Friends of the Dusk (37 page)

He laughed. In the picture window behind him, an apple tree vibrated soundlessly in the wind. Something askew here.

‘You’re obviously making him comfortable,’ Merrily said. ‘The bed?’

‘Oh, aye. He likes old things from his past around. Sentimental stuff. So I get them for him.’

Merrily smiled.

‘I’m told he used to lie in that bed and get a sense that the village of Cwmarrow – the vanished village – was still alive, around him?’

He didn’t move, but his face altered, became intense, as if something had risen in him like a gas jet. And then he controlled it, leaned back, hands behind his head again.

‘You know what it means? Cwmarrow? In the original Welsh?’

‘Seems to mean Valley of the Arrow. Which struck me as a bit odd, when the river Arrow’s more than ten miles away.’

‘They all think that. My father knew the real meaning, though he never talked about it. Didn’t even tell
me
till he’d moved out, and I thought, well, he en’t rational, but then I looked it up, and it looked right.
Cwm –
Welsh for valley, sure enough. But Arrow – that en’t Welsh, is it?’

‘Well… sometimes, over time, a Welsh word gets replaced by an English word that sounds similar, phonetically.’

‘Aye. Arrow for
Marw.
You know that word?’

‘Not sure.’

‘Welsh for dead.’

‘It means
Valley of the Dead?
’

She tried not to look horrified.

‘Now you know.’ Hector hunched forward. ‘He’s always been a dreamer.
Dreamer.
’

‘Dreams can be powerful,’ Merrily said without thinking.

‘Only if you let them. He’s a bloody children’s storyteller, a fantasist.’

‘He was an academic, wasn’t he? A scholar?’

‘What’s your point?’

‘I was just… You said you thought old things weren’t good. Sapped you. But you don’t mind that the bed—’

‘He’s an ole man, he en’t got long, I get him what he wants.’

She felt a coldness. Hector Pryce got his father what he wanted. And yet wasn’t there something close to hatred here? Or something closer to fear. Was that possible?

‘I’ll get Donna to show you out, shall I?’ Hector Pryce said. ‘Or can you find your own way?’

Obviously she could find her own way, but she looked for Donna, asking three attendants, none of whom had a local accent or knew where Donna was. She hung around by the reception desk. A stick-thin elderly lady with bright red hair came over and asked if she could help.

‘Just waiting for Donna, thanks.’

The old lady nodded seriously.

‘A very capable woman, Donna. Nothing seems to bother her.’

‘So it seems.’

‘Have you come to visit a relative?’

‘Just a friend.’

‘Kindley-Pryce?’

You’d often encounter someone like this in a home for the elderly. Someone – usually a woman – who knew everything, a gleaner and spreader of gossip.

‘You’re
his friend
?’ she said.

‘Friend of a friend. It’s the first time we’ve met.’

‘Not a niece, then? I thought you might be one of his nieces.
Great-
nieces, more like.’ She peered at Merrily, a glaze of contact lenses. ‘You do look younger from a distance.’

‘Well, that’s something.’

‘He’s the king here, you know,’ she said. ‘Three apartments to himself.’

‘Three?’

‘Look at the numbers on the door. Or rather the
shortage
of numbers. One, two, three and three is the only number on a door.’

‘His son’s a director of the company.’

The old woman scowled.

‘It’s a glossy funeral parlour, this place. I’ll tell you something.’ She came close to Merrily. ‘You don’t want to be here at night.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘I don’t come out of my room. Sometimes I leave a light on. Who cares about their bills? We pay enough.’

‘Come on now, Jean.’ Donna had appeared. ‘Jean does our public relations,’ she said to Merrily, not smiling, steering her away. ‘I’m afraid some of our guests don’t care too much what they say or to whom. Privilege of age, I guess. Now you take care on the roads, Mrs Watkins. The weather’s not going to be anyone’s friend tonight.’

Merrily stopped well short of the electronic double doors.

‘When does a person with dementia become too far… you know, too far gone… to go on living here?’

‘That’s not an easy question to answer. Some people with difficulties are inclined to wander at night, might require extra supervision.’

‘Mr Kindley-Pryce does that?’

Donna looked away.

‘I guess.’

‘Donna… did you tell him my name?’

‘You were with me when I spoke to him.’

