The Wine of Angels

Miss Devenish threw her a glance.

‘Sorry.’

‘What you have to watch out for, Merrily, is uncharacteristic behaviour. Unseasonal phenomena.’

Several apple trees were overhanging the path, although not in a graceful way, Merrily thought. The apple was an ungainly little tree, spiky and irregular.

‘They’re going to be laden with blossom this year,’ Lucy observed.

‘That a good sign?’

Lucy sniffed. ‘Implies a big crop, but nothing’s certain about the apple. Especially this particular species, the Pharisees Red.’

‘Why do they call it that?’

Lucy smiled. ‘You asked me how I knew there was death in the wind. It’s because last autumn there was blossom. Out of season.’

‘Ah,’ Merrily said. ‘An old country omen.’

‘A bloom on the tree when the apples are ripe I is a sure termination of somebody’s life! pronounced Miss Lucy Devenish.

‘Classy piece of rhyming,’ Merrily said. ‘So there was blossom in the orchard last autumn.’

‘As late as November,’ Lucy said. ‘But only on one tree.’

Merrily turned away from the orchard, annoyed with herself, as a minister of God, for shuddering.

‘Before we part, my dear ...’

‘Yes?’

‘I want you to know, whatever you may have heard about me, that I have your best interests close to my heart. And if anything disturbs you ... anything frightens you ...’

‘Like what?’ Merrily saw that the old girl was no longer smiling.

‘Oh, I think I’ll wait for your specific questions. I don’t want to ...’

‘Quarrel, huh?’ Merrily said.

‘And don’t dismiss the orchard. It still surrounds the village.’

Part Two

As in the house I sate

Alone and desolate

... I lift mine eye

Up to the wall

And in the silent hall

Saw nothing mine.

Thomas Traherne, Poems of Felicity

13 The Feudalist

EARLY MONDAY EVENING, Uncle Ted took them back to the vicarage. Apart from the new sink and cupboards in the kitchen, square-pin sockets everywhere and a black hole where the monster electric fire had been stuffed into the inglenook, it wasn’t a lot different.

‘It’s still huge,’ Merrily said hopelessly.

‘Don’t worry, girl!’ Ted squeezed her arm. ‘You’ll grow into it in no time. You and Jane’ll fill this place in no time. In fact’ – he beamed – ‘the way you’ve held things together, you’ve already grown a hell of a lot over the past few weeks. In everyone’s estimation.’

‘That’s very nice of you, but it was just the honeymoon period.’

‘Nonsense.’ Ted chuckled. ‘Dermot dropped in last night to deplete my Scotch. He says you’re holding your own better than he’d imagined. Your Own Woman, he says. That’s good.’

Bloody Dermot. Bloody Ted. She wondered what else they’d discussed. Her delinquent daughter, product of a disastrous marriage to a crook?

She felt the vicarage looming behind her, huge and ancient and forbidding like someone else’s family seat.

‘Merrily,’ Ted said, ‘you’ll come to love it. I’ve been in some really awful, draughty old mausoleums, but this place has such a lovely, warm, enclosing sort of atmosphere that you’ll simply forget how big it is after a while. Especially when Jane has her Own Apartment. Eh?’

Jane grinned. Merrily said, ‘We’ll see.’

Ted vanished into Church Street, Merrily wondering when she would get to meet his widow. Jane disappeared eagerly into the vicarage. Merrily was about to follow her, somewhat less eagerly, when Gomer Parry appeared in the drive, blinking through his glasses, unlit cigarette wagging in his teeth. For a pensioner, Gomer had a surprising amount of half-suppressed energy.

‘Removals, Vicar. What you got planned?’

‘Erm ...’ She’d given more thought to how they were going to spread the stuff around to make the vicarage look less like a derelict sixteenth-century warehouse than the method of actually getting it here.

‘Only, if you en’t made arrangements, see, you don’t wanner go botherin’ with no expensive removals firm when I got a very clean truck entirely at your disposal.’

When you thought about it, it was going to be a bit complicated. ‘It’s all around Cheltenham, you see. All over the place. Some bits in store, some at my mother’s house, some at—’

‘No problem, Vicar. Couple hours’ round trip. Piece o’ piss-cake. ‘Sides which’ – Gomer leaned closer, taking out his cigarette, confidential – ‘keeps the ole truck in business, know what I mean? Minnie, her says the place looks like a bloody scrapyard, I says you never know what you’re gonner need in life.’

‘How many vehicles have you got there, Gomer?’

‘Oh, no more’n four now. And Gwynneth, the digger.’

The mind boggled; it was only a bungalow with a garden.

‘Her’s given me three months to get ’em out, see. But Minnie’s a bit more, like, you know, religious than what I am. So I tells her, if this yere plant-hire equipment is in the service of the Lord ... Get my point?’

‘Understood. Bless, you, Gomer. Look, I’ll pay you in advance—’

Gomer backed off, outraged.

‘All right, the petrol, at least the petrol. Diesel. Whatever. How many gallons – ten, twelve?’

‘Full tank in there already, Vicar.’ He looked up at the house. ‘Three floors, eh? Gonner take a bit o’ manoeuvring about. What I’ll do, I’ll get my nephew, Nev. Big lad. What day you want us? Any day but Thursday, which is Nev’s day for the cesspits. Oh, and tomorrow. Inquest tomorrow, see.’

‘Inquest?’

‘Edgar Powell. Opened back in January then adjourned. Took ’em long enough to get it sorted. Ole Edgar’ll be compost by now.’

‘You’re a witness, Gomer?’

‘Oh hell, aye. Me and about half a dozen others. Prob’ly drag on till flamin’ teatime. ‘Specially if it’s true Rod’s gonner get Doc Asprey to stand in the box and tell ’em his dad was halfway round the twist.’

‘Why would Rod want him to do that?’

‘Stigma, Vicar. No way do he want his ole man put down as a suicide. So if they got evidence of Edgar bein’ three bales short of a full stack, it’s more likely he done it by accident, see?’

‘Right.’ She did, come to think of it, remember Alf saying Garrod Powell was insisting his father hadn’t taken