it to you straight.
Of course, it was Lol himself who’d pointed her at Lucy.
Mentioning, when Alison had talked about the Bull-Davies tradition of keeping horses, that James’s old man seemed to have carried on the equine tradition purely for a steady supply of stable girls.
The first chance she had this morning, Alison had been off to pursue this angle with Lucy Devenish, good friend of Patricia Young who’d slaved in the Bull stables in the early sixties.
‘And came home pregnant to Swindon,’ Alison said. ‘Steadfastly refusing to name the father. My gran was very supportive, although God knows she had enough on her plate at the time, with Grandfather failing fast. He died, in fact, the night after I was born, so we came back to a house of mourning, Mother and I.’
The waitress returned and, evidently thinking the minister was a hotel guest, asked if they would like anything. Lol ordered coffee, figuring this was going to take longer than Alison imagined.
‘I don’t think,’ he said, ‘that Lucy mentioned anything to me about her friend being pregnant. I don’t think she knew. She said she’d warned her to get out of Upper Hall and she’d taken the advice.’
‘You’re right, Devenish didn’t know about the pregnancy. She said this morning that that was what she was afraid of. My mother would come to her in tears, asking what could she do when she needed the job and the money. In the end, Devenish gave her some to get away. Which was kind. But too late. No, she didn’t know about a baby. How did you?’
Lol explained, without mentioning Merrily, about the book in the box. The word Young and then Alison. How he’d kept looking at it and puzzling and then remembered the name, Patricia Young. All those weeks of agonizing over why she left him, and then this moment of blinding certainty. Intuition.
‘I had no choice, Lol’
‘No,’ he said neutrally.
‘You don’t believe that. Hell, you don’t owe me any generosity, I don’t expect any. I needed to live in a certain posh village, couldn’t afford a mortgage.’ She shrugged. ‘You were there. You needed help too. I’m sorry. But I’d do it again.’
Lol didn’t react. He understood now. He didn’t care.
‘So when did your mother eventually admit the old Bull was your father?’
‘Never. Never did. My gran said she’d sometimes imply it was one of the village boys. Unconvincingly.’
‘You must have asked her who your father was, as you got older.’
‘No, no you don’t understand.’ Shaking her head impatiently. ‘I don’t remember Patricia. I don’t remember my mother at all. That’s the whole point. One day, when I was about eighteen months old, she left me with my gran, said she was going back to Hereford to see some people. Get some money out of the father, that was always Gran’s theory, because they had money problems at the time, after the old man died. Bills. Debts. He was a farmer, too, of sorts, my grandad. So Gran didn’t try to stop my mother going. Died regretting that.’
‘Why?
‘Because she never came back, Lol. She returned to Ledwardine to face the father and she never bloody well came back. Gran reported it to the police and they made cursory, routine inquiries in Ledwardine and said nobody had seen her, and that was that.’
‘That was it?’ He thought of the way the police were turning over the village for Colette Cassidy.
‘Grown women, Lol, sometimes choose to disappear. The police were suggesting she’d only come back to Swindon to dump the baby, make sure I had a good home. Then off to join some man, with no inconvenient little kid in tow.’
‘They check with old Bull-Davies?’
‘Oh, sure. Squire John, county councillor and magistrate. Local constable deferential on the doorstep. Sorry to disturb you, sir, tug-tug on the forelock, but this silly girl you once kindly employed
… Just a formality, sir, if you’d be so good as to confirm you never saw her again, thank you very much, sir, sorry to have bothered you.’
Alison tossed back her hair.
‘People like you, Lol, into all this progressive sixties music, forget that it was still quite primitive then, in country areas. You didn’t ruffle the hawk’s feathers.’
‘What do you think happened to her?’
‘I used to think she was given money to go abroad. But now I know they hadn’t got that kind of money. No way. And this is the country. What do you do with nuisances in the country? What do you do with the dog that’s worrying your sheep? What do you do with the badgers you’re convinced are spreading tuberculosis to your cows, even though badgers are officially protected? What do you do with the woman who’s threatening to expose you to the county?’
‘Was she?’
‘No way. She probably just asked for a few thousand quid. Perhaps he was worried she’d be into him for money for the rest of his life, but I can’t imagine she’d have even thought of that. She just went to ask for a bit of help.’
‘Lucy said she was naive. Kind of innocent.’
‘Which would’ve made it even easier for him.’
‘Easier?’
‘To get rid of her. The way people always did in the countryside. With pests.’
‘That’s…’
‘More difficult than it used to be. But not that much more difficult. I knew it as soon as I came here.’
‘With me?’
‘No… years earlier. Ten years ago. With a couple of girl friends. Camping holiday. It had been gnawing at me more and more. The number of times I found this place on the maps, circled it and circled it until the biro went through the paper. Then, when Gran died… I mean, she died hard. She was working well into her seventies, cleaning people’s houses so I could stay on at school, go to university. She died hard and she died full of regrets and remorse – with no reason, whatever, she was a saint, my gran. She died when I was in my final year and I dropped out at once and I got a job and I thought, those fucking rich, smug bastards, they killed my mother and they killed my grandmother, and I… I just wanted…’
She was hunched up now, gripping the sides of her chair with both hands. A side of her she’d never before let him see. She tossed back her hair again, getting herself together.
