‘Oh, you hear things. Put it this way, if Teddy
was
to go I’d certainly make sure I went too.’
Merrily’s fork froze just short of her lips.
‘Something of a man-eater,’ Beverley said. ‘That’s what they say, anyway.’
‘
Mrs Morningwood
?’
‘Always strikes me as a little … threadbare for that sort of thing. Eccentric, deranged. The way she drives around in that big Jeep, taking corners too fast. Sorry, I didn’t mean deranged, I think I meant
disarranged
.’
‘Can’t say anyone’s said anything to me,’ Teddy said. ‘Apart from you,
of course, Bevvie.’
‘Well, they wouldn’t, now, would they?’
‘Blimey,’ Merrily said.
She ate slowly, aware, it seemed, of every spice in the roast. Aware of herself eating – that element of separation which sometimes came with extreme physical tiredness when the senses, for some reason, were still alert.
Gossip. There was, unfortunately, a place for it; it was often the most direct route to … if not the truth, then something in its vicinity. She looked at Beverley.
‘Who are we talking about, then? Mrs Morningwood and … who?’
‘Oh dear.’ Beverley pouring herself some water from a crystal jug. ‘I wish I’d never …’
‘Ah, now you’ve started …’ A slightly sinful sparkle in Teddy’s blue eyes. ‘Can’t not tell us now, Bevvie.’
He knew, of course. Merrily watched their eyes. They must surely have had this discussion before. Now they were having it again for her benefit, passing on something they thought she ought to be aware of. Especially if submitting to further reflexology.
‘Farmers. I was
told
,’ Beverley said.
‘Farmers
plural
?’ Merrily blinked. ‘I mean … how plural?’
‘Well … at least two, certainly. I suppose she has that sort of rough … edge that I imagine a certain kind of man would find attractive. Admittedly, always farmers living alone. And it never seems to lead to anything. No evidence that she’s after anyone’s money, if you see what I …’
‘An independent sort of woman,’ Teddy said. ‘Was she ever married? I’m never quite sure.’
‘In London,’ Beverley said. ‘She was in London for over twenty years. Long enough to lose her local accent, certainly. But she came back, unmarried, re-adopting her maiden name, and whatever she gets up to … is a question of roots, I suppose. They go back many generations in Garway, the Morningwoods. Whatever they do is accepted.’
‘Whatever
they
do?’
‘Well, her mother … oh, I hate this.’
Beverley drank some water. Teddy leaned back.
‘It’s all right,
I
know. The family has quite a history of what are now known as
alternative
remedies. Folk remedies. What were known as wise women. There’s an old tradition of nine witches of Garway, and her mother and grandmother were more in that mould. Allegedly.’
‘They were …’ Merrily looked up ‘… considered to be witches?’
‘They dispensed herbal remedies. They were also said to – no way to dress this up, I’m afraid, Merrily – assist girls who got themselves into trouble.’
‘Oh.’
‘Used to be a local social service, didn’t it? No great need for it now.’
Merrily remembered Gomer Parry’s uncharacteristic reticence on the subject of Mrs Morningwood.
Beverley looked down at her plate.
Lord Stourport – Lol was surprised to find out that he
did
know him. Well, knew
of
him, mainly – they’d met, briefly, maybe a couple of times.
‘I never realized,’ he said on the phone to Prof Levin. ‘Jimmy Hater.’
He’d called around nine p.m., when Prof habitually took a coffee break from whatever album he was mixing. Often, he would work through midnight, the cafetière at his elbow. An addictive personality, but caffeine was safer than the booze of old.
Lol said, ‘I remember he always sounded kind of upper-class, in comparison with most of the others.’
‘Real name James Hayter-Hames,’ Prof said. ‘If you were rock ’n’ roll management in the punk era, that was
not
a good time to let it get out that your family was even posher than Joe Strummer’s. Hayter on its own, however – that was a strong and impressive name to have. Especially if you left out the “y”.’
‘I didn’t even know about the “y” for a long time.’ Lol recalled a stocky, strutting guy, Napoleonic. ‘I used to think it was a completely made-up name, like Sid Vicious. You ever produce anything for any of Hayter’s bands?’
‘Produced, no.’
‘Engineered?’
