‘What’s the fucking use? I don’t think I’ll bother with any supper. I’ll just go to bed.’
‘You’re not making a word of sense, do you know that? What’s brought this on? Can we talk about it?’
Jane just stamped past her, gripping the copy of Traherne.
It must be ... what? Three a.m.?
The alarm clock ticking, very loud in the big bedroom with hardly any furniture. The clock – an old-fashioned one with twin bells, none of your cell-battery bleepers in this house – set for five-thirty because there was Holy Communion at eight. Only about half a dozen people last week, mainly pensioners, including Uncle Ted out of familial loyalty.
She thought about Jane, then, and her mind flooded with anxiety. Once again, the kid had a secret she was afraid might be taken away from her. This time it would not be so innocuous.
She drifted away again, with the ticking of the alarm clock. A night breeze ruffled the trees. And the sounds overhead. Footsteps. Very soft. Bare feet, slithering.
Merrily was icily awake.
The room – one pine wardrobe, one small table, one bed – was grey-washed by the moon behind clouds like smoke. She lifted up an arm, and that also was grey, as though her skin was transparent and her body was filled with moon gases which made it very light, and so she didn’t even remember getting out of bed and moving to the door.
Outside were the doors, concealing mournful, derelict rooms that would never be filled. Rooms where even the memories were stale. She was alone on the first floor of Ledwardine Vicarage. A bathroom, a toilet and four bedrooms, only one slept in. She was alone on this level, while Jane paced overhead, angrily painting her walls by night. Was this part of her secret? Was the secret simply that she had to have secrets, a private life?
Merrily shivered; it would soon be summer and the night-house was November-cold.
The noises overhead had stopped. Well, all right, if Jane wanted to paint in the night, that was up to her. It was the weekend; she could keep her own hours in her own apartment. Merrily, on the other hand, needed her sleep if she was going to be up and bathed and breakfasted in time for Holy Communion.
She found herself standing by the stairs, a hand on the oak rail, a foot on the first step to the third storey. She looked up quickly and thought she saw a light glowing, and then she turned away, took a step back. It was Jane’s storey, Jane’s apartment, none of her business. But in the moment she turned away, she felt an aching sense of impending loss.
She would go back to bed, try for two more hours’ sleep. She turned to her door and realized she didn’t know which it was.
She trembled, hugged herself, arms bubbled with goose-bumps. Doors. Moonlight turning their brass knobs into silver balls. She lunged at the nearest, grabbed it, turned it. Stumbled in with her eyes closed, slammed the door behind her. In dreams, you could make as much noise as you liked.
Cold moonlight soaked an empty room, a room she hardly recognized, been inside it no more than a couple of times. A long, narrow room, uncarpeted, its floorboards black and bumpy and ending in a long and leaded window, unseasonally running with condensation.
A figure stood by the window, its back to her.
‘Jane? What are you doing down here?’
There was a vibration in the room, running like a mouse along the floorboard from the window to where she stood; she could feel it through the soles of her bare feet, and it ran up the backs of her legs, under her nightdress to her spine.
It wasn’t Jane.
She backed up to the door, her fingers feeling behind her for the knob and gripping it and turning it. The brass knob turned and turned again, but the door did not open.
Merrily turned it harder and faster, in a panic now. The figure at the window began to shift, and she saw the head in profile and the face was a man’s.
The knob loosened, began to spin in the lock until it just came out in her hand in the very instant that the figure turned from the window to face her, and it needed no moon, it carried its own pale light.
‘Oh, please,’ Merrily whispered. ‘Please, not here.’
Sean glided towards her. He could not speak for the blood in his mouth.
Jane didn’t make it to church after all. There was no explanation. After the morning service, two parishioners commented on there being only two hymns, and Uncle Ted had told Merrily she wasn’t looking at all well. It must have been a wearing few weeks, getting used to everything and now moving into a new house. She ought to think about having a few days away. Perhaps after her installation service, when she felt more secure, more bound to the parish.
Merrily asked, in a steady voice, if her predecessor, Alf Hayden, would be at the service. There were some things she wanted to ask him. About the vicarage.
‘Ah, yes,’ Ted said. ‘Alf.’
No, he said, Alf would not be coming, as he was rather unwilling to embarrass his successor at this difficult time.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘This is difficult,’ Ted said. ‘Alf’s received a letter signed by a number of parishioners urging him to use his influence to keep Richard Coffey’s play out of the village.’
She was dismayed. ‘Why’ve they written to
Ted cleared his throat, embarrassed. ‘Well, they, ah ... because they don’t feel they know you well enough yet to approach you on such a ... contentious issue.’
‘And because they think that as a trendy woman priest, I’m bound to support it! Is that right? Which of my parishioners are we talking about here, Ted?’
‘It’s causing considerable anxiety in certain areas,’ Ted said. ‘It’s only a few people, of course.’
‘But influential people, right? I suppose they know the bishop’s supporting Coffey?’
‘I shall attempt to acquaint the bishop with the way local opinion seems to be moving,’ Ted said, ‘during a dinner party to which I understand we are both invited.’
Merrily was beginning to be aware of the levels of local society she was unlikely to penetrate. Even if she wanted to. She found she was shaking with anger. It was marginally more acceptable than fear.
When she got home, Jane wasn’t there. This was no surprise.
She searched her conscience, as a parent. Then, as a parent, she walked up two flights to Jane’s apartment. Stood outside the doors on the third floor.
Went into Jane’s bedroom, where she found the bed neatly made and clothes neatly on hangers in the wardrobe. The copy of the collected poems of Thomas Traherne was on the floor beside the bed, opened spine-up. She turned it over. It was open to a poem entitled ‘The Vision’, which began,
She put the book down where she’d found it, went out and closed the door. The next door was to the so- called sitting-room/study, where Jane had been painting the Mondrian walls.
It was locked. She turned away, not entirely surprised, and went down the stairs to the first floor. A weak sun sent halfhearted beams through the landing window and through the oak balusters.
Merrily went into her own room to change into a skirt and jumper. The thought struck her that Jane, on the third floor, had risen above her. As if the third floor represented something Merrily couldn’t reach. She was on the halfway floor with her anxieties and trepidations, her earthly ties, her clinging past, her sick dreams of Sean.
She came out of the bedroom and, instead of going directly to the stairs, turned left, trying to remember which had been the door in her dream. The passage didn’t look the same at all. She opened a door at random, into a square, bare room with two small, irregular windows. Would they ever be familiar, these rooms? She tried another. The bathroom, of course. God, this was so stupid. You couldn’t control your dreams, but you must never give into them, let yourself be ruled by a runaway subconscious. Angrily, almost absently, she threw open another door.
