The Wine of Angels

‘It’s where they both went once. Whether she fully believes it or not she’ll think she has to try it.’

‘Right then,’ Gomer said. ‘Let’s not waste no more time.’

With a long rubber torch they’d found in the kitchen, they went the back way, over Lucy’s fence, across the old bowling green towards the orchard.

‘I don’t know what to say about this kind o’ thing,’ Gomer said. ‘When I was a boy, people laughed. When my granny was a girl, nobody laughed. What’s that? Barely a century. For hundreds of years, folk never questions there’s more in an orchard, more in a cornfield. Few decades of computers and air-conditioned tractors, even the farmers thinks it’s all balls. Sad, en’t it? Computers and air-conditioned bloody tractors.’

‘Watch yourself,’ Lol said, ‘there’s brambles all over the place.’

‘Aye.’ Gomer chuckled wryly through his ciggy. ‘Some orchard, this is. Never could figure it. They gets bugger-all off it, but they keeps it tickin’ over. Plants a couple o’ new trees every year, chops down a dead ‘un for firewood. But they won’t plough him up, start again, do it proper – superstition, I used to reckon, disguised as concern for the village heritage. But you look at Rod Powell, do he look like a superstitious man?’

‘What’s a superstitious man look like?’

‘Superstitious man looks more like you, Lol, you want the truth.’

‘Thank you, Gomer.’

‘More like you than Powell is all.’

‘Why’d he go along with the wassailing, then?’

‘No way he could refuse. Cassidy says it’s in the interests of the village, Powell’s a councillor ... Bugger me!’

Gomer stopped in the clearing where the Apple Tree Man stood. Twin pink moons in his glasses gave him a nightmare quality.

‘I’ve fuckin’ got it, boy! Why The Wine of Angels tastes like it’s been through a horse! Listen. Cassidy, he wants to revive the ole cider industry, right? Well, that’s a tall order, given all the established firms. But if they does manage to get it off the ground, the first thing happens, see, is they get the experts in, and they looks at this lot and cracks up laughin’. Grub the bloody lot up, they’d say, not cost effective. Plough up the whole flamin’ orchard, plant some nice neat rows of dwarf trees—’

‘Could you have a dwarf Pharisees Red?’

‘Pharisees Red, Red Streak, where’s the difference? Orchardin’s moved on, it en’t what it was.’

‘So why don’t the Powells want it dug—’ Lol stared down at the base of the Apple Tree Man. ‘Oh, Jesus.’

Gomer’s grin was savage. ‘You’re thinkin’ wild at last, boy.’

When Merrily came down from the altar, Caroline Cassidy was waiting for her.

‘I don’t know why I’m still here. I don’t really know why I came. Terrence refused. He said he would prefer to wait by the phone. I almost walked out when poor Stefan made that woman tell the story about the girl who was raped and then hanged herself.’

With that story, Merrily realized now, poor Stefan was making more of a point than he imagined.

‘Knowing that these things have always happened to young girls doesn’t make it any better,’ Caroline said.

‘People got away with it then,’ Merrily said. ‘Now they seldom do.’ Perhaps, she thought, we’re here to bring peace to the spirits of old victims. Perhaps that’s the secret of restoring balance to a community.

‘They’ve been stopping motorists and showing them her photograph,’ Caroline said. ‘Now they’re even talking about some sort of reconstruction, though what use that would be in a village this size, I can’t imagine.’

‘Get it on television again.’

‘What’s the use of that? Colette’s dead. No ... No ...’ Caroline warded off Merrily’s protests with an impatient wave. ‘Don’t give me the obligatory platitudes. I only wish ... I only wish she’d been going through a nicer phase when she ...I mean, some people had a chance to grow up, to change for the better. And didn’t. Won’t be many mourners for Richard Coffey, will there, horrible man? It’s poor Stefan one feels sorry for. I would hate ... I’m sorry, don’t think I know what I’m saying.’

‘Stefan could be a free man in a few years and getting more acting jobs than ever,’ Merrily said. ‘It is, actually, Coffey I feel sorry for. Caroline, look, I’m going to start something in a minute, and if the other bit disturbed you, it could be fairly painful. So, if you want to leave, this might be a good time.’

‘It won’t be,’ Caroline said absently. ‘There won’t be any more good times for us here.’

Merrily stepped up to the pulpit and, for the first time ever, took out the microphone from the shelf underneath. She pushed in the jack-plug, switched on, tapped the mike, heard a thump from both sides of the rood screen. She needed this tonight; there were a lot of people, a lot of tension and she didn’t want to have to shout, to sound like a preacher.

Right.

‘Erm ... could I ... could I have your attention?’

The sound was far louder than she’d expected. Everyone stopped speaking, even Bull-Davies turned round. Merrily moved back from the mike.

‘Perhaps, when Ken’s finished taking the names, those of you who are interested in, er, the truth about Wil Williams and, er ... and other things ... might like to return to your pews. Thank you.’

Lol held up The Wine of Angels bottle in the beam of Gomer’s long, black torch.

‘Unopened.’

The Apple Tree Man was still heavily blossomed, despite the dead branches. Lol thought of Dickens’s Miss Havisham in her wedding dress. Grotesque. Wrong.

Gomer bent down to sniff the grass. ‘The other bottle got opened, my guess, and some got spilled. But where’s he gone, that bottle?’

Was it likely she’d wandered off, drinking out of the bottle? But that wasn’t what happened last time. She’d be trying to replicate that, to summon the little golden lights. And then Colette.

‘Maybe she cleared off when she heard us coming. She wouldn’t know who it was. Jane? Jane! ’

No answer.

‘What do we do now, Gomer?’

Gomer was looking at the Apple Tree Man.

‘I was yere when ole Edgar blowed his head off. Accident? Balls if that were an accident, any more’n Lucy.’

‘What, somebody killed—’

‘No, you pillock, he killed hisself, all right. But it weren’t no accident. Bull-Davies fixed that inquest verdict, I reckon, just like the Bulls always fixed things for the Powells on account the Powells fixed other things for the Bulls.’

‘How do you know it was deliberate?’

‘Comin’ to it, en’t I? See, Edgar Powell, he was ninety year old, near enough, and quite a few bales short of a full barn by then. So Edgar’s standin’ yere with both barrels ready to go, and anybody can see the poor ole bugger can’t remember why the hell he’s come. Wassailin’? What the hell do Edgar know about wassailin’? ‘Specially not the foreign kind them Cassidys organized. All he’s pickin’ up is aggravation, Mrs Cassidy yellin’ at Lucy, Lucy yellin’ back, and it all boils up into a mush until it’s time to do the business and Rod gives the ole feller a nudge, and mabbe up until then he’s been asleep on his feet like an ole shire horse. And he comes round with a jerk ... I seen this. He’s standin’ ...’

Gomer walked about five yards back from the tree and dug a Doc Marten heel into the grass.

‘... yere. Just about. And he looks down, and I swear to God, the look come on his face, I thought the ole boy was gonner mess his britches. Not scared exactly, more ... hunted, like ... Hunted. Aye. Days later it come to me what Lucy Devenish said mabbe a split second ‘fore that. Can never remember the exact words, see, but it was about causin’ offence. To the tree and all that ... lives yere, lies yere ... Deep offence. Summat like that. And that was what put the shits up ole Edgar, I reckon. And then he done hisself.’