Phil Rickman - The Fabric of Sin

‘Huw, for heaven’s sake—’

‘The woman who edits the website, Rosemary Pardoe, says Monty appears to have had, quote, a peculiar experience at Garway, the nature of which is, quote, tantalizingly unclear , but which he writes about with typical spooky Jamesian humour .’

‘Saying …?’

‘Read it when you get back. I don’t want you thinking I’m embroidering it, winding you up. Some places just attract this kind of thing.’

‘ Huw —’

‘Have to be off, anyroad. I’ve work to do, and so have you.’

And then he wasn’t there, the bastard.

But if he’d thought it was so important, surely he’d have told her.

AFTER THE SERVICE, when everybody else, even Shirley West, had gone, Merrily had a furtive cigarette with Gomer Parry behind the tower. Asking him what the feeling was in the village about the resurrection of the old stones in Coleman’s Meadow. Maybe most people would actually prefer a new estate of executive homes?

‘En’t so much that, vicar,’ Gomer said. ‘Few more fancy houses en’t the argument. Tip o’ the muck-heap. It’s who’s in bed with Lyndon Pierce. Who wants to see the village turned into a town? Supermarkets and posh restaurants. And who’s on young Janey’s side.’

‘And yours, Gomer. Let’s not forget that.’

‘Ar. I’ll be doin’ my bit, sure to, to see Pierce gets his arse kicked, vicar.’

The light was back, big time, in Gomer’s wire-rimmed glasses, his white hair topping his weathered brown face like the froth on beer. Councillor Pierce had said Gomer Parry was halfway senile, an old joke who ought to be in a home. Gomer would need to be a long way into senility to forget that.

‘Harchaeologists needs a JCB and a driver,’ he said. ‘Won’t be no charge from me.’

‘That’s very generous of you, Gomer. I’m sure Jane’ll see it gets back to the right people. Erm … you know Felix Barlow?’

‘Barlow …’ Gomer adjusted his cap, screwed up his eyes. ‘Builder?’

‘From Monkland. Knows Danny.’

‘Ar. Met the feller a few times over the years. He don’t build no mock-Tudor rainbow-stone crap. Don’t build nothin’ new at all, far’s I can see.’

‘Good bloke?’

‘Oh, straight, I reckon. Liked a drink at one time, so I yeard. That’d be when he was married.’

‘When was that?’

‘Eight years, nine … I lose track. But I remember his wife. Oh, hell, aye, I remember her, all right.’

It started to rain. Merrily leaned into the base of the tower.

‘You know Lizzie Nugent?’ Gomer said. ‘Widow, up by Bearswood?’

‘Don’t think so.’

‘Husband left her with two kids and a twenty-acre smallholdin’. I was over attendin’ to some ditchin’ one day, early March it’d be, when the gales blows the roof off Lizzie’s cowshed. Smashed to bits. So I calls a few people, see if we could get some galvanized, cheapish, and somebody puts me on to Felix Barlow. He comes round in his truck that same day, with these sheets off a shed he’s took down, and we fixed the ole roof between us. Took us n’ more’n a few hours, and when he found out Lizzie en’t got no insurance he was very reasonable about it, was Felix, no question ’bout that.’

Gomer ignited his roll-up, hands cupped around it.

‘We’re havin’ a cuppa with Lizzie afterwards when up comes this bloody great white BMW. Woman inside leanin’ on the horn till Felix goes out. Givin’ him hell, we could all of us year it. Folks in the next village’d likely year it – all this, what you doin’ yere when you oughter be up at Lady So-and-So’s? What you think you are, bloody registered charity?’

‘This is Mrs Barlow?’

‘Good-lookin’ woman, mind. But it en’t everythin’, is it?’

‘Erm … no. I suppose not.’

‘Barlow goes around helpin’ too many poor widows, where’s the next BMW comin’ from?’

‘You met the woman he’s with now?’

‘The hippie? Never met her, no, vicar.’ Gomer waved his ciggy. ‘Feller’s a bit alternative hisself, mind. Builder as en’t into cheating his clients, that’s alternative for a start, ennit?’

Merrily laughed.

‘Knows the job, too. Could be in an office, collar and tie, directin’ operations. But he knows that money en’t everythin’, no more’n a goodlookin’ woman is.’

‘She is a good-looking woman, as it happens.’

‘The hippie?’

‘And not much more than half his age.’

‘Oh well.’ Gomer shrugged, teeth crushing the ciggy. ‘Just cause a feller spends all his time shorin’ up ole buildings, don’t mean all his tools is obsolete.’

Merrily blinked.

Merrily didn’t know what M. R. James had looked like. The only face she could see in her mind was Huw’s, framed by hair like dried-out straw, mounted on an age-dulled dog-collar and settling into a complacent conjuror’s smile.

We must have offended somebody or something at Garway, I think.

‘I wondered why you were so anxious,’ Jane said, ‘to borrow the M. R. James.’

Always a danger with emails. She’d been on the computer in the scullery, researching some aspect of stone rows, when Huw’s mail had come through. She’d read it, looked up the references, been into the Ghosts and Scholars website.

‘You couldn’t make it up,’ Jane said, still sitting at the desk.

Impressed, excited. Merrily walked to the window. Oh hell .

‘Mr James could make it up, though, couldn’t he? I mean, that was what he did.’

‘Oh, Mum. It was a letter to his friend. Someone who obviously knew exactly what he was on about. He doesn’t spell it out, does he? He knows she understands his point of reference.’

‘Mmm. Possibly.’

Merrily read the rest of it.

Probably we took it too much for granted, in speaking of it, that we should be able to do exactly as we pleased. Next time we shall know better. There is no doubt it is a very rum place and needs careful handling.

No, the kid was right. You couldn’t make it up. She could see why Huw had insisted on emailing the whole page from the Ghosts and Scholars website. Something had happened to M. R. James at Garway. Either something faintly curious which James’s serpentine imagination had inflated into something disturbing. Or something seriously disturbing which James, in this otherwise routine letter to a female friend, was deliberately making light of.

The editor of the website had made a kind of pilgrimage to the area to track down the settings for the main Herefordshire story ‘A View from a Hill’. Although the story seemed to be set in the general area of Garway, the village itself didn’t appear to feature, even under a different name.

‘I love this guy.’ Jane was glowing. ‘Greatest ghost-story writer ever. Because he just … well, basically, he just … he didn’t do ghosts.’

‘What did he do, then?’

‘Entities. He did entities. Creeping things. Indefinable things, exuding … malevolence. In traditional settings, like old churches and deserted shores and places with burial mounds. According to the website, he once said there was no point at all in writing about the supernatural if it wasn’t evil.’

‘Doesn’t that kind of invalidate the Bible?’

‘He meant fiction, Mum.’

‘Wow,’ Merrily said, ‘ there ’s a step forward for you.’

‘I mean complete fiction. Anyway, he wasn’t exactly anti-religious. His old man was a vicar, in Suffolk. He was brought up in the Church. He might even have gone that way himself if he hadn’t got into academic research and teaching and stuff.’