‘That’s the only time you spoke to him. You didn’t tell him earlier that I was coming?’

‘He wouldn’t have remembered.’

‘Or anyone else?’

‘You’re in the book. Mrs M. Watkins.’ Donna stared at her. ‘Is there something wrong?’

‘I meant my first name. Did you tell anyone my first name?’

‘I don’t believe
I know
your first name,’ Donna said.

She thought of asking Donna about the nieces and the great-nieces who apparently came to visit Kindley-Pryce.
I get him what he wants.

She didn’t. She smiled and left.

50

What can haunt you

L
OL LIKED HER
. He’d always kind of liked her. He thought even Merrily liked her more than she thought she ought to. But he was still wary when, for the first time, she rang him.

‘How are we, today, Robinson?’

Did you tell her the truth, that you half wished you were back in Knight’s Frome working with the crazy Belladonna? He carried the phone to the edge of the desk so that he could see out of the window above the condensation. The glass seemed to be panting in the wind.

‘You haven’t been inhaling white powder again, have you?’

‘I’ve never inhaled white powder, Athena. When you’ve been inside a psychiatric hospital and not as a visitor, you start closing doors that have never even been open.’

‘How sad,’ Athena White said. ‘Old beyond your years. How is Watkins?’

‘Which one?’

‘Is she with you?’

‘I’m alone.’

‘Ships in the night. As usual. You must be wondering if it’s meant, you and her. When you’re not staring out of your window at an unlit vicarage, hating God.’

‘I don’t hate God.’

Lol moved away from the window, dragging the phone back across the desk, and sat down hard. She might just be referencing ‘The Cure of Souls’, the embittered song he wished he’d never written a couple of years ago, but, when he thought about
it, it was most unlikely Athena White had deigned to listen to any of his music.

‘Do you ever dream she was out of it, Robinson?’

He didn’t reply. Twice this afternoon he’d been across to the vicarage. Monday, traditionally, was a vicar’s day off. Nobody in, no car in the drive. Yes, all right, sometimes he’d resented that God and the church were too close, constantly demanding. The magic was in distance: church bells and birdsong.

‘She’ll never be out of it,’ Lol said.

‘Perhaps not voluntarily…’

‘OK. I sometimes think about it, but I always conclude that life isn’t that simple. And maybe isn’t supposed to be. There’s a side to her that’s always going to be there. And if your competition for a woman’s attentions is the ultimate ineffable mystery, then— Aw, shit, Athena, what do you
want
?’

‘Suddenly, she has enemies, Robinson. Inside an ostensibly benign, venerable organization which actually is possessed of a Stasi-like ruthlessness.’

Merrily had learned that a much younger Athena White had worked for the intelligence services during the Cold War. A mindset that lingered.

‘Where are you getting this from, Athena?’

‘Don’t treat me like an idiot, you know how vindictive I can be.’

Through the remisting glass, Lol saw a hooded figure at his door.

‘I want you to listen,’ Athena White said.

‘I think Jane’s outside.’

‘Then send the brat away.’

‘I’m going to have to call you back,’ Lol said.

Your teddy bears – were they girls or boys?

You mean there are girl teddy bears?

Good answer
, Gus Staines had said.

It had, eventually, become ridiculous. Jane laughing through tears she couldn’t stop. Tears like the rain on the window.

Did you ever feel drawn to other girls at school?

I liked some girls a lot. There were girls I preferred to hang out with. Girls I wanted to hang out with, and I was quite disappointed when they didn’t want to hang out with me.

Not what I meant by ‘drawn to’, Jane.

Jane threw off her parka, flopped in front of Lol’s stove, shivering.

‘Can I get you a drink?’ Lol said. ‘Brandy?’

‘You trying to seduce me?’

‘I was thinking for the shock.’

‘How do you know I’ve had a shock?’

Lol shrugged.

‘There was a time when I kind of wanted you to. Seduce me.’

‘Jane, maybe this is not the time—’

‘No – listen – it is.’ She looked up at him; he looked worried. ‘It
is
the time. I had a crush on you – before Mum, obviously, I’ve never been
that
sick. You with your hesitant, unworldly, damaged—’

‘Who’ve you been talking to?’

‘Gus at the bookshop.’