‘For my sins. Post-punk death-metal. Not my favourite period, Laurence. Bearable at the time, with three or four bottles of red wine, God forbid, on the mixing desk. That era, I like to draw a curtain across it. Death metal – mostly foul. Jimmy Hayter – a twat.’
‘Still?’
Prof said, ‘Once a twat …’
‘Where does he live? I mean, is he accessible?’
‘Yes and no. He inherited the pile eventually, of course. It’s a responsibility. Nobody wants to besmirch the coat of arms. On the other hand, the family seat gobbles wealth. And farming, even big-time farming, doesn’t pay half the bills any more. So the earl, whatever he is now, he keeps his hand in, and when the roof falls in on the orangery or something he puts on a festival. On the very fringe of his estate, naturally. The house a mere dot on the horizon.’
‘Where
is
the house?’
‘I dunno, someplace south of Brum. Stratford way, possibly. I could find out.’
‘Death metal,’ Lol said. ‘A lot of occult there?’
‘Generally pseudo. Guys on Harleys, with skull rings and
slash-here
neck tattoos. So … occult … this would be a Merrily inquiry, would it?’
‘Would he talk to her, do you think? Say, on the phone?’
‘On the phone, Laurence, he won’t say anything worth the price of a cheap-rate call. And, frankly, the last thing you want is to expose a woman as appealing as little Merrily, with or without the dog collar, to Jimmy Hayter. Especially with his lovely wife, her ladyship, living a lavishly subsidized life in France, her physical role in his life complete … and, from what I hear, bloody grateful for that.’
‘Would he speak to
me
, do you think?’
‘Why should he do that?’
‘Maybe in the interests of … I don’t know … keeping the past where it belongs?’
Lol had the map book open on the desk in the window, marking out the route to a village he didn’t know, outside Gloucester. Tomorrow night’s concert: a big pub with a folk club, the kind of intimate gig
which, on the whole, he preferred. He pushed the page under the lamp. How far from Stratford? Forty miles, fifty?
‘The situation is, Prof, that in his youth Jimmy Hayter seems to have been part of a commune. In a farmhouse down on the Welsh Border. Some of what they might have got up to … it would help Merrily to know about that.’
‘Might have got up to?’ Prof said. ‘What’s that mean? Do I like the sound of that? I don’t. What does Merrily say?’
‘She says it gives her a bad feeling.’
‘Never dismiss a woman’s feelings, good or bad,’ Prof said, and Lol could hear the clink of the beloved and necessary cafetière, the slurping of the brown elixir. Then a silence, then, ‘Jesus, Lol, you need to understand, you must not threaten this man.’
‘Don’t take the glasses off, then?’
‘Laurence, listen to me. Jimmy Hayter … stately home, dinner parties with the gentry, but the guys with the skull rings and the
slash-here
tattoos, they still dig his garden, you know what I’m saying?’
T
EDDY WAS RIGHT
, it had once been an accepted rural service, like blacksmithing, and there had been an opportunity for Muriel Morningwood to talk about it and she hadn’t.
My mother would awake in the morning to hear her throwing up. Coming to the obvious conclusion. Which she put to Mary
.
Merrily lay on the bed, gazing up at the wardrobe. Just a wardrobe, mesh over its ventilation slits, nothing like Garway Church.
There was a different light, now, on Mrs Morningwood Senior’s motherly concern for Mary Linden. Finding out about Mary’s pregnancy, would she have offered to terminate it, or what? What had actually passed between them to cause Mary to leave the Morningwood house before morning?
Need to know.
Did
she need to know? Was this important? You kept turning over stones and uncovering other stones. At which point did you back off?
There were times when deliverance could seem like the most rewarding role in a declining Church, but it was also the most ill-defined.
It was not yet nine p.m. Needing to think about all this, Merrily had accepted Beverley’s assessment of her level of fatigue, taken herself upstairs. Had a shower, put on a clean T-shirt, lay down, her body instantly falling into relaxation … but her damn head just filling up with questions, anomalies …
Tomorrow she’d need to talk to Sycharth Gwilym. Might find him at his farm, or it might mean driving into Hereford.
Before or after facing up to Mrs Morningwood? This time, no flam, no bullshit.
She sat up. There was an electric kettle on the dressing table. She prised herself from the bed, filled the kettle in the shower room. And, of course, she needed to call Jane, perhaps talk to Siân, make sure everything was OK. Sitting on the side of the bed, she switched on the phone, and it throbbed in her hand.
