The Wine of Angels (56 page)

She shrank away, flattened herself against the bathroom door, turned her head into the wall.

The cold hit her. It stank of misery. It wrapped itself around her, a frigid winding sheet. She couldn’t breathe.

She squirmed.
Wake up.
Lips pulled tight around a prayer: 0
God, yea, though I walk through the darkness of the soul, though my heart is weak ...

At the end of the passage, a light hung over the stairs.

Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake ...

The light was a lean, vertical smear. It wasn’t much, promised no warmth, but she reached out for it, her hands groping for the stair-rail on the landing.

Should she try to run downstairs? She looked down. She tried to call down to Lol, who might not even be there. There was no easier name to say, but she couldn’t say it. ‘L ... L ...’ Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth and all that emerged was a sound like an owl-hoot, weak and lonely, and looking down the stairs was like looking down an endless, cold, black well.

The only way was up.

She looked up, just as the light flared over the stairs, like a small, contained area of sheet lightning behind cloud and she was briefly caught in its periphery, which sent a jagged shock into her still-tightened chest, and she stumbled in panic, fell forward on to the stairs into a clinging, damp vapour, dense with particles of fleeing light, and the wooden stairs under her were very rough and the air around her cold. Cold for January, desperately cold for May. She pulled herself up and was nearly pulled down again because her heart was so packed with pain.

Despair. A worm of liquid despair wriggling inside her. The light flared again for a moment, and she felt a penetrating agony in her chest as she toppled into the attic.

There was no sound but the whine of the night wind in the exposed roof timbers and her own breathing.

As she pulled herself up, the tightness fell away and she breathed odourless air. Stood, panting on the top floor of the vicarage, a place of dreams, where there were no doors. No bedroom, no sitting room/study.

No Jane.

Only a long empty space, with a sloping roof, where something cold and naked, wretchedly embracing an unending misery, metamorphosed for a wild, defiant instant into a spinning, swirling, silken vortex of silver-grey and then was gone.

39

Levels

D
OWNSTAIRS IN THE
drawing room of the vicarage, the lights were on. There were brown, smoking embers in the grate. She was wearing a shapeless, green polo-neck jumper over a white nightdress. It was still night. She’d lost a sandal. She felt cold and drained and heartbroken.

And didn’t know why.

‘She’s sleeping,’ Lol said. ‘I went back and stuck my head around the door. She’s fine. Everything’s normal.’

‘Except me.’ Merrily threw coal on the fire. She would never be warm again.

Lol contemplated her seriously through his glasses, round and brass-rimmed like some old, nautical telescope.

She said, ‘Where was I?’

‘At the top of the stairs. Swaying about. I thought you were going to fall’

‘What did you see? What was it like? Was it a kind of big, open space? Rough joists. Damp ...’ Her voice faded. She knew what he was going to say.

‘It was normal. Just like now.’

‘You didn’t go to the right place,’ she said.

‘Maybe not.’ He sat her down on the sofa and positioned himself at the other end, his back against the arm. Ethel jumped into his lap. ‘Maybe not, no.’

Seconds passed. He was thinking.

She said, ‘You’re still wearing your vicar’s gear.’

Absurd reversal of roles.

‘Mm.’ He was calmer than she’d seen him, or maybe that was merely relative to her own condition.

‘Time is it, Lol?’

‘About twenty past one.’

‘You been back long?’ His sleeping bag was on the rug in front of the fire, still rolled up.

‘Hour or so. I was wandering around the garden for a while. Thinking things out.’ He looked down at his black chest. ‘Scared to take these off, I suppose. This guy looks at things objectively.’

‘Let’s put some more coal on the fire,’ Merrily said.

She told him about all the times it had happened before, from that first night when she thought she’d followed Jane and she’d kept opening doors and wound up at the foot of the stairs, looking up to the third floor.

She shut her eyes and rolled her head slowly around, small bones creaking at the back of her neck.

‘And then Sean.’

‘Your husband?’

‘My dead husband. I know it wasn’t a dream, because ...’

She told him about the door handle which fell out again, proving she’d been in the empty bedroom when she saw him and not in her own bed, dreaming.

In the fireplace, cool yellow flames were swarming over the new coal. Lol pushed in the poker.

‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know. I did wake up in bed, and it was morning, and I thought it had been a dream. It was a hallucination, I suppose. I went into that room and I hallucinated Sean. A source of guilt, because I didn’t help him when he needed help. But he didn’t want me to. He had another woman.’

‘You’re the kind of person always feels responsible.’

‘Jane tell you that?’

‘No. I’ve actually started figuring things out for myself.’ He prodded at a cob of coal until it developed fissures and opened up and let more flames through.

‘If it’s not the house,’ Merrily said, ‘it has to be me.’

‘Could it be a combination of both? You and the house setting something off in each other? Or you and the house ... and Jane?’

‘Yeah, I know. Like adolescents cause poltergeist phenomena. I’ve heard all that. But this doesn’t happen to Jane. Nothing happens to Jane here.’

‘Only in the orchard.’

He looked into the fire for a while and then he said, ‘This question of different floors. When you’ve read lots of books on psychology like me ... That’s what I used to read in hospital. They had a library, for the doctors and the staff, with a resident librarian, and I got to know her, and that’s where I used to spend ... days. Whole days, I suppose. Reading books on psychology and psychiatric syndromes. Some of it made more sense than the patronizing crap I was getting from most of the staff.’

‘How did you stand it?’

‘Time passes,’ Lol said. ‘You don’t notice. But, anyway ... levels. The floor where you’re sleeping, that’s where you’re at. That’s your situation. Your husband’s there, your past, all your problems, your insecurities, your fears, your guilt. That’s where you keep opening doors and they lead nowhere, except into the past. That’s where you saw Sean. And when it gets too stifling, just when you feel there’s no escape, you wind up at the stairs leading to the third floor.’

