The Cure of Souls

the Third Millennium does witness the collapse of the Anglican Church, we’d rather go down quietly, with our passive dignity intact, leaving you out there waving your crosses at the sky and waiting for the angels.’

‘That’s not me, is it, Bernie?’ Below the dog collar, Merrily wore a dark grey cotton T-shirt and black jeans. Her hair was damp from the swift but crucial shower she’d managed to squeeze in between Alf Rokes’s funeral and the arrival of the Bishop. ‘They’re saying that? Even after Ellis?’

But, OK, she knew what he meant. Nick Ellis had been a rampant evangelical who preached in a village hall plastered with CHRIST IS THE LIGHT posters and used the Holy Spirit like an oxyacetylene torch. Merrily Watkins was the crank who prayed for the release of earthbound spirits, currently setting up the first Hereford Deliverance Website to offer basic, on line guidance to the psychically challenged. They hadn’t liked each other, she and Ellis, but to a good half of the clergy they were out there on the same ledge.

And one of them was mad, and the other was a woman.

Bernie Dunmore was quite right, of course: she’d been putting it off too long.

She saw that he was blatantly inspecting her from head to feet – which wasn’t far – as if looking for signs of depreciation.

‘So you want to build a team, then, Bishop?’

‘If Deliverance has its back to the wall, better it should be more than one back,’ Bernie said sagely.

Well, fine. Most dioceses had one now: a Deliverance cluster, a posse of sympathetic priests as back-up for the exorcist. It was about spreading the load, fielding the flack, having people there to watch your back.

‘OK, let’s do it.’ She came to sit down opposite him at the pine refectory table, where bars of yellow sunlight tiger-striped her bare arms. ‘The problem is… who do we recruit?’

Bernie sank more cider. Merrily tried to think what his appearance suggested if not Bishop. You could almost think he’d been appointed simply because he looked so much like one – unlike his predecessor, Mick Hunter, who might have been a rising presenter from Newsnight. Previously, Bernie had been suffragan Bishop of Ludlow, the number two who rarely made it to the palace. But his formal acceptance by Downing Street as Bishop of Hereford had been a relief all round: a safe option.

‘Anyone in particular you want to sound out, Merrily?’

Of course, she’d already been thinking about this a lot. But the members of the local clergy she most liked and trusted tended to be the ones who wouldn’t touch Deliverance with coal-tongs and asbestos gloves. And the ones who actively sought involvement in what they imagined to be a hand-to-hand battle with Satan… well, Nick Ellis had wanted the job for himself; that told you all you needed to know.

‘There must be any number of people out there better equipped spiritually than me.’ Fighting off the urge to dig for a cigarette, she poured herself some spring water. ‘I mean, so many people who seem to be living in what, seen from my miserable level, looks awfully like a state of grace.’

She glanced at him, worried he might think she was fishing for praise and reassurance. But there truly wasn’t a day that went by without her feeling she wasn’t up to this job, wondering if she wasn’t any better than the mystical dabblers she was obliged to keep warning off.

‘Then make me a list of these saintly buggers.’ Bernie Dunmore would never have considered himself one of them either, but then saintliness had never been a prerequisite for bishops. ‘Fax it across to the Palace or give it to Sophie. I’ll make the approaches, if you like. Suppose we start with… what would you suggest… two?’

‘Two clerics?’

‘That’s enough to begin with. Don’t want Deliverance looking like a faction. And, ah, would they… pardon my ignorance, but would these two need to be, ah…?’

‘What?’ Merrily blinked.

‘You know.’

‘You mean psychic?’

He looked pained. ‘What’s that other word?’

‘Sensitive?’

‘Yes. Well… would they?’

‘That’s a good question.’ She sipped some water.

‘I mean, I never liked to ask, Merrily, but would you say that you yourself…?’

‘Well, er…’

‘This is not a witch-hunt, Merrily.’

‘I don’t honestly know,’ she said. ‘Maybe we all are, to a varying degree. And maybe just doing this job gives you… insights. That is, God—’

‘All right,’ Bernie said. ‘Forget it. What else do we need?’

‘A tame shrink. Sure, we can make a good guess at who’s in genuine psychic torment and who’s clinically paranoid, but a guess isn’t good enough.’

‘And how on earth do we go about finding one of them?’ The Bishop shook his cider can, but found it empty. Merrily rose to fetch him another from the fridge, but Bernie shook his head and put a hand over his glass. ‘I mean, should we make a direct approach to the Health Authority, asking for nominations? And wouldn’t a proper psychiatrist require some kind of retainer? Doctors don’t like to do anything for nothing, in my experience, and the Archdeacon would be the first to query any kind of—’

‘I don’t know.’ Merrily sat down again. ‘There’s a whole lot I don’t know.’

‘We’re all feeling our way here,’ said Bernie, whose official elevation had been confirmed only at the end of May. ‘I mean, it’s all hit-and-miss, isn’t it? You get the wrong shrink, point him at some little old lady spouting the Lord’s Prayer backwards in a rich baritone, and he’ll still swear she’s a paranoid schizophrenic.’

‘Be hard to find one who won’t always say that. And he – or she – also needs to be a Christian because, if we ever get someone with a malignant squatter inside them, the psychiatrist is going to have to be there for the showdown.’

Bernie winced at the terminology. ‘I really can’t help you much there, I’m afraid. I don’t think I actually know any psychiatrists of any religious persuasion.’

‘Me neither,’ Merrily said. ‘But I know a man who does.’

He looked at her with the interest he usually displayed when she mentioned she knew a man. She didn’t elaborate. She was aching for a cigarette. Ethel, the black cat the vicarage had acquired from Lol Robinson, jumped onto her knee as if to prompt her, but Merrily kept quiet.

The Bishop got up and moved to the window. He was wearing his golfing clothes: pale green polo shirt over cream slacks and over what you didn’t like to call a beer gut. If this had been Mick Hunter, the ensemble would have been mauve and purple-black: episcopal chic. But Mick Hunter wouldn’t have played golf.

‘What you said a few moments ago’ – Bernie was looking out over the vicarage lawn, which Gomer Parry insisted on mowing twice a week – ‘about people living in a state of grace.’

The lawn ended at the old Powell orchard, which belonged now to the church. There were already tiny green apples on the trees, like individual grapes. Where was the year going to?

Merrily glanced at the clock. She was going to have to leave soon to pick up the kid after her English exam. No anxiety on that one, at least; English came naturally to Jane and it was the one GCSE that required no revision.

The Bishop coughed. ‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to say to you for a while.’

‘Mmm?’

‘You’re still young.’

‘Ish.’

‘Young,’ he said firmly. He had grandchildren Jane’s age. He turned back into the room. ‘And a very young widow.’

Merrily was about to remind him that if it hadn’t been for a particular fatal car-crash on the M5 she might have been a notso-young divorcee and therefore would never have made it into the priesthood. But she guessed they’d been into all that before.

Bernie said, ‘We all know that when Tommy Dobbs was exorcist here he felt it incumbent upon him to