The Wine of Angels

my words.’

‘Yes. Thank you, Ted.’ She felt like clubbing him with the phone. ‘I need to ask you, are there any relatives in the parish?’

‘None left alive I know of. McCready’s her solicitor, he’ll deal with all that.’

‘No, I meant— Oh, forget it.’

‘I’m trying to be down to earth, Merrily. Trying to rescue a runaway situation. Somebody has to.’

‘Situation...?’

‘You should never have gone out on that platform this afternoon. Here was I, telling people you’d contracted a stomach bug, and now it starts to look like, shall we say a nervous complaint?’

‘Oh, a nervous complaint. I see.’

‘Merrily, I don’t know what your personal problems are, as you haven’t seen fit to come and talk to me about them, but I do know that people are beginning to see you as a little too ... too ...’

He broke off. The line throbbed with the unspoken: he’d seen the posters and God knew what else. And one did have to think of one’s own position in the community.

‘Lucy Devenish,’ Lol said, ‘can’t die like this.’

‘Lucy Devenish just did,’ Merrily said gently. ‘And there’s nothing you or Jane, with due regard to superstitions and omens, can do to alter that.’

He stopped pacing. From the market square came the merry wail and thump of an accordion band, for the morris dancing.

‘Not Christian, I suppose. Omens.’

Merrily shook out a cigarette. ‘You smoke, Lol? I can’t remember.’

‘Used to.’ He took one, his fingers twitching. ‘Thanks. There’ve been shocks, but this ... She could make you believe you weren’t abnormal, you know? Everything has a rational explanation, she’d say. Just that most people’s idea of what’s rational is severely limited.’

‘Especially the Church’s?’

‘Maybe. She’s dead, I’m alive. Where’s the divine logic there?’

‘I’m supposed to know that? Being a priest?’

‘I can’t see you as a priest,’ Lol said. ‘I don’t know why someone like you would want to be a priest.’

‘Lol.’ She put her lighter to his cigarette. ‘Is there something happening that it’s not been considered suitable for me to know about? Because of me being a priest?’

‘I don’t ...’He looked apprehensive. ‘Maybe.’

‘There have certainly been things I don’t understand.’ She took a lungful of smoke, breathed it out hard. ‘And that the Church doesn’t want to.’

‘Like?’

‘Like, the house haunts me. I hate it. Nothing’s been right since we moved in. I have bad dreams. The kind that make you wonder if they really are dreams. What would poor Lucy have said about that, do you think, if I hadn’t been a priest?’

He took a small, self-conscious puff on the cigarette. ‘She once said to me that I was living too near the orchard.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘Well, this was the Village in the Orchard. The orchard was its life-force. Now that’s all gone, maybe the orchard isn’t such a good place.’

‘Resentful. They grows resentful.’ Merrily put the cigarette in the ashtray, pushed it a couple of inches away. ‘I’m having too many of these.’

‘If an apple had rolled right up to my feet from a tree full of blossom,’ Lol said, ‘I’d probably feel much like Jane.’ He looked at his cigarette as though it represented some aspect of his past he didn’t really want to remember. He put it out in the ashtray. ‘Sorry. Wasteful.’

‘You always been superstitious?’

‘Or paranoid? Is that the same thing? Like I was always influenced by this guy, Nick Drake. Called the band after one of his songs.’

‘Hazey Jane.’ Merrily started to sing it, went wrong and gave up. ‘Never quite figured what that song was about, but she was obviously maladjusted. Cursing where she came from, swearing at the night. My step-brother had his albums. He was very appealing, was Nick Drake. But probably ill.’

‘Probably was,’ Lol said. ‘For a long time, I was convinced I was going to die when I was twenty-six, like him. And then I was twenty-eight and I hadn’t died, and so I felt guilty. And let down, somehow. That was when I went in for the second time.’

‘The hospital?’

‘Sounds’ – he smiled – ‘insane. But these things get inside you and they get mixed up with everything else that’s wrong, and it’s like ... Is it illness, or is there something else? Alison thought it’d be good for me, moving out here, fresh air, simple life. Only Lucy saw the problems. Everywhere has its own bag of superstition. Wherever I go, it all seems to connect. I remembered Nick’s song “Fruit Tree”, which more or less says you don’t make it till you die. Sometimes, I had the feeling that Nick and Robert Johnson and these guys were out there, among the apple trees. That make sense? Does it hell.’

‘Yes, it does. I’ll tell you what happened to make me do it, if you like. I mean join the clergy.’

She undid her dog collar, placed it on the table so that it surrounded the ashtray and the smoking cigarette.

The past unclouding. The days when it all fell into place. Sean away in London for a week of meetings, and on the second day, there was this tentative visit from his anxious clerk, with a briefcase full of grief, and it was all laid out before her, all the corrupting entrails.

The third day, trying to lose the bad smell, she took her shrieking headache on a long drive into the country in the ill-gotten Volvo. Ending up at the unknown church of some saint with an obscure Celtic name – you could see the tower from a couple of miles away, but it turned out to be a tiny little place reachable only by a track. How could you put into words what happened in that bare, little church? What happened inside you that chose to happen there.

‘See, for some time before this, I’d been helping our local vicar. Decent guy, but what a waste, this man being a vicar, collecting ten grand a year, whatever it was then – if you lived with Sean, everybody was rated according to their income: he’s a forty a year man, whatever. So ten grand a year and a regular congregation of nineteen. What a loser.’

Merrily watched the smoke rising out of the white circle.

‘It was funny – one of the things that occurred to me in that little church was ... nineteen, that’s a hell of a lot of lives. And that was when I saw the blue and the gold.’

Ah. The blue and the gold. An inner vision? Hey, watch it – warning finger raised by Dr David Campbell – you’re in danger of crossing the demarcation line.

Aw, come on, David, aren’t I allowed one mystical experience, if I don’t talk about it too much? The sense of a huge benevolence, the awesome moment of cosmic awareness, the dwindling of self in an exhilarating vastness of blue and gold?

‘Anyway, whatever it was,’ she wound up, with a half-desperate cynicism, ‘it got rid of the headache.’

‘You ever experience it again?’

’A trace. An essence. Whenever I knelt to pray, it would be there, like a backcloth. This velvet security blanket of deep blue and gold. It kept me going.’

And it isn’t there now?’

‘No,’ Merrily said. ‘It isn’t, now. I don’t quite remember when it stopped. These past couple of weeks have seemed like about ten years.’

‘You ever go back to that little church?’

‘I’d be scared to,’ she said frankly. ‘In case it was just a little, grey, empty building. Wow, you’re really getting everything here, Lol. The full crisis-of-faith bit.’

She pulled the cigarette out of the ashtray, out of the dog collar.

‘It’s ironic, because I thought, the way you do, that I was being guided here. Like you maybe? Did you feel