Midwinter of the Spirit (9 page)

‘He’s an idiot. If you told Dick I’d seen my father, he’d come up with a beautiful theory involving hallucinations or drugs. But you see I don’t
have
any drugs. I don’t need anything up here; it’s a constant, natural high. And it would be kind of an insult anyway.
And
I have never had hallucinations, ever.’

Her hair swung close to his face. It was the kind of hair medieval maidens dangled from high windows so that knights could climb up and rescue them.

‘So it’s not official,’ she said. ‘I mean us: we’re not counsellor and patient or anything.’

Lol was confused. He felt himself blushing.

‘We’re a
bit
official,’ he said.

‘You have to report back to Dick?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘You’ll tell him about this?’

‘Not if…’

Moon turned away and dipped like a heron between two boxes, coming up with a dark green cardigan which she pulled on.

‘Then it was a dream.’ She bent and pouted at him, a petulant child. ‘It was all a dream.’

7

Graveyard Angel

A
MYSTERIOUS SUMMONS
to the Bishop’s Palace.

Wednesday afternoon: market day, and the city still crowded. Merrily found a parking space near The Black Lion in Bridge Street. She might have been allowed to drive into the Palace courtyard, but this could be considered presumptuous; she didn’t want that – almost didn’t want to be noticed sliding through the shoppers in her black woollen two-piece, a grey silk scarf over her dog-collar.

Looking out, while she was in the area, for Canon Dobbs, the exorcist.

What she needed was a confidential chat with the old guy, nobody else involved. To clear the air, maybe even iron things out. If she took on this task, she wanted no hard feelings, no trail of resentment.

Contacting Dobbs was not so easy. In Deliverance, according to Huw Owen, low-profile was essential, to avoid being troubled by cranks and nutters or worse. But his guy was
well
below the parapet – not even, as she discovered, in the phone book. As a residential canon at the Cathedral he had no parishioners to be accessible to, but ex-directory?

Evensong at Ledwardine Church had recently been suspended by popular demand, or rather the absence of it, so on Sunday night – with Jane out at a friend’s – Merrily had found time to ring Alan Crombie, the Rector of Madley. But he wasn’t much help.

‘Never had to consult him, Merrily – but I remember Colin Strong. When he was at Vowchurch, there was a persistent problem at a farmhouse and he ended up getting Dobbs in. I think he simply did it through the Bishop’s office. You leave a message and he gets in touch with you.’

Well, that was no use. It would get right back to Mick Hunter.

‘So ordinary members of the public have no real access to Dobbs?’

‘Not initially,’ Alan Crombie said. ‘It’s strictly clergy-consultation. That’s normal practice. If you have a problem you go to your local priest and he decides if he can cope with it or if he needs specialist advice.’

‘What happened at Vowchurch? Did Dobbs deal with it?’

‘Lord knows. One of his rules is total secrecy. Anything gets in the papers, I gather his wrath is awesome to behold. Do you have another little problem in that department yourself, Merrily?’

‘No, I…’
Oh, what the hell!
‘Off the record, Alan, the Bishop’s asked me to succeed Dobbs when he… retires.’

‘Oh, I see.’ Silence, then a nervous laugh. ‘Well… rather you than me.’

‘I realize I may have to buy a black bag and a big hat.’

‘God, you don’t want to go in for that kind of thing,’ Alan had said with another nervous laugh. ‘Have all kinds of perverts following you home.’

Merrily walked along King Street, the Cathedral up ahead filling her vision. She had no idea what Dobbs looked like and saw no men in big hats with black bags.

Although it didn’t look much from the front, the Bishop’s Palace was perhaps the most desirable dwelling in Hereford: next door to the Cathedral but closer to the River Wye, and dreamily visible from the public footpath on the opposite bank, with its big white windows on mellow red brick, tree-fringed lawns sloping to the water.

Inside, she’d never been further than the vastly refurbished twelfth-century Great Hall where receptions were held. Today she didn’t even make it across the courtyard. Sophie Hill, the Bishop’s elegant white-haired lay-secretary, met her at the entrance, steering her through a door under the gatehouse and up winding stone stairs, about twenty of them.

‘It’s not very big, but Michael thought you’d like it better that way.’

‘I’m sorry?’ Merrily pulled off her scarf.

