Phil Rickman - A Crown of Lights

Candlemas – Robin preferred the Celtic ‘Imbolc’ – was barely a week away, so that was madness. Lights in the old church, chanting on the night air? Somebody would see, somebody would hear.

Too soon. Much too soon.

Or was that an excuse because Wicca no longer inspired her the way it did Robin? Why had she found George so annoying last weekend? Why had his ideas – truths and certainties to him – seemed so futile to her?

When she got home, Robin was waiting for her in the cold dusk, down by the brook. He wore his fez-thing with the mirrors, no protection at all against the rain. He looked damp and he looked agitated.

‘We have a slight difficulty,’ he said.

Robin was like those US astronauts; he saved the understatements for when things were particularly bad.

EVEN IN EMBITTERED January, the interior of Ledwardine Church kept its autumnal glow. Because of the apples.

This was an orchard village and, when the orchards were bare, Merrily would buy red and yellow apples in Hereford and scatter them around: on the pulpit, down by the font, along the deep window ledges.

The biggest and oldest apple there was clasped in the hand of Eve in the most dramatic of Ledwardine’s stained-glass windows, west-facing to pull in the sunset. Although there’d been no sun this afternoon, that old, fatal fruit was still a beacon, and its warmth was picked up by the lone Bramley cooking apple sitting plump and rosy on Minnie’s coffin.

‘Um... want to tell you about this morning,’ Merrily said. ‘How the day began for Gomer and me.’

She wasn’t in the pulpit; she was standing to one side of it, in front of the rood screen of foliate faces and carved wooden apples, viewing the congregation along the coffin’s shiny mahogany top.

‘Somehow, I never sleep well the night before a funeral. Especially if it’s someone I know as well as I’d got to know Minnie. So this morning, I was up before six, and I made a cup of tea, and then I walked out, intending to stroll around the square for a bit. To think about what I was going to say here.’

There must have been seventy or eighty people in the church, and she recognized fewer than half of them. As well as Minnie’s relatives from the Midlands, there were several farmer-looking blokes who must have known Gomer when he was digging drainage ditches along the Welsh border. You wanner know why most of them buggers’ve come yere, he’d hissed in Merrily’s ear, you watch how high they piles up their bloody plates with pie and cake in the village hall afterwards.

Now, she looked across at Gomer, sitting forlorn in the front pew, his glasses opaque, his wild white hair Brylcreemed probably as close to flat as it had ever been. Sitting next to him was Jane, looking amazingly neat and prim and solemn in her dark blue two-piece. Jane had taken the day off school, and had helped prepare the tea now laid out at the village hall.

‘It was very cold,’ Merrily said. ‘Nobody else in the village seemed to be up yet. No lights, no smoke from chimneys. I was thinking it was true what they say about it always being darkest just before the dawn. But then... as I walked past the lychgate... I became aware of a small light in the churchyard.’

She’d approached carefully, listening hard – remembering, inevitably, the words of Huw Owen, her tutor on the Deliverance course. They’ll follow you home, they’ll breathe into your phone at night, break into your vestry and tamper with your gear. Crouch in the back pews and masturbate through your sermons... Little rat-eyes in the dark.

The light glowed soft in the mist. It was down at the bottom of the churchyard, where it met the orchard, close to the spot where Merrily had planned a small memorial for Wil Williams, seventeeth-century vicar of this parish and the vicarage’s onetime resident ghost.

The light yellowed the air immediately above the open space awaiting Minnie Parry. Merrily had stopped about five yards from the grave and, as she watched, the light grew brighter.

And then there was another light, a small red firefly gleam, and she almost laughed in relief as Gomer Parry, glowing ciggy clamped between his teeth, reached up from below and dumped his hurricane lamp, with a clank, on the edge of the grave.

‘Oh, hell.’ Gomer heaved himself out. ‘Din’t disturb you, nor nothing, did I, vicar? Din’t think you could see this ole lamp from the vicarage. Din’t think you’d be up, see.’

‘I didn’t see it from the vicarage. I was... I was up anyway. Got a lot of things to do before... Got to see the bishop – stuff like that.’ She was burbling, half embarrassed.

‘Ar,’ said Gomer.

Merrily was determined not to ask what he’d been up to down there in the grave; if he was doing it under cover of darkness, it was no business of anyone else’s. Besides, he’d made himself solely responsible for Minnie’s resting place, turning up with his mini-JCB to attack the ice-hard ground, personally laying down the lining.

‘Fancy a cup of tea, Gomer?’

Gomer came over, carrying his lamp.

‘Bugger me, vicar,’ he said. ‘Catch a feller pokin’ round your churchyard at dead of night and you offers him a cup o’ tea?’

‘Listen, pal,’ Merrily said, echoing the asphalt tones of the verger of the Liverpool church where she’d served as a curate, ‘I’m a bloody Christian, me.’

Gomer grinned, a tired, white gash in the lamplight.

‘So... we went back to the vicarage.’ Merrily’s gaze was fixed on the shiny Bramley on Minnie’s coffin. ‘And there we were, Gomer and me, at six o’clock in the morning, sitting either side of the kitchen table, drinking tea. And for once I was at a bit of a loss...’

She heard light footsteps and saw a stocky figure tiptoeing up the central aisle; recognized young Eirion Lewis, in school uniform. He was looking hesitantly from side to side... looking for Jane. He must be extremely keen on the kid to drive straight from school to join her at the funeral of someone he hadn’t even known.

It was, you had to admit, a smart and subtle gesture. But Eirion had been raised to it; his old man ran Welsh Water or something. Eirion, though you wouldn’t know it from his English accent, had been raised among the Welsh-speaking Cardiff aristocracy: the crachach .

When he saw that Jane was in the front pew, a leading mourner, he quietly backed off and went to sit on his own in the northern aisle which was where, in the old days, the women had been obliged to sit – the ghetto aisle. Eirion was, in fact, a nice kid, so Jane would probably dump him in a couple of weeks.

Merrily looked up. ‘Then, after his second mug of tea, Gomer began to talk.’

‘All it was... just buryin’ a little box o’ stuff, ’fore my Min goes down there, like. So’s it’ll be underneath the big box, kind of thing. En’t no church rules against that, is there?’

‘If there are,’ Merrily had said, lighting a cigarette, ‘I can have them changed by this afternoon.’

‘Just bits o’ stuff, see. Couple o’ little wedding photos. Them white plastic earrings ’er insisted on wearing, ’cept for church. Nothing valuable – not even the watches.’

She had stared at him. He looked down at his tea, added more sugar. She noticed his wrist was bare.

‘Mine and Min’s, they both got new batteries. So’s they’d go on ticking for a year or so. Two year, mabbe.’

Don’t smile, Merrily told herself. Don’t cry. She remembered Gomer’s watch. It was years old, probably one of the first watches ever to work off a battery. And so it really did tick, loudly.

‘Dunno why I done it, really, vicar. Don’t make no sense, do it?’