A Crown of Lights (11 page)

‘It’s a Mass.’

‘Huh?’

‘An Anglican Mass. And do you know why a Mass is generally performed in a building other than a functioning church?’

He didn’t fully. He could only guess.

‘To cleanse it,’ Betty said. ‘The Eucharist is Christian disinfectant. To cleanse, to purify – to get rid of bacteria.’

‘OK, let me get this...’ Robin pulled his hands down his face, in praying mode. ‘This is the E-word, right?’

Betty nodded.

An exorcism.

T
HE ANSWERING MACHINE
sounded quite irritable.

‘Mrs Watkins. Tania Beauman
, Livenight.
I’ve left messages for you all over the place. The programme goes out Friday night, so I really have to know whether it’s yes or no. I’ll be here until seven. Please call me... Thank you.’

‘Sorry.’ Merrily came back into the kitchen, hung up her funeral cloak. ‘I can’t think with that thing bleeping.’

Barbara Buckingham was sitting at the refectory table, unwinding her heavy silk scarf while her eyes compiled a photo-inventory of the room.

‘You’re in demand, Mrs Watkins.’ The slight roll on the ‘r’ and the barely perceptible lengthening of the ‘a’ showed her roots were sunk into mid-border clay. But this would be way back, many southern English summers since.

Walking through black and white timber-framed Ledwardine, across the cobbled square to the sixteenth-century vicarage, the dull day dying around them, the lights in the windows blunting the bite of evening, she’d said, ‘How quaint and cosy it is here. I’d forgotten. And so close.’

Close to what? Merrily had made a point of not asking.

‘Tea?’ She still felt slightly ashamed of the kitchen – must get round to emulsioning it in the spring. ‘Or coffee?’

Barbara would have tea. She took off her gloves.

Like her late sister, she was good-looking, but in a sleek
and sharp way, with a turned-up nose which once would have been cute but now seemed haughty.
The sister’s a retired teacher and there’s no arguing with her
, Eileen Cullen had said.

‘I didn’t expect you to be so young, Mrs Watkins.’

‘Going on thirty-seven?’

‘Young for what you’re doing. Young to be the diocesan exorcist.’

‘Diocesan deliverance consultant.’

‘You must have a progressive bishop.’

‘Not any more.’ Merrily filled the kettle.

Mrs Buckingham dropped a short laugh. ‘Of course. That man who couldn’t take the pressure and walked out. Hunt? Hunter? I try to keep up with Church affairs. I was headmistress of a Church school for many years.’

‘In this area? The border?’

‘God no. Got out of there before I was twenty. Couldn’t stand the cold.’

Merrily put the kettle on the stove. ‘We can get bad winters here,’ she agreed.

‘Ah... not simply the climate. My father was a farmer in Radnor Forest. I remember my whole childhood as a kind of perpetual February.’

‘Frugal?’ Merrily tossed tea bags into the pot.

Mrs Buckingham exhaled bitter laughter. ‘In our house, those two tea bags would have to be used at least six times. The fat in the chip pan was only renewed for Christmas.’ Her face grew pinched at the memories.

‘You were poor?’

‘Not particularly. We had in excess of 130 acres. Marginal land, mind – always appallingly overgrazed. Waste nothing. Make every square yard earn its keep. Have you heard of hydatid disease?’

‘Vaguely.’

‘Causes cysts to grow on internal organs, sometimes the size of pomegranates. Originates from a tapeworm absorbed by
dogs allowed to feed on infected dead sheep. Or, on our farm,
required
to eat dead sheep. Human beings can pick it up – the tapeworm eggs – simply through stroking the sheepdog. When I was sixteen I had to go into hospital to have a hydatid cyst removed from my liver.’

‘How awful.’

‘That was when I decided to get out. I doubt my father even noticed I was gone. Had another mouth to feed by then. A girl again, unfortunately.’

‘Menna?’

‘She would be... ten months old when I left. It was a long time before I began to feel guilty about abandoning her – fifteen years or more. And by then it was too late. They’d probably forgotten I’d ever existed. I expect he was even grateful I’d gone – another opportunity to try for a son, at no extra cost. A farmer with no son is felt to be lacking in something.’

‘Any luck?’

