To Dream of the Dead

the edge of the Malverns and would always be tinged with tragedy. Melancholy enough, already.

‘If you all want to hum along we can maybe cover up the fact that we don’t have a cello. Try it…’

They didn’t need asking twice. No need for the old hand behind the ear, I can’t hear you routine. Merrily thinking how she gigged every Sunday, and never captured this much attention. Maybe she needed to learn to play something.

Barry had found her a seat by the door. She drank a spritzer, finding it didn’t go too well with extra-strong mints. Nothing went with extra-strong mints except more mints.

But she knew this song and its origins, had been there at its birth. It was about how, close to the end, Elgar seemed to have lost his faith, his lifelong Catholicism. But all he really wanted, in Lol’s view, was to sidestep the complicated spiritual bureaucracy of Catholic death, the Catholic afterlife, have his spirit absorbed into the landscape that had given him his music… specifically, this music.

After a couple of minutes, Lol let the audience do the humming and began to build a guitar structure under it, finally picking up Elgar’s tune with his own words, the percussive rain behind it like he was singing from the eye of some inner storm.

Save me from the Angel of
The Agony. I want
No pomp
Or circumstance
I’ll take my chance.

Lol’s voice dipping into a valley on agony. Then rising to welcome a dawning euphoria. He held up a hand to fade the humming. Merrily saw Eirion messing with the two amps and then, with the flat screen full of bubbling water, Lol’s voice rose up clear but distant, with a faint echo, as if from distant hills.

Where the Severn joins the Teme
I’ll drift downstream
And feel release
And sing the trees
Their own song…

Lol and the lights went blurred. Merrily wiped her eyes discreetly, one at a time.

‘Didn’t think he’d mind too much,’ Lol said afterwards into the dying applause. ‘He was all right, Ed.’

‘That was amazing, but I didn’t fully get what it was about,’ the bald guy with the ruby said. ‘Dunno much about Elgar. What’s the Angel of the…?’

‘Agony.’

Lol, clearly loving this interplay with his audience, explained about Elgar’s attempt to glimpse his God in the choral masterpiece The Dream of Gerontius, from Newman’s epic poem about the progress of a soul through the various tiers of the Catholic afterlife.

‘So the Angel of the Agony is this mournful combination of sin eater and celestial advocate, pleading for the soul’s admission into Heaven. But close to the end Elgar’s Catholicism had kind of lost its grip, and when he was dying he told a friend that if he was ever walking in the Malvern Hills and he heard the tune you’ve just been humming… Ed said, Don’t be afraid. It’ll just be me. He’d told everybody he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes scattered at the confluence of the River Severn and the River Teme, but he was talked out of it.’

‘I’ve been to his grave,’ a woman said. ‘Little Malvern? It’s interesting the way his wife’s name is at the top of the stone, as if Elgar is bowing to the female principle in nature.’

‘Not sure about that,’ Lol said. ‘All I feel is he wanted to be part of the landscape, for all eternity, and… I think he probably is.’

‘In the end, that’s paganism…’ The long straight hair identified Sara, the Dinedor witch from the Sunday Telegraph. ‘Or at least pantheism. And that line about singing the trees’ songs, that’s from what it says under the Elgar statue in Hereford? Hearing the trees singing his music… or is he singing theirs? Hey, why not?’

‘Actually,’ Elliot Stooke said, ‘the biography I read suggested very strongly that Elgar had lost his faith completely. The idea that he reverted to some sort of paganism is… a bit of speculation?’

‘Probably is,’ Lol said.

‘And he was using the idea of his ghost haunting the Malverns as a metaphor, surely?’

‘Metaphors on his deathbed?’ Lol said. ‘I don’t know.’

‘If you believe he was channelling the spirit of the landscape,’ Sara the witch called out, ‘the whole thing makes—’

‘Another charming myth,’ Stooke said.

‘All I know…’ the bald guy stood up ‘… is that I came out of a very bad experience today with the clear conviction that if we lose our spiritual bond with the land there’ll be nothing left of us as a nation.’

‘Part of the earth. I’ll go with that.’ Bill Blore was on his feet, tankard clamped to his chest. ‘Bury me in a Bronze Age fucking longbarrow with a flint axe in my hand, that’ll do me.’

When the laughter died, Lol said, ‘Well, Elgar was here, we know that… and there’s even evidence that he visited Coleman’s Meadow when Alfred Watkins…’ he smiled at Bill Blore ‘… found the ley running through it.’

Merrily couldn’t make out Blore’s reaction. She spotted a few local people, including Brenda Prosser and her daughter, Ann Marie — Jim still working in the shop.

‘But if anyone really inhabits this landscape…’ Lol stroked a chord ‘… we’re probably looking at a woman.’

The lights dipped and the room went quiet as the only known image of Lucy Devenish took form on the screen.

Merrily was startled.

It was the lack of definition that produced the effect, and the way the brown tones of the picture faded into the shadows of the crooked old room. And Eirion had rephotographed it, so it was digital now.

Pixels. It was pixels.

Lucy middle-distant in her poncho, the blur of her face as she tried to avoid the camera, the amplified grain on the blown-up photo converted into pixels… fragments of the essence of Lucy separating and re-forming, suggestive of movement, creating new splinters of some old wildness in those falcon’s eyes.

‘Christ,’ someone said, ‘the old girl just turned her head.’

Someone pushed urgently past Merrily’s table and she looked up in the dimness and saw, in Mathew Elliot Stooke’s face, the confusion of expressions she’d seen and been unable to work out just before she left Cole Barn last night, after Stooke had said:

Some kind of Stone Age warrior. Short cloak or a skin…

Merrily rose abruptly and followed him out.

60 New Void

They were sitting in Bliss’s car, watching the diminishing tail lights of the police car containing Terry Stagg, two uniforms and Steve Furneaux on his way to Gaol Street to be processed.

Now they were alone, Bliss dared to breathe. Let it come out in one big spasm of relief, his body arching