Sandlands (19 page)

Freya was staring in the same direction. Her bare shoulders hunched in a shudder.

‘You're cold. Here – take my sweater.'

Instead she sat up, brushing sand and pebbles from her jeans and vest. ‘Thanks, but this shingle is bloody uncomfortable, anyway. I think I might head back.'

 

There were no evening buses to or from the village, and Bill had balked at the idea of riding pillion behind Freya on the motorbike; besides, she had no spare helmet. So he'd met her here with the hired pushbike, and now faced a lonely eight-mile cycle home. He kicked shingle over the remnants of the fire – a good Boy Scout – and walked with her back to where they'd left the bikes, behind the sea wall. The path along the top of the wall was deserted, so he might have kissed her then, as he'd have liked to have done, but as she bent to free the disc lock of her motorbike she shivered again, as if a shadow had crossed her grave, and Bill was filled with the unformed, haunting sense of its being too late.

The sea fret hugged the shoreline, so that as he rose on his pedals to mount the hill out of the town it fell away behind him and he was out into pale, clear moonlight. But, glancing back as he paused at the summit to catch his breath, he saw that the mist had shifted and risen, too, so as to create the sensation that it was following him. The road wound between tall hedges and the moon cast shifting, fractured shadows across his way. There was no sound but the creaking of the bike's saddle springs and the whir of its wheels, so that when a pheasant, startled from sleep, rose beating from the hedge he was as shaken as the bird, and his heart hammered hard in his chest. The bicycle's front light gave out a watery beam, lighting a small patch of tarmac which served only to throw everything around it into deeper darkness. The pattern of the filament resembled a skull as it ran and jumped along in front of him; he found himself trying not to look directly at it.

From his right loomed suddenly the huge, dark outline of a pylon, and behind it a phalanx of others, marching in from the sea at Sizewell armed with countless gigawatts of atomic power, crackling and buzzing, seeking the shortest route to earth.

All he could think of, all the long way home with the mist at his tail and the leaping shadows tormenting him, was the story, the ‘Warning to the Curious'. How the narrator, walking close between hedges, would sooner have been in the open, where he could see if anyone was visible behind him. And young Paxton muttering over and over, ‘I don't know how to put it back.' Then, finally, Freya's voice.
You dig up
secrets, not Anglo-Saxon crowns.
And,
Once you've unearthed
them, they cannot be put back.

 

The final week in August – the last week, too, of Bill's holiday – built to a fever of oppressive heat. The fields around the village lay dusty and inert beneath a haze of heavy air; even the stateliest trees appeared to droop and wilt. It was far too hot for long cycle rides. His room was airless – too airless even for reading in comfort – and in the bar of the Ship the only company was Raymond, the publican, growing gloomier the more the thermometer rose, and two indistinguishable regulars, George and Jim, who were scarcely more cheerful and sat playing endless games of cribbage. He saw almost nothing of Freya, who took to downing a quick pint after work and disappearing to the youth hostel to sit in the cool and write up her notes from the excavation. That, too, was coming to an end.

‘We're clearing out early. I uncovered a layer of ash. If we haven't found much, that's maybe why – it might have been sacked by the Danes.'

‘By your lot.'

‘Yeah – by my lot.'

The Friday was the hottest day so far, a treacly, damp, impenetrable heat which felt too thick for breathing. With his return to London looming, Bill remembered that he hadn't yet been to the church, either to visit the archaeological dig or to research his grandmother's family. A knock at the rectory door had furnished him with the key to the vestry in which the parish registers were kept; the pretty and heavily pregnant young woman whom he took at first to be the rector's wife but further conversation revealed in fact to be the rector assured him that they dated back to the eighteenth century. Dragging the bicycle out of the side shed where Raymond had grudgingly let him store it, he set off towards the church. It was almost five, but he had put off his expedition until he hoped the swelter might be starting to subside, and to an hour which Freya had mentioned as being more conducive to digging in a heatwave. In fact, if anything, both heat and humidity were worse than before, but cloud was massing from the west and the sky had taken on an angry, greyish-purple hue which surely meant the weather was soon to break.

