The Wine of Angels

the orchard took her. That Jane has – or thinks she has – in some way been possessed by the orchard, which is itself an entity, a sentient thing. And that it’s now taken Colette, maybe?’

Lol shook his head in defeat.

‘Which,’ Merrily said, ‘I suppose could hardly be dismissed as entirely incredible by someone whose profession implies she believes a dead man appeared to his mates, displaying his crucifixion scars. Right?’

Lol shrugged.

‘Except’ – Merrily located her lighter in a cuff of her sweater – ‘that this is paganism.’

‘I suppose it must be.’

‘It really is, Lol. It makes me want to reach for my big cross.’

‘Mum,’ Jane said from the doorway, ‘it’s some solicitor in Hereford called McGreedy.’

‘So you told her. You told her her daughter had been spirited away.’

‘Something like that.’

‘She scoff?’

‘No. But that doesn’t mean she believed it, though. You’re going to have to be patient with her. Supportive, as they say.’

‘That’s what Lucy said.’ Jane pulled the teddy bear on to her knees. ‘She said Mum was the catalyst. I’m not sure what that means.’

‘Means she’s the one who’s going to make things happen.’

‘She’s the one? We could wait for ever.’

‘What for? What do you expect to happen? What happened to you? Where did you go? Did you just fall asleep or what?’

‘It’s a blank. I mean, maybe there’s some part of my subconscious that remembers being prodded about by little green men or whatever, but it must be well buried. Suppose that’s what happened to Colette. What can we do about that? Suppose, because she wasn’t respectful, she’s been received ... less kindly.’

Lol was allowing himself to wonder whether they were really having this conversation or whether he himself had been abducted, slipped back into the hospital, back on to the medication, when Merrily returned, a little out of breath from all the stairs, her forehead furrowed.

‘This your doing, flower?’

Lol, relaxed for the first time in nearly two decades in the company of a teenage girl, let himself think how very pretty her mother was.

‘That was a lawyer called Harold McCready. He is Lucy Devenish’s lawyer. He says she went to his office a couple of days ago to add a codicil to her will, appointing an extra executor. As though she knew she hadn’t long to live, McCready said. A folksy, country lawyer. Seen it before, he said. People often know, even when they’re not ill.’

Jane sat up. ‘What’s an executor?’

‘Someone responsible for seeing that the wishes of the deceased are carried out to the letter. Normally, just a formality. Somehow, I suspect this is going to be more complicated.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s me, flower. Things get stranger. Why would she do that? Someone who’s had so little to do with her. It’s weird. I’m supposed to look over her possessions for any indications of her last wishes ... As vague as that. There’s a clerk from McCready’s office driving over with a key to her house. Have either of you ever been in there?’

‘Just the shop,’ Jane said. ‘Mum, you have to take this very, very seriously. She said you might get cold feet and want to leave. Because of what happened in the church and stuff. She said you mustn’t. She also said you should change your mind about not letting that play go on in the church. She said—’

‘Flower—’

‘I’m just a kid,’ Jane said. ‘Does executor mean the same as catalyst?’

36 Dancing Gates

‘DISASTROUS,’ DERMOT CHILD said into the early evening stillness. ‘Totally disastrous. By the end of the afternoon it was fairly conclusive. About three dozen genuine ones, the rest were rubberneckers hoping for a body bag. When the police cars dwindled to one, they took themselves off home.’

He stood on the corner of Church Street looking out to the square, where the last stallholder was packing up, spreading stains of armpit sweat on his polo shirt uncomfortably reminiscent, for Merrily, of the menacing dream- Dermot.

‘The bloody Press, too. Not an arts journalist among them. Ten people went into the exhibition, none of them bought a thing. Thirty tickets sold for the string quartet. Is it even worth it? Come and have a drink, Merrily. Do your understanding-vicar bit. Tell me you’ll offer a prayer for the festival.’

‘Priest-in-charge,’ Merrily said dully. Lack of sleep was already corroding her resolve. The last thing she needed was a cosy drink with Dermot Child. ‘Understanding-priest-in-charge. I’m sorry, I can’t, Dermot. I have an appointment. I’ll try and make it to the concert.’

‘Perhaps it’s telling us something. Controversy certainly attracts attention, but this was the wrong kind of controversy. Pulls in the wrong element.’

‘The gossiping classes, as distinct from the chattering classes.’

He smiled. ‘Clearly, the morris dancers were a mistake. Terrence’s idea. Falls between two stools. The cultured consider it quaint but a little simplistic, the working class find it more than a bit of a yawn. Terrence is all for harmless tradition. I think we need to be a touch more avant-garde.’

‘Like your Old Cider thing?’

‘Ah.’ His eyes went to sly slits and he tapped his nose. ‘You haven’t seen that yet, Merrily. And neither has Terrence, thank God. It might seem tame, but what you have is this very male celebration of fecundity.’

‘Fascinating,’ Merrily said. ‘I’m sorry, I do have to go.’

‘Approached it the wrong way at first, you see. I was looking for singers when I should’ve been seeking out untamed virility. Chaps who, with a little training, can learn to sing not from the throat, not from the stomach but from the, ah, loins.’

‘Yes,’ Merrily said. Dermot talking dirty only made her feel more exhausted. ‘Well, good luck with tonight – I’m sure you’ll get lots of people turning up on spec’

She walked across the street, but carried on down past Miss Devenish’s house, not wanting him to know where she was going. At the junction with Old Barn Lane, she turned, and he was gone. She walked back to Lucy’s terraced black and white, taking out the key. As she pushed it into the lock beside the goblin knocker, a gruff and loaded male chorus sang in her head. Auld ciderrrrrrrrrr.

Dermot’s choral work was going to be a kind of aural hard-on.

She shuddered.

She was several feet into Lucy’s living room when the door twitched shut behind her.

She started and turned her head, but no one was there. The silence, in fact, was almost companionable, and she understood that she was more afraid of Dermot Child having crept in behind her than she was of Lucy’s ghost. Would almost have welcomed the jolly, ponchoed apparition.

To advise her, for a start, on what the hell she was supposed to be doing in here.

The muted evening light was a soft presence in the single, small window, leaded and lace-curtained. But not in the room, which was well into its own dusk. Merrily went back to the door and found a light switch, an old metal one like a pewter pip.

It activated two Victorian bracket lamps over an ornate, ebony desk which sat under the window and dominated the room like an altar. The beams above it were stained as black as the exterior timbers. There was a rigid-looking armchair and a Victorian chaise longue. All four walls were half-panelled, to waist level, white-painted above, between glass-fronted bookcases. There was a single etching – two Victorian fairies, elegantly pool-peering