Phil Rickman: The Lamp of the Wicked

‘Sorry?’

‘For the money. For the resources. Have you asked God?’

‘Erm…’

Jenny Box smiled faintly, indicating that she wouldn’t pursue it now. Directly in front of them, the small medieval building known as the Market Hall squatted on its stocky oak pillars. Mrs Box stood with her back to it, hands thrust deep into the pockets of her Barbour, a firmer, tougher proposition than she’d been in the hall.

‘You were absolutely right, of course,’ she said. ‘Women, as a rule, aren’t terribly good at preaching. Listening is what we do best. That’s why women priests are so important. Women listen, and so women receive . I’m not talking feminist nonsense, but the time’s come. Don’t you feel that?’

‘I think we can all receive, women and men,’ Merrily said carefully. They were alone on the square, lit by bracket lamps projecting from gable ends. Mrs Box glanced over her shoulder.

‘That man – Clowes. What he said about us all having to accept that tourism’s the future, it makes me feel quite ill. Look at this place… it’s getting like the Cotswolds – most of the people here born elsewhere, virtually all the businesses owned by outsiders.’

Merrily said nothing. Across the square, the lighted panes in the leaded windows of the Black Swan seemed as comfortably irregular as the moon-washed cobbles. She used to think of Ledwardine as an indestructible organism that ate and gradually digested change.

‘Oh, I know I’m part of the invasion,’ Jenny Box said. ‘I can’t help that. But when I see them trying to make this lovely old church into just another arm of the tourist industry… and I watch men like Clowes, who must be at least half local, just sitting there on their fat, complacent behinds and inviting it in, for short-term gain, I see something ancient being lost… and something insidious and inherently filthy creeping in. I want to go up in the tower and ring the bells and scream a warning. Don’t you?’

‘I don’t know,’ Merrily said honestly. ‘In one way, I do want to get lots more people into church. I like the idea of these villages in parts of Italy and places, where the church is the natural centre of everything, people wandering in and out, hens laying under the pews. And yet…’

She looked up at the woman she vaguely recalled as a fashion model in the 1980s, pale and waiflike then, and a little damaged- looking, like an orphan taken in by Vivienne Westwood. Jane had said that once, when she was off school with flu, she’d seen Jenny Driscoll – newly arrived in the village then and a talking point – on some daytime chat show discussing fame, how shallow it all was. On the other hand, as Jane had pointed out, there were few aspects of modern life more shallow than daytime telly.

‘I suppose you think I’m just some bored neurotic looking for a cause, to get noticed. Just say if that’s what you think.’

‘Oh, everybody here gets noticed. The real trick is to be anonymous.’ Merrily smiled tiredly. Normally, she was invigorated by this kind of searching approach by an actual parishioner; she just didn’t feel up to it tonight. ‘I’m sorry, I should have got to know you better by now. I admit I haven’t spent as much time in the parish as I should have, due to one thing and another.’

‘Like being an exorcist,’ Jenny Box said, all whispery sibilance.

‘Deliverance Consultant is the preferred term these days.’

‘Well, I prefer the old word. How often are you called on to exorcize people?’

‘I never have.’

‘ Never ?’

‘Well, I’ve only had the job for just over a year. I’ve never encountered a… confirmable case of demonic possession.’

‘But you believe it can happen?’

‘Of course.’ Merrily wasn’t used to this. If local people ever talked about what she did outside the parish, it was never to her face.

‘What about houses? You exorcize houses, do you?’

‘Occasionally.’

‘And would you agree,’ Jenny Box asked, ‘that whole communities are sometimes in need of it? Whole establishments, situations… whole milieux ?’

‘I’m not sure what you mean.’ Merrily was thinking of last winter and the fundamentalist, Father Nicholas Ellis, who’d exorcize anything you could shake a cross at.

‘Cleansing. The expulsion of evil. You probably know that the business I was in – when I was modelling – all that’s pretty damn repellent to me these days. And though I’m well out of it all now, it’s like when you give up some bad habit – smoking – you can’t bear to be near smokers any more. You can smell them a mile off, and it’s unbearably obnoxious, all the worse because it’s tinged with this… foul desire.’

‘Right.’ Merrily was instinctively feeling the outside of her coat pocket, the familiar bulge made by her mobile phone… and the packet of Silk Cut and the Zippo.

‘So coming out here was like going into detox for me. But why would I come here , you’re asking, to this particular village, to be cleansed?’

‘No, I wouldn’t ask that. I try not to be nosy.’

‘All right, then, why are you here?’

‘Oh, I ask that all the time.’

Mrs Box laughed lightly. ‘Vicar, tell me, have you ever had what you might call a visionary experience?’ Merrily stared at her; Jenny Box raised both hands. ‘I know, I know, it depends on how you’d define visionary . Oh, the clergy, you’re so cautious these days, even the women.’

‘Especially the women. We still feel we’re on probation.’

Jenny Box regarded her solemnly. ‘But you’re the future. You must know that. Look, I’d like to discuss this and… some other things with you sometime… if you have an hour or so to spare – I mean, not now. I can see you’re anxious to be off.’

‘Well, it’s just that my daughter—’

‘No husband, though,’ Mrs Box threw in quickly.

‘He died. Some years ago.’

‘A young widow, remarried to the Church.’

It was what people often said, and it was irritating. It began to rain again.

‘Which is a wonderful thing,’ Jenny Box said. ‘You were… saved.’ She smiled. ‘It’s hard to avoid the old clichés, isn’t it?’

Merrily heard a voice calling from somewhere down Church Street.

‘I’m learning all about that because I’m writing a book,’ Mrs Box said. ‘About some things that happened to me.’

‘Oh?’ No big surprise. Jenny Box: the heartache I left behind . Serialized in one of the Sunday papers, a women’s magazine. If it was sensational enough, if there were ‘revelations’.

‘ Mum! ’

Merrily turned, saw the kid running up the street. ‘I’m sorry… that’s Jane… my daughter.’

Jenny Box took a step back, and Merrily had a sudden powerful sense of something around this woman making small, anxious flurries in the air: disorientation, loneliness.

‘I’d… like to hear about your book sometime.’

‘It isn’t finished yet. It isn’t over, you see. What the book’s about… those things aren’t over. Those things have hardly begun.’ Jenny Box shook her head and began to move away. Then she stopped beside one of the pillars of the market hall, turning her face to Merrily. ‘You said we could all receive…’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, that…’ She looked at Jane stumbling to a stop, shook her head with finality. ‘Goodnight, Mrs Watkins.’

Pulling her scarf over her head, Jenny Box walked quickly away across the cobbles into the shadows behind the hanging lamps.

And here was Jane, the kid’s face shining with rain and sweat.

‘Oh God , Mum, I’ve run all the way down to the sodding hall. Tried to call you on the mobile.’