The Wine of Angels

Alison. She’s here.

Go carefully. Go slowly. You only get one chance. Be cool.

Yeah, I’m fine. I just needed to talk to you. No weeping, no pleading. Just the truth. Because I can’t believe it was some fast-flowering infatuation did this to us, nor a sudden realization that he was what you’d always wanted. I can’t believe you saw him in his tweeds and his gumboots and you thought, that’s what I need to give my life direction, a genuine old-style landowner in a damp old seven-bedroomed farmhouse with cowshit on the lino and—

‘Laurence! Are you there? Laurence!’

Close to the door, Lol sagged.

It was not Alison. No indeed. He opened up, and there she was under the big hat, elbows making batwings out of the poncho.

‘You dismal tripehound! What the fuck are you playing at?’ Striding into the living room, flinging back curtains. ‘Do you know what time it is?’

He looked at the travel alarm on the mantelpiece. It said 14.15. This had to be wrong; maybe it had stopped.

Christ, six hours?.

Lol looked sheepishly into Lucy’s hot, glaring face. ‘I ... fell asleep.’

He remembered that this was Saturday afternoon. He’d promised to mind her shop.

The Nick Drake album was still revolving on the turntable, the needle grinding it up. It would be ruined now. Like everything he touched.

‘Don’t know what happened, Luce. It was just like ... I got up this morning ... then like fell asleep in the chair. Just completely—’

‘You’re lying.’ She was advancing on him like a big policewoman. ‘Come on, hand them over.’

‘Huh?’

‘Pills.’ She held out a big, pink palm. ‘Don’t fart about with me, Laurence, I’m not in the mood. Pills. Want to see what they are.’

‘I haven’t got any pills.’ He spread his hands. ‘Honestly.’

‘People with a background like yours,’ Lucy said, ‘always have pills.’

‘Oh God.’ He was far too ashamed to explain. ‘Doesn’t everything go pear-shaped?’

‘What you mean by that?’ Her eyes nail-gunned him to the wall. ‘Two days’ milk outside? All the curtains drawn? I won’t ask you again ... How many did you take?’

‘Lucy,’ Lol said, ‘would I leave a little cat to starve?’

She loomed over him. ‘Answer my question, damn you, or I’ll box your bloody ears.’

He stood back, both hands up. ‘I didn’t take any. No pills. All right?’

‘The milk? The curtains?’

‘See, I was lying awake all night. I’m thinking, you know, you’ve got to get your shit together, you can’t be a little wimp all your life, you’ve got to talk to her. And that ... I mean, that isn’t easy. I can’t go up to her in the street, I’m not ready to do that.’

‘Why can’t you simply phone her up?’

‘Because either he answers and I hang up, or she answers and she hangs up. She doesn’t want to talk to me. But she likes to know I’m all right, that I haven’t done anything really stupid. Like, what she really wants is for me to move out, but in the meantime she rides past the house every couple of mornings, presumably hoping she’ll see a For Sale sign but, failing that, some reassurance that I haven’t set fire to the place, cut my wrists in the bath, you know?’

‘How thoughtful,’ Lucy said.

‘I find that ... comforting.’

‘That she’s worried she might have driven you to take your own life? Ah ...’ Lucy took off her hat, tossed it on the chair. ‘One begins to see. You really are a sick, twisted little person, aren’t you, Laurence?’

He said nothing.

‘A silly charade. This was a silly, stupid charade. You wanted her to think you’d done it. You drew the curtains, made it seem as if you hadn’t collected the milk for two days, put on some mournful record. And then what? She sees you’re alive and falls into your arms?’

‘We just talk,’ Lol said. ‘Finally, we talk. See, I tried calling to her. She won’t get off the horse. She just turns around, trots away. You run after her. She—’

‘Pshaw!’ Lucy said. She was the only person he’d ever encountered who actually said this. ‘If attempted suicide is a cry for help, Laurence, this is, at best, a feeble squeak.’

‘Mmm.’ He nodded miserably.

‘Laurence!’ Lucy held his eyes like a hypnotist. ‘You’re letting me bully you! You aren’t even putting up a fight against an old woman with no business interfering in your affairs. We can’t have that, can we? Can we, Laurence?’

‘No,’ he said humbly, and she threw up her arms.

‘Aaagh! You can have what the hell you like, you clown. It’s your life. My God, but those hospital shrinks have a lot to answer for. Keep ’em drugged up to the eyeballs and then send ’em out like zombies.’

‘Actually, I was a bit like that before I went in.’

Lucy shook her head. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Have a pee, splash some water on your face, and then we’ll go.’

Through the window, he saw her moped parked behind his muddied Astra in the short drive.

‘All right,’ Lol said.

She let him push the moped down Blackberry Lane, across the square and into the mews enclosing Ledwardine Lore.

Lucy insisted she needed somebody to look after the shop occasionally. When was she to do her own shopping otherwise? Used to be a girl came in two afternoons a week, but she’d had a baby and left the area.

‘Everything’s priced,’ Lucy told Lol, unlocking the door. ‘And if it’s not, you can always make one up.’

She was doing this to bring him out, bring him into the village. He hated coming into Ledwardine on his own. They still smirked at him in shops. Been smirking at him for months. He’d thought it was because he was such an obvious townie and maybe he should grow sideburns below his ears, buy a rusty pick-up truck. Not realizing they all knew what he didn’t, that the entire bloody village knew.

‘And you won’t have to face any of the locals,’ she said, identifying his fears, gathering them up. ‘Only tourists on a Saturday.’

He relaxed. Lucy’s tiny, overcrowded shop had in it the essence of what he liked about this place, what he’d miss when he sold the cottage and cleared out: the red soil and the long, wooded hills and the twisted houses with old bones of blackened oak. And the apples. Why were apples so cheerful and wholesome, while the orchard was so oppressive?

‘Bad for you,’ Lucy was saying. ‘Wrong type of woman entirely. Not that she won’t be bad for him. But that’s his lookout. And he’s stronger than you are.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I never dress things up. Woman’s a destroyer. What you need is a preserver.’

‘We had something,’ Lol said. ‘I know I’m naive, I know I don’t see things. But you don’t set up a home with someone in a new place unless you feel there’s something worth having.’

Lucy shook her head at his short-sightedness. Lol thought of the day he’d come home to find Bull-Davies’s big Land Rover outside the cottage, filled up to the canvas with Alison’s stuff. How cool she’d been, how matter-of- fact about it, sitting him down at the kitchen table and telling him simply and concisely. Apologizing, in an almost formal way. Kissing him calmly, like she was just going off to London or somewhere for the day.

‘If you’d seen her at that Twelfth Night debacle,’ Lucy said, ‘you wouldn’t be so damned charitable. Where were you on Twelfth Night, anyway?’

‘Oxford. With a bloke I’d done some lyrics for.’

‘A cruel woman. And yet curiously shallow. Horse-riding, point-to-point, driving around in muddy Land Rovers, racing up the sweeping drive, being lady of the manor ...’