Midwinter of the Spirit

The city swirled around her in the fog, undefined. She mustn’t look back at the Cathedral. It was no part of her life now. She should go back to her own parish and deal with the church break-in. Head Ted Clowes off at the pass. At Ledwardine – her home.

Or not?

Sweat sprang out on her forehead. She felt insubstantial, worthless. She had no home, no lover, no spiritual adviser, no…

Daughter?

Failed her. Too bound up in your own conceits. Sending her into the arms of New Age occult freaks, a reaction to living with a…

Pious bitch?

Her dead husband Sean had been the first to call her that. After a day quite like this, a headachy day, the desperate day when she’d found out just how bent he was, and screamed at him for his duplicity and his greed, and he’d screamed back: I was doing it for you, you pious bitch.

She hated that word. Don’t ever be pious. Smoke, curse, never be afraid to say Jesus Christ! in fury or astonishment – at least it keeps the name in circulation. Strive to be a good person, a good priest, never a pious priest.

Once, up in Liverpool, she’d conducted a youth service wearing a binliner instead of a cassock. It was half a generation too late; some of the kids were appalled, others sneered. Not so easy not being pious.

Merrily found herself back on the green, watching the Cathedral placidly swallowing the coach party. The fog was lifting, but the sky behind it was darkening. She had no idea which way to go next.

Suppose she’d backed away from the lamplit path and supported Sean, had said, Let’s fight this together? Would he have made the effort for her, found some fresh, uncorrupted friends, a new but much older secretary? Would he, in the end, have survived? Might she have saved his life by not following the Path of the Pious Bitch into the arms of God?

She stood at the barrier preventing cars turning into Church Street. She was panting, thoughts racing again. Wasn’t it true that having women in the priesthood was creating a new divide between the sexes – because men could love both God and their wives, but no truly heterosexual woman could love both God and a man with sufficient intensity to make both relationships potent? Was it all a sham? Was it true that all she was searching for in God were those qualities lacking in ordinary men? Or, at least, in Sean.

Oh Christ. Merrily flattened herself against a brick wall facing the side of the Cathedral. The headache had gone; she wished it was back, she wanted pain. Fumbling at her dogcollar, she took it off and put it in her bag. A cold breeze seemed to leap immediately to her throat, like a stab of admonishment.

She zipped up her coat, holding its collar together, turned her back on the Cathedral and walked quickly into Church Street.

Lol saw Merrily from his window, through the drifting fog: gliding almost drunkenly along the street, peering unseeingly into shop windows newly edged with Christmas glitter.

He ran downstairs, past the bike, past Nico’s sepulchral drone and the very interested gaze of Big Viv.

‘Merrily?’ Close up, she seemed limp, drained.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Hi.’ And he was shocked because she looked as vague as Moon had often been, but that was just him, wasn’t it – his paranoia?

But paranoia hadn’t created the shadows and creases, the dark hair all mussed, dark eyes moist, make-up escaping.

He looked around. Not the flat now – it had been too awkward there the other night, as if foreshadowed by the death of Moon.

She let him steer her into the corner cafe where he and Jane had eaten chocolate fudge cake.

There was no one else in the back room. A brown pot of tea between them. On the wall above them was a framed Cezanne poster – baked furrowed earth under a heat haze.

The letter lay folded on the table, held down by the sugar bowl, revealing only the words ‘known that such events attract members of Occult Groups in search of converts’.

‘But surely,’ he said, ‘they mainly just attract ordinary people who read their daily horoscopes. It doesn’t mean she’s sacrificing babies.’

But he thought of seeing Jane and the other girl coming out of Pod’s last night, long after it was closed. And Jane pretending, for the first time ever, not to have seen him.

‘If this was London,’ she said, ‘I could get away with it. Or if Jane was grown-up and living somewhere else. If she’d even been up-front about it, I could have—’

‘Merrily, it means nothing. I can’t believe you’ve just quit because of this. It’s the Bishop, isn’t it?’

‘Sorry?’

‘He made another move on you, right?’

‘No.’ She smiled. ‘He’s been… fine. And anyway I might have taken that the wrong way: late at night, very tired. No, I’m just… paranoid.’ She held up her half-smoked cigarette as though using it as a measure of something. ‘Also I have filthy habits and a deep reservoir of self-pity.’

He nodded at the cigarette. ‘What are the others, then?’

Merrily tipped it into the ashtray. He saw she was blushing. She had no filthy habits.

‘Just… tell me to pull myself together, OK?’

‘I like you being untogether. It makes me feel responsible and kind of protective – sort of like a real bloke.’

She smiled.

‘So what are you going to do now?’

‘Go back to my flock and try to be a good little shepherd. The Deliverance ministry was a wrong move. I thought it was something you could pick up as you went along. I didn’t realize… I’m a fraud, Lol. I don’t know what I’m doing, let too many people down. I even let you down. I said I’d go and see your friend, Moon…’ She looked vague. ‘Was that yesterday?’

‘Mmm.’

‘I mean, I could still see her. I’m still a minister, of sorts.’

‘She’s not there now,’ he said too quietly.

‘Lol?’ She looked directly at him for the first time since sitting down at the table.

‘She died.’

Her face froze up behind the smoke.

‘No!’ He put up his hands. ‘She was dead long before you could’ve got there. There was nothing you could have done.’

And he told her about it: about the Iron Age sword… about the old newspaper report… why Denny had concealed the truth – why Denny said he’d concealed the truth… why Dick thought they should let it lie.

She kept shaking her head, lips parted. He was relieved at the way outrage had lifted her again.

‘Lol, I’ve never heard anything so… There is something deeply, deeply wrong here, don’t you think?’

‘But what can you do about it? We can’t bring her back. And we can’t find out what was in her mind.’

‘What about this book she was supposed to be writing?’

‘Supposed to be, but I don’t think she’d written a word. But if there is anything lying around, Denny will find it. And if it says anything he doesn’t like, he’ll destroy it without telling anyone.’

‘Will you be called as a witness at the inquest?’

‘I expect so. I was the first to… the first to enter the bathroom.’

‘And what will you say?’

‘I’ll just answer their questions. That should cover about half of the truth.’

‘And the rest of it can’t be the truth, because it has no rationality.’ She looked down into her cup as if there might be a message for her in the tea-leaves. ‘I’m so sorry, Lol.’

The point at which people say, Ah well, one of those things. Except this wasn’t.

After a while, she said, ‘What if all your working life is concerned with things that three-quarters of the