To Dream of the Dead (7 page)

Lol had been the cameo act, of course, the one-song guy – the big stars did three numbers – but it had been preceded, unexpectedly, by an interview with Jools. The great man decently glossing over Lol’s weird years, before screening a 30-second clip from the award-winning independent film about the death of village life, for which Lol’s music was the soundtrack. The micro-budget movie that was turning ‘The Baker’s Lament’ into a fluke Christmas minor hit, turning Lol’s long-dormant career around.

What he remembered most about the actual recording was not the cameras, or the one chord-change his fingers fluffed, but a bunch of people in the studio audience, swaying and mouthing the words of the chorus:

. . .
we paid for all that we used
Now the money’s all spent
That’s the Baker’s Lament

One of the mouthers, unless he’d imagined all this, had been Michael Stipe of REM, benignly smiling and inclining his long bony head. Jane had been wildly impressed. Lol, too, at the time, obviously. Before it was all put into a hard perspective by his next clear memory, of a guy approaching him afterwards, explaining that he was putting together an American tour for Original Sin and how would Lol feel about being considered for the support?

Five weeks, in the spring, the guy said. Someone else, who he’d declined to name, had pulled out, so they’d need to know fairly soon if Lol was up for it.

Five weeks.

All Lol remembered about his own response was,

‘
I’m thirty-nine
.’

The guy laughing and slapping him on the shoulder, telling him that America didn’t have an ageism problem on anywhere near the scale of Britain’s and, anyway, Lol looked younger, and the Sin guys
loved his music. Adding, with unmoving eyes, ‘
You may never get a time like this again. You know what I mean by a time? When the right people know your songs?

Lol hadn’t told Merrily. Whatever she really felt, she’d be twisting his arm to go for it. Fifteen years ago, if he hadn’t, at the time, been a guest of the psychiatric health system, he’d have signed the contract before he left the capital.

Now he thought only about the wearying cycle of soundchecks and encores curtailed because the audience had paid to see the act that came next. Bars and towns, towns and bars that all looked the same, clapboard motels with sunken beds and rusty showers.

Plus, there was a message on his answering machine from Barry at the Black Swan.
Need an answer today, Lol. Before lunchtime, preferably. I can get posters done in a couple of hours, but I need to know
.

Unnerved, Lol rolled out of bed, went to the window.

He was panting.

He looked across the narrowing street to the matching black and white timber-framed 17th-century terrace with its winter-empty window boxes and the holly wreaths on its front doors and a few lights still on, more than usual because half of the houses were holiday homes now, coming alive for Christmas.

Lol turned, his face against the wet glass, to see the front garden of the vicarage and . . .

. . . Merrily, in jeans and a big sweater, looking up and down the dripping street in the half-light, as if she’d lost something. Her face soft and pale, hair over her eyes.

Lol just wanted to run down and hold her.

The condensation was cold on his cheek.

Merrily. Merrily and the songs. Nothing else. OK, maybe occasional gigs to keep your hand in and your mortgage payments met, your professional confidence afloat.

You only had one life and his was half gone and if he couldn’t spend all of the rest of it with the woman who’d
really
turned him around, what was the point?

You know what I mean by a time? When the right people know your songs?

Lol looked up at the oak beam. How old? Four hundred years?
Longer, maybe twice as long, because it had been a tree, born into red Welsh Border soil.

The guy had been wrong.

The right people
didn’t
know his songs.

He’d toured a wide area of western Britain, but not within ten miles of this village. All the times Barry at the Black Swan had invited him to do a gig, and Lol had backed off.

Because, apart from Barry, nobody who lived here had ever acknowledged what he did. None of the locals, none of the incomers. He doubted anyone in Ledwardine had ever bought his solo album and certainly not anything he’d done years ago with Hazey Jane.

A cold audience. He’d played twice, in the past year, to cold audiences. He’d played in bars where they carried on drinking and chatting amongst themselves. He’d played one pub where a dozen people had carried their drinks outside because they couldn’t hear themselves laugh. It hadn’t mattered that much; he just wouldn’t go back there again.

