The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

Just a child then — two years ago, incredibly, she’d been just a child. Now she was a working woman with a provisional driving licence. And in a relationship — was this really the new going out with someone? Sometimes it felt that while Jane and Eirion were in a relationship she and Lol were just going out. Even though they never did.

Merrily felt her age like a grey blanket around her shoulders. Standing in the doorway, looking up at the walls, an enormous colour chart for emulsion paint. Even on a drab day, the Mondrian Walls — currently, giant slabs of crimson, cobalt blue and chrome yellow — were startling enough to have the Listed Buildings Department chasing an injunction, if they ever found out.

Merrily went in. This visit was long overdue. It wasn’t that Jane had been particularly secretive or moody or preoccupied, or anything like that. In fact, after her long-dark-night-of-the-soul period during the autumn, she’d been unusually bright and animated.

Which had seemed to be down to the weekend job — the sense of grown-up independence it would be giving her… and more. Merrily remembered working Saturdays, at sixteen, in a small, indy record shop, putting on her black and purple Goth make-up like a uniform. Getting paid to be cool.

Then the record shop had closed down, the way they did, and she’d found a back-room job in an old- fashioned department store, where the merest smear of Goth and you were out. Welcome to the world of work.

What she couldn’t quite understand was what was so long-term cool about washing up and waiting tables in a cold, rundown, under-financed country-house hotel run by a redundant TV executive with no catering experience and a young Delia Smith who should have known better. Naturally, she’d been over to Stanner and met them both — this being Jane’s first weekend job, it was important to check it out — and Amber and Ben Foley had seemed pleasant and well-intentioned. And almost certainly doomed.

The bed was made, and very neatly. This was the bed to which Jane had brought Eirion last summer — Eirion blurting it out to Merrily the very next day, after she’d accused him of being a nice guy. No, I’m not — I slept with your daughter.

Merrily smiled: innocents, really, both of them.

This afternoon, under an hour ago, Lol had rung from Prof’s studio, ominously hesitant.

The familiar leaden thud of a bag of anxiety landing on the doorstep.

Lol had been hesitant as long as she’d known him. Much less so with her now, obviously. No taboos between them any more. All right, one taboo. Just the single issue where hesitancy still came into it.

‘This is about Jane, isn’t it?’ Merrily had said. ‘This is one of those situations where you have to decide where your loyalties lie.’

‘And what’s best,’ Lol said. ‘Ultimately.’ He paused. ‘She phoned.’

‘When?’

‘Last night. She said it was, you know, absolutely confidential. I was to say nothing to anybody. Well, I realize that “anybody” almost invariably means you, but in this case…’

Merrily had sunk into the office chair, jagged neon letters spelling out PREGNANCY and ABORTION in her head. Outside, it was attempting to snow again, like it had been all week.

‘She’s not pregnant,’ Lol said, ‘as far as I know.’

‘How did you—?’

‘It’s what you always think of first.’

‘You know me that well?’

‘Anyway, she wouldn’t tell me a thing like that. The things she tells me about are the things that might offend you professionally.’

‘Kid’s always taken a special kind of delight in offending me professionally.’

‘You’re not cooperating, Merrily. You know you have to cooperate here, or I can’t go on.’

‘All right. Yes. OK. There is no way she’ll ever learn you told me, as God is my—’

‘We take that as read,’ Lol said. ‘This is about Lucy’s house.’

‘Oh well, Jane knows all about that.’ The relief making her smile. ‘We keep our secrets to an absolute minimum these days. Grown-ups. Mates. All that stuff.’

‘Jane says Lucy doesn’t want us to give up on the house.’

‘Well, obviously, we—’ Merrily paused, staring out of the window, to where the apple tree branches waved vaguely. ‘Lucy says?’

‘The late Lucy Devenish.’

‘I see.’ Merrily said.

‘You do?’

‘Lucy has appeared to Jane… in a dream?’

‘No, through, um, a third party.’

‘Oh.’ The smile dissolving, Merrily scrabbling for a cigarette.

‘She said she’d thought about it for two or three days before deciding to ring. In the end she’d decided it would be remiss of her not to pass on the message.’

‘Lol, what are we talking about here? Clairvoyant, Romany shaman?’

‘She kept saying things like, “Well, obviously I’m in two minds about the whole thing and it’s probably bollocks anyway.” After what happened with Layla Riddock, I think she’d be quite cautious.’

‘I’d’ve thought that, too.’

‘It seems to be a spiritualist medium,’ Lol said.

‘She went to a… medium?’

‘I don’t think it was that formal, but it was obvious she wasn’t going to tell me the circumstances. So I’m just… I sat around and searched my conscience. And I thought, well, we don’t know who the medium is, and there are mediums and mediums. So I decided I ought to tell you.’

‘Thank you, Lol. It’s appreciated.’

‘Don’t get me wrong,’ Lol said. ‘Lucy was a good friend to me.’

‘So you rang the agents to see if the buyers had by chance given back word?’

‘Naturally.’

‘And?’

‘The people can’t wait to move in. Although they have two children, they find it delightfully bijou rather than small and cramped.’

Merrily wondered if he’d still have told her about Jane and the medium if it had turned out that the purchasers had suddenly backed out and Lucy’s house was on the market again. She decided he would have, in the end, but maybe not until contracts had been exchanged.

‘Typical spirit message, then,’ Merrily said. ‘Sod-all use.’

Danny wasn’t sorry the job had been called off. It was too cold. The sky was tight as a snare drum, grains of fine snow collecting on the bonnet of the van like battery acid.

And Gomer was getting on in years, and excavating a wildlife pond for this posh bloke from Off, these were not the best conditions for it. So when the feller’s new wife comes on the scene, going, ‘No, I think it should be over there, don’t you, darling?’, Danny was relieved to hear Gomer suggesting they should both think about it for a few days.

Back in the van, Danny had asked Gomer how much he was going to charge the people for a wasted trip, and Gomer had shaken his head and said that wasn’t how you kept your clients. Fair enough. Danny had shrugged, still an apprentice in the plant-hire business, and Gomer had dropped him off back at the farm.

Snow was falling, light and fine as dust motes, when Danny saw the car in front of the galvanized gate and wondered which of Greta’s mouthy friends he’d have to endure before he got any lunch.

‘Ah! Now! Talk of the Devil!’ Greta giving it the full Janis Joplin from the living room, soon as he let himself in. ‘Look who’s yere, Danny!’

Danny pulled off his wellies and padded in, and came face to face with Mary Morson, Jeremy’s ex, in the black business suit her wore as some kind of social services gofer at Powys Council.

‘En’t you at work, Mary?’

‘Danny!’ Greta blasted.