Phil Rickman - Midwinter of the Spirit

‘Your mum told me where you were having lunch.’

‘Great,’ Jane said dully.

‘She said you’d had a row.’

‘It was a minor disagreement.’

‘Like between the Serbs and the Croats.’

‘What else did she say?’

‘She said a lot of things I’m inclined to let her explain to you personally.’

‘Look,’ Jane said, more harshly than she intended, ‘tell her to fax it or something. I’m not going back.’

‘You bloody are, Jane.’

‘You can’t make me do anything I don’t want to.’

Lol turned left into the crematorium drive. ‘You’re right.’ He sighed. ‘I probably can’t even trust you to stay in the car while I go inside.’

God, he looks so kind of desolate .

‘Yes, you can,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, Lol.’

Denny had been wrong. The modern crematorium chapel was at least half-full. Distant relatives, he explained to Lol – nosey bastards whose faces he only half remembered. Also, a pair of archaeologist friends of Moon’s from Northumberland, where she’d lived for a couple of years. And Big Viv and her partner, Gary. And the Purefoys, Tim and Anna. And Dick and Ruth Lyden.

And Moon, of course. Moon was here.

Denny had booked a minister. ‘Though she’d probably have preferred a fucking druid,’ he said, seeming uncomfortable and aggressive. He wasn’t wearing his earring; without it he looked less amiable, embittered. He looked like he wanted to hit people. His wife Maggie was here, without the children. She was tall, short-haired and well dressed, and talked to the relatives but not much to Denny. He must be difficult to live with right now.

The minister said some careful things about Moon. He said she was highly intelligent and enthusiastic, and it was a tragic loss, both to her brother Dennis and his family and to the world of archaeology.

Denny muttered and looked down at his feet. Anna Purefoy wept silently into a handkerchief. They sang two hymns, during which Lol gazed at the costly oak coffin and pictured Moon inside it, with her strange, hard hands crossed over her breast. To intensify the experience in this bland place, to make it hurt, he made her say, I’d like to sleep now, Lol .

It hurt all the more because he knew that was wrong. She couldn’t sleep. He kept thinking of his dream of the mist-furled Moon in Capuchin Lane, holding the broken heads of the ancestors as she’d held the crow. A dream… like the dreams she’d had of her father. Moon had joined not the ancestors but the grey ranks of the sleepless. When the curtains closed over the coffin, there were tears in Lol’s eyes because he could not love her – had not even been able to help her. It was a disaster.

And it was not over.

Outside, in the foggy car park, Dick Lyden said to Lol, ‘Never seen you in a suit before, old chap,’ then he patted Denny sympathetically on the arm. Denny looked like he wanted to smash Dick’s face in. Lol found the slender, sweet-faced Anna Purefoy at his side.

‘I feel so guilty, Mr Robinson. We should have positively discouraged her. We should have seen the psychiatric problems.’

‘They aren’t always easy to spot,’ Lol said.

‘I taught at a further-education college for a year. I’ve seen it all in young women: manic depression, drug-induced psychosis. I should have seen her as she really was. But we were so delighted by her absorption in the farm that we couldn’t resist offering her the barn. We thought she was perfect for it.’

‘You couldn’t hope to understand an obsession on that scale,’ Lol said. He realized it was going to be worse for the Purefoys than for anyone else here, maybe even for Denny. They would have to live with that barn. ‘What will you do with it now?’

‘I suspect it will be impossible to find a permanent tenant. We’d have to tell people, wouldn’t we? Perhaps we could revert to our original plan of holiday accommodation. I don’t know, it’s too early.’

‘Well, good luck,’ Lol said. He wondered if Merrily might be persuaded to go up there and bless the barn or something. He watched the Purefoys walk away to their Land Rover Discovery. Denny’s wife, Maggie, was chatting to an elderly couple, while Denny stood by with his hands behind his back, rocking on his heels. A lone crow, of all birds, flew over his head and landed on the roof of the crematorium, and stayed there as though it was waiting for Moon’s spirit to emerge in the smoke, to accompany it back to Dinedor Hill.

But nobody could see the smoke in this fog – and the way to Dinedor would be obscured. He imagined Moon alone in that car park, after everyone had gone. Moon cold in the tatters of her medieval dress – bewildered because there was nobody left. Nobody left to understand what had happened to her.

The Astra was parked about fifteen yards away. As he approached, Jane’s face appeared in the blotched windscreen, looking very young and starved. He tried to smile at her; she looked so vulnerable. It was cold in the car as he started the engine.

She said, ‘Lol, that woman you were talking to…’

‘Mrs Purefoy?’

‘The blonde woman.’

‘That was Moon’s neighbour and landlady, Anna Purefoy.’

He drove slowly out of the car park on dipped headlights.

Jane said, ‘You mean Angela.’

‘I thought it was Anna. I could be wrong.’

‘Moon’s neighbour?’

‘On Dinedor Hill. They own the farm where she died.’

After a while, as the car crept back into the hidden city, Jane said, ‘Help me, Lol. Things have got like horribly screwed up.’

THE GOLDEN SANTAS drove their reindeer across a thick sea of mist in Broad Street. The lanterns glowed red like fog warnings. In the dense grey middle-distance, the Christmas trees twinkling above the shop fronts were like the lights of a different city.

And Merrily, alone in the gatehouse office, with the Cathedral on one side and the Bishop’s Palace on the other, felt calmer now because Lol had called her before she left. Because Jane was with Lol in the flat above John Barleycorn, not three minutes’ walk away, and maybe Lol would now find out how far it went, this liaison with the wan and wispy Rowenna, serial seducer of priests.

Scrabbling about under Sophie’s desk, she found an old two-bar electric fire with a concave chrome reflector, plugged it in and watched the bars slowly warm up, with tiny tapping sounds, until they matched the vermilion of the lanterns outside.

Merrily stood by the fire, warming her calves and watching the lights. They were all part of Christmas, but anyone who didn’t know about Christmas would not see them as linked.

She thought about that devil-worshipper pulled from the river not half a mile from here… the strings of crow-intestine on a disused altar… the inflicted curse of Denzil Joy… the old exorcist lying silent, half-paralysed – or faking it – in a hospital bed inside a chalked circle. And, inevitably, she thought of Rowenna.

Linked? All of them? Some of them? None of them?

After a while she spotted the untidy man – in bobble-hat, ragged scarf, RAF greatcoat – shambling out of the fog, with his exorcist’s black bag, and wondered how many answers he could offer her.

Jane had decided to clean up Lol’s flat: ruthlessly scrubbing shelves, splattering sink-cleaner about, invading the complexity of cobwebs behind the radiators.

A purge , Lol thought.

Just as they were hitting the city centre, she’d asked if they could go somewhere: the village of Credenhill, where the poet Traherne had been vicar in the seventeenth century. Where the SAS had, until recently, been based. And where, just entering dusk, he and Jane had found the perfectly respectable but undeniably small Army house where Rowenna’s family lived. Until the last possible moment, Jane had been vainly searching for some rambling, split-level villa behind trees.