The Fabric of Sin

‘No, the Bishop. Must’ve rung several times already. I don’t think I’ve ever known him this jumpy. I just … I don’t get it.’

She took a drink. Serious decadence: a house-white spritzer in the Black Swan — oak beams, low lights — with one’s paramour. How long had it been before she’d felt able to do this comfortably? Six months? A year?

Seemed stupid now; nobody glanced at them twice — although this was probably because almost nobody knew them. Thursday night, and most of the drinkers in the lounge bar were from outside the village, having drifted in for dinner. Some probably responding to the dispiriting Daily Telegraph travel feature identifying Ledwardine as the black-and-white, timber-ribbed heart of the New Cotswolds.

Like, when did that happen? Couple of years ago, the village was still on the rim of the wilderness. Now there was talk of the Black Swan chasing a Michelin star.

‘The Cotswolds are coming.’ Merrily listened to the brittle laughter at the bar. ‘Ominous. Like a melting ice cap. Rural warming. Feels suddenly claustrophobic, or is that just me?’

Final confirmation of the county’s new economic status: the major investment in Herefordshire by the old Cotswolds’ most distinguished resident.

Charles Windsor, Highgrove.

‘Does he know about this?’ Lol said.

‘Well, that’s what I asked. Didn’t get an answer.’

‘He’d probably be fascinated. Has his other-worldly side.’

‘Only, he keeps quieter about it these days.’ Merrily looked around, making sure nobody could overhear them in their corner, well back from the bar. ‘Since the tabloids labelled him as a loony who talks to plants. Maybe they’ve been advised not to tell him, just get it quietly disposed of. As for the Bishop …’

‘You can see his problem. This is the guy next in line for head of the Church of England.’

‘That didn’t escape me. I suppose it’s as good a reason as any to play it by the book.’

No reason, however, for the Bishop to go adding extra, entirely gratuitous chapters. Full attention, I think, Merrily. We’ll need to get you a locum for at least a week. Move you over there.

And she’d gone, ‘What?’

Like … what? Sounding like Jane, probably.

‘Lol, I don’t want to go and stay in Garway for a week. I just … I don’t see the point.’

‘In which case …’ Orange sparks from the electric candles on the walls were agitating in Lol’s glasses ‘… why not just tell the Bishop to, you know, piss off?’

‘Because he’s a friend. Because I owe him. Because …’

Merrily shook her head, helpless. Lol leaned back. He was looking good, actually. Old denim jacket over a Baker’s Lament T-shirt, which he wore like a medal but always keeping the motif at least partly covered up, as if he could still only half-believe what was finally happening to him. He put down his lager, thoughtful.

‘Suppose I come with you.’

‘You’re touring.’

‘It’s only three gigs next week, just the one night away. I could reschedule … or cancel.’

‘That is not a word we use, Lol. You give anybody the slightest reason to think you’re slipping back …’

A year ago, the thought of three gigs — three solo gigs — would have given him palpitations, night sweats.

Lol looked into his glass, obviously knowing she was right, and Merrily watched him across the oak table, through this haze of love and pride blurred by fatigue. Very happy for him, if concerned that he might just be feeling he didn’t deserve it. Ominously, when she’d gone over to the cottage to drag him out to the pub, she’d heard the voice of his long-dead muse, Nick Drake, from the stereo. Worst of all, it was ‘Black-Eyed Dog’, Nick’s voice pitched high in bleak and terminal despair. Lol had turned it off before he opened the door, Merrily staring at him in alarm but finding no despair in his eyes, just this sense of puzzlement.

‘Besides,’ she said, ‘I’m supposed to be staying with the local priest. They haven’t got a vicar in the Garway cluster at present, so a retired guy’s taking services meanwhile. He and his wife do B. & B. I turn up there with a boyfriend, how’s that going to look?’

‘What about Jane?’

‘Jane stays here. Can’t miss any school at this stage. Woman curate called Ruth Wisdom’s lined up to mind the parish. Work experience. She’s OK. And Jane’s less likely to drive her to self-mutilation than at one time, and she—’

Merrily looked up. A woman was standing behind Lol’s chair.

‘Excuse me. You just have to be Lol Robinson?’

She was tall and very slender. She’d been with a group of women in their twenties, with fancy cocktails, their backs to the bar. All of them now looking at Lol, hands over smiles.

‘Nobody has to be anybody,’ Lol said.

Mr Enigmatic. The woman was leaning over him now, her glossy black dress like oil on a dipstick, one small breast almost touching his cheek.

‘Lol, I just wanted to say, we all went to see The Baker’s Lament at the Flicks in the Sticks special preview, and it was … absolutely enchanting. Especially the music, obviously. But, listen, when I went to buy the CD in Hereford they hadn’t even got it? Nobody had?’

‘Well, it … it all takes time,’ Lol said.

‘And I’m like, for Christ’s sake, this guy’s local? And the manager guy, he eventually admitted they’d had about fifteen orders just that day? Fifteen orders in one morning? This tells me you need to get a better recording company, Mr Robinson. I couldn’t even find a download?’

‘Well, it’s kind of caught them on the hop,’ Lol said. ‘All of us, really. We didn’t actually—’

‘Well, I have to say I just totally love it. Hope you don’t mind me coming over?’

‘Er, no,’ Lol said. ‘No, not at all. Thank you.’

The young woman straightened up. As did her conspicuous nipples. She looked across at Merrily and smiled at her.

Merrily felt small and dowdy and old.

‘He’s lovely, isn’t he?’ the woman said.

Walking back across the village square, Lol avoided the creamy light of the fake gaslamps; Merrily was a pace behind him.

‘Fifteen orders? In one morning?’

‘She was probably exaggerating.’

‘Why would she?’ Merrily pulled on her woollen beret, zipped up her fraying fleece. ‘She doesn’t know you. Although she’ll probably be telling people she does, now.’

‘One small song in one small film?’

‘Not so small now. And you know what? People will remember the song when they’ve half-forgotten the film. Because it’s somehow caught the mood. The zeitgeist … whatever. You have become a cool person, Laurence.’

‘It’s not real.’ Lol was shaking his head, as if to clear it after his two halves of lager. ‘It’s a freak accident.’

Sometimes you wanted to encircle his neck with your hands and …

Over a year now since this young guy, Liam Brown, not long out of film school, had written to Lol, telling him about his self-financed rural love story. How badly, after hearing it on Lol’s album, Alien, he wanted ‘The Baker’s Lament’ on the soundtrack, only wasn’t sure he could afford it. Just take it, Lol had told him, the way Lol would, sending him three versions of the song, including an unreleased instrumental track, and forgetting all about it. Not even mentioning it to Merrily until the middle of July, when the first DVD arrived.

The Baker’s Lament. There on the label, with a bread knife stuck into a country cob. The guy had named the movie after the song.

Shooting the picture with unknown actors who’d formed some kind of workers’ cooperative. Lol and Merrily