Gomer’s lunch was on the table, Minnie’s potato pie, when the phone rang. ‘Tell them to call back,’ Minnie shouted through from the kitchen. ‘And if it’s that man about the septic tank, don’t forget – you’re retired.’
‘Ar,’ said Gomer non-committally.
‘If you can’t bring yourself to tell him, you put him on to me,’ Minnie went on. ‘I’ll give him septic tank!’
Gomer groped for the phone.
‘Jeff Harris, Gomer. You were right, boy. Wouldn’t use this stuff to unblock my sink.’
Gomer sat up.
‘Shirley was coming through Ledwardine this morning, so I asked her to call for a bottle. You had me worried, see. Got to protect the image of the product or we’re all done for. Uncorked it – not so much a pop as a fizzle. Poured half a glass, took it to the window, held it up to the light…’
And?’ Gomer was on the edge of his seat now. If you couldn’t trust the word of a man who’d worked for Bulmer’s, Weston’s, Dunkerton’s and God knew who else during a forty-year career, you couldn’t trust nobody when it came to cider, but he did like to make a performance of it, did Jeff Harris.
‘Well, that about the sink… exaggerated a bit there, I confess. It’s not absolute piss, but if that’s the original old Pharisees Red, I’ll drink six pints of Australian lager out of my old farm boots.’
‘Gomer!’ Minnie came in from the kitchen, all pink and homely and steaming angry. ‘If you don’t get back to that pie in thirty seconds, it’s going back in the oven. D’you realize how much I’ve got to do before tonight?’
Gomer raised a finger, pleading for one minute.
‘It’s bottle-fermented, all right,’ Jeff said, ‘but there’s a difference between fine champagne and two-quid fizz. All right, if the Powells want to take these daft Londoners for a ride, they might think that’s all right, and at six pound fifty a bottle they can be pretty sure none of us is ever going to taste it, but in my book you don’t misrepresent cider. The Wine of Angels, indeed. What you gonner do about it, Gomer?’
‘Well… not my place, is it? Just wanted to know, like. Talkin’ to young Lloyd, I was, see, yesterday, and he reckoned they had to buy some apples in, not havin’ enough of the ole Pharisees to produce the kind o’ quantity Cassidy was after. That account for it?’
‘Bought the damn lot in, if you ask me. And got somebody to produce it for them.’
‘But why’d they wanner do that?’ Gomer asked, watching Minnie ceremoniously carrying his pie-dish through to the kitchen.
‘Didn’t want to lose face, I suppose,’ said Jeff Harris. ‘Hadn’t made cider in more than a generation, except perhaps a drop or two for themselves; now here’s Cassidy saying they must have the traditional stuff and talking about grants from the tourist board and all this. They came to an arrangement with Jeremy Selby or one of those boys, that’s my guess. Save a lot of work, make a few hundred quid each and that idiot Cassidy and his cronies, never having tasted cider in their lives, are none the wiser.’
‘Wouldn’t’ve thought it of Rod. His ole man, mabbe.’
‘Like father like son, my boy. Man’s a councillor, isn’t he? Most councillors are in it for what they can shovel into their back pockets. Fact of rural life. Let me know of any further developments.’
‘Sure to,’ Gomer said and hung up, puzzling hard.
Of course, Minnie brought his lunch back, and while he was eating it, she paraded before him in a long, dull-brown woollen dress with a wheaty-coloured shawl round her shoulders. Gomer didn’t think much to it.
‘We en’t short of a bob or two, Min. You don’t have to go as a peasant woman.’
‘This isn’t peasant’s clothes. Sunday best, this is, for an eighteenth-century farmer’s wife. Still pass for seventeenth century, though wouldn’t it?’
‘Give up trying to look nice once they got married, did they?’
Minnie snorted. ‘I only wish I had a veil, too, to hide my blushes. We all know what kind of play that Coffey’s likely to’ve written.’
‘Aye, well, that’s why we’re all gettin’ a chance to see it first, innit? You don’t like it, you think it treads on too many ole corns, you get your chance to say so out loud. Not that you will, you women, you’ll all just sit there all po-faced and then pull it to bits outside, and ‘ave another go at the vicar for good measure.’
