To Dream of the Dead

The kid was definitely up. She’d been wandering around at least half an hour ago. Probably trying for stealth, but when there were only the two of you in a big old vicarage you developed an ear for creaks.

No reply from up there, no sound of radio or running water. Merrily went back to the kitchen and cracked three eggs into a bowl. Tom Parson’s funeral was at eleven at Hereford Crem. Old Tom, local historian, one-time editor of the parish magazine, now the third village death in a fortnight. Another funeral, another empty cottage up for grabs at a crazy price, removal vans more common in this village now than buses.

The cold came for her again, and she went scurrying back into the hall.

‘Jane!’

Nothing. Merrily pulled her robe together and ran upstairs, two flights, to what Jane liked to call her apartment, in the attic. A big bedsit, essentially, with all the kid’s spooky books, her desk, her stereo, her CDs. The door was hanging open. Merrily snapped on the light and saw the duvet in a heap, one pillow on the floor.

What was this about? Jane waking up aggrieved because her craven parent hadn’t stood up at last night’s meeting and fought for Coleman’s Meadow? She hadn’t seemed annoyed last night, but Jane… one day she might become vaguely predictable, no signs of that yet.

Merrily sat on an edge of the bed, wondering what it would be like this time next year when Jane was gone. Was she really going to carry on here on her own? With Lol on his own in Lucy’s old house? If they put this place on the market, the Church could clean up. The Old Vicarage, Ledwardine, 17th century, seven bedrooms, guest-house potential. One day they’d do it, transfer the vicar to one of the estate houses, and on mornings like this it didn’t seem such a bad idea.

A videotape was projecting from the vintage VCR under Jane’s analogue TV. Give the kid her due, she’d never pined for home cinema — on a vicar’s stipend, still many years away.

The tape was labelled T-1 Feb. Recorded last winter, long before Jane had been drawn towards a career in archaeology. Trench One was never less than watchable but not exactly crucial viewing. Why this one now?

Oh, and you’ll never guess — the kid calling back casually over her shoulder as she went upstairs to bed last night — who’s going to be in charge of the dig. Merrily waiting in vain for a name, but Jane always liked suspense.

Activating the VCR and the TV, Merrily shoved in the tape and watched pre-credit shots of a sinister grey landcape under a sky tiered with clouds like stacked shelves.

A man appeared, solid, bulky, shot from below the tump he was standing on. Trench One had three regular presenters who took turns to direct an excavation, present a different viewpoint, argue over the results. It was about conflict and competition.

‘So we’ve studied the reports of the original 1963 dig…’

He was wearing some kind of bush shirt, with badges sewn on, an Army beret and jeans with ragged holes in the knees. In case anyone had any doubts, the caption spelled out:

Prof. William Blore.

‘… been over the geophysics, taken a stack of aerial pictures, and it now seems pretty clear to me that this is where we need to sink…’ Lavish grin splashing through smoky stubble. ‘Trench One! ’

Blore jumping down from the tump and standing for a moment rubbing his hands like he couldn’t wait to get into the soil, and then the sig tune coming up in a storm of thrash-metal as he slid on his dark glasses and people began to gather around him.

Young people, his students. Trench One had begun as an Open University programme on BBC 2. Very rapidly acquiring a cult following, which built and built until they gave it peak screening. The format had altered slightly: Blore as guru, channelling youthful vigour. Merrily recalled a profile in one of the Sunday magazines describing him as genial, profane and disarmingly intolerant.

She stopped the tape. Red herring, surely. No way would Coleman’s Meadow be put into the hands of the man who’d told BBC Midlands Today that anyone who thought the Bronze Age builders of the Dinedor Serpent were primitive obviously hadn’t met the philistines running Herefordshire Council.

Wondering how genial, profane and disarmingly intolerant might translate.

‘What do you think, Lucy?’

She looked up at the framed photo over a stack of Jane’s esoteric books. An elderly woman in her winter poncho. The wide-brimmed hat throwing a tilted shadow across bird-of-prey features blurred by the process of turning away. Jane had found the picture in the vestry files and cleaned it up, had copies made and framed the original.

The only known portrait of Lucy Devenish who, like the old Indian warriors she’d so resembled, had probably thought cameras could steal your soul.

Merrily thought the picture looked unusually grey and flat this morning, lifeless.

* * *

The river was still frothing like cappuccino in the lamplight, but at least he wasn’t going anywhere new.

And the rain had eased. There was some ground mist, but the sky was clearing. Looking up, Jane saw the morning star pulsing like a distant lamp.

A breathing space. She walked slowly back up Church Street towards the square. Most of the guys at school hated getting up in the morning, but she’d never found it a problem. Around dawn you were more receptive to… impressions.

Was that weird? Was she weird? Over the last couple of years, she’d done all the usual stuff — been totally hammered on cider, got laid — but somehow it wasn’t enough. Was she alone at Moorfield High in thinking it wasn’t enough?

Probably.

There were very few lights in Church Street, none in Lucy’s old house where Lol lived now. Sometimes, pre- dawn, you’d see him by lamplight, working on a song for his second solo album, at his desk under the window. But Lol had been at the meeting with Mum, listening to Pierce’s New Ledwardine bullshit, which was enough to sap anybody’s creativity.

A breeze blundered into the square, ripping away the mist like a lace-curtain and rattling the stacks of morning papers barricading the doorway of the Eight Till Late. The only sign of life. Not long ago, even in the bleak midwinter, you’d have had clinking milk bottles and the warm aroma of baking bread. Preparations for a day. Now even the morning post wouldn’t be here for hours, and the milk came in plastic bottles in the supermarkets, and soon nobody would be seen on the streets of Ledwardine until about ten when the dinky delicatessen opened for croissants.

Jane stopped on the edge of the square and looked out, over the crooked, 16th-century black and white houses and shuttered shops, towards Cole Hill, the first point of contact with each new day. Hearing Mum again, from last night.

I won’t dress this up, flower. When the stones are exposed and studied or measured or whatever happens, they want them taken away. Possibly erected somewhere else. Or… not erected.

This was Lyndon Pierce plus transient scum like Ward Savitch, of pheasant-holocaust fame. Mum had admitted she’d managed to say nothing; as the meeting was supposed to be for public information only, the words powder and dry had seemed appropriate. Jane was aware of trembling.

The church clock said 6.30, just gone. Still a while off daylight, and Mum wouldn’t be up for another half- hour. Jane walked under the lych-gate and into the churchyard, switching on her lamp, cutting an ochre channel through the mist which put ghostly wreaths around the graves.

The beam seemed to find its own way to the only stone with a quotation from Thomas Traherne:

No more shall clouds eclipse my treasures
Nor viler shades obscure my highest pleasures…