common. Lovers of landscape, solitude. Nature mystics.
Odd. Was it odd? She walked into the chancel, looked back to where the far window was halved by the bar of the screen, split by the shaft of the cross. This was very much a theme church, St George the principal one. Why did you always feel sorry for the dragon, instantly disliking the smug bastard with the spear? The charitable view was that – lance, deep throat – it was a piece of early sexual symbolism.
She padded across the nave. As usual, alone in a church, Merrily didn’t feel alone, but this time it wasn’t just about God. That little green book of Wordsworth poems suggested that Syd Spicer had been here.
Byron and Syd? Byron who despised Christianity… not a man’s religion, not a soldier’s religion. She felt Syd pondering this, lighting up. He’d want to smoke in here. Too rich for Syd, this place. Wouldn’t have liked the golden angels. Phoney High Church iconography , he’d said of what had been inflicted on his own church at Wychehill. Grotesque.
Syd, you just knew, preferred drab, damp and frugal.
Merrily moved on to a small lady chapel with more Wordsworth memorials. A medieval stone coffin lid in the floor reminded her of the Knights Templar church at Garway. Stories everywhere, written in glass and stone, many of them modern and literal but no less effective for that.
And then she came to what, unmistakably, was the real thing. Out of place, isolated, but probably pre-dating the wall into which it was set.
A stone slab. Carved images. St George again, an early depiction. George in dragon-slaying mode, but on a horse this time. She consulted the leaflet: originally a tympanum, a piece of ornate masonry between the top of a door and the arch. Herefordshire Romanesque. She knew a bit about that – early medieval. The leaflet said that a stone in an adjacent field was believed to mark the actual spot where St George had killed the dragon.
Sure. The St George who apparently was Turkish, the dragon whose legend was set in the Middle East. Merrily imagined Syd tapping his ash on the saint’s helmet, knowing he could’ve taken George, unarmed, any day of the week.
Never quite understood how saints like George fitted into the fabric of Christianity. A medieval thing, probably, an excuse for crusades, brutality masquerading as valour… a frenzy of pure excitement.
There was a whiff of cigarette smoke. Syd Spicer was back.
The Syd of an overheated confessional afternoon in the church at Wychehill, when he’d used those exact words, recalling the lethal focus you acquired in the Regiment.
…a frenzy of pure excitement… I understand the rush you get when you convince yourself that, in the great scheme of things, it’s not only justified but necessary. When you know that a difficult situation can only be resolved by an act of swift, efficient, intense and quite colossal violence.
God…
Merrily was jerked back against the stone by a shuddering in a pocket of her jeans. She fumbled out the mobile.
There was no sound for a couple of seconds, wonky signal, then Fiona’s voice.
‘You’re there, aren’t you?’
‘Brinsop. At the church.’
‘Alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’d better tell you,’ Fiona said.
36
Merrily took the phone outside and stood by the grave of the Wordsworths’ faithful servant Jane Winder. Looking across to the possible moat, the clutch of trees on what might be an island, the viridian march of conifers up the flank of Credenhill.
‘There was a party,’ Fiona said. ‘A publication party. Not for Byron: one of the other better-known SAS authors, a friend of Sam’s, so although he didn’t like parties much he thought we should go. And there were a lot of people there that Sam hadn’t seen in years, so he was doing a fair bit of catching up. Are you still there?’
‘I’ll try and improve the signal.’
Merrily moved up to the high ground behind the church, overlooking lumped and tiered fields where a village might once have stood. The signal had moved up to two stars.
‘When was this?’
‘About a month after the book was burned. I hadn’t been feeling well that night, and Sam was talking to his old mates, so I slid away and sat down at a table on my own. And then Byron was there. Not Liz, just Byron. Sam was conspicuously avoiding him, but he came up to me. Very charming and attentive. Very smooth and elegant in his Heathcliff way. Got me a brandy and sat down. Said he didn’t know what he was doing here, he’d never particularly liked… the author we were supposed to be celebrating, and his book was rubbish.’
‘This was in London?’
‘No, it was a country-house hotel, in Buckinghamshire. We’d decided to stay there, so Sam could have a few drinks. All free – the publishers were spending a lot of money on this guy at the time. A lot more than had ever been spent on Byron, anyway, and he seemed to be taking it as a personal slight. But he was very nice to me. Coming out with all sorts of bullshit. How he wished he had a wife like me, who understood.’
‘Understood what?’
‘Oh, you know, what it was like leaving the Regiment. Having to slow down your metabolism… all this. His metabolism didn’t seem to have slowed at all. He was very intense, whatever he was talking about, very concentrated. Much, I suppose, as you’d imagine he’d be on some operation behind enemy lines. In fact, I remember thinking perhaps that was how he saw this party. Someone else’s wealthy publisher, someone else’s inferior book. As though he was at war with other writers who’d been in the Regiment. The underdog, because his was a kids’ book.’
‘This was before Harry Potter, I presume.’
‘Probably. There was a tremendous… frustration there. Pretty soon, he’s pouring out his troubles, and I’m trying to be sympathetic.’
‘Wife didn’t understand him?’
‘Wife didn’t understand anything. Wife was completely bovine. After a while, I was starting to find it repellent. Self-pity I can handle – it was the venom I didn’t like.’
‘Against Liz?’
‘Against life. Anyway… as I said, I really wasn’t feeling terribly well that night. Eventually I excused myself and went to the loo and then went out for a breath of air. In the grounds, which were extensive, though not remote like you get round here. You could always hear traffic. And he was there.’
‘Where?’
‘Emerging from the bushes, as though he was on an exercise. The exercise being… I was the exercise, I-God, I can’t believe I’m telling somebody about this with Sam lying in a mortuary. It makes me feel sick. I feel sick now, and I felt sick then.’
‘He was drunk?’
‘No, I don’t actually think he was. I don’t think he needed to be. I wish I could explain what I mean by that. It was as though the… the night had released something in him. Sorry, that sounds stupid.’
‘Not to me. Go on.’
‘When I said I wasn’t feeling well, he put an arm around me and said some air might help, and he walked me away from the terrace. Down across the lawns, away from the floodlit area. What could I do? He’d been a friend. He said he wanted to talk to me. Seriously. Very focused. He told me Sam was making a terrible mistake in going into the church, that he was throwing away his life and damaging his country, and if I didn’t want a life of misery I should stop him. Or leave him.’
‘Bloody hell, Fiona…’
