Phil Rickman - The Cure of Souls

‘What’s this?’

‘It’s a top. It’s for you. You never get yourself any new clothes.’

‘Gosh, flower… that’s very…’ Merrily pulled it out of the bag. It was pale orange, cotton, very skimpy. ‘It’s going to be, er, how can I put this… slightly low-cut, isn’t it?’

‘Won’t go with the dog collar, if that’s what you mean,’ Jane said smugly.

‘Well… thank you.’ Merrily put the top back in its bag. ‘Thank you very much. It was very thoughtful.’

‘If you don’t wear it, I’ll be seriously offended,’ Jane said. ‘It’s going to be a long, hot summer.’

‘That’s what we always say, and it never is.’

‘Yeah.’ Jane sat down, stretched her bare arms. ‘I expect Lol’ll be taking a summer break from his course about now. You do remember Lol?’

‘Ye-es.’

‘The greatest living writer of gentle, lo-fi, reflective songs and also a cool, sensitive person in himself.’

‘Yes, flower, I think I remember.’

‘No, all I was thinking was, if you found me an inhibiting presence, this would be a good opportunity—’

‘Thank you, flower, for considering my emotional welfare.’

‘Any time,’ Jane said. ‘Oh, that Amy Shelbone – I remembered – she does go to our school.’

‘I know.’

‘I suddenly realized who you meant. Kind of old-fashioned. Always tidy. Bit of a pain, basically.’

Merrily nodded. ‘Mm-mm.’

‘So, is there, like, anything I can help you with?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Merrily said, ‘at this stage.’

‘Because, like—’

‘Sure,’ Merrily said. ‘What time’s Eirion picking you up?’

‘Half-nine.’

‘You looking forward to this?’

‘Sure,’ Jane said.

With the kid upstairs, Merrily went into the hall and ran a hand along the top of the tallest bookcase. It was still there, in all the dust, where she’d popped it hurriedly after they’d found it under the bath when they were having – the year’s big luxury – a new shower installed.

It was thick and misshapen, the head of the monarch obscured but Britannia distinct on the other side, also the date: 1797 – over a century after the death of Wil Williams the martyr, Ledwardine’s most famous vicar.

Feeling faintly ridiculous, she slipped the coin into a pocket of her denim skirt.

IN THE EARLY evening, a sinister, ochre light flared over the Frome Valley before the storm crashed in, driving like a ramraider down the western flank of the Malverns.

Although there wasn’t much thunder, every light on the mixing board went out at 7.02 p.m., leaving only Prof Levin incandescent.

‘Some farmer guy comes on to me in the post office in Bishop’s Frome: “Ah, you want to get yourself a little petrol generator, Mr Levin.” These hayseeds! You imagine recording music with a bloody generator grinding away out there?’

‘But think of the amazing effects,’ Lol said innocently. ‘The lights flicker… the tape stutters. Elemental scratching?’

‘Fah! You’re just being flippant because you got a new toy.’

‘It’s your toy. I’m just minding it.’ Lol had been trying to identify the different fragments of tree involved in the Boswell guitar. Here in the studio, its range and depth were incredible.

‘He’s getting it back,’ Prof said. ‘I don’t know how, I don’t know when, but he’s getting it back. They pulled a fast one on me. I said to Sally, “Help the boy if you can. Inspire him.” That’s all I said. So they palm you off with this ridiculous, overpriced—’ He pulled up the master switch so that everything wouldn’t happen at once if the power ever returned.

‘Still… you at least know where you are now, geographically, I would guess.’

‘Well,’ said Lol, ‘I know why Knight’s Frome’s all in pieces.’

Prof sniffed. ‘The Great Lake,’ he said.

‘Conrad Lake?’

‘A moral tale.’ Prof went back to his swivel chair, behind the board. ‘The Fall of the Emperor of Frome – that’s what they called Conrad, behind his back at first, but they say he grew to like it. She told you how the gods turned against him? His problems with the wilt?’

‘Actually, it wasn’t the wilt as such. It seems that Verticillium Wilt only—’

‘Verticillium! That’s the word.’

‘Only really hit these parts in the seventies. It started in Kent, and took a long time, decades, to reach Herefordshire. But there were other scourges before that: red spiders, aphids, white mould. He got them all, like the Seven Plagues of Egypt.’

They were both talking in epic terms, Lol realized, because it had seemed epic: the bountiful legacy of four generations of hop-masters wiped out in about seven years. Conrad Lake was, in effect, the last – and for a while the biggest and wealthiest – hop-master in Herefordshire. His poles and frames had surrounded Knight’s Frome like a great creosoted barrier. Looking like Belsen, Sally Boswell had said disdainfully, like Auschwitz. The estate was big enough when he inherited it, and twice as big when the first disaster struck.

Lol recalled the portrait photograph of Conrad Lake in the third and smallest room at the hop museum, his smile submerged in a heavy moustache. A difficult, greedy and obsessive man, Sally had said, referred to by the locals, behind his back, as the Emperor of Frome. Twice married and both wives had left him, the second taking his infant son. They never divorced; the boy, Adam, was raised by his mother and grandparents in Warwickshire – never again saw his father, who stayed in Knight’s Frome and fought all through the 1970s against the aphids, the red spiders and the white mould. And against the banks, who kept squeezing him, forcing him to sell off his estate piece by piece.

‘Big drama,’ said Prof laconically.

The land had then been bought by various farmers, most of them from outside Knight’s Frome, which explained why there was no real community any more, why so many of the scattered houses were now owned by incomers like Prof. A few of the old hop-yards had been reinstated, but demand was no longer so great, with so many breweries importing cheaper hops from Germany and the USA. Most of it was grazed now. A pity, in a way, Sally Boswell had said, because the deep river loam in the valleys of the Frome and the Lugg was so perfect for hops. And yet, in a way, not a pity at all; it was no accident that the third room in the museum was the darkest, a sober coda to the song of the hop.

But not everyone, it seemed, believed it was over. Least of all Adam Lake, son of the Emperor.

Though the storm had passed and the evening fields were left steaming under a bashful sun, the power failed to return, and Prof announced in disgust that he was going to bed.

‘You give me a call when it’s dark, Laurence… if we’ve got the bleeding juice back. I always work better after dark, as you know.’

Lol watched him stumping across the yard to the cottage, then went back and sat for a while in the studio, trying the River Frome song again on the Boswell, and then, because he felt bad about deserting it, on his faithful old Washburn.

But the song still lacked direction, and after a while he gave up and went out into the luminous, storm-washed evening. As the trees dripped and the air glistened with birdsong, Lol made his first real foray into what remained of the community of Knight’s Frome.

A soggy rug of slurry unrolled from a farm entrance towards the edge of what passed for the centre of the hamlet. Big old trees, oak and sycamore and horse chestnut, were still dripping onto the roofs of stone and timber-framed cottages that sprouted like wild mushrooms. A humpback bridge straddled the Frome, and on the other side of it was the church, sunken and settled as an old barn, and next to it the white-painted vicarage where Simon St John lived.