Midwinter of the Spirit

‘I do like women, you know,’ he said ruefully. ‘I’ve been very fond of women in me time.’

‘You want to protect us, right?’

‘I want to protect everybody. I’ll be sixty next time but one, and I’m starting to feel a sense of responsibility. I don’t want stuff letting in. A lot of bad energy’s crowding the portals. I want to keep all the doors locked and the chains up.’

‘Suddenly the big, strong, male chain’s acquired all these weak links?’

‘I’ve always been a supporter of women priests.’

‘Sounds like it.’

‘Just that it should’ve all been done years ago, that’s the trouble. Give the women time to build up a weight of tradition, some ballast, before the Millennial surge.’

‘And how long does it take to build up a weight of tradition? How long, in your estimation, before we’ll be ready to take on the weepers and the volatiles and the hitchhikers?’

‘Couple of centuries.’

‘Terrific.’

‘Look…’ Silver-rimmed night clouds were moving behind Huw. ‘You’re not a fundamentalist, not a charismatic or a happy-clappy. You’ve no visible axe to grind and I can see why he was drawn to you. You’re in many ways almost exactly the kind of person we need in the trenches.’

‘And I would keep a very low profile.’

‘With Mick Hunter wearing the pointy hat?’ Huw hacked off a laugh. ‘He’ll have you right on the front page of the Hereford Times brandishing a big cross. All right – joke. But you’ll inevitably draw attention. You’re very pretty, am I allowed to say that? And they’ll be right on to you, if they aren’t already. Little rat-eyes in the dark.’

Merrily instantly thought about Dermot Child, the organist in the monk’s robe. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘I think you do, Merrily.’

‘Satanists?’

‘Among other species of pond life.’

‘Isn’t all that a bit simplistic?’

‘Let’s pretend you never said that.’

A string of headlights floated down the valley a long way away. She thought of Jane back home in Ledwardine and felt isolated, cut off. How many of the other priests on the course would agree with Huw? All of them, probably. A night-breeze razored down from crags she could no longer see.

‘Listen,’ Huw said, ‘the ordination of women is indisputably the most titillating development in the Church since the Reformation. They’ll follow you home, they’ll breathe into your phone at night, break into your vestry and tamper with your gear. Crouch in the back pews and masturbate through your sermons.’

‘Yes.’

‘But that’s the tip of the iceberg.’

‘Rather than just a phase?’

‘Jesus,’ Huw said, ‘you know what I heard a woman say the other week? “We can handle it,” she said. “It’s no more hassle than nurses get, and women teachers.” A priest, this was, totally failing to take account of the… the overwhelming glamour the priesthood itself confers. It’s now a fact that ordained women are the prime target for every psychotic grinder of the dark satanic mills that ever sacrificed a chicken. And there are a lot of those buggers about.’

‘I’ve read the figures.’

‘Exaggerated – two million in Britain alone, that sort of level. I don’t think so. I’d guess no more than a thousand hard-liners and another five or six thousand misfit hangers-on. But, by God, that’s enough, in’t it? It’s a modern religion, see, masquerading as something ancient. I’ve not said much about it down there yet.’ Jerking a thumb towards the chapel. ‘I like to save it for the end of the course, on account of some priests find it harder to take seriously than spooks.’

A blur of white: an early barn owl sailing over on cue.

Merrily said, ‘What do you mean by a modern religion?’

‘Well, not in principle, though it got a hell of a boost in the eighties. All that worship of money and sex and wordly success – Lucifer as patron saint of greedy, self-serving bastards, the Lord of this World. Goes back to some of the old Gnostic teachings: God’s in His Heaven, while the other feller runs things down here.’

‘You can’t imagine people actually believing that.’

‘Why not? If you want to get on in the world, you have to join the winning team. That’s not evil, it’s pragmatic. It’s being levelheaded, recognizing the set-up. A jungle, every man for himself, that’s the manifesto. That’s the spin. Got this amazing charge in the eighties. Took off faster than mobile phones.’

‘Which was when you—?’

He lifted a hand. ‘I only talk about me when I’m drunk, and I don’t like to get drunk any more.’

She stood up and walked, with determination, around to his side of the stones. ‘Why are you here, really, Huw? I mean out here in the sticks. Are you in hiding?’

‘Eh?’

‘I just don’t go for all that Land of my Fathers bullshit. Something happened to you in Sheffield and you felt you couldn’t—’

‘Cut it any more?’

‘I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.’

She was sorry. She wished she could see his eyes, but his face was in deep shadow.

‘Aye, well, it wasn’t Sheffield,’ Huw said.

‘You don’t have to—’

‘I won’t. I’m just saying it wasn’t Sheffield. I just… Look, don’t try and turn this round, Merrily. You should consider your situation. You’re on your own, your daughter won’t be around much longer—’

‘And I can’t possibly hold myself together without a man.’

Huw stood up, the rising moon blooming on his left shoulder. ‘This is not just wankers in the back pews, you know.’

She looked at him. ‘I’ve encountered evil.’

‘Face to face? Hearing it call your name? And your mother’s name, and your daughter’s name? Feeling it all over you like some viscous, stinking—’

He turned away, shaking his head, shambled back on to the track towards the chapel.

‘Look, those blokes down there – solid, stoical, middle-aged priests: I can tell you four of them won’t go through with it. Out of the rest, there’ll be one broken marriage and a nervous breakdown. Are you listening, Merrily?’

‘Yes!’

She stumbled after him, and he shouted back over his shoulder, ‘Woman exorcist? Female guardian of the portals? You might as well just paint a great big bullseye between your tits.’

When they got back, the chapel was in near-darkness, only an unsteady line of light under the door of the stone room.

Inside, the oil lamp which normally hung in the passage now stood on Huw’s desk, next to the TV.

‘Power’s gone,’ someone said. They were all standing around in the lamplight looking guilty like small boys. There was a smell of burning.

‘Ah, Huw, ah…’ The Rev. Charles Headland flicked at the letter-box mouth of the VCR. ‘Some of us wanted to have another look at that lady. Couldn’t make up our minds. Dodgy items, poltergeists.’

‘It was mainly me,’ said Barry Ambrose, the worried vicar from Wiltshire. ‘I half-believed her, but I think I’d have wanted to go back and talk to her again.’

‘Yes.’ Huw closed the door of the room. ‘That was what they did. It was a rector in Northampton. He felt bad about them recording the first interview on tape for the likes of us, and just giving her a token prayer, so he went