Phil Rickman - Midwinter of the Spirit

Rowenna drove off, smiling.

‘Nicely handled, kitten. Thanks.’

Rowenna was new at the school, but nearly two years older than Jane. On account of her family moving around a lot and a long spell of illness, she’d got way behind, so she’d needed to re-start her A-level course. She was a cool person – in a way a kind of older sister, a role she seemed to like.

‘You don’t mean,’ said Jane, astounded, ‘that you have actually given those two hairballs a lift? Like, how did you get the slime off the upholstery?’

Rowenna laughed. ‘I see now it was a grave mistake, and I won’t do it again. What were you saying about your mother? I didn’t quite grasp the nature of the problem.’

‘Oh, it’s just…’ Jane cupped her hands over her nose and mouth and sighed into them, ‘… just she’s worth more than this, that’s all. Like, OK, maybe she was drawn into it by this spiritual need and the need to bring it out in other people, you know what I mean?’

‘Maybe.’ Rowenna drove with easy confidence. Within only a couple of hundred yards of the school, they were out into countryside with wooded hills and orchards.

‘But I mean, the Church of England? Like, what can you really expect of an outfit that was only set up so Henry VIII could dump his wife? Spiritually they’re just a bunch of nohope tossers, and I can’t see that the ordination of women will change a thing.’

‘I suppose even the Catholics kind of look like they’ve got something together.’ Rowenna’s father was an Army officer, possibly SAS, and the family had spent some time in Northern Ireland.

‘But you know what I mean?’ Jane hunched forward, clasping her hands together. ‘I imagine her in about forty years’ time, sitting by the gas fire in some old clergyperson’s home, full of arthritis from kneeling on cold stone floors, and thinking: What the hell was that all about?’

Rowenna laughed, a sound like ice in a cocktail glass. She looked innocent and kind of wispy, but she was pretty shrewd.

‘And this Deliverance trip, right?’ Jane knew she wasn’t supposed to discuss this, but Rowenna’s military background – high-security clearance, all that stuff – meant she could be trusted not to spread things around. ‘It’s obvious she thinks this is a kind of cutting-edge thing to do, and will maybe take her closer . You know what I mean?’

‘To the spiritual world?’

‘But it’s actually quite the opposite. From what I can see, the job is actually to stop people getting close. She has to actively discourage all contact with the occult or anything mystical – anything interesting . I think that’s kind of immoral, don’t you?’

‘It’s kind of fascist,’ Rowenna said.

‘Let’s face it, almost any kind of spiritual activity is more fun than going to church.’

‘I wouldn’t argue with that.’

And then, as usual, it was suddenly gone.

Sometimes you were left floating on a cushion of peace; occasionally there was an aching void. This time only silence coloured by the placid images of the Cathedral and the Wye Bridge in the small stained-glass window just above her head.

Merrily stood up shakily in the intimacy of Bishop Stanbury’s exquisite chantry. She stood with her arms by her sides, breathing slowly. It was like sex: sublime at the time but what, if anything, had it altered? What progression was there?

Outside, in the main body of the Cathedral, the prayer was over and there was a communal rising and clattering. She stood quietly in the doorway of the chantry, her grey silk scarf dangling from her fingers.

‘Go away. Go away .’ A few yards away, a man’s voice rose impatiently. ‘I can’t possibly discuss this here.’

‘I don’t understand…’ A woman now, agitated. ‘What have I been doing wrong?’

‘Hush!’

A stuttering of footsteps. Merrily stepped out of the chantry, saw a woman, about sixty, who drew breath, stifled a cry, turned sharply and walked quickly away – across to the exit which led to the Cathedral giftshop. She wore a tweed coat and boots and a puffy velvet hat. She never looked back.

From the aisle to the left of the chantry, the man watched her go.

Merrily said, ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to—’

He wore a long overcoat. He glanced at her. ‘I think your party is over in the Lady Chapel.’

Then he saw her collar and she saw his, and the skirt of the cassock below his overcoat. And although she’d never seen him before, as soon as she discerned cold recognition in the pale eyes in that stone face – the face of some ancient, eroded graveyard archangel – she knew who he was.

And before she was aware of them the words were out. Possibly, under the circumstances, the stupidest words she could have uttered.

‘Is there anything I can do, Canon Dobbs?’

He looked at her for a long time. She couldn’t move.

Eventually, without any change of expression, he walked past her and left the Cathedral.

FOR MANY YEARS, Dick Lyden had been something stressful in the City of London. Now he and his wife were private psychotherapists in Hereford. Dick was about thirty pounds heavier, pink-cheeked, income decidedly reduced, a much happier man.

‘And Moon – in her spiritual home at last?’ He beamed, feet on his desk. ‘How is Moon?’

‘Moon is…’ Lol hesitated. ‘Moon is what I wanted to see you about.’

Dick and Ruth lived and practised in half of a steep Edwardian terrace on the western side, not far from the old water-tower. Dick’s attic office had a view across the city to Dinedor Hill, to which Lol’s gaze was now inevitably being pulled. When Dick expansively opened up his hands, allowing him the floor, Lol turned his chair away from the window and told Dick about the crow which Moon claimed had mystically fallen dead at her feet.

Dick swivelled his feet from the desk, rubbed his forehead, pushing back slabs of battleship-grey hair. ‘And do you think it really did?’

‘I didn’t see it happen.’

‘So she may just have found it in the hedge and made the rest up.’

‘It’s possible,’ Lol said.

‘And the blood… she actually… That’s extraordinary.’ Dick rubbed his hands together, looking up at a plaster cornice above Lol’s head. ‘And yet, you know, while it might seem horrible to the likes of us, she’s spent quite a few years scrabbling about in the earth, ferreting out old skulls with worms in their eyes.’

‘This was a bit different, though.’

Yes, it was, Dick conceded. In fact, yes, what they were looking at here was really quite an elaborate fantasy structure, on the lines of one of those impossibly complicated computer games his son James used to play before he discovered rock music. Except this wasn’t dragons and demons; this was built on layers of actual history.

‘Let’s examine it. Let’s pull it apart.’ Dick dragged a foolscap pad towards him, began to draw circles and link them with lines.

‘What’ve we got? An extremely intelligent girl with a degree in archaeology, some years’ experience in the field… and this absorbing, fanatical interest in the Iron Age civilization, which became an obsession – the Celtic jewellery, the strange woollens. She still wear that awful sheepskin waistcoat thing?’

‘Not recently.’

‘That’s one good thing. Anyway… suddenly she’s aware she can explain this obsession in the context of her own family history. She’s been told the family roots in that particular spot go back to the Dark Ages and before – which is probably complete nonsense, but that’s irrelevant. She forms the idea that this is what she was born to do, because of the place she was born – on the side of this Iron Age fort or whatever it is.’