Phil Rickman - Remains of an Altar

‘In his office.’

‘Listen … this is crazy. That was a personal thing. Nobody was supposed to … I got fucking human rights …’

And this was a terrible mistake. How could Merrily possibly know about Winnie being a client of France’s? If Winnie chose to push this, it would rebound heavily on Bliss.

Winnie said, ‘Who else knows this?’

‘Probably half the county – it’s been on the radio.’

‘No, the oak. The oak .’

‘Just me. And my friend Lol, who you met last Monday night. The guy you thought was the exorcist.’

‘OK, listen,’ Winnie Sparke said. ‘You wanna talk about all of this, we’ll meet you. We’ll meet you there in an hour. Give me time to talk to Tim. We’ll meet you there. But you have to promise to leave us when I say. Before nightfall. OK?’

‘Sure … OK.’

‘Park where you can and go through the five-bar gate and keep walking. You won’t miss it. Nobody could.’

‘Won’t miss what?’

‘It’s about the only goddamn place I feel safe.’

‘Winnie…’

‘One hour.’

‘Where?’

‘The oak .’

48

Neighbours

Gomer and Jane drove to the east of the city, down the deep shadow of St Owen’s Street, with its heavy, brooding Shirehall, where two police cars and a van were parked.

‘Small town, see, Janie,’ Gomer said when they stopped at the lights. ‘Calls itself a city, but it en’t like Worcester and Gloucester. Small town, out on its own on the border. Even smaller back in the 1920s. So everybody of a partic’lar class knowed each other. And them bein’ neighbours for years…’

‘It could make a difference,’ Jane said. ‘Couldn’t it? In Ledwardine?’

‘Mabbe. But mabbe not. Don’t get your hopes up. Still don’t prove that ole line’s any more’n a bit of a sheep track.’

‘Yes, but now we can show that Alfred Watkins knew about it, and it was really important to him … and he wasn’t the only one.’

‘Dunno, girl. Comes down to it, it’s just a couple ole boys helpin’ each other out.’

They rattled through the lights to the Hampton Bishop road where Jane had come with Eirion the other day in search of Alfred Watkins. This fairly pleasant tree-shaded suburb, and the river wasn’t far away. Gomer turned the old jeep left into Vineyard Lane, where they’d looked for Alfred’s house, and then they got out into the smell of rich mown grass and walked back to the main road, towards the setting sun.

The big white Victorian house was on the corner, converted into flats now. The usual plaque revealing its historic importance. Jane hadn’t even noticed it the other night with Eirion, although it had been mentioned a few times in school, over the past couple of years.

Plas Gwyn. The white place.

For nine or ten years, these two men had been close neighbours, even if only one of them had been famous at the time.

It wasn’t really Jane’s idea of a nice house, although back in Edwardian days she supposed it must have looked really modern and flash. It had four floors and a verandah. It was … well, functional.

In those days, Mrs Kingsley had told them, there weren’t many houses around here, and Plas Gwyn had had major views across the river and the water meadows to the Black Mountains … across the border country to Wales, and Elgar had loved the idea of that when, newly knighted, at the height of his fame, he’d moved here in 1904 with his wife Alice and his daughter Carice.

Wow .

Mr Alfred Watkins and Sir Edward Elgar. It made total sense that they should’ve been mates. Elizabeth Kingsley had drawn up a chart showing that they’d been almost exact contemporaries – Elgar had been born in 1857 and had died in 1934, Watkins was born in 1855 and died in 1935.

And so much in common.

Both of them photographers – Elgar was said to have had a darkroom here at Plas Gwyn, where he also, like Watkins, invented things.

Both of them members of the Woolhope Club.

Both them fascinated by the landscape.

And most of Elgar’s Hereford years had been kind of slow and uninspired where music was concerned. He hadn’t composed much here at all, Mrs Kingsley said, leaving him time to spare for his other interests. The council, in search of some reflected glory, had even offered to make him Mayor of Hereford, but he’d politely – and wisely, in Jane’s view – turned it down.

Jane remembered Mrs Waters, the art teacher at Moorfield, talking about this, when the Elgar sculpture was being planned for the Cathedral green. And how Elgar got disillusioned because, although he was this mega-celeb, he thought nobody really understood his music.

Elgar at low ebb in Hereford just as the great revelation was coming to sixty-ish Alfred Watkins, billowing towards him across the humpy fields in great waves of vision.

Of course, by the time The Old Straight Track was published, Elgar had left this house. But he loved the city, Mrs Kingsley had said, and he was always coming back to stay, especially when the Three Choirs Festival was held here. Used to meet his old friends, like the playwright George Bernard Shaw, who was always trying to encourage Elgar to get back into some serious composing after the death of his wife in 1920.

‘So he and Alfred Watkins stayed in touch, obviously.’

‘Sure t’be,’ Gomer said.

Jane getting a picture in her head of these two elderly guys, Alf and Ed, standing on Dinedor Hill with the city’s churches aligned below them in the vastness of the old-gold evening. The air filling with ancient energy and orchestral murmurings.

Alf going, Bit of a problem, d’ye see? Best ley I ever found and I en’t allowed to go in there with my camera .

Something I could help with, you think, old chap? Ed tilting his head to one side. People seem to think a lot of me these days … for all the wrong blasted reasons, of course .

Well … mabbe . Alf’s beard splitting into a slow grin. Mabbe you could, too .

‘It’s weird, Gomer,’ Jane said. ‘How things happen, kind of simultaneously. Mum’s into this ridiculous situation over at Malvern where some people think that, like … Elgar’s ghost has returned?’

She stood on the pavement in front of Plas Gwyn and checked for messages on the mobile.

‘Jane, I’m so sorry .’ Mum sounded … upset? What? ‘I’ve come home, and obviously there’s a lot we need to … only I’ve got to go out again. With Lol. Shouldn’t be too late. Could you stay with Gomer? Please? ’

The sun was dropping like a great molten weight into Wales, and the air was warm and airless. Jane’s bare arms, for some reason, were tingling.

49

The Lesson

There was, at first, a cramped, dead-end kind of feel, as they edged out of the Volvo. Merrily had had to squeeze it onto a rough verge, one wheel partly overhanging a ditch. Might be somebody’s parking place, but there was nobody about in the hamlet of Whiteleafed Oak to ask. A few bungalows, cottages, and nowhere to park because the lane was so narrow.

But it was wooded, sun-dappled, intimate. It didn’t have the wide-viewed isolation of Wychehill. Locking the Volvo, Merrily could hear a radio from an open window, and there was a small trampoline and a yellow bike in one of the sloping front gardens. Whiteleafed Oak was lived-in.

The sun was burning low in a sky like tarnished brass, the air was heavy and humid, and the only sacred sound was placid evening birdsong.

Merrily looked around. There were no directional signs, no indication of where to find whatever was to be found.