‘It could be quite charming’ – Sophie reached beyond her to push open the door at the top of the steps – ‘with a few pictures and things. To the left, please, Mrs Watkins.’

There were two offices in the gatehouse: a bigger one with a vista of Broad Street… and this.

Sloping ceiling, timbered and whitewashed walls, a desk with a phone. A scuffed repro captain’s chair that swivelled, two filing cabinets, a small bookcase with a Bible and some local reference books, including Jane’s one-time bible,
The Folklore of Herefordshire
by Ella Mary Leather.

Merrily walked uncertainly over to the window overlooking the courtyard and the former stables, a few parked cars and great stacks of split logs for the Bishop’s fires.

‘Welcome to Deliverance Tower,’ said Sophie deadpan. ‘The computer’s on order.’

Walking dazed into the blustery sunshine on Broad Street, Merrily felt the hand of fate so heavily on her shoulder that she nearly threw up an arm to shake it off.

It had felt good up in the gatehouse, almost cosy. On top of the city and yet remote from it – a refuge, an eyrie. It had felt right.

Careful. Don’t be seduced on the first date
.

Sophie had said the Bishop had planned to see her himself, but Mrs Hunter had an important appointment and her own car was being serviced. This appeared to be true; through the window, Merrily had watched Mick, in clerical shirt under what was almost certainly an Armani jacket, accompany his wife to a dusty BMW in British racing green. She saw that Val Hunter was very tall, nearly as tall as the Bishop. Angular, heronlike, tawny hair thrown back, a beauty with breeding. They had two sons at boarding school; although Mick had confessed, in an interview with the
Observer
, to having very mixed feelings about private education. Merrily suspected his wife didn’t share them.

‘He’s still rather feeling his way,’ Sophie had confided, ‘but he does want change, and I’m afraid he’ll be terribly disappointed if you walk away from this, Mrs Watkins. He regards it as a very meaningful step for the female ministry.’

At the top of Broad Street now, Merrily stared at the rings in a jeweller’s window, and saw her reflection and all the people passing behind her – one man with a briefcase looking over his shoulder at her legs while her back was turned.

She began to tremble. She needed a cigarette.

Actually, even stronger than that, came the realization that she needed to pray.

Like now
.

Abruptly, as though obeying some hypnotic command, she turned back towards the Cathedral, rapidly crossing the green and once again guiltily winding the scarf about her throat to cover the collar. She wanted no one to see her, no one to approach.

Within yards of the north door, she thought of going around the back to the cloisters, asking the first person she didn’t recognize where Canon Dobbs lived, but by now the compulsion to pray was too strong, a racing in the blood.

She breathed out.
Jesus!

It happened only rarely like this. Like the day she drove into the country with a blinding headache, and ended up following a track to a cell-like church dedicated to some forgotten Celtic saint where – when she’d most needed it; when she was just finding out the sordid truth about Sean’s business – there’d been this sudden blissful sense of blue and gold, and a lamplit path opening in front of her.

A group was entering the Cathedral; it looked like a Women’s Institute party. ‘Isn’t there a café?’ someone said grumpily.

Merrily felt like pushing past, but waited at the end of the line as the women moved singly through the porch. When she was inside, she saw them fanning into the aisles, heard echoes of footsteps and birdlike voices spiralling through sacred stone caverns.

And she was just standing there on her own and tingling with need.

‘Welcome to Hereford Cathedral.’ An amplified voice from the distant pulpit, the duty chaplain. ‘If you’d all please be seated, we’ll begin the tour with a short prayer. Thank you.’

Sweating now, almost panicking, Merrily stumbled through the first available doorway and slithered to her knees in the merciful gloom of the fifteenth-century chantry chapel of Bishop John Stanbury, with its gilded triptych and its luxuriously carved and moulded walls and ceilings merging almost organically, it seemed, in a rush of rippling honeyed stone.

When she put her hands together she could feel the tiny hairs on the backs of them standing electrically on end.

‘God,’ she was whispering. ‘What is it? What
is
it?’

That sensation of incredible potential: all the answers to all the questions no more than an instant away, an atom of time, a membrane of space.

‘There’s this picture of her,’ Jane said, ‘that she once threw away, only I rescued it from the bin for purposes of future leverage and blackmail and stuff. I think she knows I’ve got it, but she never says anything.’

