Phil Rickman - Midwinter of the Spirit

‘The one with all the trees.’

In the afternoon sunshine, the woods were a golden crust on the long, shallow loaf.

‘Hmm,’ Dick turned away, ‘not particularly imposing, is it? And this was where the first settled community was? This hill is what you might call the mother of Hereford, I suppose.’

‘The holy hill.’

‘Super,’ Dick said with firm satisfaction. ‘One must feel a weight of responsibility to one’s ancestors if one was born on a holy hill. And her father’s suicide… a ready-made open wound for her to heal?’

Lol felt unhappy. He didn’t like the way Dick seemed to assume that once you’d made a neat psychological package out of something, that was it. Sorted. In Lol’s experience, real life was endlessly messy.

Dick leaned back in his leather swivel-rocker, hands comfortably enfolded over his lightbulb gut. ‘The way we create our destiny on an epic, computer-game scale – would that it was as simple for all of us. Do you know, I rather suspect there’s a paper in this. Let’s go and see her. What are you doing tomorrow morning?’

‘So you think it was a dream?’ Lol said.

‘Hmm?’

‘Her father – a dream? Or an invention?’

‘Well, good God, man,’ Dick threw up his arms, ‘what the hell else could it have been?’

DRIVING HOME, MERRILY hardly noticed the countryside: the shambling black and white farms and cottages, the emptied orchards. Over it all, as though bevelled in the windscreen glass, hovered the unchanging, weathered face of the archaic monument that was Canon T. H. B. Dobbs.

That silent confrontation in the Cathedral had erased time. She could no longer remember praying in Bishop Stanbury’s beautiful chantry – only the stumbling in and the creeping out. The interim was like an alcoholic haze.

But she had her answer.

Didn’t she just?

In the late afternoon the wind had died, leaving the sky lumpy and congealed like a cold, fried breakfast. Beneath it the historic village of Ledwardine looked sapped and brittle, the black and white buildings lifeless, as indeed several now were. Nothing remained, for instance, of Cassidy’s Country Kitchen except a sign and some peeling apple-transfers on the dark glass; and five For Sale signs had sprouted between Church Street and Old Barn Lane.

The village looked like it needed care and love and a shot of something – an injection of spirit. Of God, perhaps? Introduced by a conscientious, caring priest without selfish ambitions she wasn’t equipped to fulfil?

Confess: you were stimulated. You’d had a meaningful brush with the paranormal and you wanted to know more. In fact – admit it – it was you that Huw Owen was addressing when he said prospective Deliverance ministers should analyse their motives, consider if they needed evidence of life after death to sustain their faith, proof of the existence of supernatural evil to convince them of a power for good .

Huw had been full of foreboding. Jane had been dismissive. Only Mick Hunter was enthusiastic, and Mick Hunter was a politician.

And now God had arbitrated, signalling – in the silence of Canon T. H. B. Dobbs – His unequivocal negative.

Of course, that could have been pure coincidence – if we’re being rational about this .

But the compulsion to rush into the Cathedral, the waiting chantry, Dobbs being right there when she emerged? She’d wanted a sign, she’d received a sign. End of story. Later this evening she would phone the Bishop and tell him what wasn’t, after all, going to happen.

Mature trees seemed to push the old vicarage back from the village centre. Beneath them was parked a lurid luminous-green Fiesta.

Which had to be something to do with Jane. If it was a boyfriend, Merrily only hoped he was under twenty.

Because of the size of the house, Jane had taken over the entire top floor, formerly attics, as her private apartment, and had finally re-emulsioned her sitting-room/study as the Dutch painter Mondrian might have envisaged it – the squares and rectangles between the timbers in different primary colours. If the Inspector of Listed Buildings ever turned up, the kid was on her own.

She wasn’t on her own up there now, though, was she? Merrily edged the Volvo around the little car and parked in the driveway. Although she talked a lot about ‘totty’, Jane’s relations with boys had been curiously restrained. You waited with a certain trepidation for The Big One, because the kid didn’t do things by halves, and the first stirring of real love would probably send her virginity spinning straight out of the window.

So Merrily was half-relieved when she opened the front door to find Jane in the hall with a girl in the same school uniform.

An older girl, though not as vividly sophisticated as Jane’s last – ill-fated – friend, Colette Cassidy. This one was ethereal, with long, red, soft-spun hair which floated behind her as she gazed around.

‘Oh, hi. I was just going to show Rowenna the apartment.’ Jane gestured vaguely at Merrily. ‘That’s the Reverend Mum.’

The girl came over and actually shook hands.

Jane sat down on the stairs. ‘Rowenna’s dad’s with the SAS.’

‘With the Army,’ Rowenna said discreetly. ‘This is a really amazing house, Mrs Watkins. Wonderfully atmospheric. You can feel its memories kind of vibrating in the oak beams. I was just saying to Jane, if I lived here I think I’d just keep going round hugging beams and things. Our place is really new and boring, with fitted cupboards and wardrobes and things.’

‘I bet it’s a lot easier to heat and keep clean, though,’ Merrily said ruefully. ‘You live locally, Rowenna?’

‘Well, you know, up towards Credenhill, where the base is.’ Rowenna wrinkled her nose. ‘I wish we were down here. It’s on a completely different plane. The past is real here. You feel you could just slip into it.’

‘Right,’ Merrily said. ‘If that’s what you want.’

‘Yes.’ Rowenna didn’t blink. ‘Most of the time, yes.’

Merrily thought it was a sad indictment of society when young people wanted not so much to change the world as to change it back – to some golden age which almost certainly never was.

‘Oh, hey, listen to this!’ Jane sprang up. ‘Rowenna’s dad goes running – right? – with Mick Hunter.’

‘Well, not exactly.’ Rowenna looked a bit uncomfortable. ‘The Bishop has this arrangement to go along with the guys on some of their routine cross-country runs. It’s kind of irregular, apparently. I’m not really supposed to talk about it.’

God , thought Merrily, he’d just have to go training with the SAS, wouldn’t he ?

‘Isn’t that just so cool?’ Jane drawled cynically.

Merrily smiled.

‘She’s not what I expected at all.’ Rowenna went to sit on Jane’s old sofa, staring up at the Mondrian walls. ‘Most of the women priests you see around look kind of bedraggled. But with that suit and the black stockings and everything, she makes the dogcollar seem like… I don’t know, a fashion accessory.’

‘Clerical chic,’ Jane said. ‘Don’t tell her, for God’s sake. She only stopped wearing that awful ankle-length cassock because this guy was turned on by all those buttons to undo.’

‘Which guy?’

‘Her former organist, creepy little git.’

‘No special person in her life?’

‘Only the Big Guy with the long beard – and the Bishop.’

Rowenna shot her a look.

‘Hey, just professionally,’ said Jane, ‘I hope . Sure, the first time I saw him, I thought, wow, yeah, this is the goods. But then I couldn’t believe I’d been that shallow. Besides, he’s got a wife and kids.’