Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (47 page)

   
Caught in white light from a
small Gothic window set high in the nave, Murray Beech - light-brown hair
slicked flat, metallic features firmly set - was looking about fifteen years
older than his age. A man with problems.

   
Fay's dad shuffled and coughed.
He didn't know she was there.

   
Who was this woman, then? Slim
and small-boned, she wore a wide-brimmed brown felt hat which concealed her
hair and neck.

   
The Vicar announced there would
be a public meeting in Crybbe on Tuesday night, when the members of this
congregation would be asked to consider the merits of the New Age movement and
decide to what extent they would allow it to infiltrate their lives.

   
Now, he had no wish to condemn
the obviously sincere people who offered what appeared to be rather scenic
shortcuts to their own idea of heaven. Indeed, it might be argued that any kind
of spirituality was better than none at all.

   
The Canon coughed again; the
woman next to him was very still. Almost . . . almost
too
still.

   
'We have a choice,' said
Murray. 'We can pray for the strength and the will to confront the reality of a
world defiled by starvation, injustice and inequality - a world crying out for
basic Christian charity.

   
'Or,' he said, with the
smallest twist of his lips, 'we can sidestep reality and amuse ourselves in
what we might call the Cosmic Fairground."

   
Everyone alive moved a little,
Fay thought, watching the woman. Even sleeping people moved.

   
No. Not here. You can't follow him here. Not into church.
   
Murray hauled himself further up in
his pulpit, raised his voice.

   
'How appealing! How appealing
it must seem to live in a little world where, if we're sick, we can pass off
the health services and the medical advances of the past hundred years as
irrelevant and call instead upon the power of. . . healing crystals.'

   
Powys smiled.

   
But Fay had stiffened, feeling
the tiny hairs rising on her bare arms. Her father's face was turned towards the
pulpit. He had never glanced at the woman by his side. Fay thought, I can see
her,
but can he?

   
'. . . a little world, where,
if we feel we are suffering a certain starvation of the soul, we need not give
up our Sunday mornings to come to church. Because all we need to do is to go
for a stroll along the nearest ley line and expose ourselves to these famous
cosmic rays.'

   
Fay heard him as if from afar.
She was looking at her father. And at the woman.
Neat, small-boned, wide-brimmed hat concealing her hair and neck. And
unnaturally still.

   
The church was darkening around
Fay. The muted colours had drained out of the congregation. Everything was
black and white and grey Nobody moved. Murray Beech, flickering like an ancient
movie, black and white in his surplice, was gesturing in the pulpit, but she
couldn't hear him any more.

   
She stared hard, projecting her
fear and - surprised at its strength - her uncontrollable resentment. Until she
felt herself lifting from the pew, aware of a sudden concern in the eyes of Joe
Powys, his hand reaching out for her from a long, long way away, but not
touching. Fay rising on a malign wave while, at the same time, very slowly, the
woman sitting next to her father began, for the first time, to move.

   
Began, very slowly, to turn her
head.

   
And Fay was suddenly up on her
feet in the silent church,
 
shrieking
aloud. 'How dare you? Get out! How dare you come in here!'

   
Gripping the prayer-book shelf
so hard that it creaked.
   
'Why?' Fay screamed. 'Why can't you
just get on with your death and leave him alone?'

   
Then everybody was turning
round, but Fay was out of the church door, and running.

CHAPTER VI

   
When the Mercedes estate
carrying Simon and his three young assistants had vanished into the lane,
Rachel watched Andy Boulton-Trow, stripped to the waist, supervising the
loading of three long stones into the back of a truck. There was a small digger
m the back, too, one of those you could hire to landscape your own garden.

   
'Last ones,' Andy said, jibbing
a thumb at the stones. He'd acquired, very rapidly, an impressive black beard,
somehow hardening his narrow jaw.
   
Rachel said, 'The others are in?'

   
'The ones that are safe to put
in, without arousing complaints from the landowners We've got a nice one here
for your friend Joe.'

   
He didn't, she noticed, put any
kind of stress on the words 'your friend'.

   
'And then I'm pushing off for a
day or two,' Andy said, stretching.
   
'Is Max aware of this?'
   
'I really don't know, Rachel.'

   
She wondered if perhaps he was
pushing off somewhere
with
Max. 'A
very heavy guy,' Max had said once. 'He knows all the options.'

   
Whereas J.M. had implied that
while Andy knew as much about earth mysteries as anybody could reasonably be
expected to, it was unwise to trust him too far. 'He takes risks, especially
when the potential fall guy is someone else.' The implication being that he, J.
M. Powys, had once been the fall-guy. One day, away from here, he would tell
her about this.

   
'What's going on over there?'
Rachel had seen a cluster of men emerging from the rear entrance of the Court.
Two of them carried a rotting plank which they hurled on a heap of rubbish in a
corner of the courtyard.

   
'Big clean-out,' Andy said.
'Before the renovation proper begins. All the junk from upstairs - the detritus
of the various attempts to modernize the Court, anything not in period has to
go. Didn't Max tell you?'

