The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

he could only hear the sobs as echoes.’

At this stage, Lew had said, he was close to dumping his ministry, having been offered a teaching and community post back in Brooklyn. He’d had his letter of acceptance in his pocket, ready to post, when the mother- in-law he’d never met had arrived without warning at the rectory and he’d finally learned the truth about his dead wife’s relationship with her father.

‘Oh God,’ Sophie said irritably.

‘Intellectual sparks between a father and his brilliant daughter. Her mind excited him — Longman used to say that, apparently. When she was at Oxford, he’d visit her at weekends.’

Sophie snorted.

‘Jeavons said he’d often suspected there might have been someone else, someone she still thought about. Remembering the “unsuitable boyfriend”. Never imagining how unsuitable the boyfriend might actually have been.’

‘It’s more common than we might imagine among the so-called educated classes,’ Sophie said. ‘They encourage their children to be “liberal-minded”. Makes me sick.’

Merrily shook out a cigarette. ‘The reason Catherine’s mother had come to see him was that she also was experiencing problems. Maybe it was guilt at having walked away, or at her own resentment of Catherine. Understandable. It’s often hard to draw a line between mental unrest and… and the other thing. Lew brought in another minister, a friend, to bless the vicarage, sprinkle holy water around in the room where Catherine had slept. Then they held a Requiem Eucharist for Catherine, in the presence of her mother. Which, in normal circumstances, you might expect to resolve it.’

‘It didn’t?’

‘Got worse. He didn’t go into details. But he gave back word on the Brooklyn job and just spent a lot of time praying for an answer. Also, putting himself through a kind of ritual scourging — sleeping in the bedroom that Catherine had switched to, because he felt it was… their room, you know?’

‘The father?’

‘Jeavons felt that the fact that she’d been there, at the hospice, when the old man died, even if he wasn’t conscious — at least, she thought he wasn’t conscious — that this might have… created an opening. Maybe something had been reclaimed, something renewed. Her father had wanted her back with him. You know?’

Sophie’s face was hollowed behind the lamp. ‘That’s horrible, Merrily. Sick.’

‘Lew didn’t know what to do, or who to turn to for advice. Just kept on returning to that bedroom every night, with his Bible, and whenever he awoke — which was several times every night — he’d pray for help. He maintains that to heal we often have to suffer. A priest must go on suffering, without complaint, until something turns around. And you don’t have to look very far into the New Testament for his sources, do you?’

Sophie looked momentarily anxious and then stern. ‘I do tend to wonder if you really need this, Merrily.’

‘Tell a woman about the need for suffering and you touch a very deep seam. Anyway, it came to Lew one night that there should be a Requiem for this person he’d grown to hate: H.F.H. Longman. So… Lew Jeavons, his mother-in-law, his Deliverance friend and two other colleagues gathered in the bedroom. Lew doing the honours. Part of the suffering.’ Merrily paused.

‘And?’ Sophie said.

‘He told me he went to bed that night for the last time in that room. And he awoke in the night, as he always did, but this time he didn’t feel the need to pray. He simply turned over and… and the other side of the bed was warm. He got out of bed, pulled up the sheets and went back to their old room.’

Sophie leaned forward into the lamplight. Merrily felt the heat of her own tears and was irritated somehow.

‘He gave me a copy of a book called Healing the Family Tree by Kenneth McAll, who was a priest and a doctor. I knew about it, never read it. It argues that your mental and physical health is often conditioned by your ancestors. They fuck you up, your mum and dad, and their mums and dads and so on.’

‘Genetics.’

Merrily shook her head. ‘Maybe related — I’m no scientist. Jeavons spent about three years researching all this, here and abroad. Visiting societies where the placating of the ancestors is still considered all-important. Which was controversial, as some of them were more or less pagan.’

‘He thinks his wife was in some way destroyed by her father from beyond the grave?’

‘Lew thinks if he’d known what he was looking for, if the so-called maladjusted essence had been dealt with earlier, Catherine might still be alive. Like so much of this job, it’s hard to separate the spiritual from the psychological. He also talked about this tennis player, Kim Redmond, who was supposed to have been cured of MS. Jeavons said he spent a lot of time talking to Kim, and it came out that the kid’s father and his grandfather were both doctors. And the grandad was furious when Kim walked out of medical school with his tennis racquet — accusing him of betraying the family and his obligations to the sick.’

‘As if medicine was an ancestral obligation?’ Sophie said. ‘A tribal thing?’

‘Mmm. During Kim’s first Wimbledon, grandad dies. By the end of the week, just after the funeral, the kid’s having nightmares, beginning to feel his body is no longer his to control. His game’s shot to pieces, the doctors eventually start to suspect the worst. Jeavons’s solution was a serious Requiem for the old man, conducted at the church where the funeral had been held.’

‘And it obviously worked.’ Sophie followed tennis.

‘Or something did. The docs said it was probably an initial misdiagnosis. Which they would, wouldn’t they? Similarly, you could say that the Requiem — the emotional weight of this ancient, solemn ritual — had an immediate psychological effect on Kim, removing the burden of guilt and related symptoms. Anyway, Jeavons says we generally do half a job.’

‘Who?’

‘Us. Deliverance. Because most of us don’t take into consideration the true psychic weight of the family or tribe. And because we’re only concerned about the dead when they’re conspicuously haunting us. Jeavons’s view is that the dead always haunt us, whether we’re aware of it or not.’

Sophie sat up. ‘That’s untenable. He’s virtually saying every one needs deliverance.’

‘To a degree.’

‘And then, in no time at all you’ve become like that man Ellis, exorcizing everything from the demon drink to the demon—’

‘Tobacco,’ Merrily said. ‘Not as bad as Ellis, maybe, but it’s… perplexing.’

‘It’s the quickest way to a nervous breakdown, if you ask me,’ Sophie said. ‘My advice, for what it’s worth, is to avoid this man and all he stands for.’

‘He’s a very influential voice in Deliverance worldwide. He showed me his computer files. He’s in contact with more than three hundred priests, in the US, Canada, Africa, Australia… all submitting records of their work, building up this huge database on the healing of the dead. There are people out there who’ve been trying to heal… I dunno, Hitler?’

‘Stop.’ Sophie pointed at her, very calm, very stern. ‘Stop now. Don’t go near that man again, Merrily. Just don’t.’

11 Welshies

The smoky dusk was settling over Stanner Rocks when Gomer Parry picked Jane up in his truck, and she wondered if he could see some kind of glow coming off her.

‘Cold ole night, Janey. Gonner have at least one big snow before Christmas, I’d say.’ Gomer’s teeth were clenched like a monkey wrench on his ciggy.

With Antony Largo as the only guest, Amber and Ben didn’t need Jane to stay over, so she’d phoned Gomer and arranged for a lift home. But before she left, Antony had cornered her, and put this proposition to her and… it