‘Or beyond,’ Jane said.
‘Yes.’
‘And this is where you say, Don’t get carried away about it. Don’t get carried away like you did before, and look what happened.’ Jane gazed down, addressing the table, speaking very slowly and softly. ‘I
know
what happened. I got humiliated. And now half the nation’s going to see it happen. And all the kids at school. And Morrell. And the heads of every university department of archaeology in the UK, they will all see me getting humiliated. Maybe it’ll even be released on DVD so people who
really
don’t like me can watch me getting humiliated over and over again.’
‘It’s not been televised yet.’
‘
Oh
. . . no.’ Jane’s head came up. ‘You don’t go near him. This is not your problem, Mum. And, like, don’t give me the old your-problems-are-my-problems line, because that doesn’t apply. I’m eighteen, I’m an adult, I need to learn to deal with it. I
will
deal with it.’
‘All right,’ Merrily said. ‘Help me with
my
problem, then.’
She put her cigarettes and the Zippo on the table. Told Jane about the Stookes, the various anomalies, proven and alleged, at Cole Barn.
It was legitimate to share this stuff; Jane had been part of it from the start. She only wished it sounded more convincing in the cold, damp morning. Pre-Blore, Jane would’ve become excited, full of the implications of this for Coleman’s Meadow, the energy line, the spirit path.
She just drank some tea, sighed.
‘Well . . . couldn’t make
that
up, could you. Mum?’
Ethel pattered across the stone flags to her dish of dried food, began crunching.
‘
I
couldn’t,’ Merrily said. ‘But could they?’
Jane nodded, already resigned.
‘Was there anything on your website about, say, site-guardian legends?’
‘Mmm. Possibly.’
‘And you had an email from a man who said Coleman’s Meadow had one.’
‘It was the dowser from Malvern who had the argument with Blore in the meadow before he started on me. Lensi was there, doing pictures. She might’ve talked to him.’
Merrily lit a cigarette, noticed there were only three left in the packet. She missed the rumble of the old Aga, a victim of its oil consumption.
‘He seemed a decent bloke,’ Jane said. ‘I haven’t spoken to him about it. If you want, I can email him now.’
‘No, it wouldn’t prove anything. Let’s shelve any discussion about what a guardian is and whether there could be one in the meadow. Let’s deal with the prosaic facts. Go back to your meeting with Leonora at Lucy’s grave – presumably you’d had the email by then?’
‘Weeks before.’
‘Did you mention anything to Leonora to suggest there might be any kind of psychic disturbance in Coleman’s Meadow?’
‘I just told her about the spirit path and the need to maintain a link with the ancestors.’
‘You didn’t suggest to her that there might be something weird about Cole Farm?’
‘I didn’t know there
was
anything weird about it. What are you suggesting? They might’ve put all this together from bits they picked up from people like me?’
‘Just eliminating various possibilities. Stooke’s looking for material for another book and he’s shown a slightly more than cursory interest in me . . . and you, of course.’
‘So the bottom line . . .?’
‘The bottom line might be me telling them their house may have a problem, and they go, well, if you say so, vicar, but what can you do about it? And then I go in and do the business and perhaps they video the whole process from some hidden camera, stupid little priest furthering the spread of primitive superstition . . . and
suppose, instead of being the intelligent, sophisticated types they are, they’d been some poor old couple, et cetera, et cetera. I’m reading it already.’
‘That just . . . stinks.’
‘They haven’t done anything yet, just told me the kind of stuff that people usually hand me along with a plea for help. But I shall be cool, Jane, I shall make inquiries.’
‘What about Mad Shirley?’
‘And I’ll talk to Mad Shirley. As Huw points out, no need to approach her on behalf of the Stookes. Now she’s telling everybody I’m not a fit person to be the vicar, it’s . . . personal.’
‘Take her down, Mum.’
‘Yeah, and then I’ll get on the phone and blast the cops for not returning my computer. God, it doesn’t feel like Christmas, does it?’ Merrily finished her tea and stood up. ‘I’m just going to pop over to the shop before it gets crowded. Nearly out of cigs.’
‘What about breakfast?’
‘You and Eirion get something decent. I’ll just have toast and Marmite or something when I get back.’ She grabbed her waxed coat from the peg behind the kitchen door. ‘Won’t be long.’
