Remains of an Altar

about all the times he’d sat fingering the frets of the graceful Boswell guitar, conjuring ephemera, while Merrily waded in spiritual sewage.

Increasingly, he worried about her. She was living much of the time on cigarettes instead of proper meals and sooner or later all this chasing around after madness – the kind of madness she’d never be able to validate – would start to take its toll.

Not many nights, lately, had passed without him waking in the dark or the early dawn, cold with this formless fear of losing Merrily.

And walking back in the late evening from Coleman’s Meadow to the market square, splitting up to go to their separate beds … there’d been a disturbingly elegiac quality to that.

Recalling this, he’d felt a moment of anxiety that was close to panic and, turning it into determination, got up into the streaming red dawn and made some tea and a list of what he needed to find out.

Finding himself thinking about Winnie Sparke. The way she’d moved in on him: Pardon me … but I think I know who you are? The tumbling hair, the semi-see-through dress. Ready to come on to him that night, but now she wasn’t talking. Not to Merrily. Protecting the enigmatic Tim Loste. So what was there to protect?

At around eight-thirty, Lol sat at his writing desk in the window overlooking Church Street and rang Prof Levin at the Knight’s Frome studio.

‘Five weeks,’ Prof said. ‘In five weeks, I have a window for approximately ten days. If we can’t break its back in ten days we’re not trying.’

‘Sorry … ?’

‘Your … second … solo … album?’

‘Well, it’s coming.’ Lol could hear Prof pouring coffee from his cafetiere. ‘I’m just … not there yet.’

‘Shit,’ Prof said. ‘You haven’t even started, have you, you useless bastard?’

‘No, I’ve started. I start every day. Except today. Today, I’m not starting.’

‘Because?’

‘Tim Loste,’ Lol said. ‘What do you know about Tim Loste?’

The answer came back, sailing past on a breath like there’d been no need for thought.

‘Avoid,’ Prof said.

‘I see.’ Lol inched his chair further into the desk, picked up a pencil, gathered in his lyrics pad. ‘Why, exactly?’

Prof said, ‘Laurence, we’re all mad, in our way, aren’t we? Me, you, Loste, Elgar.’

‘Sorry, did I mention Elgar?’

‘You mentioned Loste, which means that sooner or later we’d get around to Elgar. And madness. Elgar grew up with it. Used to hang around the local lunatic asylum at Worcester.’

‘Yes, but that’s because he was Director of Music there.’

‘Yeah. Thirty quid a year, and five shillings every time he wrote a polka for the loonies to dance to. But even then he’s thinking, there but for the grace of God…’

‘You’re saying Elgar was mentally ill?’

‘But also, fortunately, touched with genius. Imagine what it’s like if you’re mental and only touched with mediocrity.’

‘Loste?’

‘Terrific conductor, arranger … facilitator. Pure creativy? Nah.’

‘You know him personally?’

‘Mmmf.’ Prof swallowing too-hot coffee. ‘Laurence, mate, everybody knows him. If you’re a halfway-proficient serious musician or a singer, the chances are he’s been in touch at one time or another, offering you the chance to make your name. No money in it, of course, just the honour and the glory of working with the young master. This is in his manic phases.’

‘In the clinical sense?’

‘Whether it’s been diagnosed I wouldn’t know. But in his depressive phases, it’s best to stay out of his way – and also in his manic phases, obviously. That’s why I say just avoid. Tell you about me and him, shall I?’

It seemed that Loste, having heard about this new recording studio at Knight’s Frome, had called Prof, introducing himself as a one-time soloist with the English Symphony Orchestra. Asking whether it was possible that Prof could put together a mobile unit to record his choir in Wychehill Church.

‘Complicated job, Laurence, if you’ve never recorded a choir before, having to mike up this huge church on your own. So what’s wrong with the studio? I’m asking him. Oh no, Loste insists it has to be the church. Not a church, this church. But … he had the money. I should argue.’

‘You went to Wychehill?’

‘Charming crowd, on the whole. The women worshipped Loste, this bumbling overgrown schoolboy … imprecise, incoherent.’

‘You mean drunk?’

‘Well … high, certainly. Or just, like I said, manic. And yet, in the end, unexpectedly, I was impressed. He’s a bloody good conductor. He channels inspiration. Shouldn’t’ve been any good at all, bunch of amateurs in a country church, but the atmosphere in there was … something else.’

‘This was Elgar?’

‘Ah, well, that’s the point, you see. For Loste, it all comes through Elgar. Elgar was always moaning that nobody understood him; Loste understands him. Totally. And the combination of Elgar and Loste somehow brings something extraordinary out of amateurs. I remember the Angelus, particularly. Shivers-up-the-spine stuff. Or so it seemed to me whose skills have, for too long, been squandered on three-chord wonders such as your good self.’

‘Four now.’

‘Congratulations. Loste, meanwhile, his ambition is to do the full Gerontius with a choir and orchestra. On the strength of what we recorded already, it wouldn’t be an embarrassment. Except he’ll need to get somebody else to twiddle the knobs on it because Gerontius scares me. Too big, too complicated. Also, an attempted orchestration of the afterlife with angels and demons … am I going there? With Loste? I think not, Laurence. Definitely not with Timothy Loste.’

Lol said, ‘Prof, was there a woman with Loste when you did the recording? A writer called Winnie Sparke?’

‘Cheesecloth and glittery bits?’

‘That would probably be her, yes.’

‘All right,’ Prof said, ‘you remember Yoko Ono in the film they made of the session for Let It Be? Sitting there, watchful? More than a bit like that, only less of the inscrutable. Not a promising relationship, was my feeling. She looks at him, sees toyboy; he looks at her … mummy.’

‘You know anything about her?’

‘Not much. She’s a writer. Does these Mystic Meg kind of books. What’s your angle?’

‘She’s told Merrily that she and Loste are on the edge of the solution to a great and beautiful mystery.’

‘Merrily?’ Prof said. ‘This is a Merrily situation? Oh, for fuck’s sake. A great and beautiful mystery? Avoid, avoid, avoid!’

‘Well, it’s not too hard to avoid him at the moment,’ Lol said. ‘He’s in custody. The cops are questioning him about a murder on Herefordshire Beacon.’

‘Loste? This is the man found in the old fort, his throat cut from ear to ear? You’re serious?’

‘The guy worked at this hip-hop palace at the Royal Oak, outside Wychehill. Which Loste apparently believes is…’

‘An evil presence sapping his creativity. I heard that. Only, he doesn’t have any creativity. He’s an interpreter. A facilitator. That’s as far as it goes. Bloody hell, Lol. I mean, bloody hell.’

Someone was knocking on Lol’s back door.

‘Do you see him as someone who could kill?’ Lol asked.