‘My mother miscarried, apparently,’ Mrs Buckingham said brusquely. ‘There was a hysterectomy.’ She shrugged. ‘I never saw them again.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘Found a job in Hereford, in a furniture shop. The people there were very good to me. They gave me a room above the shop, next to the storeroom. Rather frightening at night. All those empty chairs: I would imagine people sitting there, silently, waiting for me when I came back from night classes. Character-building, though, I suppose. I got two A levels and a grant for teacher-training college.’

It all sounded faintly Dickensian to Merrily, though it could have been no earlier than the 1970s.

‘So you never went back?’ The phone was ringing.

‘After college, I went to work in Hampshire, near Portsmouth. Then a husband, kids – grown up now. No, I never went back, until quite recently. A neighbour’s daughter – Judith – kept me informed, through occasional letters. She was another farmer’s
daughter, from a rather less primitive farm. Please get that phone call, if you want.’

Merrily nodded, went through to the office.

‘As it happens’ – closing the scullery door – ‘she’s here now.’

‘Listen, I’m sorry,’ Eileen Cullen said. ‘I couldn’t think what else to tell her. Showed up last night, still unhappy about the sister’s death and getting no co-operation from the doctor. I didn’t have much time to bother with her either. I just thought somebody ought to persuade her to forget about Mr Weal, and go home, get on with her life. And I thought she’d take it better coming from a person of the cloth such as your wee self.’

‘Forgive me, but that doesn’t sound like you.’

‘No. Well...’

‘So she didn’t say anything about holding a special service in church then?’

‘Merrily, the problem is I’m on the ward in one minute.’

‘Bloody hell, Eileen—’

‘Aw, Jesus, all the woman wants is her sister laid to rest in a decent, holy fashion. She’s one of your fellow Christians. Tell her you’ll say a few prayers for the poor soul, and leave it at that.’

There was an unexpected undercurrent here.

‘What happened with Mr Weal after I left the other night?’

‘Well, he came out. Eventually.’

‘Eventually?’

‘He came out when
she
did. And he chose to accompany her down to the mortuary.’

‘Is that normal?’

‘Well, of course it isn’t fockin’ normal. We’re not talking about a normal feller here! It was a special concession. Merrily, I really have to go. If the sister’s tardy, how can you expect the nurses—’

‘Eileen!’

‘That’s all I can tell you. Just persuade her to go home. She’ll do no good for herself.’

‘What’s
that
supposed to—’

Cullen hung up.

It was dark outside now, and the thorns were ticking against the scullery window.

When Merrily returned to the kitchen, Barbara Buckingham was standing under a wall lamp, her silk scarf dangling from one hand as if she was wondering whether or not to leave.

‘Mrs Watkins, I don’t want to be a pain...’

‘Merrily. Don’t be silly. Sit down. There’s no—’

‘I try to be direct, you see. In my childhood, no one was direct. They’d never meet your eyes. Keep your head down, avoid direct conflict, run neither with the English nor the Welsh. Keep your head down and move quietly, in darkness.’

The woman had been too long out of it, Merrily thought, as the kettle boiled. She’d turned her spartan childhood into something Gothic. ‘Tell me about the... possession.’

‘In essence, I believe, your job is to liberate them. The possessed, I mean.’

Merrily carefully took down two mugs from the crockery shelf. ‘Milk?’ Through the open door, she could still hear that damned rosebush scratching at the scullery window.

‘A little. No sugar.’

Merrily brought milk from the fridge. She left her own tea black, and carried both mugs to the table.

‘It’s a big word, Barbara.’

‘Yes.’

‘And often abused – I have to say that.’

‘We should both be direct.’

‘And I should tell you I’ve yet to encounter a valid case of possession. But then I’ve not been doing this very long.’

‘It may be the wrong word. Perhaps I only used it to get your attention.’ Looking frustrated, Barbara tossed her scarf onto the table. ‘I’ve attended church most of my life. Much of the time out of habit, I admit; occasionally out of need. I have no time for... mysticism, that’s what I’m trying to say. I’m not fey.’

Merrily smiled. ‘No.’

‘But Menna has been possessed for years. Do you know what I mean? Weal suffocated her in life; now he won’t let her go after death.’

Cullen:
He asks for a bowl and a cloth and he washes her. Very tenderly, reverently you might say. And then he’ll wash himself: his face, his hands, in the same water.

And followed her down to the mortuary. Did Barbara know about that?

