The Magus of Hay (7 page)

12

Cripple

B
ETTY HAD LEFT
Robin painting tree shadows on the shop walls between the bookcases while she shopped for food in Hay.

The sun was out, tourists on the streets. Book tourists. You could pick them out by the shabby-chic clothing, bum bags and back-carriers for babies, some of the men in Bohemian wide-brimmed hats. All kind of middle-class neo-hippy, and Mr and Mrs Oliver looked more like tourists than locals.

They were coming out of Jones the Chemists, one of the oldest businesses in town, Mr Oliver stuffing packages into an old Waitrose bag-for-life.

‘—right then. If I go and pick up the rest and see you outside Shepherds in say an hour?’

Crossing the road arching his neck in his purposeful way. When, half an hour later, Betty saw Mrs Oliver – long skirt, summery bag on a sash – walk into the ewe’s milk ice cream parlour, she followed her in, introduced herself.

‘And when are you opening?’ Mrs Oliver said.

She was comfortably plump, hair short and near-white. Diamond earrings, sharp eyes, gardener’s tan.

‘This weekend, probably,’ Betty said. ‘We’re a bit nervous. Not having had a shop before.’

‘I’m sure you’ll do well,’ Mrs Oliver said.

‘Yes, we… hopefully.’ She looked round. The dominant colour in here was green, an arboreal haze over everything. ‘Are you fully recovered now?’

‘From what?’

‘I’m sorry, your husband said you’d been… not well.’

‘
Did
he?’

Betty said nothing. Discomfort hovered. Then Mrs Oliver seemed to relax, and her eyes lit up like coals in a stove when you pulled out the damper.

‘I’m Hilary.’

‘Betty.’

‘I’m glad we’ve met. Now, listen. You mustn’t be put off by James’s failure. Running a bookshop in a recession seems to require a level of enterprise that he lacks. We came here on a romantic whim –
his
romantic whim – for a weekend a few years ago, when he was convinced he’d seen Martin Amis having coffee with Andrew Motion, while he was still Poet Laureate. James’s… pavement-café-society moment. After that, he just
had
to live here.’

‘And open a shop? Bit drastic?’

‘My dear…’ Mrs Oliver did an unsmile ‘… James is one of those people who need to
buy in
. Move as quickly as possible to the centre of things. No use Martin Amis popping in for a browse and a coffee if he doesn’t become James’s close friend.’

‘And has he?’

‘Never been seen since. Nor Motion. Though I can’t deny that you
do
see authors here. They say every notable writer comes at least once, out of curiosity.’

‘I’ve heard that.’

‘Gets to the point, as I say, where you’re imagining you’ve seen someone and you actually haven’t. Ah, that’s so-and-so! It isn’t, but you think it
is
because this is Hay. I saw Beryl Bainbridge once. There she was walking amongst the open-air shelves at the honesty bookshop under the castle walls in her grey, fitted coat and a scarf and gloves. Not a face you’d think you could mistake, and I thought, I know, I’ll ask her if she’d mind signing some of her books. But it couldn’t have been. Her—’

Someone pushed past the table, dislodging it and causing Hilary Oliver’s coffee to spill. She frowned.

‘Terribly sad. Her obituary was in the
Guardian
the following day. I suppose what I’m saying is that this is one of those places where people become prone to delusions of one kind or another. Like this ridiculous business of the King, which began as a joke decades ago and doesn’t go away. He was pointed out to me once. I couldn’t take it on board. My God, his
trousers…’

Hilary Oliver shuddered.

‘Will you still stay here, Hilary, now there’s no business?’

‘Well, we do have quite a nice house, with a big garden. And friends who like to come for weekends. We’ll probably have to stay until such time as James convinces himself it was a worthwhile exercise. He’s talking about standing for the town council. Ridiculous – town councils in this part of the world are
nothing
. No powers. Small-time talking shops. On reflection, I suppose he’ll quite enjoy that.’

Betty licked her ice cream, thoughtful. What had seemed quite funny at first was suddenly acutely depressing. It was how you didn’t want ever to wind up: purposeless. Looking for a reason.

‘But at least you’re out of the shop,’ she said.

