Phil Rickman: The Lamp of the Wicked

Jane looked up. ‘What’s the problem… Ted?’ In the light from the steamy window, his wide face looked like ridged sandstone; he hated it when she talked to him like an equal. She grinned. ‘ Not … the great Commercialization-of-the-House- of-God storm?’

It’s a contentious issue,’ Ted said heavily, ‘and it needs to be resolved before it starts to split the village. Your mother knows that.’

Meaning he didn’t want it dividing the ever-diminishing percentage of villagers who actually went to church. Not much of an issue at all, then. Jane converted the grin into a sweet and sympathetic smile. ‘I’ll get her bulletproof vest out of the airing cupboard.’

‘One day, Jane,’ said Uncle Ted, ‘you’ll learn to take some things seriously.’

‘And the day after that, they’ll bury me.’ Jane refixed the headset. ‘Better split or the chips’ll be cold.’

Get a life, Ted.

She walked back through the village, its windows like Christmas lanterns. So far this year, it had been featured in three national-newspaper holiday supplements. Among the cars parked on the square – and taking up enough space for two – was this great long blue and cream Cadillac.

Ridiculous, really. Soon, it was going to be like living in one of those pottery villages that Ledwardine Fine Art was too upmarket ever to sell. Maybe each pottery village should have its own bijou pottery lady vicar. So much more tourist appeal than a crumpled old priest with a frayed dog collar and breath that smelled of communion wine.

‘Once upon a time,’ Huw said wistfully, ‘folk believed the world were surrounded by angels, wing-tip to wing-tip. Interesting concept, eh? Everybody under the protection of vast, angelic wings, like newborn chicks.’

‘Bit claustrophobic, though, when you think about it,’ Merrily said.

‘Also, the ultimate communication system. Safe, reliable…’

‘Ah. Right. I see where you’re coming from.’

‘But where do they go now, the angels? No room left up there for the poor buggers, with all them signals clogging up the atmosphere – radio waves, satellite TV, daft sods in supermarkets ‘ringing home half a mile away.’ Huw put on a whiny Home Counties drawl. ‘“Darling, I’m at the cheese counter now – do we want Emmental or smoked Cheddar?”’

‘So it’s fair to say you’re against masts, then.’ Merrily wondered if Huw ever visited a supermarket, the way she often wondered why no woman appeared to have shared his life. He’d mentioned one once, in passing – just the once – but she’d sensed there was sadness attached.

‘It’s easy money, lass,’ he said. ‘Lot of space doing nowt inside church spires. No maintenance costs. Ten grand a year or more in the parish coffers. Environmentally friendly, too, on one level. Saves putting up them unsightly steel things on the hills.’

‘But on another level, it could be causing cancer, damaging people’s brains, et cetera. A lot of evidence piling up there.’

‘Aye.’

‘However, we’re likely to get a mast anyway. Some farmer or other’s going to give permission sooner or later for one of your unsightly steel things. So that’s still bad health all round and a spoiled view.’

‘You’d be reluctantly in favour, then,’ Huw said.

‘Well, no. I’m instinctively against it. But we could use the money, and Uncle Ted’s smart. He knows that if he backs down on mobile phones, it’ll be much harder for me to resist his plans for putting a gift shop in the vestry. I’m in a corner, Huw, and the meeting starts in about forty minutes.’

Merrily glanced at the scullery window, where the climbing rose used to knock against the glass in the night wind. Although she’d pruned it last spring, she half expected it to have grown back: tock… tock… tock…

‘ And the Hereford Times is hovering, because the mobile phone company looks like it’s one of those about to start transmitting soft porn to new-generation handsets. I don’t want to wind up in the papers again.’

‘Stay out of it,’ Huw said. ‘Let the parish council take the decision, but make sure you nobble a few of them first.’

Politics. I hate all that.’ Merrily gazed into the Anglepoise circle of light enclosing the Bible, her sermon pad and a volume of the Alternative Service Book, 1980. In His Presence , it said on the front. ‘Erm… would there be a Deliverance angle?’

‘On mobile phones?’

‘Transmissions. Signals… all that. I suppose that’s why I’m ringing, really.’ She heard footsteps on the kitchen flags; the chips had come.

‘Spirits in the air?’ Huw said.

‘Something like that.’

‘Or you could say the spire, which should be pointing to heaven, would be acting instead as a conductor for all kinds of shit thrown up from the earth.’

‘You put these things so elegantly,’ Merrily said.

‘Stuff the Parish Council. Say no to it, lass.’

‘Right.’

I MEAN, LET’S face it, nobody comes to church just to hear me preach…

It had just slipped out, and now they were all staring at her, as though she’d blasphemed in public or something.

Whatever you said always sounded more strident in the parish hall, the one building in mellow, timber-framed Ledwardine without a soul. The hall had been built in 1964. Its pink bricks and white tiling put you in mind of a disused abattoir; its caged, mauvish ceiling lights made faces gleam like raw meat.

‘What I meant’ – Merrily almost squirmed in her plastic chair – ‘is that I’ve never really thought of myself as much of an orator. I’m… not always entirely comfortable in the pulpit. Like, who am I to step up there and lay down the law?’

Now she’d made it worse. She looked quickly around the table from face to face, aware that she was blushing because it could have been taken as a reference to her private life. She wondered if any of them knew about her and Lol. Maybe they all did. Maybe it was all over the parish. Harlot.

‘Well, since you ask, Mrs Watkins…’ The chairman, James Bull-Davies, looked half-amused. ‘My understanding of the situation was that, for this short period every Sunday, the vicar was supposed to be some sort of mouthpiece for the Almighty. Suffused with the Holy Spirit. Or have I got that wrong?’

Merrily felt in need of a cigarette. She also felt like laying her head on the table and covering it with her arms.

‘That’s a little unfair, Mr Davies.’ The soft, mildly Irish voice of Mrs Jenny Box drifted like scented smoke from the far corner. ‘Mrs Watkins was displaying simple humility, and if that isn’t part of God’s core agenda for us all, then I don’t know what is.’

‘Oh Gord!’ James Bull-Davies leaned back abruptly, to vague splintering sounds from his carved wooden chair. ‘Shut your damn mouth, James.’ He waved a hand in exasperation. ‘Anyone object if we drag this discussion back to our agenda? Or else we’ll be here till the pubs’ve closed.’

James was chairing the meeting on military lines, eight tables arranged into a square. You felt that there should be sand trays and little model tanks. But it was good, Merrily had reflected, to have him back. He’d been out of village life for over a year, gathering his private affairs into some kind of order. Now, he and Alison were breeding horses professionally, and Upper Hall farmhouse was getting its leaking roof retiled.

In the semi-feudal past, it had been understood that the Bull family fortune should also maintain the fabric of the parish church; nowadays it was accepted that the odd crumpled tenner in the collection was going to be James’s limit. The church was on its own now. It needed more income, short and long term.