‘Makes sense. She’d hardly take it to Colette’s party.’
Feeling a need to explain, she said, ‘Jane’s had this long-term plan to paint the plaster squares and rectangles between the wall-beams in different colours, so it’d be like sitting inside this huge Mondrian painting. You know Mondrian. Dutch painter? We had a couple of days in London last year and we went to this exhibition of his stuff, and when we came here she got this ambitious idea. It probably looks terrible.’
The key fitted. The sleeping bags were rolled up behind the door. Merrily could have gathered one up, brought it out with barely a glance at the Mondrian walls. Maybe she’d have done that. If they’d been Mondrian walls, nice plain squares of colour.
‘What ...?’ She froze in the doorway.
‘You OK?’
‘No.’ Merrily put on the lights.
The walls had been painted all one colour. Blue. Midnight blue, divided by the timber-framing. But the timbers were part of it. Painted branches were made to protrude from them, thicker ones closer to the floor, becoming more plentiful as they neared the ceiling where they all joined together in a mesh.
As though she’d tried to bring the timbers in the wall alive, turn them back into trees.
‘I don’t understand.’ Merrily fought to keep her voice level.
‘Must have taken her a long time,’ Lol said.
‘Must have taken her whole nights. Why? What does it mean?’
He didn’t reply. He was looking at the ceiling. Among the beams and the intertwining branches were many small orbs of yellow and white, meticulously painted. Lights in the trees.
‘Little golden lanterns,’ Lol said. ‘Hanging in the night.’
She thought he must be quoting some line of half-remembered poetry.
The police left their car on the square and walked towards the church gates. Jane followed them, about thirty yards behind.
‘Some back-up, you reckon, Kirk?’ one said.
‘In bloody Ledwardine, in the early hours? Let’s take a look around first. It turns out they’ve just gone in there for a smoke and a shag, we’re gonner look like prats.’
The first two people to come out of the orchard walked straight into the two policemen. They were Danny Gittoes and Dean Wall. They were both drunk.
‘Aw shit.’ Dean put up his hands. ‘I never done it, officer.’
‘Over by the wall, lads. Let’s have your names.’
Dean and Danny were having their pockets turned out when Jane slipped behind a row of graves and past them into the orchard. Moving not stealthily but with great care, excusing herself as she passed between the trees.
Spending hours with Lucy and Lucy’s books, there wasn’t much she didn’t know now about apples and orchards. Knowledge was the best defence, Lucy said. Knowledge or felicity. Thomas Traherne had learned felicity. Had discovered, against all the odds, the secret of happiness through oneness with nature, with the orb.
Sometimes over the past week, usually in the daytime, Jane’s worldly self had told her other self that this was all absolute, total bollocks.
But now, with the white-clothed apple trees all around her, the blossom hanging from them like robes, it was Lucy’s world that seemed like the real world.
The moon had come out, and its milky light bathed the Powell orchard, and Jane felt she was on the threshold of a great mystery.
If Dean Walls and Danny Gittoes were refusing to come quietly, Jane wasn’t aware of it. If the bassy music was still booming from Dr Samedi’s black box, she could no longer hear it. If the guests at Colette’s party were making their stoned, confused way among the tangle of trees, she couldn’t see them.
Although there
And you wanted to join them in the dance, far finer and more fluid than the grossness on the square. The further into the orchard you went, the lighter you felt. As though you too were made of petals and could be fragmented and blown away by a breeze, dissolving and separating, a snow of molecules, until you were absorbed into the moonbeams, disappearing from the mortal sight.
A bump. A bump stopped her.
A bump and a bouncing.
Jane bent down as it rolled almost to her feet. She picked it up. It was small and its skin was soft and puckered and withered like the cheeks of a very old woman.
She held it in the palm of her hand. It was no bigger than a billiard ball, though only a fraction as heavy. It must have been up on the tree all winter. Perhaps the only one. All winter through, and the birds had left it alone.
In most parts of Britain, according to Lucy’s books, a single apple that remained on a tree all winter was a harbinger of death.
(The fact that it didn’t really rhyme, Lucy said, was a sure sign of the truth in it.)
What did it mean when an overripe apple survived the winter to tumble from a tree in full blossom?
Jane thought back over everything that had happened tonight. The images stammering through her mind like a videotape in fast-reverse. The tape stopped at a moment in the church, Mum on her knees, bent over, then looking up, threads of vomit on her lips.
Looking up.
Jane’s arm jerked back in a spasm and she threw the mummified apple so far into the orchard she didn’t hear it land, and she turned and ran all the way to the vicarage.
Part Three
27
High Flier
SIX A.M AND fully light, if overcast and cool. A thin, sharp breeze blew apple blossom over the churchyard wall from which the church noticeboard projected.
On it, a printed poster for the festival opening – the old, prosaic title, Ledwardine Summer Festival having pushed out Dermot’s Old Cider suggestion precisely because most of the posters had already been printed. But over this poster another smaller one, A4 size, had been drawing-pinned, giving notice of a