Merrily heard a key in the side door, beyond the scullery, and then footsteps on the back stairs: Jane coming in, going up to her apartment.

‘They were our family solicitors,’ Barbara said. ‘Everybody’s solicitors, in those days, it seemed. Weal and Son... the first Weal was Jeffery’s grandfather, the “and son” was Jeffery’s father R.T. Weal. Weal and Son, of Kington, and their gloomy old offices with the roll-top desks and a Victorian chair like a great dark throne. I first remember Jeffery when he was fifteen going on fifty. A lumbering, sullen boy, slow-moving, slow-thinking, single-minded, his future written in stone – Weal and Son and Son, even unto the ends of the earth. I hated them, the complete
unchangingness
of them – same chair, same desk, same dark tweed suits, same dark car creeping up the track.’

‘Eileen Cullen told me she thought he probably became a father figure,’ Merrily said. ‘After Menna had spent some years looking after her own father. Your dad was widowed, presumably.’

‘Sixteen or seventeen years ago. I had a letter from Judith – my friend in Old Hindwell. My father wouldn’t have told me; I no longer existed for him. And he was ailing, too. Later I learned that Menna never had a boyfriend or any social life, so she lost the best years of her life to her bloody father, and the rest of it to Weal. Who, of course, became the proverbial tower of strength when the old man died.’

‘He looked after her then?’

‘Seized his chance with a weak, unworldly girl. I... came to find her about two years ago. I’d recently taken early retirement. My daughter had just got married, my husband was away – I was at a
very
loose end. One morning, I simply got in my car and drove up here, and knocked on their door...’ She stared into space. ‘Menna seemed... unsurprised, unmoved, entirely incurious. I’d forgotten what these people can be like. She just stood there in the doorway – didn’t even ask me in. Talked in an offhand way, as though I was a neighbour whom she saw occasionally but didn’t particularly care for.’

‘And you actually hadn’t seen each other since she was a baby?’

The woman shook her head. There was distance now in her voice. ‘She... wore no make-up. She was pale, in an unnatural, etiolated kind of way, like grass that’s been covered up. And quite beautiful. But she didn’t seem to either know or care who I was. She might as well already have been dead.’

Jane nicked the cordless from Mum’s bedroom and took it upstairs to the trio of attic rooms that now made up her apartment: bedroom, sitting room–study and a half-finished bathroom. She put on the lights, took off her jacket, sat on the bed. Thinking about poor Gomer going home on his own to a house full of Minnie’s things. It made her cry.

Fucking death!

Jane dried her eyes on a corner of the pillowcase. Gomer wouldn’t cry. Gomer would get on with it. But how much in life was really worth getting on with? Where was it leading? Was Minnie any closer now to knowing the answer?
Oh God.

Jane picked up the phone and looked at it and shrugged. If this didn’t work, it didn’t work. She rolled up her sleeve. The
Livenight
number was written in fibre-tip on the inside of her left arm. Jane pushed in the numbers, asked for Tania Beauman. The switchboard put her on hold and made her listen to Dire Straits – which could have been worse, though Jane would never admit it.

She leaned back against the headboard and contemplated the Mondrian walls, wondering if anyone else had ever had the idea of painting the squares and rectangles between sixteenth-century beams in different colours. She wondered what Eirion would think of it.

If she was ever to bring him up here.

If?
Time was running out if she was going to fit in two
serious
lovers before she hit twenty. Serious could mean six months. Longer.

‘Tania Beauman.’

‘Oh, hi.’ Jane sat up. ‘You know who this is?’

‘Oh,’ said Tania.

‘Hey, don’t be like that. I may have cracked it for you.’

‘Cracked... what?’

Jane swung her feet to the floor. ‘I’m telling you, Tania, it wasn’t easy. She really didn’t want to know.
Livenight
? Pff! But I’m, like, “Look, Merrily, being elitist is what put the Church of England in the hole it’s in today. You can’t just turn a blind eye to paganism and pretend it isn’t happening all over again. Or before you know it there’ll be more of
them
around than you...” ’

‘That’s a very cogent argument,’ Tania said, ‘but why aren’t I talking to your mother?’

‘Because I’ve, like,
nearly
got her convinced – but I’m not quite there yet.’

‘Well, I have to tell you, you don’t have much time.’

‘But do I have the incentive, Tania? That’s the point.’

‘I wondered if there’d be a point.’