To Dream of the Dead

‘And time’s running out.’ Lol picked up one of Eirion’s bags. Maybe take him in the parlour, get him something to drink. ‘Actually—’

‘So how did it go, Lol? I couldn’t believe it when Jane told me. When’s it on?’

‘When’s what—? Oh, yeah, sorry. New Year’s Eve.’

‘What they need to do is erect a big flat-screen TV…’ Eirion looked back towards the square and all the bulging, crooked black and whites leaning over it. ‘Over there. By the Christmas tree.’

‘Eirion, it’s one song. Might even get cut.’

‘No way.’ Eirion rubbed his hands. ‘Strange, it is, coming back here. I’ve dreamt about it, Lol. Couple of times recently. One of those places that come up in dreams. Perhaps because it never changes.’

‘No.’

‘Anyway, I’m glad I’ve seen you first. Got presents in the car. Nothing much, but I was wondering, would it be OK if I left them at your place?’

Lol looked back at the vicarage. The light in the attic had gone out. ‘No problem at all,’ he said. ‘In fact, why don’t we do that now?’

In the scullery, the rarely used third bar of the electric fire was glowing neon-red and making these little zinging noises, like open nerves. Merrily lit a cigarette and carried her tea to the window overlooking the dank Decembered garden.

‘Have you ever thought of leaving here?’ Jane said.

‘Not really. Well… once or twice. Have you?’

Surely not. Surely never in a million years.

Jane, sitting on the old sofa, expressionless, made no reply. Not since Lucy…

No, that wasn’t the same. When Lucy was killed, Jane had lost control, pulling her hair and screaming abuse at God, even Merrily failing to realise at the time how big a death this was. But Jane had been a kid then and Merrily a nervous, novice parish priest, and their relationship was on a permanent cliff-edge.

‘I… heard Bill Blore on the radio at lunchtime,’ Merrily said. ‘They’d been asking him about Clement Ayling’s murder.’

Jane said nothing. She’d insisted on washing her face before she came down. Washing it over and over, with cold water.

‘It struck me that he might’ve had to delay your interview. Or even call it off?’

She’d been thinking that Lol might be the one to reach Jane. Lol with his sixth sense for humiliation and despair. But when she’d slipped downstairs, Lol had whispered that Eirion was on his way, a day early because of the floods. Everything happened at once in this house. She hadn’t told Jane who, when the front-door bell rang, had still been on the edge of the bed, body language screaming, Leave me alone, like for ever.

‘He didn’t want to talk about it,’ Jane said.

‘Sorry?’

‘Blore. Wanted to get on with his excavation. Naturally, they — the media — didn’t want to talk about anything else.’

‘And that put him in a bad mood? I was thinking maybe he’d kept putting you off and you were hanging around the site getting cold and wet and nothing happening.’

‘If only.’

‘Flower…’ Merrily on her knees by the sofa, picking up Jane’s left hand. ‘Just because Blore didn’t want to talk to you today…’ Watching the nails of Jane’s right hand sinking into the cushion. ‘There’ll be another opportunity. He clearly needs you for his programme, if he’s going to—’

Merrily held Jane’s hand firmly in both of hers. No, of course. It was worse than that, wasn’t it?

‘You don’t understand.’ Jane’s hand was gripping Merrily’s fiercely, tears pooling. ‘You weren’t listening. I’ve been stupid. Unbelievably stupid.’

Eirion had the Takamine on his knee. He’d worked out some chords to Sufjan Stevens’s ‘Chicago’. He seemed to have improved a lot. He looked around at the whitewashed walls, the orange paint that Jane had insisted should be applied between the beams in the ceiling.

‘You’ve got this place fantastic, Lol. Is that your mother?’ Nodding at the picture over the inglenook.

‘It’s Lucy Devenish,’ Lol said. ‘The only known photograph. For which she seems to have been determined not to pose. Hence the blur.’

‘Ah. That’s her, is it? That blur over the face makes her look a bit… unearthly.’

‘Mostly, she was very earthly. I always hear her saying… after Alison had left and before I met Merrily, when I was really low and a bit deranged, she said…’ Lol did the voice ‘“You really are a sick, twisted little person, aren’t you, Laurence?” Never dressed things up.’

Eirion laughed.

‘Then she gave me Thomas Traherne to read to straighten me out. “Have to learn to open up, Laurence. Go into the village on your own and go in smiling. That’s what Traherne did. Discovered felicity.”’

‘Did it work?’

‘Eventually.’ Lol opened a couple of bottles of Westons cider. ‘That and a few other things. Always presuming I am straightened out.’

‘This was her place, wasn’t it?’

‘Still is. Lucy’s house, my mortgage.’

‘Jane talks to her,’ Eirion said. ‘At her grave. Is that healthy, do you think?’

‘I always think graves are for us, not the dead. Lucy’s grave… Jane thinks it’s on an energy line. A spirit path.’

‘Well, that’s Jane, isn’t it?’

‘If it gives her energy…’

‘What about this house?’

‘Who knows? I only got it because the last people moved out after a short time. Claiming it was haunted.’

‘But you…?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Maybe Miss Devenish is happy you’re here.’ Eirion drank some cider. ‘God, listen to me, I’ve not been here half an hour and I’m talking like Jane already.’

‘But I’m always conscious that if I slip back, she’ll bloody well manifest with that hooked nose and the eagle eyes and the poncho flapping…’

‘Steady on, Lol.’ Eirion shuddered, put the bottle down. ‘Slip back how?’

‘Or it’s like I’m only allowed to stay here for some purpose.’ Lol sat down on the hard chair at the desk in the window. ‘Anyway… I’ve been putting these songs together.’

He told Eirion about Christmas Eve at the Black Swan and the suite of songs illustrating elements of what Lucy had called the Ledwardine Orb.

‘Traherne… Wil Williams, the 17th-century vicar here who was accused of witchcraft… Alfred Watkins, who discovered leys… his friend Edward Elgar, the composer who turned the landscape into music… and Lucy, who bound it all together.’

‘How many songs?’

‘Five so far, three more in the works. And a reworking of Nick Drake’s “Fruit Tree”, which seemed appropriate. Apple trees… change and decay. Mortality.’

‘Nearly enough for an album. Hey…’ Eirion’s eyes lighting up. ‘This is actually the second solo album? The sequel to Alien?’

‘Maybe, if I can pull it off, I won’t be an alien any more.’

‘Like you’ll’ve landed?’

Lol shrugged, uncertainly.

‘Sounds a bit pathetic, doesn’t it? As for playing the songs for the first time in public, in the Black Swan on Christmas Eve…’