Remains of an Altar

‘Passes the time. Where are the chocolates? She said you’d brought me chocolates.’

‘Sorry, left them in the car. Black Magic still appropriate?’

Miss White giggled. Lol remembered how Merrily had reacted when she’d first encountered her – called in within weeks of being appointed Deliverance consultant to look into claims by elderly residents that The Glades was being haunted by a handsome man of a certain era. Treading on eggshells in the big shoes of Canon Dobbs, Hereford’s last Diocesan Exorcist. On a later occasion, knowing that Merrily needed help but was afraid of what Athena White might represent, Lol had gone on his own to tap into her knowledge of forbidden things.

Finding he got on rather well with this one-time highly placed civil servant who’d decided to devote her retirement to the study of the complex esoteric disciplines popularized by Madame Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner and Dion Fortune. Maybe a stretch on psychiatric wards had helped.

‘So?’ she said. ‘Have you been inside the cassock?’

‘Never really been turned on by women in uniform.’

‘Don’t be evasive.’

Miss White used to say she’d forgone the high-maintenance, roses-round-the-door cottage to set up what she called her eyrie in an old people’s home because it gave her more inner space. Lol had no idea how old she was, but, like an elderly radio, all her valves still appeared to be glowing.

‘OK. Out of uniform, it’s much easier,’ he said, and Miss White clapped her tiny hands.

‘Splendid! And you needn’t explain why the clergy-person isn’t with you. I always felt she regarded me as a potential patroller of the Left-Hand Path, with whom it would not be at all appropriate to be publicly associated.’

‘I’m the go-between,’ Lol said.

‘You lied to Cardelow. Told her some frightful porkie about first meeting me when you came to visit poor Pole.’

‘That was because I wanted to talk to you … about Maggie Pole,’ Lol said.

‘She died.’

‘I know.’

‘In her sleep. And in the middle of a quandary. She thought I was a spiritualist, you know. A medium. Some of the inmates do. Frightfully insulting, to be lumped in with the pygmies. But I tend not to disabuse them – they wouldn’t understand the distinction.’

‘Mrs Pole asked you to help her, as a … spiritualist?’

Athena White didn’t respond for a while, exploring him with her eyes.

‘Robinson, are you still working with that dreadful shrink in Hereford?’

‘Dick Lydon?’

‘So-called psychotherapist.’

‘No, I gave all that up. It didn’t seem to be actually curing people.’

‘Good,’ Miss White said. ‘Psychoanalysis was the great folly of the twentieth century. Leads nowhere except up its own bottom.’

‘In what way did Maggie Pole ask you to help her?’

‘Robinson, I know the woman’s dead, but there are certain proprieties to be observed. Why do you want to know?’

‘All right,’ Lol said. ‘When I first came to see you … you remember? We talked about Moon, the archaeologist, and Hereford Cathedral and its connection, along the ley line, with Dinedor Hill?’

‘Ley lines?’ Miss White placed a purple-tipped finger on her chin. ‘Watkins? Your friend’s called Watkins, isn’t she?’

‘So’s her daughter. Jane. I don’t think you’ve ever met Jane, but she … Jane feels very strongly about things, and she doesn’t give up. And she’s only seventeen and still at school, and she’s thrown herself into something which is backfiring on her. And I’m feeling guilty, because I didn’t get involved and she’s vulnerable and I’m not … well, not in that way.’

‘Oh, I think you are, Robinson. You didn’t want to interfere in case it should harm your relationship with her mother, which you appear to value above life itself.’

‘You ought to be—’

‘Don’t you dare tell me I ought to be a psychologist. How does this connect with Margaret Pole?’

‘Jane’s found what she thinks is a forgotten ley line, which somebody wants to build across. In Ledwardine. It’s called Coleman’s Meadow. We’re told that Margaret Pole’s mother left it to her, having apparently said she didn’t want it touched. I wondered what had made Maggie Pole change her mind. When I heard she’d been at The Glades I thought if anyone might know something about this it would be … you?’

Miss White withdrew into her cushioned grotto like some little English guru.

‘Ah…’ It came out like a tiny puff of white smoke. ‘A ley line. Could that have been what it was about?’

‘This makes sense?’

‘She wanted me to contact her mother.’

‘You mean on the…’

‘In the land where the dead sit in an eternal garden among eternal fountains, discussing trivia and eating fairy cakes. Wanted me to contact her mother to ask if she was doing the right thing. A man kept coming to visit her – all too frequently in her last year. Well, you see this all the time. You don’t have to be here very long to recognize a vulture in a suit. He was … some relation.’

‘Nephew?’

‘I listened to Pole talking to the inmates – sometimes sit in the lounge, pretending to be asleep. She’d ramble on about how worried she was that he was going to have to give up his farm – the last farm in a farming family, for umpteen generations. Falling prices, imports, the usual problems. I was thinking, what does he want from her?’

‘Maybe a piece of land that he knew he could sell for a lot of money, for housing? Which she’d promised not to sell.’

‘Yes. On which basis, I think he wanted her to give him the land. As a way of saving his farm. Trying to persuade her it was futile to preserve it as … I don’t know, some sort of memorial? Do you know what kind of memorial?’

Lol shook his head.

‘Rather intriguing. Pole used to talk of her mother as some frightfully elevated creature with aesthetic sensibilities far beyond those of her slug of a husband. Perhaps she’d met a lover in that meadow. That would be nice, wouldn’t it? Pole never told me.’

‘But she came to you … eventually.’

‘A dilemma. Said she was sure the last thing her mother would have wanted was for her grandson, or whatever he was, to lose everything. Keeping her awake at nights – well, you know how old people dwell on these things. So yes, in the end, after much heart-searching, she came to me.’

‘And what did you do?’

‘Oh, we had a seance. Great fun! Most of the old dears were absolutely terrified – they do so love to be terrified. And then Cardelow appeared in the middle of the proceedings like some great dollop of rancid ectoplasm and broke it up.’

‘And did you … ?’

‘Of course I didn’t. Never been drawn to necromancy … well, not in that way. The seance was a sham. My attitude was to take the path of least resistance. If Pole’s mother was such an elevated soul, she’d hardly be worried about the loss of one field. Obvious way to go was for Pole to keep her promise not to sell it in her lifetime and simply agree to leave it to the sod. I said an angel in Grecian attire appeared to me in a dream and passed on that little snippet.’

‘So, um … the fate of Coleman’s Meadow is probably your fault.’

‘I suppose it is, yes. But you know, Robinson…’ Miss White smiled sweetly. ‘We really aren’t meant to have much of an effect.’