‘Bloody hell, Jane, you do like to seek out the most authoritative sources.’

‘She was very nice about it. She let me unload everything. She was very patient.’

See, I was playing it cool. Didn’t want to comes across as some wispy new generation New Age loony. It was Sam who started talking about it. Pointing up to Carn Ingli, in the Preseli Hills, the most mystical place in Pembrokeshire. If you spend a night up there you’re supposed to come down as a visionary. Sam was like, ‘Well, why not? These stories don’t come out of nowhere, they’re crucially important. They should inform archaeology.’

And did you go up there together? To sleep at… where was it?

Carn Ingli. No, because that was the night we got pissed and I spent the night in her bed. She wanted to do it the next night, go up there and I thought, Christ, it would be like commitment, like getting engaged or something. So next day I came home. I didn’t have to, but I was terrified.

Terrified?

That it was… like a latent thing?

Latent… at nineteen? Oh Jane, you’re so funny. All right, Sam. Is she feminine, or…?

She’s very attractive. In a very appealing, down-to-earth kind of way. She became my refuge. I wanted to be with her.

‘She keeps texting me,’ Jane told Lol. ‘She’s offered to get me into another dig. Which would be great. She’s clearly a bit, you know, in love? I think. I mean, how would I know? I’m nineteen years old in the Third Millennium and a complete innocent. I’ve been with just one guy and… and one woman…
possibly.
An innocent and a complete mental case –
you
can see that, you spent whole years amongst them.’ She stopped, looking into his anxious eyes. ‘You’re going to tell me I’m not, right? That I’m not, at the very least, in the middle of a breakdown.’

‘I’m not qualified,’ Lol said.

Jane moved away from the stove to lean her back against the seat of the sofa and told him about going with Mum to the place with the ruins and the brook and the mysterious plateau below the forestry, where she’d become aware of the woman in black, and the black had fallen away.

‘I hoped it was a ghost. I did
not
want it to be the other thing.’

‘What other thing?’

‘An image of what was really haunting me.’

‘And you didn’t tell your mum?’

‘She has enough to worry about. Doesn’t she?’

‘And did you tell Gus?’

‘No!’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s something that – if it’s real, and it might be – Mum might want to know, and if I couldn’t tell her…’

‘So you’re just telling me?’

‘I’m just telling you. You’re the only person I can trust. And you did a psychotherapy course.’

‘I dropped
out
of a psychotherapy course. To learn a fifteenth chord.’

Jane grinned.

‘Even Irene knows more than fifteen chords.’

‘
Irene?
’

‘Slip of the tongue. It means nothing.’

‘Listen,’ Lol said. ‘I have one question, as a failed psychotherapist and former mental patient. This… whatever you thought you saw… have you seen it since… in any form?’

‘It haunts me. Makes me shiver. If I’ve learned one thing, watching Mum dithering and agonizing, it’s that ghosts are the least of what can haunt you.’

Merrily called Huw from the gloom of the Etnam Street car park, at the bottom end of Leominster, noticing how few cars were parked under its pine trees in case one should come down in the gale.

‘You were right. I shouldn’t have gone. If I hadn’t gone, I might’ve given up on Cwmarrow on the basis that there was nothing else I could do. And now I can’t.’

‘Dementia itself can be frightening, lass.’

He sounded cautious.

‘It’s frightening to begin with,’ she said, ‘because you know there’s no way back. If you’re on the outside, you’re terrified you might end up hating someone you love because it’s not the same person. Because, increasingly, there isn’t a person there at all.’

She’d thought hard about this, reliving it again and again, everything that happened at Lyme Farm, as she drove very slowly back to Leominster, headlights on, under creaking trees.

Reliving it again now, for Huw.

When she’d finished, it was like the signal had gone. She looked up at the wavering pines, matt black on deepening grey.

‘Huw?’

‘It’s a bugger, Merrily. I don’t know what to advise you.’

‘No.’

‘How sure are you?’

‘On one level, as sure as I can be. I was expecting a sad, befuddled old man.’

‘Arguably, lass, what you’ve just described to me is a sad, befuddled old man.’

‘The difference is in the detail. I assure you I didn’t
want
to feel a sense of deep… negativity. What scares me most is the very idea of suggesting that dementia leaves people open to elements of oppression… or worse.’