   
'I think he mentioned
something,' Rachel said uncomfortably. He hadn't, of course. Increasingly,
things had been happening around her without any kind of consultation.

   
Like the appropriation of Gomer
Parry's bulldozer in the night?

   
Max liked to live dangerously;
she didn't. She was deeply glad to be leaving his employ.

   
'Make a good bonfire,' Andy
Boulton-Trow said, nodding at the pile of rubbish. 'Maybe we should organize
one for Lammas or something. A cleansing.'

   
He stretched his lithe body
into the truck. 'Have fun,' he said.

Powys raced out of the church, clutching the Uher by its strap She'd
left it there, on the pew, still recording, with a motor hum and a hiss of
turning spools.

   
He scanned the churchyard, but
she was gone. He ran to the gate, looked both ways, thought he could hear
running footsteps, but there was nobody in sight. He glanced over his shoulder
and saw a white-bearded, dog-collared old man in the church entrance, also
looking from side to side.

   
Her father. Both of them
looking for Fay.

   
Powys stabbed vaguely at the
Uher's piano-key controls until the hum and hiss ceased with a final whirr.
Then he slung the machine over his shoulder, stuck the microphone in his pocket
and set off towards Bell Street. Or would she have gone to the studio?

   
Making an outburst in church
was a clear sign of instability. People who made outbursts in church were
usually basket-cases.

   
Except in Crybbe. Leaping up
and screaming, Powys thought was surely a perfectly natural reaction to the
miasma of almost-anaesthetized disinterest emanating from that congregation.

   
Bloody weird, though, what
she'd said.
   
Why
can't you just get on with your death and leave him alone?
   
Bloody weird.

   
As he came to the corner of
Bell Street, he almost lost a foot to a familiar red Ford Fiesta, shrieking
round the corner in low gear, crunching over the kerb.

   
The driver saw him, and the
Fiesta squeaked and stalled. The passenger door flew open and bumped the Uher,
and the driver called out, 'Get in!'

   
Powys climbed in and sat with
the Uher on his knee. 'You left this in the church,' he said.

   
'Thanks.' Fay started the
engine and the car spurted into the square.

   
'Your father . . .'

   
'Fuck my father,' she snapped,
and she didn't speak again until they passed the town boundary and there were
open hills all around and a rush of cold air through the side windows, the
glass on both sides wound down to its limits.

   
Fay breathed out hard and
thrust her small body back into the seat, the Fiesta going like a rocket down a
lane originally created for horses.

   
'Got to be something awry,' she
said remotely, 'when the most newsworthy item on the tape is the reporter
having hysterics.'

   
Powys said, 'When's visiting
time at the vet's, then?'
   
She turned towards him. 'You want to
come?'
   
'I've got a choice? Watch the road,
for Christ's sake!'
   
She said, 'You want me to talk about
it, I suppose.'
   
'Up to you.'

   
'Well,' she said, 'I suppose if
I can talk about it to anybody, I can talk about it to you. Don't suppose I'll
be telling you anything you haven't heard before.'

   
'That's right,' Powys said.
'I'm an accredited crank. And I'll be a dead crank if you don't . . .'

   
'Yet so cynical.' Fay slowed
down. 'You didn't used to be cynical. Unless that wide-eyed, wow-man-what-a
mind-blower feel to
The Old Golden Land
was a put-on.'

   
'Well,' he said, 'the
light-hearted element kind of dissipated.' He closed his eyes and the past
tumbled down to him like a rock slide.

   
              
Joey goes round the
Bottle Stone
                  
And he goes round ONCE.

   
What's happening is you're developing a link with the stone, in
an umbilical kind of way. You're feeling every step you take, bare feet
connecting sensuously with the warm, grassy skin of the earth. And all the
while the terrestrial magnetism - let's imagine it exists - is seeping up
through the soles of your feet. . .

                  
And he goes round TWICE.

   
Stop it.

   
He rubbed his eyes. 'That
was
your dad, was it, with the white
beard? Rachel told me about him. She said he was, er. something of a fun guy
for his age.'

   
'He was always fun,' Fay said.
'That was the problem. Clergymen aren't supposed to have that much fun.'

   
Powys watched her drive,
not
like Rachel. She bumped the gears,
rode the clutch and went too fast round blind bends.

   
He tried to watch the
landscape. 'Nothing like this where I grew up. Love at first sight, when I came
down here.'

   
'Where was that? Where you came
from.'

   
'Up north. Very industrialized
part. A long bus-ride to the nearest cow. Every square yard, for as far as you
could see, built on for about the fourth time. Where we lived they'd eradicated
grass like a disease. It's quite nice now, if you like Georgian-style semis
with concrete barbecue-pits.'

   
Fay said, 'I grew up in old
vicarages and rectories, in little villages with thatched houses. And Oxford
for a time.'

   
'Deprived childhood, huh?'

   
'There's more than one kind,'
Fay said. 'Not many ley-lines where you came from, I suppose.'

   
'You just had to work harder to
find them," Powys said, stiffening as Fay clipped the hedge to avoid an
oncoming lorry.

   
'Bloody loony.'

   
Could she, he wondered, really
be referring to the innocent lorry driver?