Message.
‘
Merrily, it’s Sophie. Could you ring me at home?
’
Sounding strangely close to excited, Sophie said she might have solved the mystery of the cuttings.
‘Cuttings?’
‘Canon Dobbs, Merrily.’
‘Oh … sorry.’ Hell, the cuttings. On hands and knees on the carpet, Merrily pulled one of the overnight bags from under the bed, dug out the plastic folder. ‘I was just … going through them again.’
‘In which case, you’ve probably noticed several mentions of the late Sir Laurens van der Post.’
‘Yes.’ Scrabbling through the papers. ‘That’s, erm …’
Uncovering an article enclosing a picture of this benign-looking old guy with a grey comb-over, side-on to the camera: PRINCE’S GURU: SAGE OR CHARLATAN?
‘You haven’t read them, have you, Merrily?’
‘I …’ Merrily sighed. ‘I haven’t read them all. Things have been complicated. Just inconveniences, really. But time-consuming.’
‘Do you know
anything
about van der Post?’
‘This and that.’
Van der Post, Laurens: white South African who bonded with the bushmen of the Kalahari studying so-called primitive belief systems and showing what Western societies might learn from them, while drawing public attention to the horrors of apartheid.
A war hero. But known primarily, in later years, as a close friend of the Prince of Wales. A seminal influence.
‘The Church wasn’t happy,’ Merrily recalled, ‘when Charles decided he should be William’s godfather. On account of van der Post’s own belief system being not strictly C of E. Correct?’
‘He believed that all religions were, essentially, one,’ Sophie said.
‘Which possibly accounts for Charles’s declared intention of becoming Defender of
Faiths
, when he becomes king?’
‘Which almost certainly
does
account for it. The extent of van der Post’s influence can never be overstated. He was extremely mystical in a way that I suspect your … daughter would understand.’
‘Pagan?’
‘That would be too simplistic. He died in’ 96, at the age of ninety, having been far closer to the Prince in his crucial formative years than, I would guess, anyone in the Church of England. You’ll find details in the cuttings about the time they went together into the wilderness of Kenya and van der Post imparted his knowledge of … I suppose the word “shamanism” would not be inappropriate.’
‘It’s coming back to me. Closeness to the land, anyway.’
‘And the alleged … spirits of nature. Evidently a very powerful experience for a young man. They were camping out in a very remote area, without guards or detectives. And there, if you want to look for it, lies the basis of this much publicized – and possibly much misrepresented – communication with plants. It might have sown the seeds of the Prince’s passion for conservation and green issues generally.’
‘Interesting.’
What was also interesting was the way Sophie – who
worked for the cathedral
– talked about it, with no hint of condemnation. As if even the fringe-pagan became less obnoxious, for her, if it happened to be championed by royalty. If it ever came to a stand-off between the Church and the Crown, whose side would Sophie be on?
‘But where’s it leading, Sophie?’
‘It leads,’ Sophie said, ‘directly to Canon Dobbs. When he first came over here in, I think, the late 1920s, van der Post became a farmer in Gloucestershire for some years. Canon Dobbs grew up near Cirencester. My information is that he might even have worked on the van der Post farm as a boy, during holidays.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘I’ve been speaking to a retired clergyman – nobody you would know, so don’t ask – who knew Dobbs years ago. He said Dobbs would
often talk about a South African farmer he’d known before the war who had helped to awaken his spiritual faculties.’
‘If they stayed in contact, Sophie, that doesn’t totally add up. Dobbs’s attitude to spirituality, while not exactly fundamentalist, was certainly tightly focused.’
‘Merrily, you only encountered him at the very end. We’re talking about the 1930s, when he was a boy, and Laurens van der Post a young man. They may not subsequently have followed the same spiritual paths, but in their questing years … Anyway, they were exchanging letters almost until van der Post’s death.’
‘You know this for a fact?’
‘I confirmed it about an hour ago, with Mrs Edna Rees. You remember her?’
‘Yes, I do.’
Dobbs’s housekeeper in Gwynne Street who had once told Merrily he hardly spoke to her. A cloistered existence in his later years.
‘She sometimes, in his absence, managed to clean his office,’ Sophie said. ‘And she remembers the letters.’