Eirion had come down in expectation of central heating, gone back for a fleece, still looked cold. Pampered rich kid. Jane moved away from the sink, picked up a towel to dry her hands.
‘She’s annoyed with herself for letting things slide. I’ve seen this before. She needs to walk around the square a couple of times, smoke a cigarette, gear herself up.’
‘Something happened I
don’t
know about?’ Eirion said. ‘I mean apart from us being cut off until January?’
‘Some people are messing her about, that’s all.’
Jane felt suddenly depressed. Everything seemed so . . . cheesy.
‘She’s so . . . not like a vicar, your mother, isn’t she?’ Eirion poured grapefruit juice into a glass. ‘Not like you think of vicars. Especially women. Not what you expect.’
‘What – like they don’t smoke, don’t swear? Don’t sleep with the bloke across the street?’
‘She doesn’t make you go . . .’ Eirion wiggled his fingers like he was getting rid of something cloying. ‘In a strange way, she’s more
human than the rest of us. Forget it, I don’t know what I’m talking about.’
‘It is odd, actually,’ Jane said. ‘I think it’s something about deliverance people. Something that makes them dispense with the bullshit. I don’t quite understand it either.’ She looked over to the window. ‘I wonder if Blore’s going to be back on the site.’
‘They’ll surely be going home for . . . See, I was about to say Christmas, but he doesn’t do Christmas, does he?’
‘The TV crew won’t be able to get all
their
stuff out. Unless they moved some of it last night after dark. But then, if the bridge went down around seven . . .’
‘Maybe they’ll have vans the other side and carry what they can across the footbridge.’
‘We should check it out, all the same. I more or less promised Coops.’
‘Your mum might be right, you know,’ Eirion said. ‘Blore might’ve found nothing. And Cooper’s just embittered because they didn’t give him control of—
what
?’
Jane had walked over, put her arms around him. She felt a bit tearful.
‘We’re destroying your Christmas, aren’t we?’
Eirion smiled sadly, running a hand down Jane’s hair.
‘So far, it’s the best Christmas I’ve ever had.’
‘Ah. Right.’ Jane looked up at him, solemn. ‘Just for a minute, I forgot you were Welsh.’
Dodging neatly away, grinning, clapping her hands and then, as Eirion chased her round the table, snatching an apple from the bowl and throwing it at him. Eirion caught the apple, tossing it from hand to hand, as a vague smear of sun in the high window opened up this white fan of light in the room.
Jane stopped, catching her breath.
‘Jane . . .?’
‘Lucy.’
Jane sat down. Eirion did his wry smile, but his eyes were wary. He put the apple on the table.
‘It was just something coming back to me.’
As clear as reality. As clear as if it had been Lucy who’d caught the apple, and Jane was back in the old shop, Ledwardine Lore, the day
they cut an apple in half, sideways. Not, as you normally did, through the stalk. She remembered Lucy holding out a half in each hand.
There . . . what do you see?
And Jane had seen, for the first time, the slender green lines and dots in the centre of the apple which formed a five-pointed star. The pentagram that lay at the heart of every apple but which you only discovered if you cut through it sideways, which people seldom did. The hidden magic in the everyday. Lucy saying,
Forget all this black magic nonsense. The pentagram’s a very ancient symbol of purification and protection
.
‘I think something’s staring us in the face,’ Jane said.
As if, in that momentary lifting of the spirits, when she’d ducked away from Eirion, picked up the apple, something had opened up for her, like two halves of an idea she couldn’t yet put together.
Let no one talk of the humble apple to me
, Lucy had said.
Jane sat down. She felt slightly dizzy. Nothing was quite real.
‘Irene, could you . . .?’
‘Anything.’
‘If Lol has to go out with Gomer again? Like his hands . . .?’
‘I’ll help,’ Eirion said. ‘If Gomer will accept me.’
‘And tell Lol not to play “Fruit Tree” tonight.’
Most of the village was lying low. Many people had been up late talking in the street, half anxious, half excited, about the implications. Some of them driving out to see the bridge, just to make sure. Lights still burned here and there in the greyness, shimmered in the dark water, but only James Bull-Davies and Gomer Parry were to be seen, at the top of the square, leaning against Gomer’s jeep.
‘Long ole night, vicar.’
‘I don’t know how you do it, Gomer.’
He looked scarily happy. Shirley West would be seeing the Devil’s light in his bottle glasses.