‘No we’re not. We still own it. We had an opportunity to sell the premises and he refused. Two approaches. Both backed away when James demanded they sign a document committing them to preserving it as a bookshop. Perverse. He was held up to ridicule in some quarters because he would only sell
good
books. He said if we weren’t dependant on it for a living, we should feel obliged to stand up for what he saw as Literary Quality.’

‘That’s… kind of admirable, really. Isn’t it?’

‘My dear, it’s bloody silly, precious and guaranteed to fail. I have to say he wasn’t terribly pleased, at first, when he found out the kind of books you were proposing to sell, but at least they’re books. In the end, he simply refuses to be seen as betraying what he calls the defining quality of the town. But… he’s out of it. I know he likes to say it was my health that was suffering, but it was his. I’ll say no more.’

Betty said, ‘I wondered why you hadn’t developed it upstairs, opened up more book rooms. Something we can’t do, of course, or we wouldn’t have anywhere else to live.’

Hilary’s chin retracted, eyes widening.

‘You’re not proposing to
live
in those upstairs rooms?’

‘We don’t really have a choice at the moment.’

‘James didn’t tell me
that
. I mean it’s all so… small and…’

Betty waited. What else had James failed to tell her?

The old woman who whistled traipsed past the door in her long coat.

‘Anyway, you’re young. You have the energy.’ Sounded like she hadn’t been told about Robin’s condition. She looked at her watch. ‘James will be coming back soon. Did you want to talk to him? About health?’

‘Er… perhaps not. Perhaps you can both drop in and have a look over the weekend. See what a mess we’ve made.’

‘We’d love to. But it won’t be a mess. I sense in you a level of determination neither of us possesses.’

Maybe she meant a level of need.

Robin had left the door open, but the paint cloths over the shelves were enough to convince passers-by they weren’t open yet for business.

Except for Gareth Nunne. Wedged in the doorway, blocking Robin’s light.

‘Feel responsible for you now, you bugger. What kind of idiot takes any notice of an old fart with his business crashing round his ears?’

‘A desperate man, Nunne,’ Robin said. ‘A desperate man.’ He put down his palette of acrylics, dropped his brush in the water jar. ‘You realize it’s gonna look better than this. We’re barely started here.’

Gareth Nunne pulled the sheets off a couple of shelves.

‘Better how, boy?’

‘Tidier, for a start.’

‘Tidy?’ Nunne reeling back, like he’d been pepper-sprayed. ‘You don’t want bloody
tidy.’

Robin grinned, first time today.

‘Tidy,’ Nunne said, like he was addressing a small kid, ‘looks like you know what you’re selling.’

‘We know
exactly
what we’re selling.’

‘Of course you do. I’m just telling you it en’t good to
look
like you know. If you’re wearing a suit and all your shelves are beautifully ordered and it looks like every book’s been assessed and valued, you’re buggered. What you need are subtle hints of chaos… confusion… incompetence. You don’t wanner blow it like Oliver, come over as
clever
, when what your customer wants is stupid. Some vague, booky type who don’t function in the real world. Your customer’s looking for a bargain. Wants to think he’s put one over on you.’

Nunne pulled down Wells’s guide to the sacred magic of gemstones.

‘Say your punter’s bought this for peanuts and he’s real chuffed, and he tells you it’s a first edition. You go, “First edition? Is it really? Well, well. I never noticed that. Good heavens, you got a bargain there, all right.”’

‘And that works how?’

‘It’s a sacrifice. They’ve got you down as an idiot, and that means they’ll come back.’

‘Uh… right.’

‘However,’ Gareth said, ‘if you’re
buying
second-hand books different rules apply. You go, “Well, of
course
it’s a first edition – there only ever was one edition, and if people didn’t want it first time around, they’re not gonner want it now. Only way it’ll sell is as part of a set. Say fifteen quid the lot?”’

‘You tried to pull that one on me.’

‘Aye, and leased bloody Oliver’s shop for him. Jesus.’

Nunne beamed at Robin. His port wine stain shone. Then he was serious.

‘Don’t get me wrong. We’re not in competition, yere, like your
Waterstones and your Smiths. It’s about getting people into
the town
. The town’s one big bookshop. All the rest, the fashion shops, the antique shops, the art shops, that’s just the support. When it ceases to be the support and starts to dominate the book trade… that’s when Hay will fall, boy.’

He probably didn’t mean it to sound as portentous as it did.

