Phil Rickman - Midwinter of the Spirit

‘Ted,’ she backed away from him, ‘I really don’t want to go into this now, whatever it is. OK? Can we talk in the morning?’

It was not too dark to see his plump, smooth, retired face changing colour. ‘Were you here this morning? Someone thought they saw you.’

‘Early, yes.’ God, was that only today?

‘What time?’

‘I don’t know… sevenish maybe. What—?’

‘Did you notice anything amiss?’

‘I just went up to the chancel to pray. Don’t say—’

‘Yes, someone broke in. Someone broke into your church last night.’

‘Oh God.’ She thought at once of a dead crow and a smell of piss. ‘What did they do?’

‘Smashed a window.’

‘Oh no.’

‘Come and look.’

She followed him into the church, where the lights were on and they turned left into the vestry, where she saw that the bulb had been smashed in its shade and a big piece of hardboard covered the window facing the orchard.

The vestry. Thank God for that. No stained glass there.

‘Did they take anything?’

‘No, but that’s not the point, is it?’

No blood, no entrails, no urine . Merrily took the opportunity to fumble her way to the wardrobe and pull out her vestments on their hangers. She’d have to change at home now.

‘Have you told the police?’

‘Of course we did – not that they took much interest.’

‘I suppose if nothing was taken… Look, I’m sorry, Ted. I’ll have to take a proper look round tomorrow. I have to tell Jane where I’m going.’

‘And where are you going?’

‘I have to conduct a service over at Stretford. Near Dilwyn.’

‘This damned Deliverance twaddle again, I suppose,’ he said contemptuously. ‘You’re on a damned slippery slope, Merrily.’

Denny’s speech, his whole manner, had slowed down – like somebody had unplugged him, Lol thought, or stopped his medication. Denny seemed ten years older. His oversized earring now looked absurd.

‘You see, Dad – he’d bought this house for us to move to when he sold the farm. At Tupsley, right on the edge of the city.’

Denny had the chair, Lol was on the floor by the bricked-up fireplace. A parchment-shaded reading lamp was on.

‘Far too bloody close, that house,’ Denny said. ‘Christ. I used to wonder, didn’t he ever think about that? How Mum was gonna be able to handle living around here with his suicide hanging over us? The whole family tainted with it? Everybody talking about us? The selfish bastard!’

Lol thought of that smiling man with the Land Rover who threw a shadow twenty-five years long. Denny lit up a Silk Cut from a full packet Merrily had left behind.

‘So after he… died, we flogged the Tupsley house sharpish, and moved over to the first place we could find in Gloucester. We had relatives there, see, and nobody there to blab to little Kathy about what had happened, like kids would’ve done if we’d still been in town – whispers in the schoolyard. Jesus, we never talked about it. It never got mentioned in our house – let alone how it happened. If some bloody old auntie ever let it slip, Ma would go loopy for days after. And me… she’s watching me all the time in case I’m developing the symptoms.’

‘Of what?’

‘Schizophrenia.’

Lol sensed Denny Moon’s personal fears of inheriting some fatal family flaw, some sick gene – Denny keeping the anxiety well flattened under years of bluster, laughter and general loudness.

‘So we… when Kathy’s five or six and starting to ask questions like how come she didn’t have an old man, we told her it was an accident. His gun went off in the woods. No big deal – she never remembered him anyway. When she was older, twelve maybe, I broke it to her that he topped himself, and why. But I stuck with the gun. You know why? Cause I knew she’d make me tell her what it was like, finding him. What he looked like in that trough – like one of them stone coffins you find around old churches.’

‘Yes.’ Lol found himself nodding, remembering the photo of Moon in the Cathedral Close charnel pit, gleefully holding up two ruined medieval skulls like she’d been reunited with old friends. So happy, so at home with images of death – reaching out to the image of her dead father, feverish eyes under the flat cap she thought he might have been wearing when he shot himself.

Sick!

Denny threw him a grateful glance. ‘I was fifteen. All you can do with a memory like that is burn it out of your mind – like they used to do with the stump when you lost an arm in some battle. So she leaves school, goes off to university in Bristol. I get the first shop – inherited, Mum’s side. I come back to Hereford. I meet Maggie. You know the rest.’

‘It never occurred to you she’d find out one day?’

‘Why?’ Denny croaked. ‘Why should she? All those years ago, how many people remember anyway? It was over . And how could I ever have imagined, in any kind of worst-case scenario, that she was gonna rent this place – the same fucking barn? What kind of impossible nightmare coincidence is that? I was amazed it’s still here. Like who’d want to live at a house with that abattoir right next door?’

‘Somebody obviously tried hard to keep the barn out of view.’ Lol thought of the wall of fast-growing Leylandii. Planted there, presumably, by the people who’d bought Dyn Farm from Harry Moon, or by the owners after that. Out of sight, out of mind, out of nightmares. ‘And the Purefoys were incomers. How would they know?’

‘Stupid gits.’

‘You…’ Lol hesitated. ‘You didn’t think of telling her before she moved in?’

‘And what do you think that would’ve achieved, Laurence? You think that would’ve put her off?’ Denny produced wild, synthetic laughter. ‘ Her? ’

Poor bloody Denny, who wanted to burn away his own last image of Harry Moon like cauterizing a stump – terrified of what might happen if he came up here and it all crashed back on him.

So he’d simply stayed away, paying Dick to look out for his sister, and both of them laying it on Lol. Wanting Lol to get close, move in with her. Lol imagined what Merrily would say about this – a situation so unbelievably flawed and precarious that only men could have allowed it to develop.

And in a way that was right. But Lol could see Denny’s skewed logic: why he’d gone to Dick Lyden instead of a real psychiatrist, and to Dick rather than Ruth. A guy he knew from the pub – a mate, nothing formal. Someone he could talk to, without having to tell all. He’s an idiot , Moon had said.

‘That paper,’ Denny said. ‘That copy of the Times – it never even came into our house. You know anything about this – how she got hold of it?’

Lol shook his head. ‘First time I’ve seen it. I don’t know… Did somebody give it to her? Was she going back through the old newspaper files, part of her research, and came across it that way?’

‘And just laid it out there on the table, where the Purefoy woman found it? Had it all worked out, didn’t she? So bloody happy to join the father she couldn’t even remember.’ Denny began to cry. ‘Happy? You think she was happy?’

Some psychologist, Lol thought… maybe even Dick in his paper for Psychology Today … might draw a flawed parallel with the Heaven’s Gate mass-suicides, all those people in San Diego who came to believe they could hitch a ride on the Hale Bopp comet.

‘I never understood her,’ Lol said.

And always just a little repelled .

‘All down to me,’ Denny said, his voice flat and dry like cardboard. ‘It’s all going down to me. She suddenly learns I lied to her all those years ago; that’s what they’re gonna say. And that fucking sword – and the bath. You know where that bath is, don’t you?’ He sprang up, fists clenched at his sides. ‘That was exactly where the mangers were. For winter feed and water.’