Phil Rickman - A Crown of Lights

‘They were our family solicitors,’ Barbara said. ‘Everybody’s solicitors, in those days, it seemed. Weal and Son... the first Weal was Jeffery’s grandfather, the “and son” was Jeffery’s father R.T. Weal. Weal and Son, of Kington, and their gloomy old offices with the roll-top desks and a Victorian chair like a great dark throne. I first remember Jeffery when he was fifteen going on fifty. A lumbering, sullen boy, slow-moving, slow-thinking, single-minded, his future written in stone – Weal and Son and Son, even unto the ends of the earth. I hated them, the complete unchangingness of them – same chair, same desk, same dark tweed suits, same dark car creeping up the track.’

‘Eileen Cullen told me she thought he probably became a father figure,’ Merrily said. ‘After Menna had spent some years looking after her own father. Your dad was widowed, presumably.’

‘Sixteen or seventeen years ago. I had a letter from Judith – my friend in Old Hindwell. My father wouldn’t have told me; I no longer existed for him. And he was ailing, too. Later I learned that Menna never had a boyfriend or any social life, so she lost the best years of her life to her bloody father, and the rest of it to Weal. Who, of course, became the proverbial tower of strength when the old man died.’

‘He looked after her then?’

‘Seized his chance with a weak, unworldly girl. I... came to find her about two years ago. I’d recently taken early retirement. My daughter had just got married, my husband was away – I was at a very loose end. One morning, I simply got in my car and drove up here, and knocked on their door...’ She stared into space. ‘Menna seemed... unsurprised, unmoved, entirely incurious. I’d forgotten what these people can be like. She just stood there in the doorway – didn’t even ask me in. Talked in an offhand way, as though I was a neighbour whom she saw occasionally but didn’t particularly care for.’

‘And you actually hadn’t seen each other since she was a baby?’

The woman shook her head. There was distance now in her voice. ‘She... wore no make-up. She was pale, in an unnatural, etiolated kind of way, like grass that’s been covered up. And quite beautiful. But she didn’t seem to either know or care who I was. She might as well already have been dead.’

Jane nicked the cordless from Mum’s bedroom and took it upstairs to the trio of attic rooms that now made up her apartment: bedroom, sitting room–study and a half-finished bathroom. She put on the lights, took off her jacket, sat on the bed. Thinking about poor Gomer going home on his own to a house full of Minnie’s things. It made her cry.

Fucking death!

Jane dried her eyes on a corner of the pillowcase. Gomer wouldn’t cry. Gomer would get on with it. But how much in life was really worth getting on with? Where was it leading? Was Minnie any closer now to knowing the answer? Oh God.

Jane picked up the phone and looked at it and shrugged. If this didn’t work, it didn’t work. She rolled up her sleeve. The Livenight number was written in fibre-tip on the inside of her left arm. Jane pushed in the numbers, asked for Tania Beauman. The switchboard put her on hold and made her listen to Dire Straits – which could have been worse, though Jane would never admit it.

She leaned back against the headboard and contemplated the Mondrian walls, wondering if anyone else had ever had the idea of painting the squares and rectangles between sixteenth-century beams in different colours. She wondered what Eirion would think of it.

If she was ever to bring him up here.

If? Time was running out if she was going to fit in two serious lovers before she hit twenty. Serious could mean six months. Longer.

‘Tania Beauman.’

‘Oh, hi.’ Jane sat up. ‘You know who this is?’

‘Oh,’ said Tania.

‘Hey, don’t be like that. I may have cracked it for you.’

‘Cracked... what?’

Jane swung her feet to the floor. ‘I’m telling you, Tania, it wasn’t easy. She really didn’t want to know. Livenight ? Pff! But I’m, like, “Look, Merrily, being elitist is what put the Church of England in the hole it’s in today. You can’t just turn a blind eye to paganism and pretend it isn’t happening all over again. Or before you know it there’ll be more of them around than you...” ’

‘That’s a very cogent argument,’ Tania said, ‘but why aren’t I talking to your mother?’

‘Because I’ve, like, nearly got her convinced – but I’m not quite there yet.’

‘Well, I have to tell you, you don’t have much time.’

‘But do I have the incentive, Tania? That’s the point.’

‘I wondered if there’d be a point.’

‘To be blunt,’ Jane said, ‘I need a very, very small favour.’

Home burial. It was becoming, if not exactly commonplace, then less of an upper-class phenomenon than it used to be. Merrily tried to explain this to Barbara Buckingham: that it was a secular thing, or sometimes a green issue; that you often didn’t even need official permission.

‘The main drawback for most people is the risk of taking value off their house if and when it’s sold. No one wants a grave in the garden.’

‘He’s not...’ Barbara had picked up her scarf again; she began to wind it around her hands. ‘He is not going to bury Menna; that’s the worst of it. She’s going into a... tomb.’ She pulled the scarf tight. ‘A mausoleum.’

‘Oh.’ To be loved like that .

‘He has a Victorian house at Old Hindwell,’ Barbara said. ‘The former rectory. Do you know Old Hindwell?’

‘Not really. Is it in this diocese, I can’t remember?’

‘Possibly. It’s very close to the border, about three miles from Kington, on the edge of the Forest. Radnor Forest. Weal’s house isn’t remote, but it has no immediate neighbours. In the garden there’s a... structure – wine store, ice house, air-raid shelter, I don’t know precisely what it is, but that’s where she’s going to be.’

‘Like a family vault?’

‘It’s sick. I went to see a solicitor in Hereford this morning. He told me there was nothing I could do. A man has a perfect legal right to keep his dead wife in a private museum.’

‘And as a solicitor himself, your brother-in-law is going to be fully aware of his rights.’

‘Don’t call him that!’ Barbara turned away. ‘Whole thing’s obscene.’

‘He loved her,’ Merrily said uncertainly. ‘He doesn’t want to be parted from her. He wants to feel that she’s near him. That’s the usual reason.’

‘No! It’s a statement of ownership. Possession is – what is it? – nine points of the law?’

‘That word again. Do you mind if I smoke?’

‘Go ahead.’

Merrily lit a Silk Cut, pulled over an ashtray.

‘What about the funeral itself? Is it strictly private? I mean, are you kind of barred?’

‘My dear!’ Barbara dropped the scarf. ‘It’s going to be a highly public affair. A service in the village hall.’

‘Not the church?’

‘They don’t have a church any more. The minister holds his services in the village hall.’

‘Ah. And the minister is...?’

‘Father Ellis.’

‘Nick Ellis.’ Merrily nodded. This explained a lot.

‘I don’t know why so many Anglicans are choosing to call themselves “Father” now, as if they’re courting Catholicism. You know this man?’

‘I know of him. He’s a charismatic minister, which means—’

‘Not happy-clappy?’ Barbara’s eyes narrowed in distaste. ‘Everybody hugging one another?’

‘That’s one aspect of it. Nick Ellis is also a member of a group known as the Sea of Light. It’s a movement inside the Anglican Church, which maintains that the Church has become too obsessed with property. Keepers of buildings rather than souls. They claim the Holy Spirit flows through people, not stones. So a Sea of Light minister is more than happy to hold services in village halls, community centres – and private homes, of course.’