Outside the ice cream parlour, a man was crouching on the pavement, taking pictures of the castle, across the marketplace.

‘Not really what one would call a
romantic
ruin, is it?’ Hilary said.

You couldn’t argue with that. Some medieval castles were beautifully stark, like sculptures made by the hand of God. This one looked like a ruin inside a ruin. Repeatedly smashed and burned, patched up, rebuilt, reformed, abandoned again. And now it just hung around, Betty thought, like some huge, shambling, schizophrenic psychiatric patient in the care of the community.

Maybe Robin related to the castle as a fellow cripple.

Cripple
. He liked that word.

‘The keep,’ Hilary said, ‘is supposed to have been built by a huge woman. Matilda. Or Maud. Or something.’

Betty had Googled it. The origins of the castle, as much as she could find. Matilda, or Maud, had been the wife of a Norman baron, William de Braose, who ran most of the southern Welsh border in the twelfth century, the reign of King John. William had been known as The Ogre after organizing the massacre of several Welsh leaders he’d invited to dinner at Abergavenny Castle, twenty-five miles or so from here.

‘Built it on her own, do you think?’ Betty said. ‘Or did she just brief the contractors?’

‘No idea. I suppose it’s partly legend. Matilda was eventually starved to death by King John, apparently. Not here. Somewhere. Perhaps I’m oversensitive, but I find none of that romantic.’

Hilary Oliver turned away from the castle. As perhaps, Betty
sensed, she always had.

‘’Scuse me.’ The man with the camera was on his feet, approaching Betty. ‘This is rather cheeky of me. Taking some shots for a tourist guide, and I need a figure to stand in front of the castle. Would you mind?’

‘Me?’

‘Only be middle-distance. To give the picture a sense of scale.’

Never liked being photographed. Native Americans thought it captured your soul. But then she thought about Robin.

‘OK, then.’

‘Very kind. If you stand there in the centre of the square, away from the cars…’

He took several in the end. Her looking at him, her looking up at the castle. She felt awkward, but he seemed professional and harmless enough – dumpy, bearded, middle-aged guy. And she knew that Robin would go, Hey, connection! You arrived. You’re part of the scene. You’re
part of Hay
.

‘If you give me your address,’ the photographer said, ‘I’ll send you some copies of the brochure when it’s printed.’

‘It’s OK, honestly,’ Betty said. ‘Don’t worry about that. I’m sure it’ll be pointed out to me.’

They always promised you copies, but they never arrived.

And giving her address as Back Fold had an element of finality she was still unsure about.

13

Protocol and courtesy

‘D
AVID
H
AMBLING
,’ Bliss said.

‘So how are you, now, Frannie?’

‘Better than David Hambling.’

Merrily thought about this.

‘He’s dead, right?’

‘All right, considerably better,’ Bliss said. ‘How did you know he was dead?’

‘I just… know the way you approach things.’

She’d gone out without her mobile again, had to wait until she was home to call him back. Answering service. She could wait. She’d done some ironing and sketched out Sunday’s sermon on the general theme of bereavement.
Sermon
. Never a favourite word. One dictionary definition employed the verb
harangue
. How long would a haranguing vicar last these days? Little female pulpit punk screaming hellfire. They’d take you away.

See… already talking to herself.
And
bloody well forgotten that, with Martin Longbeach in the pulpit, she didn’t even need a sermon. God, she was losing it. Stress. Quite glad when Bliss had called back just before seven p.m.

‘How much you know about Cusop, then, Merrily?’

Sophie had been right, his speech was a little slurry, Mersey mud reclaiming its own.

‘I know where it
is
.’

An insignificant left turn, just as you were about to cross the Welsh border into Hay-on-Wye.

Bliss said, ‘Your patch?’

‘Certainly in the diocese.’

‘Separated from the Dyfed-Powys police area by two or three fields and the Dulas Brook,’ Bliss said. ‘Right on the rim. The brook actually marks the English border. Learned that today.’

‘New knowledge always makes a day worthwhile.’

‘Something wrong, Merrily?’

‘Nah, just a bit… Go on. tell me something else about Cusop Dingle.’

‘You can’t see Hay at all from there, close as it is. Too low. Can’t see much of anything, really. Funny kind of place. Secretive. Lorra trees. Would you like to see it?’