They walked past the school tennis courts, their nets removed for the winter, and across to the sixth-form car park where Rowenna’s Fiesta stood, six years old and lime-green but otherwise brilliant.

‘She’s wearing this frock like a heavy-duty binliner, right? And her hair’s kind of bunched up with these like plastic spikes sticking out. She’s got on this luminous white lipstick. And her eyes are like under about three economy packs of cheap mascara.’

Rowenna shook her head sadly.

‘Her favourite band,’ Jane said, ‘was Siouxsie and the Banshees.’

‘Don’t,’ said Rowenna, pained.

‘Well, actually they weren’t bad.’

Rowenna unlocked the Fiesta. ‘You could always sell the picture to the tabloids.’

‘Yeah, but she’d have to do something controversial first, to get them interested. Just another woman priest who used to be a punk, that isn’t enough, is it? I suppose I could take it to the
Hereford Times
.’

‘Who’d pay you about enough to buy a couple of CDs.’

‘Yeah, mid-price ones.’ Jane climbed into the passenger seat. ‘No, the point I was trying to make: you look at that picture and you can somehow see the future priest there. You know what I mean, all dark and ritualistic?’

‘What, she’s some kind of vestment fetishist?’

‘No! It’s just… oh shit.’

Dean Wall and Danny Gittoes, famous sad Ledwardine louts, were leaning over the car, Dean’s big face up against the passenger window. Jane wound it down. Dean fumbled out his ingratiating leer.

‘All right for a lift home, ladies?’

‘Not today, OK?’ Rowenna said.

‘In fact, not
ever
.’ Jane cranked up the window. ‘Like, no offence, but we’d rather
not
wind up raped and the car burned out, if that’s OK with you.’

Dean was saying, ‘You f—’ as Jane wound the window the last inch.

‘Foot down, Ro.’

Rowenna drove off, smiling.

‘Nicely handled, kitten. Thanks.’

Rowenna was new at the school, but nearly two years older than Jane. On account of her family moving around a lot and a long spell of illness, she’d got way behind, so she’d needed to re-start her A-level course. She was a cool person – in a way a kind of older sister, a role she seemed to like.

‘You don’t mean,’ said Jane, astounded, ‘that you
have
actually given those two hairballs a lift? Like, how did you get the slime off the upholstery?’

Rowenna laughed. ‘I see now it was a grave mistake, and I won’t do it again. What were you saying about your mother? I didn’t quite grasp the nature of the problem.’

‘Oh, it’s just…’ Jane cupped her hands over her nose and mouth and sighed into them, ‘… just she’s worth more than this, that’s all. Like, OK, maybe she was drawn into it by this spiritual need and the need to bring it out in other people, you know what I mean?’

‘Maybe.’ Rowenna drove with easy confidence. Within only a couple of hundred yards of the school, they were out into countryside with wooded hills and orchards.

‘But I mean, the Church of England? Like, what can you really expect of an outfit that was only set up so Henry VIII could dump his wife? Spiritually they’re just a bunch of nohope tossers, and I can’t see that the ordination of women will change a thing.’

‘I suppose even the Catholics kind of look like they’ve got
something
together.’ Rowenna’s father was an Army officer, possibly SAS, and the family had spent some time in Northern Ireland.

‘But you know what I mean?’ Jane hunched forward, clasping her hands together. ‘I imagine her in about forty years’ time, sitting by the gas fire in some old clergyperson’s home, full of arthritis from kneeling on cold stone floors, and thinking: What the hell was
that
all about?’

Rowenna laughed, a sound like ice in a cocktail glass. She looked innocent and kind of wispy, but she was pretty shrewd.

‘And this Deliverance trip, right?’ Jane knew she wasn’t supposed to discuss this, but Rowenna’s military background – high-security clearance, all that stuff – meant she could be trusted not to spread things around. ‘It’s obvious she thinks this is a kind of cutting-edge thing to do, and will maybe take her
closer
. You know what I mean?’

‘To the spiritual world?’

‘But it’s actually quite the opposite. From what I can see, the job is actually to
stop
people getting close. She has to actively discourage all contact with the occult or anything mystical – anything
interesting
. I think that’s kind of immoral, don’t you?’