‘I never said a word against that young woman.’
‘Aye, but you done your share of noddin’ and frownin’ and glancin’ sideways.’
‘You would say that – you’re a man. If she was fat and fifty, you’d be having second thoughts just like the rest of us. Especially when she’s letting something like this go on in the church.’
‘That don’t stop you goin’, though, do it?’
‘I like to make up my own mind.’
‘Oh aye. And you’ll all be gatherin’ round like them women round the ole guillotine, hopin’ she’s put both feet in the slurry again.’
‘That’s not fair. Anyway, when you’ve finished your pie, we’ll sort something out for you, my duck.’
‘Gerroff, woman. I en’t goin’. I done my bit. Me bein’ there en’t gonner help the vicar. Anyway, they didn’t ‘ave no plant hire in the seventeenth century.’
‘Never mind plant hire, you’re a retired businessman!’
Gomer closed his eyes in anguish.
It was simple really. Or so Jane said. Lucy’s house, like most of those on the vicarage side of Church Street, backed on to the old bowling green, which in turn was accessible from the orchard, which you could access from the bottom of the vicarage garden.
So if Jane were to let herself into Lucy’s by the front door and go round and leave the back door open for Lol… geddit?
‘And while you’re in there, maybe you find out whatever Lucy was trying to tell us.’
‘If she was trying to tell us anything.’
‘I know she was,’ Jane said.
Soon after she’d gone, with Merrily still organizing Stefan Alder, the phone rang, the answering machine kicking in.
‘Merrily, it’s Ted. What the hell d’you think you’re doing? Don’t you think there should have been a meeting of the church council before you let these people take over the place at short notice, especially for something so politically and morally sensitive? I cannot believe you went over all our heads in this deplorable fashion, and I have to say that if this is an example of the kind of behaviour we can expect from you in the future, then I’m afraid you can no longer count on my support and I wish, herewith, to dissociate myself entirely from tonight’s outrage.’
That was the first.
The second one, just under ten minutes later, said sternly, ‘Councillor Powell, Mrs Watkins. I should be glad if you would telephone me immediately upon your return.’
Within two minutes, the third.
‘Ah, Merrily, my love. No wonder you don’t need a man. You’re obviously quite capable of fucking yourself. My condolences.’
Firmly and decisively, Jane shut the door of the house in Church Street and then was stopped, very scared, by the sight of the winter poncho draped over the post at the bottom of the stairs.
The poncho hung there, dark and sombre like a kid’s idea of a ghost. It was both frightening and awfully moving. It made her wish she hadn’t come because it brought home to her – more even than the sight of the body in the road – the cruel reality of Lucy’s death.
To banish the fright, she threw her arms around the poncho, buried her face in its folds. Burst at once into sobs, hugging the woollen thing tight, but the hardness, the deadness of the oaken post beneath only made it worse, its rigid, knurled point imprinting on her forehead the message that the wonderful Lucy Devenish really was never coming back.
When she pulled away, the poncho fell in a heap to the floor, as if the spirit had drifted away from under it. She gathered it up quickly and carried it up the narrow stairs, finding Lucy’s bedroom, putting the poncho on the bed and walking out without looking at anything because a bedroom was private.
She went into the bathroom and looked at her face in the mirror. She looked like a child, and the tear stains didn’t help. She washed her face, dried it on an Aztec-patterned bathtowel that reminded her of the summer poncho and was just so Lucy she nearly wept again.
Wipe your eyes, you little snot! Pull yourself together!
She tried to hear Lucy’s voice saying it, but it wasn’t there, was it?
She wasn’t here, and there was nobody else who knew the real truth about Ledwardine. The place was all tarted up and polished like the archaic tools and farm implements on the walls in the Swan that nobody quite knew the original purpose of anymore.
Downstairs, in the low-ceilinged living room, she felt a bit better. There were photos on the walls to look at, which was different to photos in some dusty album at the bottom of a wardrobe. And, of course, the bookshelves beckoned.
