Phil Rickman - The Lamp of the Wicked

Jane struggled with this. It wasn’t feminism as she knew it.

‘We find the strength inside ourselves,’ Jenny said, ‘and that’s the only true strength. All the rest is violence.’

She’d fled the Church because it had been dominated, for her, by male violence, and she’d taken refuge in the New Age – all those hazy places Jane had been – because it was all basically Goddess-dominated. And that was how Vestalia had come about.

‘We mind the hearth, is what we do, the altar of the home. It’s men , you see, who despoiled the old, simple churches, so you have areas like the Bull Chapel in the parish church here, with the tombs of brutal men and their effigies reflecting material wealth and power. I’d surely take a jackhammer to that auld divil now and throw the pieces in the river.’

‘Yes,’ said Jane, who’d often felt the same about the sandstone effigy in the Bull Chapel, with its eyes fully open and its arrogant little smile.

But, while bemoaning the way it had been dragged into the male world of warfare and brutality, Jenny had come to miss the Church, the weight of it, the tradition, the sometimes pure beauty of it. And then something happened to beckon her back.

‘One day, I was in North Wales, alone. I’d had… well, call it nervous exhaustion, and I’d been lent a cottage, to disappear there for a while. And this day I’d walked for hours on my own, trying to cool my head, and it started raining, and I came upon this wee church, not far from the sea, and it was open, and so I went in to shelter. ’Twas very plain – no stained glass, no statues, no tombs, no carvings. The simplicity, that was a big statement in itself, a huge statement. And for me it was as if I was coming home again, you know? I was enfolded by it. I think your mother would understand.’

‘She’s been there. Well, not there , but like… somewhere similar.’

Yeah, a similar church, on a similarly desperate day, bringing away with her what she’d talked of as the vision of blue and gold, the lamplit path – less a calling than a beckoning whisper at a time of personal crisis, and the one aspect of Mum’s religion that Jane had always understood.

But had Mum told Jenny Box about the experience? And had Jenny Box now absorbed it into her own mythology? Uncertainty seized Jane again. Was she being used in some way? She glanced at Mrs Box, walking with her head down, hands in the pockets of her brown, rain-bubbled Barbour, talking about why, when she came back, it was not to the Church of Rome but to the Anglican Church that she’d been taught, as a child, to despise.

‘You see, the strange thing was, the day I went into that little Celtic church – though I didn’t know this until afterwards – that was the very day the Synod, or whoever it was, voted to permit the ordination of women. So here was I, feeling the call back to Christianity… and here was God meeting me halfway.’

Jane stopped in the street. ‘You mean you joined the Anglican Church because it had accepted women as priests?’

Jenny smiled at last. ‘And wasn’t that the most significant development since Christ himself was on earth?’

There was a stage, Jenny Box told Jane, when she’d even wondered about becoming a nun, but didn’t think she could handle the discipline. And no, she didn’t really see herself becoming a priest. Too much of a private person. But when her marriage went the way of all her other relationships – she didn’t elaborate, perhaps she didn’t need to – and she was looking for a permanent bolt-hole, it was natural to seek out somewhere with a woman priest who looked like staying.

The questions started hammering inside Jane. ‘No, listen,’ Jenny Box snapped, ‘I know it sounds like I was stalking her, but it isn’t like that. I needed to know this was the right place. The right home. The right hearth .’

‘What are you saying?’ A car came around the corner from Old Barn Lane, sending up spray from the gutter, and some of hit Jane in the face like spit. ‘What did you do ?’

‘I just did my research, was all. If we’re taking on a new manager for one of the shops, I like to know where they’re coming from, whether they fit in with the ideology of the business.’

‘You had her checked out ?’

‘There’s… an agency we use in London.’

‘Like…’ Jane wiped her face with the sleeve of her fleece. ‘You don’t mean a private investigator?’

‘Obviously, the agency we use doesn’t work out here, but they subcontracted it to a local man. Don’t look at me like that, Jane; I needed a priest, I’ve always needed a priest, someone who could guide me on my journey into the great ocean of the spirit. Maybe join me there. Don’t look at me like that! It’s not sexual and I’m not mad, all right?’

Jane felt suddenly light-headed. ‘Not sexual?’

‘Holy God, girl!’ Jenny Box flinched, and her features appeared suddenly blurred and oblique, as though she’d been struck. ‘Does everything have to be sexual? I’m on the run from all that. My husband is greedy, violent… and worse.’

‘Gareth?’

‘Yes, the charming Gareth, who likes young girls, gets off on the vulnerable, who only married me because when I was thirty- five there was still something about me that looked eighteen, but let’s not go into that . Oh, he has a very considerable charm, does Gareth, and a wonderfully plausible manner, and it worked on me for a long time – I’m not easy for the charm, but he was good at it, and I thought he wasn’t like the others, but… You see, it took God to show me what I was doing – letting them bully me, Jane. Hadn’t I always been attracting the kind of men who loved to bully women? And me turning it to my advantage, I thought – figuring I could get my own way in the end by letting them dominate me. Which is all fine and well until the day you say no, just the once, and then it starts to get ugly. Christ, does it get ugly. So if you ask me what I wanted from your mother… I wanted a friend, was all, a friend to go with me on the spiritual journey.’

it

Oh God . Jane looked away, across the street.

‘And the things Humphries found out, the private eye… all he told me, Jane, were good things – how she helped sort out that trouble in the village over the play, the things she’d done as an exorcist… I’d never even heard of a woman exorcist before, a woman appointed to deal with the Devil himself – well, this was stepping into the big shoes . And how she stopped this charismatic priest who was abusing women. And then helping the mentally ill guy – that kind of thing.’

Jane looked up. ‘Mentally ill guy?’

‘Robinson?’

‘Oh. Right.’

‘And when I saw her, what kind of a person she was – so unassuming – I knew she was someone I wanted to help. I swear to God it’s no more complex than that. So whatever Gareth told you…’

And Jenny began talking of this recent discord over the business, Vestalia, how Gareth Box had opposed her attempts to introduce a Christian dimension to try and reflect in a domestic setting the spiritual simplicity she’d discovered in that tiny seaside church in North Wales – Gareth saying this was commercial suicide. At the same time knowing his hands were tied, because she was both the creative force and the figurehead. And now the inevitable split was looming, and Gareth was accusing her of being brainwashed by the Church, by this woman priest.

‘He found out about the money,’ Jenny said.

‘Money?’ It didn’t strike Jane at first.

‘The money . In the sack. Well, he was salting away what he could, knowing he didn’t have long before the golden goose flew the pen, shifting what money he could get his hands on, investing in other companies. So I thought… why not? And here was Merrily in a situation where male priorities were attempting to influence her better judgement, penetrating the sanctuary. And he found out. And then he wanted to know about Merrily, this woman priest who’d bewitched me. So when you arrived at his door, the bastard must’ve thought ’twas his birthday… in all kinds of ways.’