The Lamp of the Wicked

you, if anybody asks. I don’t think I want it back.’ She packed up the box and put the children’s Bible on top before closing the flaps. She looked up at him. ‘Your girlfriend – she’s a priest, isn’t she?’

Lol nodded.

‘Mumford told me,’ Cola said. ‘The copper.’

‘That’s why you got these out, isn’t it?’ Lol said.

Cola nodded. ‘Tell you what, why don’t you take the lot? She’ll know what do with them.’ She tried for a wry smile, which soon faded. ‘I’ll hang on to the kids’ Bible.’

40 Big Shoes

THE AIR IN Ledwardine was damp and chilly, and Jane told Jenny Box that she felt old, felt like she’d been alive for ever and knew everything the world had to tell her, and it all came to nothing. All you needed to know was that everybody had a banal personal agenda and, after a short-lived glow, everything faded into grey disillusion and the realization that anybody – anybody – given the circumstances, would shaft you, to attain something really trivial. And, as there was no God to intervene on behalf of justice and balance, you just went through life trying to avoid getting shafted. And that was it – you went through life. That was it. Nothing. Nothing but going through life.

As soon as it was out, gasped into the misty village night, Jane couldn’t believe she’d said it. Especially to Jenny Box, this superficial, pseudo-spiritual business person, this daytime-TV phoney. She felt like one of the stupid punters on Jerry Springer or Livetime, coughing up great gouts of angst like phlegm for people to say, Oh how disgusting, thank God I’m not like that.

But Jenny Box didn’t react as expected. Didn’t say this was a stupid attitude for someone so young, at the dawn of everything, on the threshold of the great adventure, and all that crap.

‘It can be a bad time,’ Jenny said. ‘When I was your age, most of the time I was in a state of confusion and terror. I’d shut myself in my room – whichever anonymous room it happened to be – and I’d shiver and cry and take pills sometimes. And then, at some strategic point, a kind man would come along and he’d go, “There, there, I’ll look after you, you’re with me now, and everything’s going to be all right”.’

‘This was when you were modelling?’ They were standing just under the fat oak pillars of the market hall, which inhabited the cobbles like some giant, fossilized crustacean.

‘I left home after an unhappy experience with the priest, Father Colm. I told your mother it was a friend of mine he’d had his auld hands all over, but I don’t suppose she was fooled.’

‘Oh.’ Mum hadn’t mentioned this.

‘The awesome injustice of it was that, although they never talked about it and they still don’t, my family and the whole damn community held me responsible for the downfall of a Good Man.’

That figured, thinking back to what Eirion had gleaned from the Net: Jenny Driscoll brought up in a rigid, rural Catholic community, and then ‘escaping’ into the heartless, soulless media world of a foreign country. Looked like a girl who bruised easily.

Jenny said, ‘Modelling. Yes, you can model for passing fashions or you can model for old, old perversions. Oh, I was a model, all right. I was styled for abuse.’

Jane looked at the pale face under the white scarf, lustred by the haloes of the fake gaslamps. Romantic in a besmirched way.

‘Some women are, you know – quite literally. This was the heartless eighties, and I became the image that fuelled the fantasies of thousands of men of a certain sort. A woman with the frailty of a child doll. Turn her upside down and listen to her cry – mama, mama – and then make it better. And they do make it better for a while. But when you stop crying, it isn’t long before they start to miss it, and they have to make you cry again and again. And they don’t realize the crying mechanism’s all worn out, and that’s how the doll gets broken. Does this shock you at all, Jane?’

‘Well, I…’

‘Ah, but you’re a modern girl. You’ve heard it all before.’

‘Maybe I just haven’t thought about it,’ Jane admitted. ‘Not really. Like, you’re bombarded from all sides with statistics and reports and people opening their hearts, and there’s just so much of it that it all becomes a mush. You don’t really hear it any more.’

‘No. Well, the thing I’m trying to explain – the time’s come when I have to explain it – is how I came to… fancy your mother. I didn’t think I’d be explaining it to you, but no matter, you’re the one that’s here.’

‘Oh,’ Jane said, with a tightening of the gut.

They walked through the deserted night-time village, through the centuries from cobbles to tarmac, down Church Street where Lucy Devenish, the folklorist, had lived in a black and white cottage and inspired Jane in all kinds of ways before dying. And then down towards the modern bungalow where Gomer Parry lived, alone now since Minnie had died, alone at work without Nev and without even Gwynneth and Muriel, the diggers.

Ledwardine itself remained unhurt by any of it, an organism, as Mum liked to call it, with the joins between the ancient and the new glossed over in black and white paint, and the warm lamps in the windows melting their bits of night. In many ways, it was the ultimate place to live. A nest.

But that wasn’t why Jenny Box had come. That was, like she’d told Mum, because of the angel. And also, it seemed, exactly as Gareth Box had said, because of the angel that was Mum. And yet it all sounded different, as Jenny Box talked about men and women and the Church.

‘… All the men who directed the religions of the world, waged the holy wars – leaving the women at home because the women weren’t strong enough to fight or strident enough to preach. Well, thank God for that, because during the time they were left behind, with only the small, domestic things to exercise their minds, women were learning to look inwards. To journey inside themselves and reach the ocean of the spirit.’

Jane struggled with this. It wasn’t feminism as she knew it.

‘We find the strength inside ourselves,’ Jenny said, ‘and that’s the only true strength. All the rest is violence.’

She’d fled the Church because it had been dominated, for her, by male violence, and she’d taken refuge in the New Age – all those hazy places Jane had been – because it was all basically Goddess-dominated. And that was how Vestalia had come about.

‘We mind the hearth, is what we do, the altar of the home. It’s men, you see, who despoiled the old, simple churches, so you have areas like the Bull Chapel in the parish church here, with the tombs of brutal men and their effigies reflecting material wealth and power. I’d surely take a jackhammer to that auld divil now and throw the pieces in the river.’

‘Yes,’ said Jane, who’d often felt the same about the sandstone effigy in the Bull Chapel, with its eyes fully open and its arrogant little smile.

But, while bemoaning the way it had been dragged into the male world of warfare and brutality, Jenny had come to miss the Church, the weight of it, the tradition, the sometimes pure beauty of it. And then something happened to beckon her back.

‘One day, I was in North Wales, alone. I’d had… well, call it nervous exhaustion, and I’d been lent a cottage, to disappear there for a while. And this day I’d walked for hours on my own, trying to cool my head, and it started raining, and I came upon this wee church, not far from the sea, and it was open, and so I went in to shelter. ’Twas very plain – no stained glass, no statues, no tombs, no carvings. The simplicity, that was a big statement in itself, a huge statement. And for me it was as if I was coming home again, you know? I was enfolded by it. I think your mother would understand.’

‘She’s been there. Well, not there, but like… somewhere similar.’

Yeah, a similar church, on a similarly desperate day, bringing away with her what she’d talked of as the vision of blue and gold, the lamplit path – less a calling than a beckoning whisper at a time of personal crisis, and the one aspect of Mum’s religion that Jane had always understood.

But had Mum told Jenny Box about the experience? And had Jenny Box now absorbed it into her own