As he locked up his bike by the church gate he could almost smell the approaching rain. The breeze had stilled, leaving the air dull and leaden. Even the birds had quietened. There was no activity at what he took to be the excavation site; the square trench near the tower was covered over with tarpaulins. They must not have been working this afternoon at all, or else were starting very late or had knocked off early to avoid the storm.

Inside the church it was cooler, which was some relief, but the air tasted stale and held no stir of movement. The vestry door was to the left of the chancel arch, just as the rector had described to him: a heavy oak door below a simple gothic arch, the old wood much patched and repaired. Beside it, in the final bay of the nave, was a stained-glass window – early Victorian, by the colouring and manner, with its elongated figures and elaborate folds of drapery. It depicted Mary in the centre panel, holding the Christ child as if he were made of Dresden china – which, indeed, he did somewhat resemble. On either side stood unknown saints with extravagantly curling beards; one held an open book and one a giant golden key. But what caught Bill's attention was something above and behind the three principals, where stylised leaves and lilies wreathed the upper portions of the lights and among them a banner unfurled, its ends elegantly scrolled. The field was a brilliant blue and on it a simple blazon: three repeated images in silver-white argent, each with three distinctive trefoil tines, familiar in heraldic design. There was no mistaking them – the three Anglo-Saxon crowns.

Bill saw that his hand was trembling as he slotted the vestry key into the lock, and resolved to pull himself together. It must be the hot weather: too much sun, addling his mind and making him a prey to foolish notions. He'd find Gran in the parish registers, make his notes, then return to the pub and take a long cool bath. If he hurried, he might even make it back before the storm broke.

It was in the third book of the marriage register that he found the entry. Manning, his mother's maiden name. Edith Ann Manning – that was his grandmother. He read the lines twice, three times, but the information refused to be grasped; it dodged and danced and taunted him, defying comprehension.

 

15th June 1938

 

Charles Edward Manning

bachelor of the parish of Little Glemham

son of Thomas
and Jane Manning

 

to

 

Edith Ann Ager

spinster of
this parish

daughter of William and Elizabeth Ager

 

Bill closed the register with a snap that sounded abnormally loud in the stifling air. Consumed by an urgency for which he couldn't fully account, he pushed it back between the other volumes on the shelf, then blundered from the vestry, fumbling in his impatience to lock the door, and on out into the churchyard, Freya and the dig forgotten, almost running now to where he'd left his bike. Already the first few bloated drops of rain were beginning to fall, wetting the path in haphazard splashes and saturating the unnaturally early dusk with moisture. It was suddenly cold.

His fingers shook so that he struggled with the bicycle lock, and by the time he was mounted and pushing off along the lane the rain was coming down in earnest: a fierce, unrelenting downpour. It was rain so dense that it almost had solid shape, like vertical columns of water. The surface of the road fizzed and steamed beneath his tyres where cold liquid met heated tarmac, while overhead the power lines sputtered and hissed in warning. Bill's hair and face were soon drenched, water cascading down his brow and temples and into his eyes. It tasted metallic on his lips; it ran from his chin in rivulets.

The secrets of the past, he thought. Family secrets.
You dig
up secrets and they cannot be put back.
He was an Ager. No Paxton, but an Ager; the watcher, not the watched. Why was he impelled to flee? If there was a ghost at his heels, it could only be his own.

For a moment the slate of the sky was lit to an eerie yellow. Then came a rumble that could be the first roll and judder of thunder, or the growl of an approaching engine, blurred by the drum of rain. Blindly, with head down and eyes screwed tight against the stinging torrent, Bill pedalled into the storm.

Parochial Church Council of St Peter'
s, Blaxhall

Minutes of a meeting held in the village
hall on Tuesday 24th November 2015 at 7.30 p.m

Present: Sheila Mott (vice-chairperson and church-warden), Dorothy Brundish (secretary
)...

