Phil Rickman: The Lamp of the Wicked

So it was Jane who made the face. Like, was this ridiculous, or what?

‘OK. Fine, let’s leave it at that,’ Mum said, and stubbed out the line. She put the cordless on the dresser and stood looking at it for a fraction too long before turning back to look into the room. In the lamplight her face was soft and in the long linen alb she looked, for a moment, like a little girl waiting to go to bed. Just needed the teddy.

‘Cold call?’ Jane raised both eyebrows. ‘Emma from Everest? Stacey from Staybright?’

Mum came back to the table. She did look tired. Well, it had to be getting her down, this bobbing and weaving, covering her tracks.

‘You don’t have to do this, you know, Mum. Not with me.’

‘What?’ Now an expression: wariness.

‘I’m on your side. I like Lol. I mean, in other circumstances – like not involving my ageing parent – the twenty-something age gap between him and me would be as nothing. But, you know… if I can’t have him… What I’m saying is, if you want to arrange a little tryst , you have my blessing. And, er…’ jabbing a thumb towards the ceiling. ‘His too, I’d guess. He’s not inhuman. Presumably.’

Jane sat back, arms folded. For a moment, Mum was almost smiling. Then she said brusquely, ‘Don’t you have homework?’

‘Done it. Double free period this afternoon. However, if that’s code for you want me to leave the room so you can call back, exchange a few steamy intimacies, I’d be happy to—’

‘Don’t push it, flower,’ Mum said mildly.

‘Push it? Jesus, if anybody ever needed a good push…’ Jane subsided into her chair, drumming her fingers on the refectory table. This was not the time.

‘Look at the time.’ Mum closed her eyes, the childlike bit dropping away. She was thirty-seven now, no getting around that – heading for the rapid slide into cronehood, with her prospect of happiness, which had seemed so close, receding again. ‘Parish meeting at half-seven, and we haven’t eaten yet.’

‘Not a problem.’ Jane stood up. ‘Why don’t I go down the chippy?’

‘I thought you were boycotting the chippy.’

‘They’re now claiming they’ve stopped using animal fat. I can live with that.’

‘Would you?’ Mum looked grateful, dragging her bag from the dresser, pulling out her purse.

‘You want mushy peas, too?’ Jane asked.

After the kid had left, Merrily went into the scullery-office, closed the door, switched on the Anglepoise and sat down, pulling her black woolly cardigan over her alb. She thought about calling Lol back but then – parish meeting: income, cash flow… pressure – phoned Huw Owen instead.

‘You know everything,’ she said. ‘What line do I take on a mobile-phone mast in the spire?’

Huw said, ‘Cold over there, is it?’

‘Not by your criteria.’ Huw’s rectory was well up in the Brecon Beacons, above the snowline, where spring and autumn would wave to each other from either side of July.

‘I were only thinking about you earlier,’ he said. ‘You and your rock star. Serious, is it, or just a fling?’

Rock star : a touch of irony, there. She didn’t rise to it. ‘We’re permitted flings now?’

‘Merrily,’ Huw said, ‘these are the days of sex-change clergy, transvestite clergy, bondage clergy, cocaine clergy. I’d say, as long as it doesn’t involve Alsatian dogs… What’s Bernie Dunmore’s view?’

‘Up to the individual conscience. Between the individual and God.’

‘Nice. You can tell why he made bishop. And what’s God say?’

‘He says to get on with it or Jane’ll be back with the chips.’

She pictured Huw slumped, shoeless and shaggy-haired, in front of his fire of coal and logs, the uncurtained window a cold blue square in the whitewashed wall. From the edge of his sheep-shaven lawn, you could see the site of the cottage where Huw had been born a bastard, as he liked to phrase it, two years before his mother took him off with her to Sheffield, to grow up a Yorkshireman with a weight of Welsh on his back.

Huw Owen: the mongrel come home to the hills. Merrily’s Deliverance-tutor, her spiritual director.

‘Aye, go on, then,’ he said. ‘Mobile-phone masts? The tips of the Devil’s horns.’

Crossing the market place in the damp dusk, Jane looked back once. Through the heavy, dripping autumn trees, the lights of Ledwardine Vicarage were blurred, as though seen through tears, and she was wondering about Mum and Lol and how it could possibly be going wrong so soon.

All through the late summer, Mum had seemed brilliantly light and girlish, maybe for the first time since she’d been ordained. Twice, she’d actually worn this provocatively low-cut top Jane had brought back from a summer sale in Hereford as kind of a joke.

Jane had imagined the skimpy thing lying on the floor of Lol’s loft and was entirely cool about the notion. Mum had been a widow for over six years now and, although the crash that had killed Dad on the M5 had been a drastic kind of reprieve from a marriage gone bad, it was time to dump the guilt for ever.

It had to be guilt, didn’t it? Mum had always been good at guilt, on any level. During the summer, Lol had written this song, ‘The Cure of Souls’, about the problem women priests might have loving God while also loving a man.

Which was only a problem if you believed that God was a man. If you believed that God was anything.

And if this thing – this faith in something unknowable, unprovable and very possibly bollocks – was likely to screw it up for Mum and Lol, there was no way Jane could live with that… like, even if she had to stand out here in the square and publicly burn Bibles on the cobbles.

The violence of the thought disturbed her a little. Pulling her beret down over her headphones, she switched on the Super Furries’ Rings Around the World to blow it all away, crossing now into Church Street, with its lamplit black and white façades, moving under the dimly lit windows of the former Cassidys’ Country Kitchen. At least the Cassidys had tried to serve traditional local produce, whereas now the place was charging an arm and a leg for two bits of squidge cradled in a red lettuce leaf. Gourmets were said to travel from three counties to eat here, but local people only ever came once – probably calling at the chippy on the way home.

This was typical of the way the village was going. With another overpriced antique shop and poor Lucy Devenish’s old Ledwardine Lore turned into some rip-off, designer-trivia emporium pretentiously called Ledwardine Fine Art, it was close to becoming unbearably chic, with coachloads of French and Japanese tourists, like in the Cotswolds.

At least the chippy was still in business. Jane slipped into Old Barn Lane, where its single window gleamed grease-yellow in the drizzle. This year, autumn had come down hard and fast, like some dank, grey roller blind. No Indian summer, no golden October days, and too late for all that now.

She bought cod and chips, twice. She and Mum didn’t eat meat at all any more, but occasionally relapsed into eating fish. After all, Jesus had eaten fish, hadn’t he? Jesus, in the right mood, would double your catch. Jane stepped down from the shop doorway, holding the chip package away from her fleece.

‘Jane – tell your mother not to be late tonight, won’t you?’ Uncle Ted Clowes stood there, merging with the greyness, bulky and stupidly sinister in his wide-brimmed Mafia hat. Until his retirement, Uncle Ted had been a solicitor, and you still couldn’t trust the old bastard. He didn’t like Mum being Deliverance consultant because it regularly took her out of the parish, out from under his thumb – which was probably the only truly worthwhile aspect of the whole crazy Deliverance thing.