‘You’re asking me for a date?’

Merrily sat down, put an elbow on the scullery desk to take the weight of the phone.

Bliss said, ‘
Have
you heard of David Hambling?’

‘Not sure. Was he a priest?’

Small laugh from Bliss.

‘If you can spare the time, I’d like you to take a look at Mr Hambling’s library. As a person with knowledge of what we might call the spiritual underside.’

‘Satanist?’

‘Half-eleven all right?’

‘Sure. Why not.’

‘I wouldn’t keep you long, it’s just— Sorry, did I get that right? you just agreed without an argument and having to clear it with the Bishop?’

‘I did.’

‘Bloody hell. Well. If you know where the Cusop Dingle sign is, follow it and just keep driving till you see my car.’

‘Is it possible there’s something in Cusop I need to know about?’

‘Might be.’

‘Only it has a church and a minister. Should I mention it, out of protocol… courtesy, even?’

‘Nah, I wouldn’t. Not at this stage.’

‘Frannie, you don’t know what protocol and courtesy
mean.’

‘Yeh, well, had trouble with a lorra words since I had me head kicked in.’

‘I did wonder how that was going? In fact I even Googled
brain-injury
, which is something I don’t normally—’

‘Merrily.’ Bliss’s voice was suddenly wound tight. ‘Brain
stem
injury. Different. How’s Jane?’

‘Gone away for gap-year therapy. How did he die, this man?’

‘Found in a pool below a waterfall. Probably drowned. We don’t know for certain yet.’

‘Cusop has a waterfall?’

‘Several, apparently. Least, the brook does.’

‘Don’t have to inspect a body or anything, do I?’

‘Eleven-thirty, then,’ Bliss said. ‘Ta ra.’

She sat staring at the phone. Would she have said yes with such alacrity if the Bishop – and even Sophie – hadn’t gone behind her back over Sylvia Merchant? Courtesy and protocol. A two-way street.

No call that night from Jane or Lol. None expected. Jane had already rung four times in just over a day – what did that say about both of them?

She left it till after ten, when she knew he’d be in, and called Huw Owen in the Brecon Beacons. No answer. No answering machine. Didn’t try again. What did she really expect him to say about Sylvia Merchant? What could you really claim to do for these people when even the dictionaries had their doubts?

Merrily went to bed too early, a last-light sheen on the landing window, a brown fog on the oaken stairs.

On your own. In that vast old vicarage
.

Who knew how old the vicarage really was? Three centuries, four centuries, five… more? You’d need to carbon date every oak beam even to make an educated guess. She’d gone up and down these stairs tens of thousands of times, knowing the
house was empty but also knowing that Jane would be home before nightfall. And also, in the past year or so, that Lol was in his cottage at the bottom of the cobbled square.

Coming back from the bathroom, it was like being the only guest in a drab old hotel. One of the bulbs in the landing light had expired a couple of nights ago and now the walls were the colour of worn leather and she was unusually aware of her footsteps. It was oppressive in the way it had been when she and Jane had first moved in and she’d had recurrent dreams of the house being even bigger than it was, with a forbidden extra storey. Also vividly bloody dreams of her dead husband, Sean, Jane’s father, who had died in a motorway crash with his other woman.

Did she actually like this vicarage? It was impressive. Lots of period features.

No, not a lot, really. Amazing it had survived when the Church was flogging them off all over the country, putting the clergy into former council houses. She suspected the reason it hadn’t happened here was Uncle Ted, senior churchwarden, retired solicitor with an extensive portfolio of stocks and shares, who’d been known to bail the parish out more than once and thought a showpiece black and white village like Ledwardine deserved a seventeenth-century seven-bedroom mausoleum for its vicar to freeze in.

Merrily spun round, shivering in her T-shirt and pants, gazing into the night-blue squares of the leaded window. A small black shadow flitted in front of her into the bedroom.

Me and the cat
.

Some people said cats were drawn to negative energy. Ethel mewed. Merrily bent and picked her up, put her on the rug and climbed into bed.

After a few minutes she got up again, went across to the window which overlooked the village lights, said a small, neutral prayer for Ms Merchant and the soul of Ms Nott and went back to bed.

There was a small bump and squirmy movements between her feet.

Ethel. Hopefully.