‘So we were on this camping holiday, Julie, Donna – mates from college. I made sure we came here, never told them why. Yeah, it would be twelve years ago, the year after I dropped out. It was a good summer, we hired mountain bikes. I had the route all marked out on the OS map, and when we came to Upper Hall, there he was, the good and great John Bull-Davies, overseeing the haymaking. Sitting on the edge of the bottom meadow in his linen jacket, with his fat bum on a shooting stick. John Bull-fucking-Davies.’
‘How did you know it was him?’
‘I didn’t. At first. I walked over on my own and asked for directions to Canon Pyon. It was very hot, and I was wearing shorts and a skimpy top and sweating profusely, and he said I looked awfully hot and I could probably do with something long and cool. Always remember that. Something long and cool. He leered. Must’ve been in his sixties. Then he saw the other two waiting for me down by the field gate. Too many. Too awkward. So he gave me the directions to Canon Pyon.’
‘You think he’d really have made a play for you, with all the blokes at work in the field?’
‘Absolutely. Probably wanted them to see. The old squire as potent as ever he was. They’ve always fucked who they liked. It was the way. Their right. Droit de seigneur. Before I went back to the bikes, I stood there and looked at him. Full in the face. Memorizing every little, poxy detail. Been a good-looking guy in his time. I stood and I kept on looking at him, until even he became uncomfortable and turned away. Then, that night, in a pub – in this pub, actually – I stared at myself in the mirror and I was nearly sick with disgust.’
The coffee came, and Lol paid for it. It was a different waitress, who clearly recognized Alison, so Lol said, ‘Oh, and Auntie Doris sends her love, by the way.’
Alison poured the coffee with a steady hand.
Cramp in her left leg awoke her.
She’d fallen asleep in the middle of her attempted prayer, head in a curled arm on the duvet. The arm was numb. She was cold. She needed to pee.
She struggled upright, rubbing at the cramped calf. There was no sound from above or from below. What time was it? She groped for the alarm clock, peered at its luminous hands.
Nearly half-twelve. Sunday. The Sabbath. The Working Day. Holy Communion. Morning service. An unusually full church. What would the vicar look like? How would she behave? Would she be pale and penitent? Would she have crimson eyes and drool? However the vicar looked, there’d be enough material for a whole week’s gossip.
The efficient Ted would have rung back while she and Jane were at the lodge, and, on getting no reply, gone ahead and summoned the trusty, retired minister from Pembridge. Making long-term plans, no doubt, to distance himself: a discreet word here, an expression of concern there. Did my best for her, but the traumas of the past, you know. My fault, should have realized her nerves were simply not up to it, parish this size… all the pressure…
Pressure on her bladder. Merrily slid her feet into her sandals, found the sweater at the bottom of the bed and pulled it on over her nightdress. Shuffled to the door, aching with weariness, feeling old and beaten, worn out, done in.
For several minutes after she’d finished, she sat there on the lavatory, bowed over, her face in her hands. Her nerves were shot. It made her ashamed. Dozens of people in the village had real, solid, frightening problems – serious illness, recent bereavement, job loss, the prospect of a house being repossessed because they couldn’t meet the mortgage, and, of course, the extreme and constant anxiety and fear when a daughter has disappeared. Compared with all of this, her own problems were meaningless, ephemeral, fatuous.
Merrily washed her hands and face in cold water.
Go back to bed, forget it. Don’t think about tomorrow night either, or how you’re going to organize it; if it’s meant to happen, it will; if it isn’t, let it go, let the original decision stand, no Wil Williams in the church, thank you. Thank you and, if necessary, goodbye. She pulled the bathroom door closed behind her.
Something rushed at her from the blackness. In a vivid instant, she had the clear impression of a hard nucleus of bitter cold, rolling along the lightless passage like a soiled, grey snowball, rapidly gathering momentum, frigidity.
She shrank away, flattened herself against the bathroom door, turned her head into the wall.
The cold hit her. It stank of misery. It wrapped itself around her, a frigid winding sheet. She couldn’t breathe.
She squirmed. Wake up. Lips pulled tight around a prayer: 0 God, yea, though I walk through the darkness of the soul, though my heart is weak…
At the end of the passage, a light hung over the stairs.
Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake…
The light was a lean, vertical smear. It wasn’t much, promised no warmth, but she reached out for it, her hands groping for the stair-rail on the landing.
Should she try to run downstairs? She looked down. She tried to call down to Lol, who might not even be there. There was no easier name to say, but she couldn’t say it. ‘L… L…’ Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth and all that emerged was a sound like an owl-hoot, weak and lonely, and looking down the stairs was like looking down an endless, cold, black well.
The only way was up.
She looked up, just as the light flared over the stairs, like a small, contained area of sheet lightning behind cloud and she was briefly caught in its periphery, which sent a jagged shock into her still-tightened chest, and she stumbled in panic, fell forward on to the stairs into a clinging, damp vapour, dense with particles of fleeing light, and the wooden stairs under her were very rough and the air around her cold. Cold for January, desperately cold for May. She pulled herself up and was nearly pulled down again because her heart was so packed with pain.
Despair. A worm of liquid despair wriggling inside her. The light flared again for a moment, and she felt a penetrating agony in her chest as she toppled into the attic.
There was no sound but the whine of the night wind in the exposed roof timbers and her own breathing.
As she pulled herself up, the tightness fell away and she breathed odourless air. Stood, panting on the top floor of the vicarage, a place of dreams, where there were no doors. No bedroom, no sitting room/study.
No Jane.
Only a long empty space, with a sloping roof, where something cold and naked, wretchedly embracing an unending misery, metamorphosed for a wild, defiant instant into a spinning, swirling, silken vortex of silver-grey and then was gone.