December (10 page)

      
'Out of condition, you are. Vicar. You townies.' Mr Edwards
chuckled and pulled the vicar towards the top of the hump.

      
As they climbed, the teeth began to lengthen and then holes
appeared in them. And then a huge hole, which became an archway, and then a
series of ruined arches, like worn, pink-brown ribs, and suddenly they were
looking down on all of it.

      
'Bit like that old dead sheep, isn't he?' Mr Edwards said. 'On
a grand scale. Come along now, there's a path winds down. And I was right,
though, wasn't I?'

      
'I'm sorry?'

      
'You can't do it. Can't sneak up on him.'

      
The Abbey seemed to be stretching, almost languorously, rising
up around and beyond them.

      
The other times, the vicar had come to it by the more direct
route, the narrow, twisting road, like a tunnel in summer. And never before on
foot.

      
'I've tried it from every angle,' Mr Edwards said. 'Stroll down
the valley, the normal way and, of course, he spots you from a distance, that's
easy. Come through the wood, and he explodes on you all at once - well, too
much to take, that is. But even this way, sneaking in from behind, he knows
you're approaching and before you know it, he's got you surrounded.'

      
The vicar looked nervously behind him and there was this jagged
stone wall he
 
didn't even remember
passing. A lump of rubble was lying by his shoe like a brown skull. When he
turned again, the great archway was rearing over him, the holes in the wall above
it like cold, white eyes.

      
'Come on, then. Vicar, I'll show you the layout.'
      
'Perhaps another day,' the vicar
said, adding faintly, 'There'll be lots of other days.'

      
At the far end, the Abbey ceased to be a ruin. There was a
square tower with a chimney, its stone the same weathered pink-brown but not so
rough-hewn, its windows opaque.

      
A wind had arisen. Backing off, the vicar felt the Abbey
somehow swirling around him, a dusty mist which might get to his lungs.

      
Zap began to whine.

      
'Bloody dog,' Mr Edwards said. 'No feeling for the glories of the
past. Never likes to come this way.'

      
'Let's go.' The vicar was shocked at the weakness of his
voice, no projection, so much for the sermon-training at college. Perhaps it
was
in his lungs.

      
Mr Edwards had started down the slope. 'Won't take ten minutes,
Vicar. We can take a quick stroll around the ruins and then return along the
valley bottom, more direct, see.'
      
The vicar said, 'Let's just get the
fuck out of here.'
      
If Mr Edwards had heard this
sudden, surprising profanity from a man of the doth, he didn't react. He began
to climb back to the top of the hump. Perhaps he actually wants to get this
over, the vicar thought. Then we wouldn't have to return to the Abbey

      
Mr Edwards arrived next to him, panting a little. 'Aye, he's a
funny old bugger, the Abbey. The tourists and the backpackers come and go, but
local people ignore the place, no appreciation. No feeling for the past. Have
it demolished, they would, the farmers, to make more grazing land.'

      
'Who owns it now?'

      
Mr Edwards explained that it was in the
care
of the Government. The ancient monuments people, they
maintained it, although it remained in private ownership. Had been a hunting lodge,
an inn, an outward-bound centre for bad boys. And then a recording studio -
'more bad boys, rock and rollers, see. Not seemly for a holy ruin, you ask me'.
He smiled slyly. 'You have views on this. Vicar? Sacrilege? 'Course, being an
Anglican ... All left-footers, we were, when the Abbey was last in use.'

      
'We're still all Christians, Mr Edwards.'

      
'That's the modern view, is it? Ecumenical. Well, I have no quarrel
with that, though I know some that would. But as a ruin, is this still a holy
place, would you say?'

      
The vicar pondered what he should reply to this.

      
Eventually, he said, 'Some people say, fancifully perhaps,
that the stones retain things. All that worship. All that veneration.'

      
'All that rock and roll?' said Mr Edwards. 'And what would old
Abbot Richard have said to
that?'

      
'What
could
he say,
Mr Edwards, with his own personal history?'

      
The story of Abbot Richard, who founded the first abbey at
Ystrad Ddu, was set down in the Department of the Environment official handbook
which the vicar had found on his shelves when he arrived, along with local Ordnance
Survey maps.

      
'I never thought about it like that,' said Mr Edwards. 'Gives hope
to us all, I suppose, old Richard.'

      
It was an apocryphal story: the maverick monk who'd funded the
Abbey in the eleventh century had been dismissed from a religious house at
Hereford for alleged thieving and fornication and had finally found salvation
through a holy vision this beautiful valley, falling to his knees, vowing to
establish a religious community on this very spot.
      
I suppose Richard would have been
quite sympathetic towards rock and roll,' the vicar said. 'At least it was an
attempt put new life into the place. What happened to it, do you know?'

      
It had closed down some years back, Mr Edwards said, shaking
his head. The boss of the record company that owned it had died suddenly,
leaving problems over the estate. Rumours were that it had been resold. Rumours
suggested the people who'd recently bought the old Abbey farm across the valley
were interested in acquiring it. But there were always rumours in a place like
this, and meanwhile the tower house lay silent and derelict. Shame.

      
And people in Ystrad, see, they are always a touch restive when
the place is derelict.'

      
'I thought you said they'd all rather see it flattened.'

