Phil Rickman - Midwinter of the Spirit

‘Don’t tell me. These are messages for you alone. Look, Jane, what I’m going to do is give you a telephone number. Not mine, because I don’t think you should be entirely influenced by one person or feel that you’re being pressed from one direction.’

Angela reached down to a handbag on the floor and pulled out a notepad and a pen. Jane felt a welling excitement and also a small, fizzing trepidation as Angela wrote.

‘This is the number of a young woman called Sorrel, not far from here. You’ll like her. She’s very down-to-earth.’

‘Who… is she?’

‘Just another person with a questing spirit. She runs a healthfood restaurant in Hereford and holds meetings there for people of a like mind: to share experiences and consider methods of developing their skills.’

‘Sounds a bit… I mean, I’d feel a bit…’

‘If you did decide to go, you could always take your friend… Rosemary, was it?’

‘Rowenna.’ Jane felt much better. ‘Yeah, that’d be cool. Er… develop skills? What sort of skills do you think I might have?’

‘Healing? Clairvoyance? It’s not for me to say. Perhaps you can find out.’ Angela tore the top page out of her notebook and placed it in front of Jane. ‘It’s entirely up to you now.’

‘Right,’ Jane said. ‘Right.’

When she stood up, her legs felt cold and trembly.

Moon was pulling down the old-fashioned rollerblind over the CLOSED sign on the door.

All the lights were out except for a brown-shaded one on the counter, so that the air in the shop had a deep-shadowed sepia density. The unsaleable balalaika hung forlornly on the wall behind the till. The low-level music from the speakers each end of the single seventeenth-century beam was by Radiohead at their most suicidal: the one about escaping lest you choked.

Lol swallowed. Moon said to him, as though he’d been here for some time, ‘I asked Denny to come over for supper. He said he’d really love to but he was too busy. I knew he’d say that.’

‘Well, he probably is. Work’s piling up in the studio.’

Moon shook her head. ‘It’s his wife. Maggie thinks I’m still doing dope – and I’m poison in all sorts of other ways. Plus, he just doesn’t want to come to the barn.’

She came to stand next to him. She was wearing a long brown cardigan over a too-much-unbuttoned white cotton blouse and jeans. Something dull and metallic hung from a leather thong around her neck.

‘Moon, you can’t go home on your bike, in the dark, up that hill. It’s snowing hard.’

‘I’ve got good lights – and nothing will touch me on Dinedor.’

‘I could try and get it in the back of the car. Or I could take you back in the car now, and pick you up again tomorrow.’

He felt tense – the missing element here, as usual, was lightness. In any situation, Moon was a solemn person: no humour, no banter. As if all the family’s irony genes had been been used up on Denny sixteen years before she was born.

‘Silly making two trips,’ Moon argued.

‘I don’t mind, really.’

‘Or you could stay,’ Moon said. ‘Why not stay over?’

She was very close to him. ‘What exactly did Denny say to you?’

‘He said… that he was glad you weren’t on your own.’

Moon laughed lightly.

‘What did you tell him, Moon?’

‘It doesn’t matter. Poor Denny.’ Moon took Lol’s left hand and held it between both of hers. They were slim hands but strong, hardened by delving in the earth. ‘And stupid Dick. I can’t believe how timid and stupid people can be. Dick and his feeble psychology; Denny hiding behind a wall against the past. And you?’ She looked closely at his hand. ‘Are you timid too?’

‘Oh, I’m more timid than any of them,’ Lol said.

‘What of? What are you frightened of, Lol?’

She was standing close enough now for him to see that there was dust on her blouse. She seemed to attract dust. Dust of ages , Lol thought. The past had become attracted to her.

A long way away, Radiohead were playing Karma Police , about what you got if you messed with Us; he could hardly hear it for the drumming in his head.

‘I think I’m frightened of you,’ Lol whispered in shame, ‘and I don’t know why.’

The movements were so minimal that he’d hardly noticed her creeping into his arms, until they were kissing and his hands were in the long, long hair and something flared inside him like when you finally put a match to a long-prepared fire of brittle paper and dry kindling.

‘So what are you going to do?’ Rowenna asked, as they drove into Ledwardine marketplace, which had a lacing of snow.

‘Stop just here for a while,’ Jane said. ‘You haven’t even told me what she said to you .’

The cobbled square, with its little timbered market-hall, was lit by electric gaslamps on wrought-iron poles and brackets. Rowenna parked under one of these, and its light turned her hair into shivering spirals of rose-gold.

‘She told me my spiritual progression would be very much bound up with a friend’s.’

‘Oh, gosh.’

There were only two cars on the square, both in front of the Black Swan. There was a light visible between the trees which screened the vicarage, and Jane thought she could see a cluster of early stars around the tip of the church steeple, but that might just have been snow. She just so much wanted this to be a magical night.

‘So, are you going to phone this other woman, kitten?’

‘It’s a big step.’

‘No, it isn’t. You can check it out first, and if it sounds iffy you don’t get involved.’

‘ I don’t get involved?’

‘All right, we don’t.’

‘What about Mum?’

‘We don’t have to invite her, do we?’

‘You know what I mean. Right now, she would not be cool about this. She’s insecure enough as it is.’

‘Of course she’s insecure. She’s a Christian.’

‘I don’t think I can do it to her.’

‘You’re not doing anything to her!’

‘I’d be lying.’

‘They expect us to lie,’ Rowenna said.

The snow made spangles in the fake gaslight.

‘I need to think about this.’

‘Well, don’t think too long. Like Angela said, repressing it may seriously damage your health.’

Jane sighed. The village seemed deserted. Through the snowflakes, the light in the vicarage looked very far away.

‘WHERE DID YOU get to, flower?’

‘Oh, Hereford and places. Shopping and stuff.’

‘What did you buy?’

‘Nothing much. Rowenna got… some things.’

‘She seems to have a lot of money,’ Merrily said, heating soup at the stove. ‘I suppose she’s indulged quite a bit, having to be dragged around the country with her father stationed at different bases.’

‘Yeah,’ Jane said noncommittally. She’d arrived home about seven – looking a bit pale, Merrily thought. Outside, it was snowing quite hard and sticking impressively to the ground and the trees. November snow; it couldn’t last, surely.

‘Where did Rowenna live before?’

‘What’s this about?’ said Jane.

‘Just interest. You seem to be spending a lot of time with her, that’s all.’

‘That,’ said Jane, ‘is because she’s interesting. They were at Malmesbury in Wiltshire. Her dad was with the Army at Salisbury or somewhere. They don’t like to talk about it, the SAS, so I don’t ask. Satisfied?’

Later, she said, ‘I’m sorry, Mum. I’m being a pig. Tired, that’s all. I think I’ll have an early night.’

Merrily didn’t argue; she wanted to be up early herself. She suspected there’d be a bigger congregation tomorrow than usual; people always liked going to church in the snow.