Phil Rickman - Midwinter of the Spirit

The Dyn farmhouse was unexpectedly close – no more than fifteen yards behind the tight row of Leylandii. It was these conifers that deprived the barn of its view, but when you passed between them…

Lol almost gasped.

They were standing on a wide white lawn sloping away to a line of low bushes which probably hid the road. But it might as well have been a cliff edge.

Below it, the city – a timeless vision in the mist.

‘Startling, isn’t it?’ Tim Purefoy folded his arms in satisfaction. ‘Best view of Hereford you’ll get from anywhere – except from the ramparts of the hillfort itself.’

The snow had made Hereford an island and softened the outlines of its buildings, so that the new merged colourlessly with the old. And because the city had somehow been bypassed by the high-rise revolution of the sixties and seventies, it might all have been seventeenth-century, even medieval, underneath. It was both remote and intimate; it made Lol feel very strange.

‘See how the steeple of All Saints is superimposed on the Cathedral tower?’ Tim said knowledgeably. ‘That’s one of Alfred Watkins’s ley-lines. An invisible, mystical cable joining sacred sites – a prehistoric path of power.’

‘And we’re standing on it?’

‘Absolutely. It goes very close to the house. We had a chap over to dowse it – the earth-energy. They’re energy lines, you know. And spirit paths, so we’re told.’

No wonder this guy had taken to Moon. Standing in the thin rain on the snowy lawn, Lol suddenly felt he could jump off and slide down that mystical cable from the hill to the steeple to the tower in the mist.

‘Probably all nonsense,’ Tim Purefoy said, ‘but at sunset you can feel you own the city. Come and have some coffee, my friend.’

Lol shook himself.

The farmhouse was three-storeyed, ruggedly rendered in white. With lots of haphazard, irregular mullioned windows, it looked as old as the hill itself. How could Moon live out in that sunken, tree-smothered barn, knowing her own family had lost this house, and this view?

‘Anna!’ Tim Purefoy shouldered open the door of a wooden lean-to porch on the side of the house. ‘Coffee, darling!’ He held open the door for Lol. ‘Come in, come in. Don’t worry about the boots. It’s a flagged floor, and the place is a damn mess this morning, anyway.’

Globular hanging lights were switched on in the vast, farmhouse kitchen. It was golden with antique pine, and had an old cream-coloured double-oven Aga which seemed actually to be putting heat into the room. Like a furnace, in fact. Lol felt almost oppressed by the sudden warmth.

‘One second…’ The woman kneeling at the stove wore jeans and a sackcloth-coloured apron tied over a long rainbow sweater. Her fair hair was efficiently bound up in a yellow silk scarf.

‘My wife, Anna.’ Tim Purefoy pulled off his cap, freeing springy white-blond curls. ‘Darling, this chap’s a friend of Katherine – who seems to have gone walkabout in the woods again.’

‘Oh gosh. Not untypical, though.’ Anna Purefoy closed an oven door, sprang up, patting floury hands on her apron. ‘I’m making bread. One can buy a marvellous loaf at any one of a half-dozen places in town, but one somehow feels obliged , living in a house this old. Do you know what I mean?’

Lol nodded. ‘Responsibility to the ancestors.’

‘My God,’ said Tim. ‘This chap does know Katherine.’

‘It’s good to think someone does.’ Anna pulled out chairs from under a refectory table. Concern put lines into her face. She was perhaps fifteen years older than she’d first appeared.

‘Don’t interfere , darling!’ said Tim with affection. ‘You know what we said about interfering. My wife’s lost unless she can find someone to worry about.’

‘There’s a loaf in here for Katherine,’ said Anna. ‘Left to herself, she’d go days without food.’

‘Oh, nonsense, Anna!’

His wife glared at him. ‘Tim, I have been in her kitchen and found the refrigerator absolutely bare , while the girl sits there with all her books and her maps and her notes. Fascinating, what she’s doing, of course, and we’ve learned a lot by helping her, but she’s so obsessive , isn’t she? I feel enormously guilty.’

‘She thinks we twisted her arm to take on the barn.’ Tim pulled off his Barbour, revealing a thick and costly cowboy shirt and a silk cravat. ‘In fact, she virtually twisted ours.’ He focused narrowed eyes on Lol. ‘You know the history, I suppose.’

Lol nodded warily. ‘I, er, know about her father.’

‘Oooh.’ Anna hugged herself with a shiver.

‘Speaking personally,’ Tim said, ‘I wouldn’t want to live within a hundred miles of here under those particular circumstances – but there we are. Telephone’s in the hall. I say, do take off your coat, so you won’t feel it so cold when you go outside again.’

From the square oak-pillared hall, Lol called the shop and got no answer. Then he called Denny at home.

Denny said angrily, ‘Gone? How can she be gone?’

‘So you haven’t seen her? I came to pick her up here—’

‘What you mean, came to pick her up?’

Lol said awkwardly, ‘Denny, there’s… there’s nothing happening between Moon and me. There never has been.’

Denny was quiet for a few seconds, then he said, ‘I don’t believe this. You gay, Laurence?’

‘No.’

‘Then what the fuck…? I can’t… She sometimes goes in to see the idiots next door… at the farm.’

‘That’s where I’m calling from, and they haven’t seen her, either. They say she sometimes goes out for walks, but I can’t see any footprints.’

‘I’m coming over,’ Denny said. ‘Fucking stay there.’

Lol went back outside with both Purefoys.

‘You, er… you still own the barn, presumably?’

‘Oh yes,’ Anna said. ‘Katherine’s indicated several times that she’d like to buy it, but we’re not awfully happy about that idea. It is very near to the house, and suppose she… Well, suppose she had a change of heart or had to sell suddenly?’

Meaning, Lol guessed, suppose she was removed by men in white coats.

‘ Anyone could buy it then, couldn’t they?’ Tim said. ‘And it’s awfully close to our house.’

‘So you still have keys, presumably.’

‘Well, we do. But we’d never dream of going in without permission. As I keep telling Anna, it’s not our place to interfere. Or to be… over curious. That is, we try not to notice what we’re not supposed to notice.’

What had Moon been doing?

Lol wondered how long the Purefoys themselves would stay here, once they’d got used to that view, and over the novelty of homemade bread. Houses like this, previously occupied by the same family for centuries, might then change hands half a dozen times in the following twenty years. It was hard to settle under the weight of someone else’s tradition.

And costly, too. You bought a country residence for what seemed like peanuts compared with London, and then you found out how much you had to spend just to keep it standing. Moon must have been a gift to them. They’d probably run out of money halfway through converting the barn, and bodged the rest very quickly once she came on the scene.

‘Are you something to do with the little shop?’ Anna asked, a scarlet parka now setting off her yellow scarf. ‘That place where Katherine works?’

‘Me? Not exactly, I’m just a… friend of hers. And of Denny.’

‘Must be a busy man, her brother,’ Tim said. ‘Never seems to have time to visit her here.’

Lol tried knocking one more time, harder in case she was still asleep.