was just that they all had to go on living here, and Lol and Mum had been through all kinds of crap already, and it just really pissed Jane off that there was some mean-spirited git in this village who begrudged them a hint of happiness.
And Mum was the vicar and therefore too nice to deal with it, and Lol was too timid, and so…
She pulled the photocopy from her jeans, held it up to the window. Close.
Jim Prosser, who ran the shop, waved to her from inside. Jane put away the paper, waved back. Jim knew everybody in Ledwardine, must have seen a fair few handwritten shopping lists and weekly orders, for delivery. And he knew all about Mum and Lol.
Maybe not. And the lettering wasn’t that close.
She walked off down Church Street. Sharp Saturday sun slanting on Ledwardine, the black and white cottages and shops all tarted up for the early tourists looking for pseudo-antiques and maybe a weekend cottage to display them in.
Predatory Londoners on the spree. Jane had read in one of the Sunday property supplements that, now you couldn’t find a garden shed in the Cotswolds for much under half a million, the Welsh Border was no longer considered too remote for commuters. So Ledwardine, this classic calendar village still enclosed by ancient orchards, was well in the cross-hairs. Even its one-time council estate no longer looked like a council estate, with its new hardwood windows, rendered brickwork, conservatories bulging out like transparent blisters.
Hereford’s estate agents were doing faster business than Venus’s Wankline.
Lol had somehow squeezed in, though Jane guessed that his mortgage on Lucy’s house was crippling. And knew that when she got round to needing a place of her own there’d be like no chance here. And she liked Ledwardine, didn’t want it to become Beverly Hills with a botox population and Jim Prosser forced to stock disgusting pate de foie gras to stay in business.
But unless you had a farm or something to inherit, you were stuffed. At least when the Church kicked her out of the vicarage Mum could move in with Lol. If that was acceptable to Mr Vicerage.
Who might be here right now on the square, watching.
Jane wandered around, keeping an eye open for Eirion’s car. After Mum had put her off going to Lol’s, she’d called Eirion at home in Abergavenny, and he’d said, yeah, OK, he could probably try and cobble together a few quid for the petrol; he’d come over. Less enthusiastic than he might have been. Was something cooling off? It was true that there were times when she felt she needed some space, maybe go out with someone else, just to, you know, compare. But the thought of Eirion with another girl… she couldn’t handle that.
She stopped in front of the two-up, two-down terraced cottage, separated from the pavement by a ridge of new cobbles. Lucy’s house. A little black Nissan was parked outside behind Lol’s clapped-out Astra. The man from
But she knew that if Lol was being too self-deprecating she’d just get annoyed and give herself away. And she was annoyed enough already, at the carrion crows from Off scooping up Ledwardine. And at herself for being so insecure.
‘You must feel I’m rather on your back,’ Saltash said, cruising onto the Leominster road.
He had dark glasses on and his leather seat eased well back. There was a buttermilk sun, and the hedgerows on either side of the road were greening up almost in front of their eyes.
‘Well, I… tend to think that if you arrive with a psychiatrist most people feel a bit threatened,’ Merrily said. ‘Some of them have really had to steel themselves to approach someone like me, and so… we probably need to think of a way around that.’
Saltash chuckled. ‘Just as well I’m no longer a psychiatrist, merely a new member of the team who wants to learn.’
‘Probably a few things I could learn, too,’ Merrily said, being diplomatic for the moment. She was wearing civvies, jumper and skirt. In another parish, you didn’t make a show of what you were.
The BMW was swallowing miles in small, easy sips. When Saltash slowed for the Leominster traffic island, the engine made a thick and fleshy sound, as if it was powered by rising sap. With the size of insurance premiums and the cost of petrol, you peered into a sports car these days and almost invariably saw white hair and driving gloves. Merrily tightened her seat belt.
‘So what exactly do you want to know about ghosts, Nigel?’
‘Ghosts?’ Saltash twisted his head towards her, the cords in his long neck like piano wires. ‘Oh, ghosts are terribly interesting. Don’t you think? I doubt there’s ever been a wholly convincing study, though.’
‘That mean you’re thinking of making one?’
‘Be awfully time-consuming, but perhaps worthwhile. I’d certainly be quite interested in examining apparitions as subjective — or reflective — phenomena.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘A study of perceived apparitions to discover what they’re telling us about the perceiver.’
‘The ghost as a psychological projection of someone’s inner condition?’
‘Inner guilt, inner torment.’ Saltash joined a tailback of cars from Leominster’s town-centre lights. ‘Sense of loss. Repressed sexual desire. Is the perceived ghost, for instance, shadowy and quiescent? Is it urgent, or aggressive?’
‘So I can take it you don’t accept the possibility of ghosts as an objective reality.’
‘Merrily, the very word “ghost” ’ — Saltash’s smile broke out — ‘is surely an antithesis of the word “real”.’
‘So, even as a Christian—’
‘I don’t think the Bible has a lot to say on the subject. Or am I wrong?’
‘Well, it… occurs, here and there.’
‘But probably without a hard and fast definition of the term ghost. You see, I don’t know how far you personally go with this. I’m not going to ask you about your personal “psychic experience” — highly subjective, therefore rarely helpful, and not a can of worms I’d want to open at this stage of our relationship.’
This stage?
Merrily had the feeling of being worked, becoming the subject of some kind of private thesis. And guessing that whatever she said next would seep, at some strategic point, back to Sian Callaghan-Clarke.
There was that mellow, new-car smell inside the BMW, a discreet No Smoking sign on the dash. She wished she was alone, in her rattling Volvo.
‘Look, I… I don’t have a particular problem with psychological projection. Probably does account for a lot of ghost stories. But it doesn’t fully explain the traditional haunted house, does it? Where something is seen again and again, by more than one person. How would you deal with that?’
‘Where do you want to start?’ The lights turned green; Saltash turned left. ‘Preconditioning? Folie a deux on a grand scale? If I were a physicist, I might even be drawn to seek a more scientific explanation of the trace- memory theory. But that’s not my backyard. The mind’s where I live. Edging, a touch warily for the moment, however, around Jung’s collective unconscious.’
‘So I’d be safe in assuming that the whole idea of the unquiet dead… would be well over your belief threshold.’
‘Merrily…’ Nigel Saltash wore his smile like a gold medallion. ‘Do you think we know each other well enough yet to even raise that question without the risk of permanent damage to an otherwise promising relationship?’
Promising? Promising how?
They were leaving Herefordshire now, and the personality of the countryside was changing. She saw the plains and ridges and escarpments of Shropshire: a bonier landscape, a lighter green, a bigger sky.
She saw, far in the east, the sawn-off slope of the Clee Hills. And then, momentarily, in the middle distance, fading out of the morning mist to the north-west, the tower of the church that was sometimes called the Cathedral of the Marches.
St Laurence’s, Ludlow. The ancient town clustered below it, an island in amber. A small town with an antique lustre and a bigger history than the whole of Herefordshire.
