The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

woman in Hereford whose grandchild had cerebral palsy. Nobody she knew. The letter concluding: I said to my husband that the doctors were hopeless, so we ought to give the Church a last chance.

‘Last chance?’ Lol said. ‘Save my child or else?’

‘Show us some action, or you’re finished. And the point is, they can finish us. It’s like if you do a gig and only two people turn up… no more gigs. And gigs are what the Church is about. Hence Alpha, all the dynamic, youth-oriented stuff. A good gig. You gotta do a good gig.’

‘But isn’t that what you’re doing on Sunday nights?’

‘Well, I thought so. Only it wasn’t meant to be a healing gig. It was about, I dunno, helping people develop an inner life? But you discover that most people don’t want an inner life. They just want a good outer life, and you need to be fit and healthy for that, and if the Church can take away your ailments, hey, that’s cool. Magic. Like, if you look at the medieval Church, all those pilgrimages to the holy shrines with sick relatives on stretchers, hundreds of amazing cures attributed to St Thomas of Hereford. The Church works magic, so the Church becomes rich and influential.’

‘You’re still identifying more with Celtic hermits in caves?’

‘Maybe they were even worse. Nothing to be responsible for.’ Merrily’s head sank down into the pillow. ‘Healing’s about taking responsibility. How can you take responsibility for something that—?’

‘That you can’t totally believe is going to happen?’

‘God help me.’

‘What about this bloke?’

‘It can happen.’ She rolled away. ‘I mean, it can.’ She was sweating. ‘Jesus, am I ever going to be big enough for this job?’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Canon Jeavons. Llewellyn Jeavons. Llewellyn with two Ls, Canon with two Ns.’

‘As in loose?’

‘That’s what he said on the phone. He jokes around a lot.’

‘He doesn’t have a problem with it, then.’

‘Evidently not.’ She turned back to face Lol. ‘But then he’s a bloke.’

‘Crass and insensitive?’

‘Confident of his tradition.’

Lol said, ‘What’s basically wrong with this idea of a healing group? Responsibility shared with Catholics and Methodists and… whoever.’

‘Pentecostalists?’

Lol sighed. ‘If you must.’ His parents had been out on that fevered frontier, accusing him of amplifying the Devil’s music, then swapping his picture on the mantelpiece for one of Jesus Christ. This had been one of the principal milestones on the road to Victoria Ward and the syringe-wielding Dr Gascoigne, immortalized in the creepy, cathartic ‘Heavy Medication Day’, on the new album.

‘It’s probably the best solution,’ Merrily said. ‘But it’s got to be more than healing. I don’t want to run an all-singing, all-dancing medicine show.’

‘Sometimes healing’s a by-product. Like when you’re in love, you feel healthier.’

‘That’s a good point. Holistic.’

She felt better. More complete. It should always be like this. Yesterday, she’d thought it could be; she hadn’t told him why, and there didn’t seem much point now.

However, later, lying spooned on the rim of sleep, she heard Lol’s voice: hesitant, feeling his breath warm on her ear in the darkness.

‘There’s a house. In Ledwardine.’

A hollow moment.

‘For sale.’ Lol said.

‘Oh.’

‘A small, terraced house in Church Street. Did you know?’

‘Lucy’s house,’ she said. ‘No, I didn’t know, not until… it was in yesterday’s Hereford Times.’

‘And the week before’s. I found it while I was making a fire with the paper. It kind of leapt up at me.’

‘I only saw it yesterday. You’d think someone would have…’

But why should anyone have told her about it? For the past year, it had just been a weekend cottage for two solicitors from Luton. They never came to church; she’d met them, once, briefly. It was a small investment; they didn’t care whose house it had been, and because they weren’t there during the week no estate agent’s sign had gone up.

‘I’m never going to be a star,’ Lol said, ‘but it looks like I might make a living out of it for a while. Enough to cobble together a deposit. If I do the tour and the album sells a few. Can’t stay here indefinitely, Prof needs the space. Every time somebody comes in to record, I’m back in the loft over the studio. It’s not really convenient for anybody.’

‘Did you ring them up about it — the agents?’

‘I thought I’d better talk to you first.’

Lol was rebuilding foundations. He’d faced an audience again after many years, some of them spent on psychiatric wards. Circumstances had meant she hadn’t been there for him when the unforgiving lights came up; she never again wanted him to feel alone.

‘Lol…’ Her throat was dry. ‘It’s gone. It’s sold.’

‘The house?’

‘I’m so sorry. I rang the agents this morning.’

A cloudy silence. Across the room, the lights of Malvern blurred, and she realized that her eyes had filled with tears.

Lol said, ‘You rang the agents?’

‘Well, I… It just seemed like the answer to the problem. Separate houses, just two minutes’ walk away. I thought it must be meant. I thought how delighted Lucy Devenish would have been to have you living there. And I thought that if you couldn’t raise the deposit, maybe we could somehow do it jointly.’

‘You’d do that?’

‘Of course.’

Lol expelled a long breath and put both his arms around her.

Christ. She closed her eyes; the last thing she wanted was for him to feel grateful.

‘But it’s gone,’ she said.

Gone. In the paper for a whole week, and we never saw it. And then we both did, too late. Like it wasn’t meant to happen at all, and the point was being underlined for us.

‘It’s become a very desirable place, Ledwardine,’ Merrily said. She shivered slightly, unaccountably, in his arms. A goose walking over her grave.

For a time — just around the time he was realizing he wasn’t never going to make it as a rock star, or even out of farming — Danny Thomas had been into some serious drinking. Never quite an alky, mind, but his name was written in big, dripping letters on the walls of half a dozen pubs in Kington and the Radnor Valley.

It ended when he got banned for a year. Greta wasn’t up for ferrying him to and from the half-dozen pubs, so that was it: Danny stayed home. Cheaper than the Betty Ford clinic, and the music was better.

And it was during this period of near-abstinence that he’d come to realize that what he needed more than the booze was crowds sometimes — loud, mindless crowds. So when he’d got his licence back he’d rationed himself to two nights a week and made sure he didn’t go out until half an hour before closing time, when the pubs was packed and so many folks was pissed it was almost contagious.

Which was how come Danny missed all the action tonight, down at the Eagle in New Radnor, when Sebbie Three Farms had to be escorted to his Range Rover.

They was all still talking about it when Danny arrived at twenty past ten. All familiar faces in here tonight, from Gwilym Bufton, the feed dealer, ole Joe Cadwallader, from Harpton, young Robin Thorogood, the American