But this . . . was where he lived. In Lucy’s old house – there should be a blue plaque outside. This was where he wrote the songs that were so much a part of who he was. That, in some ways, were
all
that he was. If he said no to Barry, it was cowardice. Ledwardine would have good reason to despise him.

But if he said
yes
, and Ledwardine despised him . . .

Lol saw Merrily looking down the street directly towards this window, and pulled his face away, stood clutching the wooden sill with both hands while the west wind rattled the panes as if it was trying to shake some sense into him.

The whining of the wind seeming to echo Councillor Pierce.

Grow or die
.

T
WO WOMEN IN
a graveyard before dawn . . . this was not the kind of encounter you could easily walk away from. A sense of déjà vu had thrown Jane off balance, but she kept on walking along the side of the church, the woman and the wind keeping pace with her.

‘Been out every morning for about a
week
or something,’ the woman said, ‘and there hasn’t been anything much in the way of decent light
at all
. Rather hoping today was going to be the breakthrough.
No
chance.’

Jane’s lamplight had found the costly lustre of a big camera with a fat lens, the kind of kit that made Eirion’s prized SLR look like a budget disposable from Tesco.

‘Yeah.’ She looked up; the sky was paler, but there were none of the pastel streaks that preceded an actual sunrise. ‘We get a clear night, and then it all closes in again.’

‘What are you, a poacher?’

‘Do I look like a poacher?’

‘Dunno. Too dark to see. I was thinking, the lamp? Don’t poachers lamp things?’

‘So I believe,’ Jane said. ‘But, like, not often at a quarter to seven in the morning.’

Incomers: what could you say?

Be a bit rude to lamp her directly, but the haze on the edge of the beam had revealed bushy red-gold hair, and the posh, musky voice suggested fairly young – probably a bit younger than Mum, maybe early thirties? Still sexy, anyway, and aware of it.

The déjà vu had explained itself – Jane recalling meeting another photographer, from the
Guardian
, one afternoon last summer when they’d been trying to get publicity for the campaign. This had also
followed a visit to Lucy’s grave. It was like Lucy was the catalyst, her grave a
live
place. The idea made Jane feel happier. She asked the woman where she was from and got a vague arm-wave towards the orchard.

‘Oh . . . down there.’

‘No, I mean who are you with? Which paper?’

‘Oh, I see. Freelance.
Observer
,
Independent on Sunday
. . . magazines. I write the words, too, sometimes.’

Jane nodded. Wasn’t as if hacks and snappers were scarce in Ledwardine, not since the village had been identified as the principal centre of the –
retch
– New Cotswolds.

‘Lensi.’

‘Sorry?’

‘People call me Lensi. Used to be Lenni, but now it’s Lensi – L-EN-S-I. For obvious reasons.’

She had what Jane was starting to think of as a New Cotswold accent. Posh, but a trace of London. And . . . jolly. The only word for it. Super-confident, no sense of intruding.

‘Right,’ Jane said. ‘Cool.’

‘And you are?’

‘Jane.’

They’d come through the small gate at the top of the churchyard and out onto the still-deserted square, where the fake gaslamps exposed a biggish woman in light-blue Gore-Tex, gleamingly new. Wide face, wide mouth, lovely even, white teeth. Also sapphire earrings and Ugg boots – Chelsea wellies.

‘Well,’ Jane said. ‘I’d better be—’

‘So who
is
Lucy? I mean, you haven’t got a dog or anything with you?’

God
.

‘She was a friend.’

‘Was?’

‘The graveyard? Flat stones with, like, names carved into them?’

Jane stopped by the unlit Christmas tree, over twice her height and swaying in the wind. She could see lights in the vicarage. Should be getting back. Mum had a funeral; she wouldn’t be in the best of moods by now.

‘Her name was Lucy Devenish. Used to have a shop just over
there, called Ledwardine Lore. Got knocked off her moped. Killed. On the bypass.’

‘And you . . . still like to chat with her, do you?’

‘Look,’ Jane said, ‘if you want to catch the best of the early light, you could go down that alley, and you’ll come to a stile which takes you into the remains of an old orchard, with a gateway into—’

‘Coleman’s Meadow. I know. It’s the way I came.’

Jane stared at her, silent.

