Phil Rickman - The Wine of Angels

She wasn’t here, and there was nobody else who knew the real truth about Ledwardine. The place was all tarted up and polished like the archaic tools and farm implements on the walls in the Swan that nobody quite knew the original purpose of anymore.

Downstairs, in the low-ceilinged living room, she felt a bit better. There were photos on the walls to look at, which was different to photos in some dusty album at the bottom of a wardrobe. And, of course, the bookshelves beckoned.

But first, Jane went into the little kitchen, which faced north – always the bleakest light – and overlooked the old bowling green, a few morose sheep nibbling out there now. Under the window was a Belfast sink beside a sturdy-looking cast-iron cooker, and there was a small fridge and a kind of sawn-off Welsh dresser with a cardboard box on it. A note was tucked into one of the box’s flaps.

Compliments of the Ledwardine Festival.

Thanks for your help,

Barry Bloom

The box contained six champagne bottles. She lifted one out. Its ornate label featured the familiar black line-drawing of the parish church, and, in archaic lettering,

The Wine of Angels.

Oh, Lucy. Oh, wow.

Jane went quickly to the back door, unbolted it, turned the key and then removed two bottles from the box.

It was like they’d been waiting for her.

She looked out of the window, giving Lucy’s hook-nosed ghost a chance to manifest among the sheep, its arms rising angrily from the dark poncho’s folds. Put those back at once, you tripehound!

But nothing appeared. The Wine of Angels lay heavy in her arms. Jane carried the bottles out of the back door and over the fence on to the path bordering the bowling green.

It was meant.

‘ You duplicitous woman. Your hypocrisy defies belief. You lied to my face!

The machine, as Merrily came in, recording a message. Distorting badly.

‘ To my face, Mrs Watkins. ’

‘And good afternoon to you too, James.’ Merrily dumped her bag on the hallstand. When the shit hit the fan, an answering machine was mercifully absorbent. She saw Lol in the kitchen doorway and smiled weakly. ‘I get more popular all the time.’

‘ It is clear to me now that you were, from the beginning, conspiring with certain subversive elements to undermine the stability of my village. I am a soldier. I cannot tolerate that!

Lol said, ‘Is he real?’

‘ My information is that tonight you propose to allow this man to lay out his foul smears in public. I am giving you this opportunity to call it off. You may consider this an ultimatum. ’

‘My God,’ Merrily said. ‘This is a prepared statement.’

The red light on the answering machine blinked and swelled like some warning vein in Bull-Davies’s forehead.

‘ If I do not hear from you before four o’clock, I shall personally take action to put a stop to this homosexual farce. And to ensure that you never again have an opportunity to use Church of England property to defame and to destroy. If you are representative of women priests then, by God, I shall make it my business to ensure this village will never have another when you are gone. Good-day to you. ’

Lol said, ‘And you thought Alison was playing with fire.’

‘Sometimes,’ Merrily said, ‘you do things without quite understanding why.’

‘You don’t know why you’re doing this?’

‘Well, I know how it started.’ She leaned against the hallstand with her back to the flashing red light. ‘It started with me feeling pressured by anonymous letters and veiled threats and people trying to use the media to get what they want and ...’

She sighed and dug in her bag for cigarettes.

‘And then we were sitting there in Coffey’s house, and this idea was suddenly taking shape and it all came pouring out almost like I was speaking someone else’s thoughts. I hadn’t reasoned it out, it just ... I don’t know, maybe my self-destruct mechanism came into play.’

‘Maybe, when it’s over,’ he said, ‘they’ll all wonder why they made such a fuss.’

She looked at him over her lighter, shaking her head. ‘You don’t think that.’

He didn’t know what to say.

‘I suppose I was kind of hoping Coffey would put the arm on Stefan and it would all fall through, and then I’d have done my bit, given them a chance. But of course Stefan got his way. And then this morning I mentioned it to Gomer Parry and now we have a whole bunch of people due to turn up in fancy dress. So it’s been generating its own momentum. Like it was meant. Preordained. Destiny. Fate. Something working me like a puppet. Out of control. Except of course it isn’t. I could stop it now.’

Lol turned to her and put out a hand and she took it.

‘What should I do?’ she said. ‘Looking at it objectively.’

He had no idea what to say. How could he be objective when he was falling in love with her?

‘Is it the right thing?’ Merrily said. ‘That’s the only question, isn’t it, when you think about it.’

STEFAN ALDER WAS waiting for her under the lych-gate just before eight. She’d expected some smart, stately late-Stuart gentleman, but he was no more in period costume than he had been this morning. The neutral black trousers and white shirt, a little crumpled now, a smudge of green mould on the arm where it reached a muddied open cuff. A deep, red scratch dividing the back of one hand.

‘I don’t want ...’ Stefan stepped away from her scrutiny as though it were a court summons. ‘I don’t want a twee little costume drama. I don’t want a pantomime. They understand this, don’t they?’

‘It’s all right.’ Merrily backed off, putting up her hands. ‘Nobody wants that, Stefan.’

‘Sorry.’ He smiled palely. ‘First-night nerves.’ He laughed, as if this was a private joke.

‘You eaten?’

‘An apple.’

Symbolic, but insufficient calories. He looked lonely and he looked frail. Merrily suspected he’d been given a bad time at the lodge. She imagined the patchwork face sneering, but inwardly Richard Coffey would be eaten up with unquenchable jealousy because his beautiful Steffie was in love with a ghost.

The sun was going down behind the church, which had faded from red to brown and would soon be black.

Merrily wasn’t in costume either. Not period, nor clerical. She wore a long black skirt and a black, high-necked cashmere sweater – another relic, like the Volvo, of Sean’s boomtime. There would only be room in there for one minister tonight.

‘Stefan,’ she said. ‘What’s in this for you?’

He looked frightened of the question. The moon was rising over his shoulder. An unusually distinct moon, already yellow.

‘Redemption,’ Stefan said bleakly. ‘Isn’t that what we all want?’

‘I suppose. But for whom?’

He didn’t answer that. He looked out across the empty market place, where the first lights were coming on. ‘Which way will they come? Where shall we stand?’

She led him to a tree. An apple tree, as it happened, which in the evening was absorbed into the big shadow of the church. He stood rigidly, a bag of nerves. Bloody Coffey. He might have helped; he could have been here for moral and artistic support, he could have enlisted the aid of his technical friends. Or did Coffey, perhaps, want this to fail, so that the whole project – not his idea, anyway – might be discreetly dumped? Had she actually been playing into Coffey’s hands?