Phil Rickman - Remains of an Altar

Thinking about the winter after Lucy died, when she’d seriously embraced some kind of goddess-worship, lying about her age to join this women’s esoteric group, The Pod, in Hereford. Wondering now why she’d more or less abandoned paganism which, on nights like this, seemed a kind of healthy spiritual response to nature and the environment.

A better relationship developing between her and Mum probably had something to do with it. Mum becoming more liberal as she became more secure in her own job. And then there was Eirion. Meeting Eirion, falling in … love, probably.

Which was looking like a dead end.

Jane moved out of the shadow of the market hall and across the cobbled square, walking towards the church until the top of Cole Hill came into view, smoky and seductive in the dusk. The hill of the shamans.

Eirion. She badly wanted to see him, but it was pointless. Within three months he’d be at university. Emma Rees at school – not a particular mate, but you had to feel sorry for her – had been engaged to some bloke, and he’d gone to college in Gloucester ( that close) and within about a month it was Dear Emma … a bloody text message!

Jane didn’t do texting any more. Texting was for kids and adults with emotional dyslexia.

She took out her mobile, switched it on and watched it lighting up. Brought up the Abergavenny number from the phone book. This would be a small test, right?

Jane drew in a long, ragged breath and pressed the little green-phone sign, listening to it ringing. Decided no and was about to hit the little red-phone button when…

‘Jane Watkins.’ Eirion said in her ear. ‘I know the name from somewhere . Hang on … Yes! Didn’t we used to go out together at one time?’

Eirion’s phone had, of course, flashed up the caller’s number. So good to hear his stupid Welsh voice. Actually, not good at all.

‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry I haven’t rung. It’s been … it’s like…’

‘Thought I was being phased out, I did.’ Eirion exaggerating the accent. ‘In view of my imminent departure to some distant seat of learning. Strange how we become paranoid, isn’t it?’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘Would’ve slashed my wrists in the bath,’ Eirion said, ‘except I’ve only got an electric razor.’

‘You could always have plugged it in, dropped it in the bath and electrocuted yourself. Lateral thinking, Irene.’ Jane smiling, in spite of it all. ‘Look, what would it cost to set up a website?’

‘Shit,’ Eirion said. ‘Any thoughts of you still wanting me for my body…’

‘It was never about your body, fatso.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Anyway, how soon could you organize it?’ Jane said.

Feeling that sense of what have I got to lose? urgency. Thinking of the council pygmies trashing the reputation of the great Alfred Watkins: lot of nonsense … New Age cranks …

Jane Watkins standing on the market square in ancient Ledwardine feeling the lines of energy, the ancestral spirit, glowing and pulsing all around her, rippling through her in the numinous dusk.

‘It was when Simon St John was laying down the cello parts for Alien ,’ Lol said, ‘and I said I’d like something pastoral but moody. So Simon starts playing this lovely, sorrowful tune. And there it was. Hills … real hills. Texture. Dull day. Low cloud. And some diffuse, underlying emotion. Elgar’s Cello Concerto .’

‘Wow,’ Merrily said.

No particular reason for Lol not to know about Elgar. His own dead muse, Nick Drake, had, after all, been inspired by the likes of Delius and Ravel.

But Elgar had always seemed so Establishment . Hadn’t he been made Master of the King’s Musick? Hadn’t he composed all these marches and patriotic anthems? Hadn’t he written Pomp and Circumstance , whose very title…

‘Misunderstood,’ Lol said. ‘Most of his life people were getting him wrong. Even his appearance … Looked like an army officer. Or a country squire. Misleading.’

‘You mean you like Elgar?’

‘Son of a piano tuner with a shop in Worcester. Self-taught. Lived for nine years in Hereford where he employed his daughter’s white rabbit as a consultant because his wife wouldn’t let him have a dog. Kept trying to invent things. Had a home laboratory. Seems to have blown it up, once. What’s not to like?’

Merrily drove a little faster. You slept with someone – albeit rarely for a whole night – and you thought you knew everything about him.

‘And even when he was famous,’ Lol said, ‘he was often mentally, emotionally and spiritually … totally messed up.’

She glanced at him, sitting there with his hands on his knees, watching the dark, burnished landscape. How much common ground was there in the creative landscapes of classical composers and guys who cobbled together, albeit sometimes brilliantly, four-minute songs on their guitars?

‘He smoke?’

Thinking about Hannah and the strong tobacco.

‘Lifelong,’ Lol said.

‘What about women? Did he … like women?’

‘A lot. His wife was nine years older and a lot higher up the social scale than him. Her dad was a general or something. She helped him and encouraged him. It seems to have been a good marriage.’

‘But?’

Some people suggest he had affairs with younger women. It’s more likely to have been just … crushes.’

‘Where’d you learn all this?’

‘Couple of biographies.’

‘It’s just … you’ve just never mentioned him. You’ve never once mentioned Elgar.’

‘Well, you don’t, do you?’ Lol said. ‘He’s just too … too there . Part of the tourist trail. Every few miles, another sign saying Elgar Route . Nobody notices any more. He’s official. He’s a thousand people waving Union Jacks at the last night of the Proms. Which is why it’s so interesting how ambivalent he was about all that.’

Lol looked out of the side window towards a round hop kiln spiking the sunset like the tower of a Disneyland castle.

‘In fact, he was a romantic, a dreamer. And the landscape was everything. This landscape. When he was dying, he—’

He broke off, pretending to correct a twist in his seat belt, Merrily slipping him a glance.

‘Lol?’

‘Sorry?’

‘When he was dying what ?’

‘Bit of whimsy, that’s all. Maybe not a good time.’

Merrily sighed.

‘OK,’ Lol said. ‘He’s lying there. He knows this is it. Coming up to the big moment he famously orchestrated in The Dream of Gerontius .’

‘That’s the one about the guy who’s dying and what happens afterwards? I’m sorry, I ought to know. I feel so…’

‘Heavenly choirs, conversations with angels, stodgy theology, heavy-duty dark night of the soul.’

‘Right.’

‘Anyway, inches from death, Elgar – I suspect – is trying hard not to think about the implications of all that. And Gerontius goes on for ever, while the Cello Concerto comes in at less than half an hour.’

‘Your kind of music.’

‘Look, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I was checking out Elgar—’

‘No, you’ve every right— Just … carry on.’

‘So there’s a friend at the bedside. And Elgar beckons him over and feebly whistles the main theme from the Cello Concerto .’

Lol began to whistle softly, this rolling tune that rose and fell and rose and then fell steeply … and the road swooped down among long fields and hop yards under a sheet-metal sky warmed by bars of electric crimson.

‘This isn’t going to be a joke, is it?’ Merrily said.