The Wine of Angels

‘Really,’ she said flatly. ‘And who told you that?’ She smiled. ‘No, I didn’t think you would. Hang on, give me a couple of minutes, I’ll wander over the vicarage, see if she’s around.’

She inspected the receiver and then put it down on the window ledge and signalled to Merrily to follow her into the passage. ‘Guy from The Sunday Times in London. Apparently, somebody’s rung to tell them there’s a row developed over you refusing to let Coffey do his play in the church. Looks like your chance to back off before they crucify you as a Philistine.’

‘Damn.’

‘You want to buy some time? How about if I tell them you’re out at a string quartet recital and then you’re going on to a fashionable village cocktail party?’

‘And then they print it anyway and say I was unavailable for comment. Sod it.’ Merrily went back into the kitchen, snatched up the phone. ‘Hello. Merrily Watkins.’

‘Mrs Watkins, hi. So sorry to bother you in the evening. Craig Jamieson at The Sunday Times newspaper. I’m just checking—’

‘Sure. To be honest, I can’t imagine why anyone should want to cause mischief by telling you complete lies about an issue on which no decision’s yet been announced one way or the other.’

‘Really? That is puzzling, isn’t it, Mrs Watkins?’ Craig Jamieson sounded about seventeen, but Merrily supposed he must be at least a PhD to be a hack on The Sunday Times. ‘You see, I’ve spoken to Richard Coffey and he told me he wouldn’t be in the least surprised to find that you’d turned against the play. Because of all the pressure you’d been under.’

‘Pressure?’

Craig Jamieson chuckled. ‘I gather certain ... well-established families are feeling threatened.’

‘Look, I don’t want to be cagey, but whoever told you this is going way over the top. There’s been no row. Have you spoken to the member of the well-established family?’

‘I was going to see what you had to say first.’

‘Well, I’m sure that if you spoke to him he’d tell you he was right behind the play. Good heavens, when someone as distinguished as Richard Coffey wants to put your obscure little community on the literary map, you don’t throw it back in his face, do you?’

God forgive me.

There was a pause. Then Craig Jamieson said, ‘So you’re going to let them do the play in your church?’

‘I ... Look, I can’t just tell you that, can I? When nothing’s been officially decided yet. I mean, there’s ... you know what the Church is like ... there’s protocol. I haven’t even talked it over with the bishop yet.’

‘He has to give his permission, does he? That’s the Bishop of Hereford, right?’

‘It’s just ... it’s protocol. You know. I’m sorry, but there’s really no story. You know?’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said Craig Jamieson blandly.

Coffey, Merrily thought. This is Coffey. He wants to force the issue.

Perhaps it was time to call his bluff.

Replacing the phone, she saw Lol’s fist connecting with the table. He was staring down at the scrawl in Mrs Leather’s book.

‘Young Alison,’ he said. ‘Young Alison.’

37 Wil’s Play

IN A CORNER of the bar at the Swan, Gomer Parry sniffed suspiciously into his poncy glass. Not that he was any kind of connoisseur, see, but there was something ...

‘Stop that,’ Minnie hissed down his ear. ‘It’s not French wine, you know. You’ll be showing us up.’

‘En’t right, somehow.’ Gomer shuffled uncomfortably inside what he’d always thought of as his laying-out suit. ‘Nothing wrong with it, like, but it en’t right.’

‘The rubbish you talk, Gomer. Can’t you just drink it?’

There was a free glass of the so-called Wine of Angels for everybody attending the string quartet concert – recital, Minnie kept stressing, I think it’s a recital, Gomer – served in thin champagne glasses. Bottles of the stuff, with the picture of the church on the label, were set out on a special table, Emrys, the wine waiter, doing the honours to make everybody think this was a real privilege, like. ‘Fermented in the bottle,’ he kept telling the arty buggers from Off, whose Land Rover Discoveries were clogging up the market place – not that there was many of them, but a few of that sort went a long way, in Gomer’s view.

On account of the tickets not going as well as they’d figured, Dermot Child’s festival flunkeys had been doing the rounds, offering half-price seats to locals and finally fetching up at Gomer and Minnie’s bungalow, the bastards. ‘Oughter be called off, I reckon, in respect of poor Lucy,’ Gomer had mumbled, but Minnie had shelled out for the tickets straight off, though neither of them’d know a string quartet from a dustcart crew.

There were other people you wouldn’t expect to see at this kind of do. Brenda Prosser, from the Eight till Late shop, and Bernard and Norma Putley, from the garage, putting a brave face on it ‘spite of their boy being grilled by the Law over drugs. Oh, and Bull-Davies with his blonde floozie.

No sign of the vicar, mind. Gomer was worried about that little lady. Needed friends, she did, and all that was happening was folk getting turned against her. Too many mischief-makers. Life was boring in the country now, for folk born and raised locally. No jobs worth getting up for, less they moved away, the telly always showing them what they were missing, the Sun telling them they ought to be having dynamite sex twice a night and different partners at weekends, drug dealers showing enterprising youngsters like Mark Putley how they could earn enough for a smart motorbike.

And no characters any more. Gomer fiddled in a pocket of his stiff, blue jacket for a cigarette he daren’t bring out. No characters, now poor Lucy was gone. All gloss and no soul. The string quartet was made up of professional musicians from London with weekend cottages hereabouts.

And the so-called Wine of Angels, even that had no character. All this talk about the Pharisees Red and it tasted like supermarket cider. Whatever the old recipe was, the Powells had lost it.

‘En’t right,’ Gomer mumbled, following Minnie into the big dining room, done out as a concert hall. ‘Artificial’ That was the word. Whole village was artificial nowadays, but the cider, that needed checking out.

‘Here for the concert, Reverend?’ asked the fifty-something man at the hand dryer. Bank-manager type.

‘Yes, I er ... I’m staying with friends in Hereford.’ Try and project your voice more. Always sound confident. ‘I gather the Queen’s Arms Quartet are building up quite a reputation.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ the bank manager said. ‘I believe they are. Well ... enjoy it’

As the toilet door wheezed into place, the face of Sandy Locke came up in the mirror. The Reverend Sandy Locke. Whose parish was in Hampshire, who was spending a couple of weeks with some old college friends in the cathedral city and who, this evening, was indulging his fondness for chamber music.

In the mirror, the Rev. Sandy Locke produced a surprisingly encouraging smile. It scared him how plausible he looked. How confident, how relaxed. He actually wouldn’t have recognized himself. A natural vicar’s face, Merrily had told him. Kind of fresh and innocent.

God forbid.

The ponytail had had to go. It was quite reasonable for a vicar to have long hair these days, Merrily said, but in Ledwardine it would make some people look again. Jane had cut his hair, finishing off with nail scissors so that it looked neat and groomed. Merrily had produced the black jacket and black cord jeans, the black T-shirt thing and the dog collar, all out of her own wardrobe. Everything was very tight. The jacket buttoned the wrong way, but it wouldn’t button anyway.

He froze momentarily when, on leaving the Gents’, he brushed against a woman who turned out to be Detective Inspector Annie Howe, severely youthful in her business suit. Howe glanced at him and they both smiled and he was terrified, but Howe moved on, and that was the clincher: the Rev. Sandy Locke bore no resemblance to the police picture of the young Lol Robinson, sex offender.