Downstairs in the drawing room of the vicarage, the lights were on. There were brown, smoking embers in the grate. She was wearing a shapeless, green polo-neck jumper over a white nightdress. It was still night. She’d lost a sandal. She felt cold and drained and heartbroken.
And didn’t know why.
‘She’s sleeping,’ Lol said. ‘I went back and stuck my head around the door. She’s fine. Everything’s normal.’
‘Except me.’ Merrily threw coal on the fire. She would never be warm again.
Lol contemplated her seriously through his glasses, round and brass-rimmed like some old, nautical telescope.
She said, ‘Where was I?’
‘At the top of the stairs. Swaying about. I thought you were going to fall’
‘What did you see? What was it like? Was it a kind of big, open space? Rough joists. Damp…’ Her voice faded. She knew what he was going to say.
‘It was normal. Just like now.’
‘You didn’t go to the right place,’ she said.
‘Maybe not.’ He sat her down on the sofa and positioned himself at the other end, his back against the arm. Ethel jumped into his lap. ‘Maybe not, no.’
Seconds passed. He was thinking.
She said, ‘You’re still wearing your vicar’s gear.’
Absurd reversal of roles.
‘Mm.’ He was calmer than she’d seen him, or maybe that was merely relative to her own condition.
‘Time is it, Lol?’
‘About twenty past one.’
‘You been back long?’ His sleeping bag was on the rug in front of the fire, still rolled up.
‘Hour or so. I was wandering around the garden for a while. Thinking things out.’ He looked down at his black chest. ‘Scared to take these off, I suppose. This guy looks at things objectively.’
‘Let’s put some more coal on the fire,’ Merrily said.
She told him about all the times it had happened before, from that first night when she thought she’d followed Jane and she’d kept opening doors and wound up at the foot of the stairs, looking up to the third floor.
She shut her eyes and rolled her head slowly around, small bones creaking at the back of her neck.
‘And then Sean.’
‘Your husband?’
‘My dead husband. I know it wasn’t a dream, because…’
She told him about the door handle which fell out again, proving she’d been in the empty bedroom when she saw him and not in her own bed, dreaming.
In the fireplace, cool yellow flames were swarming over the new coal. Lol pushed in the poker.
‘What happened?’
‘I don’t know. I did wake up in bed, and it was morning, and I thought it had been a dream. It was a hallucination, I suppose. I went into that room and I hallucinated Sean. A source of guilt, because I didn’t help him when he needed help. But he didn’t want me to. He had another woman.’
‘You’re the kind of person always feels responsible.’
‘Jane tell you that?’
‘No. I’ve actually started figuring things out for myself.’ He prodded at a cob of coal until it developed fissures and opened up and let more flames through.
‘If it’s not the house,’ Merrily said, ‘it has to be me.’
‘Could it be a combination of both? You and the house setting something off in each other? Or you and the house… and Jane?’
‘Yeah, I know. Like adolescents cause poltergeist phenomena. I’ve heard all that. But this doesn’t happen to Jane. Nothing happens to Jane here.’
‘Only in the orchard.’
He looked into the fire for a while and then he said, ‘This question of different floors. When you’ve read lots of books on psychology like me… That’s what I used to read in hospital. They had a library, for the doctors and the staff, with a resident librarian, and I got to know her, and that’s where I used to spend… days. Whole days, I suppose. Reading books on psychology and psychiatric syndromes. Some of it made more sense than the patronizing crap I was getting from most of the staff.’
‘How did you stand it?’
‘Time passes,’ Lol said. ‘You don’t notice. But, anyway… levels. The floor where you’re sleeping, that’s where you’re at. That’s your situation. Your husband’s there, your past, all your problems, your insecurities, your fears, your guilt. That’s where you keep opening doors and they lead nowhere, except into the past. That’s where you saw Sean. And when it gets too stifling, just when you feel there’s no escape, you wind up at the stairs leading to the third floor.’
Psychological claptrap. She needed a cigarette.
‘But, up there, Merrily, is the Unknown. It could be Enlightenment. But it could also be madness. You’re afraid of what you might learn.’
‘I didn’t learn anything. I’d fallen asleep in the praying position and woke up feeling really low and beaten and hopeless. But until I went up into that attic, I didn’t know what sorrow was. Or felt like, because I still don’t know what it was. Why I felt so bad.’
‘And it was different.’
‘I wasn’t frightened. I had this freedom up there. The freedom to cry for ever. And I knew I couldn’t. I couldn’t make a sound. Mustn’t be heard.’
‘By Jane?’
‘Jane wasn’t there. Nobody else was there. It was a different time, Lol. It was a time of indescribable unhappiness.’
Merrily wept.
The sorrow she was giving off was so profound, he had to blink back his own tears.
He wanted to hold her.
He didn’t touch her.
He went to make tea.
Later, he lay on the sofa and watched her sleep in front of the fire, curled up in the sleeping bag there like a child, the orange coals and the wire fireguard making glowing, crisscross patterns on her face. The cigarettes and Zippo lighter on the rug, a few inches from her nose, Ethel by her feet.
Never had got around to telling her about Alison. He’d wanted to ask her, How will this end? What can we do about it? He’d asked Alison. She said she had no idea.
But it’ll be on my terms. When I tell him.
You still hate him?
How can I hate him? My own flesh and blood.
Alison had laughed.
Yesterday morning, she’d told most of this to Lucy and then Lucy had died, bequeathing the responsibility to Merrily Watkins.
Lol was back in the alien sweatshirt, the vicar’s clothes neatly on hangers behind the door. Merrily had not told him what had happened when she and Jane had gone to Richard Coffey’s place.
Lol looked at Merrily, sleeping. He thought of Lucy on her back on a mortuary table in Hereford, cold and hatless and awaiting her post-mortem. This made him anxious, too anxious to sleep.
Ethel, the cat, wasn’t sleeping either. She lay at the bottom of the sleeping bag, where Merrily’s ankles were, and she watched Lol, golden-eyed and purring gently.
Merrily’s face was flushed by the firelight. He couldn’t stop looking at it.
Twice in the night, he got up to put more coal on the fire to keep her warm.