Phil Rickman - Midwinter of the Spirit

Merrily tipped it into the ashtray. He saw she was blushing. She had no filthy habits.

‘Just… tell me to pull myself together, OK?’

‘I like you being untogether. It makes me feel responsible and kind of protective – sort of like a real bloke.’

She smiled.

‘So what are you going to do now?’

‘Go back to my flock and try to be a good little shepherd. The Deliverance ministry was a wrong move. I thought it was something you could pick up as you went along. I didn’t realize… I’m a fraud, Lol. I don’t know what I’m doing, let too many people down. I even let you down. I said I’d go and see your friend, Moon…’ She looked vague. ‘Was that yesterday?’

‘Mmm.’

‘I mean, I could still see her. I’m still a minister, of sorts.’

‘She’s not there now,’ he said too quietly.

‘Lol?’ She looked directly at him for the first time since sitting down at the table.

‘She died.’

Her face froze up behind the smoke.

‘No!’ He put up his hands. ‘She was dead long before you could’ve got there. There was nothing you could have done.’

And he told her about it: about the Iron Age sword… about the old newspaper report… why Denny had concealed the truth – why Denny said he’d concealed the truth… why Dick thought they should let it lie.

She kept shaking her head, lips parted. He was relieved at the way outrage had lifted her again.

‘Lol, I’ve never heard anything so… There is something deeply, deeply wrong here, don’t you think?’

‘But what can you do about it? We can’t bring her back. And we can’t find out what was in her mind.’

‘What about this book she was supposed to be writing?’

‘Supposed to be, but I don’t think she’d written a word. But if there is anything lying around, Denny will find it. And if it says anything he doesn’t like, he’ll destroy it without telling anyone.’

‘Will you be called as a witness at the inquest?’

‘I expect so. I was the first to… the first to enter the bathroom.’

‘And what will you say?’

‘I’ll just answer their questions. That should cover about half of the truth.’

‘And the rest of it can’t be the truth, because it has no rationality.’ She looked down into her cup as if there might be a message for her in the tea-leaves. ‘I’m so sorry, Lol.’

The point at which people say, Ah well, one of those things . Except this wasn’t.

After a while, she said, ‘What if all your working life is concerned with things that three-quarters of the civilized world now consider irrational?’

‘That could be stressful,’ he said. There were lights on in the café now, but they didn’t seem to reach Merrily. What was she not telling him?

She said, ‘You know why some vicars busy themselves constantly with youth work and stuff like that? It’s so that if, at any point, they realize there’s no God, they can think: Well, at least I haven’t been wasting my time .’

‘Cynical.’

‘Rational. For the same reasons, some Deliverance ministers prefer to think of themselves as Christian psychologists.’

‘Psychology is wonderful,’ Lol said grimly. ‘Look how much it helped Moon.’

‘Perhaps she had the wrong therapist.’

‘We must get her a better one next time. I think you could have helped Moon. I wish to God I’d told you about her earlier. And I think… I think there must be a lot of other people you could help.’

‘Thanks, but you’re being kind.’ She dropped the cigarettes and lighter into her bag, then folded up the anonymous letter very tightly.

This was not good: nothing had been resolved. He sensed that when she returned to her flock she would be different: a sad shepherd exiled, unfulfilled, into a community that wasn’t a community any more. None of them were; village life, like he’d said in his song, was no more than a sweet watercolour memory. She’d grow old and lined, and end up hating God.

‘Listen.’ Lol lowered his voice to an urgent whisper. ‘My life is pathetic. I’m a failed performer, a mediocre songwriter, an ex-mental patient who can’t keep a woman. My sole function on this earth at the present time appears to be producing an album for a semi-talented, obnoxious little git who’s blackmailing his father. Three days ago, a woman I couldn’t love but needed to help just… shut me out in the snow. And then slashed both her wrists. Now somebody who I care about is holding out on me in exactly the same way. What does this tell me?’

Mega self-pity , he thought as she sat down again. Occasionally it works .

Merrily said, looking down at the table, ‘Sometimes I think you’re the only friend I have left.’

‘Friend,’ he repeated sadly.

She met his eyes. ‘It’s a big word, Lol.’

He nodded, although he knew there were bigger ones.

Outside, it was already going dark, and the fog had never really lifted.

JANE STOOD ON the vicarage lawn, Ethel the cat watching her from inside the kitchen window. There was fog still around, but a paler patch almost directly overhead; the moon was probably just there, behind layer upon layer of steamy cloud.

Right, then.

She’d been told that it was OK to do this from the inside of the house, but she didn’t feel quite right about that. Not with the moon, somehow. And it was a vicarage. Whereas the garden bordered the old and sinister orchard which, though it belonged to the Church, had been here, in essence, far longer. Pre-Christian almost certainly.

The night was young but silent around Jane. You could usually hear some sounds from the marketplace or the Black Swan, but not many people seemed to have ventured out tonight. Also, the fog itself created this lovely padded hush. It lined the hills and blocked in the spaces between the trees in the dense woods above Ledwardine, as if the whole valley had acquired these deep, resonant walls like a vast auditorium.

She wondered if Rowenna was outside in her garden, too. The problem was that there were doubtless other houses overlooking that one, and Rowenna had younger brothers who would just take the piss, so she was probably now in her room – searching for the same moon.

Jane looked up, cleared her throat almost nervously. Probably Mum felt like this in the pulpit. Don’t think about Mum. This is nothing to do with her .

She drew in a long, chilled breath, imagining moonbeams – unfortunately there weren’t any – also being drawn down, filling her with silken, silvery light. And then she called out – not too loud, as villages had ears.

‘Hail to Thee, Lady Moon ,

‘Whose light reflects our most secret hopes .

‘Hail to Thee from the abodes of darkness.’

Something about that abodes of darkness making it more thrilling than the sun thing in the morning. Especially in this fog.

And it did work, this cycle of spiritual salutation. It put the whole day into a natural sequence. It deepened your awareness of the connectedness of everything, and your role as part of the great perceiving mechanism that was humanity.

Jane felt seriously calm by now and not at all cold – like she was generating her own inner heat. Or something was. She looked up into the sky again, just as this really miraculous thing began to happen.

The moon appeared.

First as just a grey imprint on the cloud-tapestry. Then as this kind of smoke-wreathed silver figurine: the goddess gathering the folds of her cloud-robes around her.

And finally… as a core of brilliant white fire at the heart of the fog.