 

Dorothy had served as secretary of the PCC for more than forty years. During that time she had graduated from her old Smith-Corona portable typewriter through, successively, an Amstrad and a Macintosh desktop the size of a Ford Fiesta to the current MacBook Pro, slim and silver, provided by the deanery. Over the same period she had moved through several pairs of spectacles, each with progressively fatter lenses. The MacBook allowed you to enlarge the font and twiddle around with differently coloured backgrounds but, even so, typing these days was rather a strain. A pity that deanery resources didn't run to the supply of new eyes.

 

Item
1: Arrangements for the interregnum

Miss Ivy Paskall has been
appointed on a temporary basis to provide cover during the
absence of the rector...

Although, strictly speaking, it wasn't actually an interregnum. That would have been a commonplace enough phenomenon, of which there had been three during Dorothy's tenure as secretary – following, respectively, the retirements of Harry Camplin and Bartholemew Leach and the untimely death from pancreatic cancer of poor David Tuttle at the age of only sixty-two – and procedures for covering services in such circumstances were well established. But six months of maternity leave, necessitated by the pregnancy of the Revd. Kimberley Jackaman, who'd not been married a year – this was an eventuality unanticipated by diocesan synods of the past.

Dorothy moved her mouse back over the text on the screen before her, selected ‘arrangements for the interregnum' and pressed ‘delete', before substituting ‘arrangements for maternity cover'.

The congregation would all rally round, of course, to support the churchwardens, and old Harry Camplin still lived in the village and had volunteered his best offices, but at eighty-seven and with his prostate issues there were limits to what they could expect, even now with the new plumbing in the choir vestry. It was the Rural Dean who had suggested Ivy's name; he had met her at a dinner at his old college over in Cambridge. She came with impeccable credentials: sensible and fifty, with a career in teaching behind her, followed by a double first in Philosophy and Theology, she was completing a doctorate on the early Christian church in East Anglia before training for the ministry. It meant she was only a licensed lay reader where they might have hoped for a deacon or even a retired priest, but what she lacked in terms of investiture she more than made up for with the forthright energy and old-fashioned common sense that had struck them all so forcibly at the informal interview held around Kimberley's kitchen table at the rectory. Even Air Vice-Marshal Fitzpatrick had been impressed. And while a lay reader wasn't authorised to celebrate weddings or baptisms or administer the sacraments, she could at least conduct a funeral – that being, it often seemed, the rite most in demand at St Peter's. The most immediate thing, too, was that Ivy would be here for the busy Christmas period, and it didn't take an ordinand to rally tots in dressing gowns and tea towels or lead the carols round the crib.

She obviously couldn't move into the rectory, as old Canon Whiterod had done during the last interregnum. Kimberley and her husband were very much in possession, and busy pasting Peppa Pig wallpaper in the first floor box room. But the Air Vice-Marshal had offered the use of Church Cottage at a preferential rent, and Mrs Suggett said she could easily manage to do for Ivy in the way of cleaning as well as for the Reverend. Not of course, as Dorothy reminded herself, that it was an interregnum this time.

 

* * *

 

Village die-hards might not like it, but Dorothy thought the Epiphany Burning was rather fun. The kiddies always loved a bonfire, after all, and they could all do with something bright and cheerful to think about, with the Christmas merriments done and packed away for the year and the brunt of the winter weather no doubt still to be faced.

The idea had been Ivy's, but Sheila Mott had jumped on board with enthusiasm, organising the jacket potatoes and the hot fruit punch – non-alcoholic, so no objection could be raised on that score. The appearance of the Rural Dean to apply the taper and bless the flames had added the incontrovertible seal of approval.

The practice was a long-established one, according to Ivy, in the European protestant tradition. The taking down of Christmas trees and other evergreens which had been brought indoors to celebrate the season were taken out and burned. The cleansing fire represented purification, the sacred funeral pyre from which rebirth would come: for the ancients, the cycle of death and regeneration in nature; for Christians, sin, absolution and amendment of life.