To Dream of the Dead

‘No, really. He’s meeting all the people involved with Coleman’s Meadow from the outset. You were the outset. What time’s your school bus get in — half-four? Should still be some light. So if you want to come over to the site when you get home?’

‘Wow, you are serious.’

‘All I’d say, Jane,’ Coops said, ‘is, don’t get carried away. Whatever he tells you, don’t get carried away.’

‘You know me, Coops,’ Jane said, tingling. ‘Ms Cool.’

* * *

On a good day, Merrily would have been leaving the church nursing some new and unforeseen possibility, the softly gleaming ingot of an idea. Saved again.

Or at least not feeling sick with dread.

When she walked out, in Jane’s red wellies, under the dripping lych-gate, it was like Ledwardine was drifting away from her. All its colours washing out, daytime lights in the shops burning wanly behind the sepia screen of slanting rain. Gutted by the feeling that the village was getting bigger and, at the same time, more amorphous, more remote.

Like God?

All she’d seen, in meditation, were the small crises she’d failed to react to, the issues she’d back-burnered. All coming together like coalescing clouds, making darkness.

Crossing to the Eight Till Late, she saw a pale orange poster in one of the mullioned windows of the pub on the edge of the square.

Christmas Eve at The Black Swan Inn.

Ledwardine’s own

LOL ROBINSON

(‘The Baker’s Lament’)

in concert.

9 p.m.

All welcome.

God, Barry hadn’t wasted any time, had he? All welcome. Would that work? Already she could hear the background noise from the bars, people talking and laughing while Lol, bent over his guitar, murmured his tribute to Lucy Devenish whom most of the Swan’s clientele had either never known or considered mad.

From Brenda Prosser at the shop, she bought a box of All Gold for Sarah Clee.

‘They must be mad.’ Brenda apparently continuing a conversation she’d been having with the previous customer who’d already left the store. ‘Merrily — pardon me for being nosy, but do you get properly recompensed? I mean for all these flowers and fruit and chocolates you keep buying for sick parishioners?’

‘Erm… no. Who must be mad?’

‘Those archaeologists. All turning up this morning in their Land Rovers. And a TV camera team, too — what’s that programme…?

‘Trench One? They’ve arrived? I didn’t know that.’

‘And a big tall crane. We didn’t know there was going to be TV. What can they hope to do in this weather?’

‘I actually think they like it, in a way,’ Merrily said. ‘Makes it look more dramatic on TV if they’re fighting the elements and they’re all covered in mud. Makes archaeology look like… trench warfare?’

‘Rather them than me.’ Brenda shivered. ‘All the farmers have moved their sheep from within about half a mile of the river, did you know?’

‘Doesn’t surprise me.’

‘Give Sarah my love, will you?’ Brenda said.

Not possible, as it turned out. The rain had slowed, but there was no promise of brightness in the swollen sky when Merrily reached the age-warped cottage in Blackberry Lane, with its window boxes of yellow and purple winter pansies. Brian Clee, retired postman, had the front door open before she was through the garden gate.

‘I’m sorry, Merrily, should’ve rung you.’ He looked worn out, frazzled ‘She was only took in this morning, see. Another ward closure — some infection. Half the hip ops postponed.’

‘That means she’ll be in over Christmas?’

Merrily followed Brian Clee into the house, his white head bent under the bowed beams in the hall. She left Jane’s red wellies on the doormat, took off her coat and stayed for a cup of tea, listening to Brian’s opinion of the county hospital, its unfriendly, automated rip-off, too-small car park, its smoking ban in the grounds so you couldn’t even have a fag to calm your nerves.

‘She’ll be fine, Brian. We prayed for her last weekend, and we’ll do it again on Sunday.’

‘Thank you, Merrily.’

Brian nodding as she left him with the chocolates. Not displaying much conviction, though, that virulent hospital infections could be neutralised by prayer.

The word ‘prayer’ will, in turn, reflect memories of something quaint and rather childish. The nightlight on the bedside table. Something grown out of.

‘Sod off, Stooke!’

Merrily stopped in the lane. Had she actually said that out loud? She was furious at herself for letting this get to her. There was no earthly reason…

And yet there was. She kept forgetting this — Stooke’s wife coming on to Jane like that, asking too many questions. That was a reason. She’d even Googled Leonora Winterson, finding next to nothing. No picture, anyway; Lensi took pictures rather than appeared in them — and certainly not with her husband. In fact, Google Images had only one shot of him — the ubiquitous Charles Manson pose. His website said he didn’t do TV, and cameras were banned from his bookshop signings.

I’m not a personality, just an investigative journalist who investigated a god and found two thousand years of lies, fabrication, abuse, corruption, hypocrisy…

Couldn’t get rid of him. Like he was her nemesis or something. Merrily splashed angrily through a chain of puddles into the churchyard, arriving at the modest grave of Lucy Devenish.

It had come to this.

‘I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here, Lucy. I’m supposed to minister to the living.’

Standing in the grey-brown rain with her bare hands on the rounded stone, remembering the first time she’d encountered the indomitable Miss Devenish, on an ill-fated night of wassailing in the orchard. Lucy with her hooked Red Indian’s nose, wearing her trademark poncho and a sense of unease.

Amply justified that night. During the traditional loosing of shotguns through the branches, to promote a good year of apples, old Edgar Powell had blown his own head off. They used to say — kids, mainly — that Edgar haunted the orchard, and if you looked up into the branches of the Apple Tree Man, the oldest tree, you might see him. The tree had been chopped down. A mistake, Jane had said; old Edgar could appear anywhere in the orchard now, smiling through the branches and the blood. It didn’t scare pagan Jane.

You know what, Lucy? Merrily’s grip tightening on the head-stone. I think I’m losing it. Thought it was going all right. The regular congregations weren’t exactly huge, but the Sunday- evening meditation… word was spreading and we were getting people actually interested in searching for something inside themselves. I was finally beginning to see what you meant by the orb.

Orb was a word Lucy had borrowed from Traherne, the 17th-century poet, drunk on Herefordshire. Lucy using it to describe the ambience of Ledwardine, the confluence of tradition, custom, history and spirit. The orb was an apple, shiny and wholesome.