never going to.'
'I bet you did.' Dic sneered. 'I bet that really cut you up.'
She ignored it. 'I was thinking, if we'd slept together, just the once, to kind of get it over, bring down that final barrier… You got the vaguest idea what I'm saying?'
He just looked at her through the smoke.
'Anyway,' Moira said, 'we didn't. It never happened. Maybe that's another piece of guilt I'm carrying around. I don't know.'
The piano music stopped. Dic lay back on the sofa, hands clasped behind his head. Outside, the wind was getting up, spraying dead leaves at the windows.
There was a polite knock on the door and Cathy came in.
'I'm making some tea, if…'
'Oh, yeah, thanks.' Dic sitting up, looking sheepish.
'Be ten minutes,' Cathy said.
Moira said as the door closed, 'Lottie. Your mother. She know about this?'
'We never discussed it.'
'But you think she knows, right?'
Dic shrugged.
'This girl. This so-called girl of Matt's. You know who she was?'
'No. I tried to find out from people at the folk club – The Bear, you remember the joint? Nobody seemed to know her.'
'So how do you know they were…?'
'Because they went straight into this shop doorway. Would've taken a jack to prise them apart.'
'Right,' Moira said sadly. 'And she looked… like me?'
'Yeah. Superficially. Like you used to look.'
'Thanks a lot.'
Dic picked up the cushion and hurled it with all his strength at a bare wall. 'I didn't mean it like that, OK? I don't mean a fucking thing I say. I just like insulting people, yeah?'
'Sure,' Moira said. This wasn't getting either of them anywhere. She wished she'd stuck to her original plan and never agreed to come here with him. So he had problems. They'd made him stand there playing the pipes while they messed with his dad's body in its coffin. She could feel the confusion and the rage billowing out of him.
'Dic…' She was going to regret this.
'Yes?'
No, she wasn't. She wasn't going to say anything either of them might regret. She gathered up her cloak from the carpet.
'I'm away, all right?' The hissing sound disturbed him. And the occasional popping. And the blue glow.
It came from the circular wick of the paraffin stove. Intense, slightly hellish, ice-blue needles pricking the dark, the close stone walls shimmering like the inside of a cave lit by a cold and alien sea-glare.
Joel turned the flame up fully until it was flaccid and yellow, and then he blew it out. The stove was having little or no effect anyway. His original plan had been to bring an electric heater down here, but there was no power point, and the nearest one in the church was too far away for Alfred Beckett's extension lead to reach.
Joel lit a candle.
With the stove out, the temperature must be plunging, but at least it didn't look as cold.
He sat on the side of the camp-bed, with the double duvet wound around him.
Cold he could live with, anyway, insulated by years of refereeing schoolboy rugby matches. Cold he could almost relish.
He'd taken off his boots but added an extra pair of rugby socks. When he lay down, his feet – projecting from the bottom of the bed – would touch the stone blocks of the far wall. That was how cramped this cell was.
But discomfort was good. It was a holy place. Above him the nave of St Bride's, around him its ancient foundations. Rock of Ages. A blessed place, a sanctuary where bishops – well, at least one bishop – had passed the dark, cold hours in sacred solitude.
If he hadn't been so bone-tired, so sated with righteous rage, Joel might have spent the night in holy vigil, on his knees on the stone floor, like some mediaeval knight. Praying for divine aid in the deliverance of Bridelow from its own dark dragon.
But his body and his mind were both demanding sleep… a state often at its most elusive when most needed. He was also rather appalled to find his loins apparently yearning for the comfort of a woman. Before his conversion, Joel had exploited his God-given glamour at every opportunity – and there had been many. Now he did not deny himself the yearning, only its habitual, casual assuagement.
He told himself this unseemly erection in the House of God was merely a side-effect of the cold and the pressure of the duvet.
His watch told him it was not yet 10 p.m. But tomorrow, he felt, would be a long day. So he would allow his body sleep.
When he blew out the candle and lay back, the paraffin stench hung over him like a chloroform cloth. He must not sleep in this air. Clutching the duvet around him, he arose into the absolute darkness, followed his nose to the stinking heater and pulled it two yards to the oaken door. Bent almost double, he carried the appliance into the little tunnel which led to the stairway.
And then, leaving it out there, shuffled back to his cell. Locking the thick and ancient door of his sanctuary against the pagan night. Falling uncomfortably into the rickety bed.
Tread carefully, Joel.
What did the Archdeacon mean by that? Joel would tread with the courage and determination of the first Christians to walk these hills. Those who had driven the heathens from their place of worship and built upon it this church.
And whose holy task, because of the isolation of the place and the inbred superstition of the natives, had yet to be completed..
With God's help, Joel Beard would drive out the infidel. For ever. Cathy was pouring boiling water out of a big white teapot, down the sink. 'Forgot to put the bloody tea in. I'm a bit impractical.'
'Well, don't bother for me,' Moira said. 'I have to go.'
'You're the singer, aren't you?' Cathy filled the kettle, plugged it into an old-fashioned fifteen-amp wall- socket. It was that kind of kitchen, thirty years out of date but would never be antique. Moira said wearily, yes, she was the singer.
Cathy said, 'Still, I bet you don't play the piano as good as me:
Moira grinned. 'How long you known Dic?'
'Years. On and off. He'd come up to Bridelow with his father at weekends. I used to fancy him rotten at one time.'
'Used to?'
Cathy shrugged. 'That was when we were the same age,' she said elliptically.
Moira looked at her. A little overweight; pale, wispy hair pulled back off a face that was too young, yet, to reflect Cathy's cute sense of irony.
'When we came in, you said you thought your father was knackered. You said it'd do him good to get out of this place for a while.'
'I said that, did I?'
Try again. 'You were born here?'
'So they tell me. I don't live here at present. I'm in Oxford.'
'Doing what?'
'Studying,' Cathy said. 'The principal occupation in Oxford, next to watching daytime telly and getting pissed.'
'What are you studying? Oh, hey, forget it. I'm tired of walking all around things. What I really want to know is what happened at Matt's funeral that fucked your dad up so bad. And who's the other minister, the big guy, and how come you don't like him. Also, who's the crone who fumbles in coffins, and why was your daddy letting it go on. That's for starters.'
