paper back onto the chair.
Maybe the woman in green Gore-Tex had seen the annoyance on her face; she’d stopped a few paces away. Merrily stood up.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you coming.’
Shoulder-length straight dark hair under a black woolly hat. Cursory make-up. She lowered a leather shoulder bag to the flags, turned candid brown eyes on Merrily.
‘You’re angry.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Yeah, well, me too,’ Fiona Spicer said.
It was about surviving marriage to a man who would vanish overnight, usually for weeks at a time, and sometimes she didn’t know where in the world he was, or why, or when she’d see him again, or if.
‘Exciting boyfriends, for a while.’ Fiona Spicer’s voice was thoughtful and seldom lifted. ‘But, as husbands… problematical.’
Most people, this might’ve been small talk, ice-breaking stuff: the partner’s little quirks, how Fiona had known Syd before he joined the army. How they’d met on holiday, a teenage seaside romance, exchanging letters for a couple of years before they even saw each other again. And it got no better.
‘For more than half my marriage, my husband’s keeping secrets from me – me and the rest of the country. Where he’s going, what he’s doing there.’ They’d moved to the corner near the votive stand where three candles were alight. ‘I thought all that was over, when he left the Army. But part of them doesn’t leave, ever. He’d keep going to the window, as if he was looking for a reason to walk out. Sometimes I’d wake up in the night, and he’d be at the window in the dark.’
‘They come out of the Regiment at forty, is that right?’
‘At Sam’s level. You get a hazy kind of honeymoon period before they start wondering what they’re for. If their life has meaning any more.’
Fiona took off her wool hat, laid it on her knees.
‘I suppose I was luckier than most. Just a few months of agonizing before he hit God like a ground-to-air missile.’
‘ Syd?’
‘God’s warrior. All gunfire and smoke. As if saving a soul was the same as rescuing a civilian from terrorists. He did settle down, eventually. Probably as a result of Emily going off the rails.’
‘You must be relieved all that’s over.’
‘One problem ends, another opens up. Suddenly… it’s like the old days again: secrecy, lies, obfuscation.’
‘Because he’s back in Credenhill?’
‘He was never at Credenhill. But, yes. Back to the Regiment. Assuring me it was going to be entirely different this time. First and foremost, he’d be a priest. And that would be different. I almost believed the bastard. Then the curtain came down again. The vagueness, the false optimism. Everything’s fine. Everything’s going to be all right. And you know he means afterwards.’
‘After what?’
‘You tell me, Mrs Watkins. Sam kept your number in his car.’
‘ Sam? Oh…’
Samuel Dennis Spicer. SD. Thus, Syd.
Fiona was gazing up at the sanctuary, the Virgin at home. Two elderly couples filed through an oak door in the richly panelled screen to the right. The Audley chantry – the Thomas Traherne chapel now, recreated to honour, in new stained glass, the seventeenth-century poet and celebrant of the mystical Welsh Border countryside. Who had also, as it happened, been vicar of Credenhill.
‘Did he know you were coming here?’ Merrily said. ‘To Credenhill?’
‘I rang last weekend, suggesting I might come over, get things organized… and there was immediate resistance. Oh, there were things he needed to do to it, it was still in a mess. Well, I like a mess, gives me a sense of purpose. Hell, I’m supposed to be living there in a few weeks. No… he didn’t know I was coming. Compliance is an essential virtue for a Regiment wife, but I’m fifty-one, for Christ’s sake. I’ve been through that phase.’
‘So you went to see Syd, without giving any indication that you were coming.’
‘It was easier in the old days, when they were in Hereford. All that high fencing, like a prison, but it was still in the city. Credenhill, you feel more exposed. Still, I found the house easily enough, end of the row, near a little wood.’
Fiona had parked the car, gone up and knocked on the door. Ready for Syd saying this really wasn’t convenient and maybe she could come back in a couple of hours. But there was no answer.
Fiona had her hands in the pockets of her jacket. Like Sophie, she was overdressed for the weather – even a scarf, as if she’d learned from experience that you couldn’t trust signs of warmth.
‘So you let yourself in,’ Merrily said.
‘I know where he hides things like spare keys. Not under the step. And I didn’t do anything furtive, which always gets noticed.’
The two couples came out of the Audley chantry and Canon Jim Waite appeared, said ‘Hi, Merrily,’ and then guided the visitors into the Lady Chapel. Merrily nodded at the chantry door.
‘Why don’t we go in there? I’ll tell you what I know.’
She talked about Syd at the Brecon chapel, sitting in the shadows, asking no questions. And afterwards at Huw’s rectory, that unconvincing airy optimism. It’s going to be all right. It’s working out. How they’d decided, she and Huw, that there was probably a security aspect to whatever was troubling Syd.
‘Always a good get-out,’ Fiona said. ‘And that’s it, is it?’
‘There’s a bit more. He phoned Huw yesterday to inquire about certain deliverance procedures.’
They were on separate wooden benches, Merrily by the windows, Fiona by the door, staring bleakly into a stained-glass starburst Godface of blinding white.
‘Let me get this right. Deliverance is exorcism?’
‘Yes.’
‘To get rid of spiritual evil.’
‘Sometimes. Syd suggested to Huw that an old evil had come back to haunt him. Would you have any idea what that might be?’
‘There was a book dealing with it. Deliverance. It was with two other books on the back seat of his car, in the garage. The car wasn’t locked, which is how I got your number.’
Fiona hadn’t answered the question; Merrily didn’t push it. Fiona said Syd had told her the Credenhill house was a mess, but it had actually been very tidy. Everything in its place. Not the places Fiona would have put things, but all very neat.
He’d lied, to keep her away. Why?
‘Not another woman. He’d’ve told me.’
Her face was flushed, but only by the sun through the firework blaze of extreme stained glass. The new Thomas Traherne windows, four of them, were small and ferocious, with individual dominant colours: the almighty white, the crucifixion red, the pagan green. You never enjoy the world aright, Traherne had written…till you are clothed in the heavens and crowned with the stars.
You had the impression that it had been a long time since Fiona had found anything in the world to enjoy.
‘I made myself some tea,’ she said. ‘Sat down in the living room for a while, thinking he’d be back. When he didn’t come back, I started to look around. Some of it… You could come back to the house and take a look if you wanted to. If you have the time.’
‘If he’s back, he won’t be overjoyed to see me there.’
‘If he’s back, he can bloody well live with it.’
No raising of the voice, just a hoarse, fur-tongued undertow, thick with history. Fiona was looking into the second window, which had an ephemeral Christ figure in a shaft of light, arms wide, head bowed, crucified without a cross.
‘Do you know anything about the house?’ Merrily asked. ‘Who lived there before? I mean, they’re not old houses, are they?’
