To Dream of the Dead

‘Alas, she’s right. Disregard my whimsy.’ Al closed the guitar case, held it out to her like a sheaf of flowers. ‘Take her home.’

‘Al, you’ll have to hold on to her while I get my chequebook out.’

‘Pay me after Christmas,’ Al said. ‘As the sofa retailers say.’

‘Absolutely not. Just tell me how much. It’s not a problem. I’ve some money put by—’

‘I haven’t yet decided on a suitable price,’ Al said.

‘Please. Let’s not quarrel about this. I want to pay the proper price and Lol would want that, too. Especially Lol, because of… what happened to the other one.’

‘Ah, yes. The man who had it smashed, as a warning. Leave a hundred pounds in cash on the table. Do you have a hundred pounds? If not, fifty will do. Don’t cross me, drukerimaskri, or the curse will come down, and you know how good we are at this.’

‘I do have a hundred pounds, but… it’s just a deposit, Al.’

‘There we are, then.’ Al thrust the guitar case at her and then sprang back, laughing, all limbs, like a grasshopper. ‘Tell me… does Laurence feel guilt, because the young man died unfulfilled, unrecognised, and now Laurence is… almost halfway famous?’

‘Nick Drake?’ Merrily said. ‘You’re talking about Nick Drake again?’

She wasn’t about to say that Lol had seen the destruction of the Boswell, the finest handmade acoustic guitar in the country, as a sign of his unworthiness. A confirmation that he’d never be as good as Nick Drake.

‘Leave it, Al,’ Sally said, and Merrily was grateful.

Before she left the Hop Museum, she put down all the notes in her wallet without counting them.

‘A deposit, Al.’

Before she drove away into the cold, liquid night, she sat in the back seat with the guitar case across her knees and, without thinking too hard about whether this was right or reasonable, she asked God to bless the Boswell.

In Lol’s house, Jane sat with Eirion next to the wood stove in the mouth of the inglenook, sipping hot chocolate, listening to Lol’s new music.

Can melting sugar sweeten wine?
Can light communicated keep its name?
Can jewels solid be, though they do shine?
From fire rise a flame?

Her back almost touching the stove, Jane felt this odd, warm shimmer as Lol’s voice rose to meet a high guitar note. Lol sat on the edge of the sofa, looking apprehensive, the guitar on its stand under the window.

The room was lit by a fat candle on the low table, the music crisp and real, from the stereo. Lol had made demos on mini-disc of most of the new songs. He could do concerts now, even fairly intimate folk-club-type gigs, but he was still too shy to play live in front of friends. Like he felt that people who knew him would see through the songs to all the flaws in his character, his weaknesses.

Crazy?

Not when you knew the Lol Robinson story. Barely twenty and convicted of sexually assaulting a fourteen- year-old girl while on tour with Hazey Jane. An offence actually committed, while Lol was asleep, by the band’s bass-player, who’d walked away, leaving Lol on probation, unjustly disgraced, disowned by his creepy Pentecostalist parents, swallowed by the psychiatric system. His career wrecked, his spirit smashed.

It was Jane’s mum who’d finally brought him out of the past. But before he even knew Mum, Lucy Devenish had begun to reassemble him. Lucy and the poems of Thomas Traherne, who’d seen the essence of paradise in this border landscape. Found happiness. Felicity.

Before dying at thirty-seven.

Which meant that Lol was older than Traherne now. Oh God, nothing was ever perfect, nothing was easy.

Thus honey flows from rocks of stone
Thus oil from wood, thus cider, milk and wine
From trees and flesh… thus corn from earth…

He’d turned three of Traherne’s 17th-century poems into songs, and it couldn’t have been easy at all; they all had strange, archaic rhythms.

‘We can illustrate this no problem,’ Eirion said. ‘I’ve got dozens of pictures from last summer that we shot along the ley. All very lush and pastoral. It’s the Elgar stuff I’m not sure about. Maybe I could download some pictures from the Net. Could I hear that again, Lol?’

Lol located it on the disc. The song was just called ‘Elgar’, dealing with the composer’s thoughts as he lay dying, but it wasn’t morbid; it was, in the end, uplifting.

When it was over, Lol said, ‘People misunderstood Elgar for years, thought he was too grand. Just an ordinary guy, lower middle-class. Insecure…’

‘Right.’

Jane was getting a real feel for this now, how it all tied in. Elgar had been a friend of Alfred Watkins and had actually had his picture taken with Watkins in what was almost certainly Coleman’s Meadow. Lol had written a new song about Alfred Watkins, using lines from the seminal Old Straight Track set to this kind of chugging, pulsing rhythm, like you were following a ley on foot, the music speeding up as you reached what Jane was certain had to be Cole Hill at sunrise, midsummer.

Whether some of the crass bastards who drank and dined at the Black Swan would get any of this was anybody’s guess and, for a moment, Jane could hear it all being drowned out by whoops and laughter and inane chat.

And then realised she was actually hearing voices. Raised. Outside the window. Raised voices, excitement. Or panic.

Lol stood up, turned the music down and went over to the window, wiping off condensation with his sleeve.

‘Something seems to have happened.’

Merrily had taken what seemed to be the safe route, through Bromyard, but who could tell? The entrances to several side roads were blocked by portable signs, some of them semi-submerged.

FLOOD

ROAD CLOSED

She flicked the wipers to double speed, driving like a learner first time out, hands on the wheel at ten to two, unblinking, the radio on low. Halfway to Leominster, the Radio Hereford and Worcester all-night flood special said,

‘… And if you’ve just tuned in and you’re heading into Hereford from the south on the Abergavenny or Ross roads, police advise turning back because the Belmont roundabout has now been closed. Belmont roundabout is closed.’

Not good. Halfway to becoming the Isle of Hereford.

The wipers strained and the surface water tugged at the wheels, but she made it around Tenbury Wells, its town-centre streets turned into canals, according to the radio.

‘They knew this was coming, look,’ a caller to the station said, ‘and they’ve never spent a penny on flood prevention. When was this river last cleaned out? Tell me that.’