Phil Rickman - Midwinter of the Spirit

Winter glory.

Oh, wow! She heard me .

Jane just stood there and shivered in amazement and delight, like totally transported.

Cool!

Like really, really, really cool.

‘Visiting time’s not for another hour,’ Sister Miller said. ‘It’s teatime and the patients have to eat. You’ll need to come back.’

Sister Miller was all nurse: tough and ageless. Merrily concentrated on her seasoned face, because the view along Watkins Ward was dizzying and oppressive. It would have been hard to come up here alone tonight, any night.

She told Sister Miller that Sister Cullen had said visiting hours were less strict if the patient was in a side ward.

‘Which one?’

‘Canon Dobbs.’

‘That old man?’ said Sister Miller. ‘Are you relatives?’

‘I’m a… colleague.’

‘Because my view is that he doesn’t need to be here now, no matter what Dr Bradley says. Why can’t someone look after him at home? He’s just taking up a bed.’

‘You mean he’s recovering?’

‘Of course he’s recovering. I’ve been in nursing for nearly forty years. Mr Dobbs was walking perfectly well this morning. He can also feed himself. I believe he could also talk, if he wanted to.’ Sister Miller turned on Lol. ‘Have you any idea why he’s refusing to talk?’

Lol thought about it. ‘Perhaps he’s just impatient with routine questions like “How are we today?”.’

‘You have ten minutes and no longer,’ said Sister Miller.

It was like praying over a tomb. He lay on his back, as still as an effigy. Eyes shut. You were not aware of him breathing. He looked dead.

Just a short prayer, then. Nothing clever. Someone else having seen to all the smart stuff. Afterwards, Merrily brushed her knees and sat in the bedside chair.

‘Hello, Mr Dobbs.’

He didn’t move. He was like stone. Could he possibly be awake?

‘We haven’t spoken before, as such. I’m Merrily Watkins.’ Keeping her voice low and even. ‘I’ve come to say goodbye.’

On the other side of the door’s glass square, Lol smiled. OK, that was not the most tactful thing to say in a hospital.

‘By which I mean that I’ve now decided not to accept the Deliverance… role. I just wanted you to know that. We never met formally, and now there’s no reason we ever should.’

The side ward enclosing Dobbs was like a drab chapel. A faintly mouldy smell came from him – not organic, more like the miasma of old books in a damp warehouse.

‘I’m sorry that you’re in here. I’m sorry we didn’t get to you sooner in the Cathedral.’ She half-rose to pull the bedside chair a little closer and lowered her voice to below prayer level. ‘I’m even sorrier you didn’t feel able to tell any of us what you were doing there.’

She leaned her face forward to within six inches of his. They’d kept him shaved, but stubble had sprouted under his chin like a patch of sparse grass on a rockface.

‘It doesn’t matter to me now – not professionally. I’m out of it, feeling a little humiliated, rather slighted. I know Jesus Christ was the first exorcist, but also that half the world’s population is female, and rather more than half the people with problems of psychic disturbance – or so it seems to me – are female too. I believe that one day there will be a female exorcist in this diocese, without the fires of hell burning in High Town. I just wanted you to know that too.’

No reaction. Yet he could apparently walk and feed himself. She felt angry.

‘I probably felt less insulted, but more puzzled, when I heard you’d been avoiding all women. Dumping your housekeeper – that wasn’t a terribly kind thing to do. Why are you scared of women?’

Her hand went instinctively to her throat. She still wasn’t wearing the dog-collar.

‘I don’t know what makes you tick, Canon Dobbs. I’ve been trying to forgive you for setting me up for that final session with Denzil Joy.’

She felt tainted just uttering the name, particularly here. Too much like an invocation?

‘If you wanted to scare me off, show me how unpleasant it could be, you very nearly succeeded. But that wasn’t, in the end, why I decided to quit.’

She stood up. On his bedside table she placed two pounds of seedless grapes and two bottles of Malvern water.

‘Maybe you could share these with Huw Owen – next time he comes with his candles, and his holy water, and his magic chalk.’

She waited. Not a movement. She took a last look at him, but he remained like a fossil.

When she reached the door, she stopped, noticing that Lol’s eyes had widened. She resisted the urge to spin around.

Once out of the door, she turned left towards the ward entrance, refusing even to glance back along Watkins to the top side ward where Denzil Joy’s spirit had left his body.

And gone where?

The sudden shudder ripped up her spine like a razor-blade.

‘OK, he opened his eyes,’ Lol informed her, outside the hospital. ‘As soon as you turned your back and walked away, his eyes snapped open. Then closed again when he saw me standing on the other side of the glass.’

Merrily’s Volvo was parked in a small bay near a little park. By the path to the Victoria footbridge over the Wye. They leaned against it.

‘He heard it all, then?’ she said.

‘Every word. His eyes were very bright, fully aware – and mad as hell when he saw me.’

‘Good. My God!’

‘Mmm.’ Those eyes had spooked Lol. They were burning with the hard, wary intelligence of an old tiger. But the effect of this news on Merrily he found exciting.

The cold had lost its bite and the fog had thinned. He could see the three-quarter moon as through a lace curtain.

Merrily said, ‘Could we go for a short walk? I need to clear my head.’

It was very short. He followed her through the patch of parkland to a kind of viewing platform overlooking the still dark Wye and the suspension footbridge.

‘Last time I stood here, Inspector Annie Howe was showing me where a body had been found.’

‘What exciting times you have, Merrily. Such drama.’

‘Too much drama.’ She stood with her back to the river, beside an ornate lamp standard. ‘Well, this suggests Dobbs was an active participant in Huw’s ritual, doesn’t it? Or maybe even directing it?’

‘You’re the expert.’

‘Obviously not, or I’d know what this was about.’

‘And this Huw going behind your back, that’s the reason you resigned?’

She shrugged.

‘I still don’t see it.’

‘Lol, he was my course tutor: the Deliverance man. He’s the nearest I’ve had or wanted to have to a spiritual adviser. I rated the guy. I really liked him.’

‘I see.’

‘No, you don’t. A father-figure, just about. But, more important, the person you trust to guide you through the… through the hinterland of Hell, if you like. But what if there’s something iffy about what they were both doing?’

‘Iffy?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘And you want to?’

‘Yeah.’ Her dark hair shone in the lamplight.

‘More than a professional interest?’

‘I don’t have a professional interest any more. I am just so angry. That shit .’

‘Excellent.’

‘Huh?’

‘I’m happy you’re mad. When I first saw you in Church Street you were about as animated as Mr Dobbs back there. I worry easily.’

She smiled, shaking her head. ‘Lol…’

‘Mmm?’

‘I said some stupid things, all right? Things that weren’t necessarily true.’

‘Which in particular?’

‘You choose,’ Merrily said. Her face seemed flushed.