But first, Jane went into the little kitchen, which faced north – always the bleakest light – and overlooked the old bowling green, a few morose sheep nibbling out there now. Under the window was a Belfast sink beside a sturdy-looking cast-iron cooker, and there was a small fridge and a kind of sawn-off Welsh dresser with a cardboard box on it. A note was tucked into one of the box’s flaps.
Compliments of the Ledwardine Festival.
Thanks for your help,
Barry Bloom
The box contained six champagne bottles. She lifted one out. Its ornate label featured the familiar black line-drawing of the parish church, and, in archaic lettering,
The Wine of Angels.
Oh, Lucy. Oh, wow.
Jane went quickly to the back door, unbolted it, turned the key and then removed two bottles from the box.
It was like they’d been waiting for her.
She looked out of the window, giving Lucy’s hook-nosed ghost a chance to manifest among the sheep, its arms rising angrily from the dark poncho’s folds. Put those back at once, you tripehound!
But nothing appeared. The Wine of Angels lay heavy in her arms. Jane carried the bottles out of the back door and over the fence on to the path bordering the bowling green.
It was meant.
‘You duplicitous woman. Your hypocrisy defies belief. You lied to my face!
The machine, as Merrily came in, recording a message. Distorting badly.
‘To my face, Mrs Watkins.’
‘And good afternoon to you too, James.’ Merrily dumped her bag on the hallstand. When the shit hit the fan, an answering machine was mercifully absorbent. She saw Lol in the kitchen doorway and smiled weakly. ‘I get more popular all the time.’
‘It is clear to me now that you were, from the beginning, conspiring with certain subversive elements to undermine the stability of my village. I am a soldier. I cannot tolerate that!
Lol said, ‘Is he real?’
‘My information is that tonight you propose to allow this man to lay out his foul smears in public. I am giving you this opportunity to call it off. You may consider this an ultimatum.’
‘My God,’ Merrily said. ‘This is a prepared statement.’
The red light on the answering machine blinked and swelled like some warning vein in Bull-Davies’s forehead.
‘If I do not hear from you before four o’clock, I shall personally take action to put a stop to this homosexual farce. And to ensure that you never again have an opportunity to use Church of England property to defame and to destroy. If you are representative of women priests then, by God, I shall make it my business to ensure this village will never have another when you are gone. Good-day to you.’
Lol said, ‘And you thought Alison was playing with fire.’
‘Sometimes,’ Merrily said, ‘you do things without quite understanding why.’
‘You don’t know why you’re doing this?’
‘Well, I know how it started.’ She leaned against the hallstand with her back to the flashing red light. ‘It started with me feeling pressured by anonymous letters and veiled threats and people trying to use the media to get what they want and…’
She sighed and dug in her bag for cigarettes.
‘And then we were sitting there in Coffey’s house, and this idea was suddenly taking shape and it all came pouring out almost like I was speaking someone else’s thoughts. I hadn’t reasoned it out, it just… I don’t know, maybe my self-destruct mechanism came into play.’
‘Maybe, when it’s over,’ he said, ‘they’ll all wonder why they made such a fuss.’
She looked at him over her lighter, shaking her head. ‘You don’t think that.’
He didn’t know what to say.
‘I suppose I was kind of hoping Coffey would put the arm on Stefan and it would all fall through, and then I’d have done my bit, given them a chance. But of course Stefan got his way. And then this morning I mentioned it to Gomer Parry and now we have a whole bunch of people due to turn up in fancy dress. So it’s been generating its own momentum. Like it was meant. Preordained. Destiny. Fate. Something working me like a puppet. Out of control. Except of course it isn’t. I could stop it now.’
Lol turned to her and put out a hand and she took it.
‘What should I do?’ she said. ‘Looking at it objectively.’
He had no idea what to say. How could he be objective when he was falling in love with her?
‘Is it the right thing?’ Merrily said. ‘That’s the only question, isn’t it, when you think about it.’
Part Four
A mist involves the eye
While in the middle it doth lie
And till the ends of things are seen
The way’s uncertain that doth stand between.
Thomas Traherne,
‘The Demonstration