The Lamp of the Wicked

Not one of Lol’s favourite phrases. Meant to be was a trap.

‘I’m gonna ask you straight out,’ Sam said, ‘I like to be direct. If there’s any way at all that you could find the time to turn this poem into a song – well, I don’t have the money to pay you, but you could keep the song, if you liked the idea. And the cause is good. It’s a world issue and a big one. It’s what my life’s been building towards.’ Sam paused. ‘You still there, boy? You hung up on me yet?’

When Eirion called, Jane was lying on her bed with Ethel the cat and a paperback. As soon as she heard his voice, she thrust the book under the pillow, as if he could see it down the line.

Eirion said, ‘I’m afraid I have to tell you she seems genuine, Jane. There is like no dirt at all on Jenny Driscoll – not on the Net anyway, and I searched hard. In fact, what I’ve read I rather like.’

Jane thought that, with this unnatural thing he was developing for once-good-looking old ladies, his opinion was hardly to be trusted, but she didn’t say anything.

‘Do you want to know now?’ Eirion said. ‘Or shall I print some of it out and fax it over or something?’

‘Can you give it to me potted? I’ll stop you if anything sounds interesting.’

OK.’ Eirion cleared his throat and started to enunciate like it was the voice-over on a TV biog. ‘She was born in County Wicklow into a respectable lower-middle-class family. Father was the manager of a small soft-drinks business. As a teenager, Jenny apparently got itchy feet and sent her picture to a model agency with an office in Dublin. It turned out she had the kind of looks that appealed at the time, and she wound up in London within a year. Someone said she “looked like a girl who bruised easily”. Evidently a famous quote. This was the post-punk New Romantic era, apparently. Terrible clothes, terrible music. And this element of sadomasochism.’

‘Mum was there – I’ve seen the pictures. She was briefly into Goth.’

‘Yes,’ Eirion said thoughtfully, ‘I know.’

‘Lewis…’ Jane gave it serious menace. ‘Kill that fantasy right now.’

Eirion chuckled.

‘OK, so New Romantic.’ Jane knew some of this, but there might be something new.

‘But romantic in a kind of besmirched way,’ Eirion said. ‘Because she looked so vulnerable, they were putting her into these Vivienne Westwood type of things, so that she came across like some kind of teenage streetwalker. Smudged lip gloss and mascara with dribbles, like she’d been crying. Tarnished before her time, you know? It was all a little bit pervy, I suspect.’

‘I’m so glad you recognize it.’

‘She seems to have recognized it, anyway,’ Eirion said. ‘She suddenly packed in modelling at the height of her career, washed off all the make-up and got a job in children’s television, on the production side.’

‘How saintly.’

‘Where she was soon found to have an aptitude for presenting.’

‘What do you know?’

‘And kids liked her because she still had this faintly risque ‘reputation, so in no time she’s presenting this cult teenage show – she was out of her teens by then, but she didn’t look it. And she eventually became quite popular with parents and older people because there was obviously a genuinely nice person underneath. And, as she got older, she resurfaced, presenting these lifestyle kind of shows – this is the mid- to late nineties, when she was also offered a column on one of the papers – could’ve been the Mail or the Express, I forget, but that was how she met her husband, Gareth Box. A journalist.’

‘Wrote the column for her?’

‘Do you have to be disparaging all the time?’ Eirion said. ‘Box was an assistant editor in charge of features or something but, since she was making so much more money than him, he seems to have packed that in soon after they got married, to manage her career. Maybe she was being exploited.’

‘Hmm,’ Jane said sceptically.

‘Anyway, this was when private TV production was really taking off, and Jenny and her husband came a long way very rapidly and started creating these home make-over type of programmes, with heavy emphasis on feng shui – there was a series for Channel Four which I remember seeing a couple of and it was actually pretty good. And that was when they set up this shop called Vestalia, which very rapidly became a chain and seems to be worth… well, a lot of money.’

‘Never put a foot wrong, then.’

‘But then she backed out of the spotlight.’

‘Or she saw when the spotlight was about to move on. Or they were making so much money that she didn’t need all that bullshit any more.’

‘There was some speculation at this time that the marriage was cracking up,’ Eirion said, ‘although she was never linked with anyone else.’

‘Staying together for the sake of the business?’

‘I don’t know, Jane. They were worth quite a lot by then, because Vestalia was into major cities, and also changing direction. One article I found, from the Telegraph, at the end of last year, was about how she was increasingly into personal development and meditation and spirituality, and he wasn’t particularly, but he went along with it. And it was then that the shops started to really specialize in creating a spiritual home environment. They’d stopped using the phrase feng shui, though, because that was seen as a passing fad.’

‘This is quite good, actually,’ Jane said. ‘We’re getting closer.’

In fact, this was moving nicely in the direction of home chapels.

She slid the paperback book out from under the pillow. It was called Working with Angels, Fairies and Nature Spirits. About a year ago – OK, she would admit this – she’d been finding it seriously inspirational, entirely sensible in its evocation of a complex world with all these different layers of existence, all these forces and incorporeal intelligences you could call on to improve and focus your own life.

Now, however, as a more balanced person, she was simply consulting the book to establish where the Box woman was coming from. Obviously, it helped that not too long ago Jane herself had been just as loopy, but there was method in Jenny’s particular madness; her so-called spiritual development always seemed to run parallel with an increase in material wealth.

The bottom line: this didn’t sound like a woman who gave away eighty grand without some underlying purpose unconnected with her immortal soul.

‘You actually did OK here, Irene.’

‘How very kind,’ Eirion said.

‘No, really, I mean… thanks.’

Maybe she and Eirion, approaching this from different directions – his investigative skills, her background esoteric knowledge – could nail the duplicitous bitch to the wall before Mum got stitched up.

‘What do you do now? How do you respond to this?’ Prof Levin advanced on Lol across the studio floor. ‘What you do now, Laurence, is not respond. That is, you decline… rapido. Because the one thing you, of all people, do not need at this stage is to get in with crazies. So what you do is you call him back and you put it very politely and very firmly. You don’t ask any more questions, you resist all his attempts to make you read the lyric, and you never ever write a song or the merest line of a song that reflects this proposed theme in any way.’

‘Except…’ Lol backed up against the glass-sided recording booth, ‘I kind of—’

‘You then make sure to avoid having dealings of any kind with this person, ever again.’

‘Only I kind of like him,’ Lol said.

‘Jesus.’ Prof feigned an intention to put his foot through the golden weave fronting the Guild Acoustic amp. ‘Of course you liked him. These people, they’re oh so very nice and humble and they tell you you’re Lennon and Dylan and Paul Simon all rolled into one, and they would consider it an honour to, in some small way, serve your art. Pah! Two years later, five, ten… whenever it seems like you’re finally doing OK for yourself, along comes the exceedingly unfriendly letter from their lawyer.’

‘He actually dealt with that,’ Lol said. ‘He said he was prepared to sign the whole thing over to me. Draw up