‘Don’t need much sleep these days, see. Done all my growin’ and never had much in the way of beauty.’ He stood looking down the street, rolling a cig. ‘Dunno what’s left for us to do with the ole river, but I reckon our commander-in-chief yere’ll have a few ideas.’
‘Well, we can’t build a new bloody bridge,’ James said. ‘Not even you.’
‘Erm . . .’ Merrily sank her hands into her coat pockets. ‘Can I ask you guys something? In confidence.’
‘Ask away,’ Gomer said. ‘Like the ole poet said, What is this life if, full of care, we en’t got time for the little vicar?’
‘Cole Barn. What’s the history? It did belong to your family at one time didn’t it, James?’
‘Gord, vicar, way back everything belonged to my blessed family. Barn itself, no. Ground it’s built on, yes – sorry, said I’d check if there was any mention of stones. No there wasn’t but the Bulls weren’t exactly of an antiquarian bent. If the stones were in the way, they’d’ve buried them or smashed them up and that would’ve been that.’
‘When did your family last own the land?’
‘Cole Farm was . . . finally sold, I think, in the 1900s, to Albert Evans, family’s estate manager at the time. Inherited by his eldest daughter who’d married into the Pole family, and then finally – as you know – left by Margaret Pole to Gerry Murray, who’s now in with Pierce and capitalises on his inheritance by flogging the barn to the Frenchies.’
‘Any gossip about it?’
‘Sort of gossip?’
‘Erm . . . my sort of gossip.’
He took it well. Didn’t blink. He had, after all, been a soldier.
‘Not that I’ve ever heard. Called Cole Barn on the sales particulars, but Albert Evans built it as a house, for his retirement. Meant his eldest could move into the existing farmhouse with
his
family. Didn’t live there very long, though, Albert. Moved down to the village, for convenience. House was eventually gutted, became a cattle shed. That’s it, really.’
‘First I yeard of it,’ Gomer said, ‘was when ole Harold Wescott was renting the land from Maggie Pole, and he put his beasts in there, and they made that much noise at night as Maggie, up at Cole Farm, her couldn’t get no sleep, so her makes Harold transport the beasts two mile to his
own
barn. That was how it become a tractor shed, see. Tractors don’t moan.’
‘Never knew about that,’ James said. ‘Live and learn.’
‘I done some drainage work there once, for Harold,’ Gomer said. ‘Or tried to. Beggar of a job. Nothin’ went right. Sometimes you finds ground don’t wanner be shifted, see.’
‘What made you think that?’
‘You just gets a feel that a place is tellin’ you summat.’
‘Like
bugger off?
’
‘Mabbe. Ole digger . . . ole digger broke down twice – well, I’m saying
ole
digger, her was new back then, and we never had no real trouble with her since. I goes back to Harold Wescott, I says Harold, en’t there nowhere else you can put this drain? Well, I knowed there was, see, but it’d be longer, and Harold, he was always bloody tight like that, so I told him I’d do it for the same price, and that was that. Sorted.’
‘This was near Cole Barn?’ Merrily said.
‘Twenny yards? There was no front on him then, the ole barn, so I’d keep the digger in there while I was on that job.’
‘And, erm . . . that wouldn’t have been when you couldn’t get her started, by any chance?’
‘You’re ahead of me there, vicar.’
‘Not been back since?’
‘Not likely to, either. Gerry Murray got his own digger, as we all bloody know.’
‘Sore point,’ James said. ‘Murray was hired to do the preliminary ground-stripping for the archaeological dig. Pierce obviously fixed it.’
‘Bent bastards,’ Gomer said.
The Eight Till Late had only just opened. It was empty.
Apart from Shirley West behind the till.
In the front of the shop, this was. Not in the post office which still had its blind down, concealing the public information posters, the clock and even the iron cross which Shirley had hung very prominently, as if she, definitely not Merrily, was God’s representative in Ledwardine. As if the post office was the centre of the real faith.
Merrily looked into the smoky eyes below the coiled hair, summoning a smile.
‘Morning, Shirley. Jim not in?’
‘Getting his breakfast,’ Shirley said. ‘He stayed open half the night, the poor man. What do you want?’
Charming as ever.
‘What’s going to happen with the post office today, Shirley?’
‘May not open. No mail going in or out. I’m waiting for instructions from head office.’