Psychological claptrap. She needed a cigarette.

‘But, up there, Merrily, is the Unknown. It could be Enlightenment. But it could also be madness. You’re afraid of what you might learn.’

‘I didn’t learn anything. I’d fallen asleep in the praying position and woke up feeling really low and beaten and hopeless. But until I went up into that attic, I didn’t know what sorrow was. Or felt like, because I still don’t know what it was. Why I felt so bad.’

‘And it was different.’

‘I wasn’t frightened. I had this freedom up there. The freedom to cry for ever. And I knew I couldn’t. I couldn’t make a sound. Mustn’t be heard.’

‘By Jane?’

‘Jane wasn’t there. Nobody else was there. It was a different time, Lol. It was a time of indescribable unhappiness.’

Merrily wept.

The sorrow she was giving off was so profound, he had to blink back his own tears.

He wanted to hold her.

He didn’t touch her.

He went to make tea.

Later, he lay on the sofa and watched her sleep in front of the fire, curled up in the sleeping bag there like a child, the orange coals and the wire fireguard making glowing, crisscross patterns on her face. The cigarettes and Zippo lighter on the rug, a few inches from her nose, Ethel by her feet.

Never had got around to telling her about Alison. He’d wanted to ask her, How will this end? What can we do about it? He’d asked Alison. She said she had no idea.

But it’ll be on my terms. When I tell him.

You still hate him?

How can I hate him? My own flesh and blood.

Alison had laughed.

Yesterday morning, she’d told most of this to Lucy and then Lucy had died, bequeathing the responsibility to Merrily Watkins.

Lol was back in the alien sweatshirt, the vicar’s clothes neatly on hangers behind the door. Merrily had not told him what had happened when she and Jane had gone to Richard Coffey’s place.

Lol looked at Merrily, sleeping. He thought of Lucy on her back on a mortuary table in Hereford, cold and hatless and awaiting her post-mortem. This made him anxious, too anxious to sleep.

Ethel, the cat, wasn’t sleeping either. She lay at the bottom of the sleeping bag, where Merrily’s ankles were, and she watched Lol, golden-eyed and purring gently.

Merrily’s face was flushed by the firelight. He couldn’t stop looking at it.

Twice in the night, he got up to put more coal on the fire to keep her warm.

40

Bad Year for Apples

‘O
H, WOW
,’ J
ANE
said.

She was standing in the drawing-room doorway, fully dressed. Lol came up behind her from the kitchen, with tea things on a tray. Over Jane’s shoulder he could see Merrily, hurriedly propping herself up in the sleeping bag.

‘Flower, before you say a word—’

‘Well, well,’ Jane said. ‘So you got it together.’

It was nearly eight a.m. Substantial sunshine had collected in the bay window, coloured pale green by the trees.

‘You slept together,’ Jane said.

‘No!’ Merrily sat up in the sleeping bag. ‘I mean yes, but no.’

‘This’ – Jane ambled into the room, hands on hips – ‘is really quite seriously cool’ She turned, beamed at Lol. ‘And she looks so much better. Don’t you think she looks fantastic?’

‘Yes,’ Lol said honestly. ‘However—’

Merrily stood up. The sun shone through her white nightdress. Lol thought maybe he should close his eyes. Couldn’t quite manage that.

‘That’s it. That is just about enough.’ Merrily looked around for her sweater, failed to find it, covered herself with the sleeping bag. ‘Make some toast, child.’

‘Right,’ Jane said. ‘Anything you say.’

The phone rang. ‘
I’ll
get that.’ Merrily gathered the sleeping bag around her. Jane giggled. Lol moved out of the doorway. Merrily passed him without a glance.

Lol shut the drawing-room door behind her, faced up to Jane.

‘Vicars don’t lie. Nothing happened.’

‘In which case’ – Jane frowned – ‘you ought to be bloody well ashamed. She doesn’t attract you?’

‘Well ... ye-es ... yes, she does.’

‘God.’ Jane breathed hard through her teeth. ‘She’s not quite a
nun.
She needs somebody.’

‘But preferably somebody stable.’

‘Oh yeah, somebody really, really stable.’ She glared at him. ‘Come
on.
My
dad
was stable. My dad was this like utterly focused individual who knew exactly where he was going the whole time.’

‘I thought he was bent.’

‘And getting away with it! Because he knew he could. Because he was stable inside. Focused. Balanced. Never worried about anything, not really. My dad thought a neurosis was ... was ...’

‘Something you can grow in a window box, with care.’

‘Yeah. Exactly. So, you know, screw
stable.
Life’s too short. Look, I know you’ve had your problems. I listen at doors sometimes, I’m not afraid to admit that.’

‘You do, huh?’

‘Those back stairs are very useful. You could go through life really ignorant if you didn’t listen at doors. Like, Colette always saying you were scared of her, like it was really cool having somebody who’s scared of you, but it wasn’t her at all you were scared of, I know that now, and I’m glad. And I’m glad Karl Windling’s dead. I mean not glad he’s
dead,
like if there was some other way he could be completely out of your face ...’

‘Well, I haven’t figured out how I should feel about that either.’

‘You should feel free. Hey, I forgot ... Did you get to see Alison last night?’

‘I have a problem with free,’ Lol said.

‘Just that I keep seeing people, twice, three times, Jesus,
four
times as old as me, and they
still
haven’t done anything. And then they die.’ Jane slumped into the sofa. ‘I don’t know what I’m trying to say. Everything’s peculiar. I’ve decided if I don’t want to believe things, then I won’t. So I don’t believe you and Mum didn’t sleep together and I don’t believe Lucy’s dead, OK?’