‘I live near there,’ Lensi said. ‘For nearly seven weeks now, on and off. We’re in a barn conversion.’

‘Cole Barn?’ Jane backed up into one of the oak pillars of the market hall. ‘You’ve bought Cole Barn? But it’s—’

Blighted
was Gomer’s word. Been on the market for a while, very desirable property and everything, but who wanted to lay down big money and maybe wind up living next to an estate of luxury executive homes?

‘Just renting it, actually,’ the woman said. ‘We’re checking out the area generally, to see if we like it, before deciding whether we should buy ourselves in.’

Buy ourselves in?

‘And I was reading about all this kerfuffle over prehistoric remains, so now I’m sort of keeping an eye on it for the
Indy
, in case it blows up into something . . .’ Lensi stood back and stared openly at Jane. ‘You’re not Jane Watkins, by any chance?’

Damn
.

‘They sent me some cuttings, including a picture of the girl who started all the fuss. Objecting to the housing, if I’ve got this right, because it was on a ley line or something? That was before they found the stones.’

Jane said nothing. Lensi peered at her, the camera swinging free, dense coppery hair falling over one eye.

‘You
are
!’ She began flapping her jacket. ‘Jane, what fun!’

‘
Fun?
’

‘Sorry!’ Lensi backing off, palms raised. ‘I know – serious matter. I realise that. Is it true you didn’t know
anything
about the buried stones when you started your campaign?’

‘Nobody did. And if you were at the meeting last night then you already know all this.’

‘Oh . . . none of
that
came out. It was quite disappointing. Jane, look, I’m sorry if I offended you. I just want to get this right. How you found out about the stones – just for information, I’m not writing it down or anything.’

Jane sighed. Eirion, who was planning a career in journalism, was always saying that pissing off the media was counter-productive. How could you expect them to publish the truth if you didn’t tell them the truth?

‘Please?’

‘OK . . . I’m like standing on Cole Hill.’

‘That’s the—’

‘It’s the only hill around here worth calling a hill. It was one evening last summer, and I had this . . . I’m not calling it a vision or anything, it was just some things coming together.’

How could you explain it to a stranger? How could you convey the sudden awareness, at sunset, of this dead straight ancient track, passing like quicksilver through the field gates at either end of the meadow in direct alignment with the church steeple?

Perfect example of a
ley
, as first discovered by Alfred Watkins, of Hereford, nearly a century ago, in this same countryside. Alfred Watkins wasn’t
known
to be an actual ancestor of Merrily and Jane Watkins, but who could say? She’d certainly felt he was there with her, like Lucy. Well, maybe not
quite
like Lucy.

‘Leys are . . . nobody knows for certain what they are. Just straight tracks from one ancient site to another, or maybe lines following arteries of earth energy. Or spirit paths. Where the dead walk?’

Lensi said nothing. The sky was shining dully, like a well-beaten drumskin.

‘The dead are very important,’ Jane said. ‘To a community. You need continuity.’

‘Really.’

‘Ancient people knew that, in a way we don’t today. It’s important, for stability, for the spirit of the place, to have the ancestors around, keep them on your side. Which is why we need to keep this ancient path open . . . passing through the church, through the graveyard and the medieval orchard . . . then through the standing stones, to the top of Cole Hill, the holy hill.’

‘Why is it holy?’

‘It’s like the guardian hill for the village.
Cole
is actually an old word for juggler or wizard. And Coleman’s Meadow, at its foot . . . The Coleman . . . the shaman? So, like, if you uncover the old stones after centuries and then take them away and build an estate of crappy executive homes for wealthy—’

The sapphire earrings twinkled.

‘If you build houses we don’t even need,’ Jane said, ‘then you’re breaking the only link we have with the earliest origins of the village for purely commercial reasons. So we set up the Coleman’s Meadow Preservation Society—’

‘
We?
’

‘Me and my . . . ex-boyfriend.’

‘This was a pagan sort of thing, was it?’

‘Kind of.’

‘As in worshipping old gods?’

‘The sun. The moon. Yeah, I suppose old gods. But obviously it’s not
only
pagans, it’s everybody who’s concerned about preserving what’s important. We’ve had a lot of support from all kinds of people, all over the country . . . abroad, even.’