The Wine of Angels

‘Have you seen the doctor?’

‘That twerp Asprey? No, thank you. And indeed, Merrily, I’d be very grateful if you wouldn’t mention this to anybody. Tell the Cassidy woman to mind her own damn business.’

‘Is there anything I can do for you?’

‘Your daughter’s done everything. Take her home.’

Caroline Cassidy’s gossip-greedy gaze alighted on them as soon as they emerged into the mews.

‘Oh, Merrily, I’m so glad!’

Perhaps she noticed Jane’s vacant eyes, because she backed off a little, with a meaningful glance towards the door of Ledwardine Lore.

‘She, er, she was helping Miss Devenish,’ Merrily said.

‘All day?’

‘No, that was ... a mistake on my part. I got a little confused. Everything got kind of criss-crossed. I’m sorry to have caused such a fuss.’

Caroline’s tilted smile showed she believed not a word, and who could blame her.

Jane was silent. Crossing the market place. Merrily kept glancing at her, sure she was a little pale. In curious contrast, as it happened, to Miss Lucy Devenish, who’d looked as ripe and ruddy as one of the apples in her damned shop window. Blood-pressure – balls.

They crossed the square to the church and the vicarage shoulder to shoulder, but there was distance between them.

Into the silence came a long, low rumble from the church. Merrily could see through the lych-gate that the porch doors were wide open, like amplifying hands. The sound was like the rising drone of an enormous vacuum cleaner.

‘Again!’ sang a man’s voice. ‘Come on, again! Fill those lungs!’

Dermot Child, rehearsing his choral work, the male voices like mud in the bottom of a deep pond.

Aulllllllld ciderrrrrrrrr.

Jane didn’t look up, but Merrily thought she saw the kid shiver.

Lol came down from the loft. He stumbled.

‘This is a nightmare, Lucy.’

‘Perhaps.’ Lucy’s face was gaunt in the gloom. ‘If her mother doesn’t start to realize a few things soon, I’m going to have to talk to the child in greater depth.’

All the apple colours and the translucence in the wings of the fairies had dulled like a stained-glass window at night. The shop seemed heavy around Lucy. It seemed to be not so much a diversion for her as a symbol of responsibility. For the first time it occurred to him that she was probably quite an old woman.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘She was just lying there. She was all white. At first, I thought she was dead. When she moved, it ... I just wanted to run away from it. But I couldn’t. You know? I couldn’t move. What was she doing there, Lucy? Again.’

‘Laurence,’ Lucy said, ‘you’re living on your own, too near the orchard. At the wrong time. If you have a weakness, some things will play to that weakness. When you’re prepared to tell me what the weakness is, we can take it from there.’

‘I’m all weakness,’ Lol said.

‘You’re not helping yourself.’ Lucy’s face darkened. ‘I can’t help you if I don’t know the root of the problem.’

‘Can I think about this?’

‘It seems to me,’ Lucy said severely, ‘that you’ve already been thinking about it rather too long.’

18 The Little Green Orchard

IT WAS, MERRILY thought in dismay, like still living in a hotel. One without any guests or staff. A hotel in winter.

‘Sure this is the lot, Vicar?’ Gomer Parry had asked her, about three times.

‘I’m afraid it is.’

This is awful, she was still thinking, after two days of moving things around. She’d forgotten quite how much furniture she’d sold or given away over the past three years. What it meant was that they had about enough for a decent-sized flat with one living room and a couple of bedrooms.

Gomer Parry had done it in one trip. Bloody sight easier, he said, than when he and Minnie moved in from the Radnor Valley, with all Minnie’s clutter from nearly forty years of marriage to the late Frank. Gomer and his nephew, Nev, took no more than half an hour to get all the stuff in. But, until such time as the property market improved to a point where the Diocese could make a killing on Ledwardine Vicarage, Merrily was stuck with it.

Behind the door, she’d found a letter from the North Herefordshire Gay and Lesbian Collective expressing support for Richard Coffey’s ‘brave reappraisal of an historic injustice’ and urging her to ‘do the right thing’. She filed it for a future non-committal reply and returned to practical problems.

So. OK. There were two ways they could handle this situation. They could scatter the bits and pieces around, so that the whole place had the air of somewhere partly moved-into. Or they could furnish a couple of rooms reasonably well, which made it seem as though you were the live-in caretakers in some kind of hostel.

‘I’m told there’s a couple of reasonable secondhand shops in Hereford. If we spent say two hundred pounds fairly wisely, we might make a bit of a difference.’

‘Yeah,’ Jane said. ‘Whatever.’

It didn’t help that the kid was still into the idea of this third-floor flat arrangement. More into it than ever, in fact. She’d charmed Gomer and Nev into taking her bed to the top floor, into one of the smaller bedrooms, while the biggest one up there, which she insisted on keeping locked until she’d finished painting the walls, had her stereo, her albums, her books.

Merrily felt guilty as well as intimidated. Acres – literally, probably – of wasted space.

‘But, my dear, virtually all country vicarages are like this,’ Caroline Cassidy said, when she and Terrence arrived to assist. ‘That’s why so many vicars end up having enormous families. Of course, you’ll marry again one day. Oh yes, you will!’

‘Perhaps I could offer a home to some refugees,’ Merrily had said, and Caroline had looked quite appalled. Almost as appalled as she’d been when she first saw their miserable collection of worthless furniture, making Merrily scared that they were going to be regarded as a charity case and all kinds of appalling junk would get dumped on them. ‘Actually,’ she’d lied, ‘there’s quite a bit more over in Cheltenham, but we wanted to do a bit of decorating first.’ Caroline had looked sceptical.

As, in fact, she had over the issue of Jane’s disappearance, which Merrily had tried to gloss over. Fairly sure she hadn’t mentioned to Caroline that the kid had failed to catch the bus in the morning, she’d said Jane had simply missed the one home and had to get a lift from a friend’s father.

All right then, flower, what really happened?

She never seemed to get a chance to ask the question – one for a long night in front of a log fire. But it was getting too close to summer for log fires and they never seemed to get a full night in together. Now people knew where to find the vicar, the doorbell and the phone rarely stopped.

Which was good. In a way. It was good to deal with day-to-day stuff: planning weddings and christenings, agonizing over whether to buy new prayer books. And putting off decisions on more contentious issues.

On Friday night, Richard Coffey invited her to dinner at the Black Swan. He had with him a man called Martin Creighton, a theatre director, and Creighton’s earnest girlfriend Mira Wickham, a set designer.

‘I happened to run into the bishop,’ Coffey said.

‘Oh.’ Merrily fingered her napkin. ‘I wondered if you might.’

‘He’s thrilled, of course, about our idea for staging Wil in the church. He’s very keen to encourage the wider use of ecclesiastical premises. For the church to be the centre of the community again.’