      
'Aye, but as long as it's
there
they like to have someone in residence. They've never forgotten the
tragedy, must be twenty years ago, when it was abandoned for a year or so and
two young people, boy and a girl - in search of a spot of privacy as you might
say - climbed the spiral staircase to the south-west tower and half the bloody
wall collapsed and they tumbled thirty feet the ground, with a ton or so of
masonry on top of them.'

      
'God,' said the vicar. 'What happened to them?'

      
'Lay there all night, at the foot of the tower. Young chap was
dead by the time one of the farmers found them next morning. And the girl ...
the girl's still paralysed from the waist down. Your Mrs Pugh, your
housekeeping woman ... her daughter, you know?'

      
'God almighty. Isabel Pugh? That's how it happened?'

      
Mr Edwards beamed at having imparted to the new minister
another essential piece of local knowledge. 'As I said, Vicar, the countryside
is a dangerous place'

      
As if to amplify his point, the slated roofs of the hamlet
that was Ystrad Ddu slipped into view, and the little community indeed look vulnerable,
the black and viridian forestry swooping down on it from other side, the bare,
pink, clefted rock partly overhanging it in a huge shelf. The old church, which
at some stage had lost its tower, was so small and insignificant that it might
have been just another of the hillside cottages which lay haphazardly, like old
books fallen from the shelf.

      
It was late afternoon now and hesitant wisps of smoke curled
from the squat chimneys. One smudgy plume had drifted up into the cleft of the
overhanging rock, making it look like a smoking volcano. Beyond it was the lump
of a semi-distant mountain top.

      
'That the Skirrid, Mr Edwards?'

      
'It is indeed. Notice how, from here, the peak seems to be
rising from the gap in our own rock? Perhaps it is on the very same fault line.
Perhaps they were both cloven at the same time.'

      
'What, during the Crucifixion?'

      
One of the guidebooks left behind for the vicar had related
the local legend explaining how the Skirrid, the malformed mountain beyond
Abergavenny, had acquired its peculiar shape, having been split by an
earthquake at the very moment of Christ's death on the cross. The event was graphically
depicted on the sign outside the Skirrid Inn - an arrow of lightning piercing
the peak.

      
Mr Edwards donned his sly expression again. 'You believe that,
Vicar?'

      
'Now, what am I supposed to say to that? I'm sure there are sound
geological reasons why I should dismiss it as superstitious bollocks. On the
other hand ...'

      
'Yes!' The little man quivered with delight. 'Exactly what I
meant when I said the modern church was a bit uncomfortable in this area. So
much history, so much legend - and most of it distinctly ecclesiastical in nature.
The vision of Richard, the martyrdom of Aelwyn. And the holy mountain of
Gwent.'

      
Mr Edwards extended an arm towards the horizon. 'For many
years ...' his voice deepened, went suitably sonorous and sepulchral... people
would take helpings of soil from the summit of the Skirrid. Farmers scattered
it on their fields for fertility and whole churches, it's said, were built on
mounds of earth brought from up by the site of the old chapel of St Michael,
close to the great cleft - the spear wound in the side of the saviour. Am I
embarrassing you, Vicar?'
      
'Just a little.'

      
'Your predecessor, now, he wouldn't hear a word of it. Oh, no
place for this old nonsense in the modern Church! Got to move on from superstition!
Even wanted to start a fund for electric lights and heating in the church.
Didn't get very far, I'm afraid.'

      
They came to the new vicarage, built of brick, faced and white
washed, on the edge of the sloping village. It was just out of the shadow of the
cloven rock, open to the fields and the valley.

      
'And where do you stand, Mr Edwards? Do you think we should
all be up the Skirrid with our shovels?'

      
'Well...' Mr Edwards took off his cap, scratched the centre of
a full head of pewter-coloured hair. 'Before I retired I was, as you know, a
history adviser for schools in Mid Glam. So my feeling is that we should
continue to be aware of these matters, but not to the point of- how can I put
this? - getting obsessed.'

      
'No,' said the vicar, who knew all about the power of
obsession. 'And you really don't like the Abbey, do you, Mr Edwards?'

      
'What do you mean?'
      
'The Abbey. The atmosphere there.'
      
'It's a piece of history,' Mr Edwards
said, as if this was all that mattered, isn't a question of not
liking
a place. If we all stopped
visiting ancient sites because we found the atmosphere oppressive, what would
happen to them then? Go to rack and ruin.'

      
'Which it has,' the vicar pointed out, lifting the latch on
his garden gate. 'And how do you mean, "oppressive", exactly?'
      
'Oh, the wife, I think it was, used
that word, the first and last time she walked there with me. The wife, God help
us, likes old places to be ...
pretty.

      
The vicar thought, his wife won't go with him, his dog only goes
0n sufferance. 'I bet,' he said carefully, 'that you don't really like going on
your own.'

      
'Now, that's ridiculous,' said Mr Edwards, putting his cap back
on, tugging it over his ears. 'Stuff and nonsense, that is.'

V

A
Sighing of Satin

'Your daddy wis here last
night,' Donald said. 'Still wearin' the big horn-rims. When he came out they
wis good an' misted.'
      
Donald stepped back and waved her
up the steps of the huge caravan, a mobile mansion, and into the china cave
which had been the Duchess's parlour.

      
Amid all the china plates on the walls, there was a gilt-framed
board with about twenty photos under glass. A young man in a suit and
horn-rimmed glasses smiled worriedly in black and white out of the bottom
left-hand corner.

      
'Who told him?' Moira asked.

      
'She left instructions, hen. Him tae be told. And yourself, of
course. Afterwards.'