Jane knelt. If she was late for breakfast, late for school, it didn’t matter. This was important. This was the person to whom she’d have to answer if the village lost its ancient heart.
‘Lucy,’ she whispered to the headstone, ‘the bastards want to have them ripped out. Put on a flatbed truck and taken away.’
Sometimes, when she was on her own in the early morning or at twilight, calm and focused, she’d almost see Lucy Devenish, eagle-faced and huddled in her poncho on the edge of some folkloric otherworld.
‘So, like, if there’s anything you can do?’
She’d been coming here every day for weeks now, far longer than she’d been going to the river. Talking to Lucy, keeping her up to date. It was important.
Jane looked up to see only steeple, mist and morning star, felt damp seeping through the knees of her jeans. She stood up, on the edge of the old coffin path along which the dead of Ledwardine had once been carried.
As she walked away, there was a tiny sound like a snapping twig on the path to her left, as if someone was walking beside her. Only some small mammal, but it made her smile as she set off along the ancient trackway which would later proceed, in perfect alignment with the gateways at each end of Coleman’s Meadow, to the Iron Age camp on Cole Hill.
It was like you were walking the border between worlds. Walking with ghosts. Could be down to Bill Blore, now, to stop the sacrilege, let Lucy walk in peace.
A voice came bubbling in the soggy air.
It said, ‘Who’s Lucy?’
Lol lay listening to the gunslinger wind prowling Church Street. Scared now. For a couple of days after London, it had been simple bewilderment and gratitude to whatever had got him through it. But this morning he’d awoken into darkness, the swaggering wind, anxiety.
Five days ago now, London, and reduced to a dream-sequence. Last night, to put it in its place, he’d been set on doing something real. Like maybe standing up and laying into Lyndon Pierce, this bastard who last summer had said to him,
He looked up at the oak beam over the bed, thinking about its permanence, how it had become stronger with age. How, if you tried to bang a nail into it now, the nail would snap off.
A lot like the woman who used to live here.
But how unlike either the woman or the beam
Remembering the routine cowardice assailing him as he’d climbed on the stool with his guitar to do ‘Baker’s’ in the big BBC studio, surrounded by an audience top-heavy with
Lol had said they’d probably view the performance and then decide to lose him from the final edit. Jane had looked sinister. ‘Only if Holland and his producer want to be stalked for the rest of their lives by a vicar’s psychotic daughter with a machete.’
He’d smiled and told her everything. Everything he could remember about his big day out in the big city, recording ‘The Baker’s Lament’ for BBC 2’s flagship music programme,
Lol had been the cameo act, of course, the one-song guy — the big stars did three numbers — but it had been preceded, unexpectedly, by an interview with Jools. The great man decently glossing over Lol’s weird years, before screening a 30-second clip from the award-winning independent film about the death of village life, for which Lol’s music was the soundtrack. The micro-budget movie that was turning ‘The Baker’s Lament’ into a fluke Christmas minor hit, turning Lol’s long-dormant career around.
What he remembered most about the actual recording was not the cameras, or the one chord-change his fingers fluffed, but a bunch of people in the studio audience, swaying and mouthing the words of the chorus:
One of the mouthers, unless he’d imagined all this, had been Michael Stipe of REM, benignly smiling and inclining his long bony head. Jane had been wildly impressed. Lol, too, at the time, obviously. Before it was all put into a hard perspective by his next clear memory, of a guy approaching him afterwards, explaining that he was putting together an American tour for Original Sin and how would Lol feel about being considered for the support?
Five weeks, in the spring, the guy said. Someone else, who he’d declined to name, had pulled out, so they’d need to know fairly soon if Lol was up for it.
Five weeks.
All Lol remembered about his own response was,
‘
The guy laughing and slapping him on the shoulder, telling him that America didn’t have an ageism problem on anywhere near the scale of Britain’s and, anyway, Lol looked younger, and the Sin guys loved his music. Adding, with unmoving eyes, ‘
Lol hadn’t told Merrily. Whatever she really felt, she’d be twisting his arm to go for it. Fifteen years ago, if he hadn’t, at the time, been a guest of the psychiatric health system, he’d have signed the contract before he left the capital.
Now he thought only about the wearying cycle of soundchecks and encores curtailed because the audience had paid to see the act that came next. Bars and towns, towns and bars that all looked the same, clapboard motels with sunken beds and rusty showers.
Plus, there was a message on his answering machine from Barry at the Black Swan.
Unnerved, Lol rolled out of bed, went to the window.
He was panting.
He looked across the narrowing street to the matching black and white timber-framed 17th-century terrace with its winter-empty window boxes and the holly wreaths on its front doors and a few lights still on, more than usual because half of the houses were holiday homes now, coming alive for Christmas.
Lol turned, his face against the wet glass, to see the front garden of the vicarage and…
… Merrily, in jeans and a big sweater, looking up and down the dripping street in the half-light, as if she’d lost something. Her face soft and pale, hair over her eyes.
Lol just wanted to run down and hold her.
The condensation was cold on his cheek.
Merrily. Merrily and the songs. Nothing else. OK, maybe occasional gigs to keep your hand in and your mortgage payments met, your professional confidence afloat.
You only had one life and his was half gone and if he couldn’t spend all of the rest of it with the woman
