Phil Rickman - The Wine of Angels

‘No,’ he said humbly, and she threw up her arms.

‘Aaagh! You can have what the hell you like, you clown. It’s your life. My God, but those hospital shrinks have a lot to answer for. Keep ’em drugged up to the eyeballs and then send ’em out like zombies.’

‘Actually, I was a bit like that before I went in.’

Lucy shook her head. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Have a pee, splash some water on your face, and then we’ll go.’

Through the window, he saw her moped parked behind his muddied Astra in the short drive.

‘All right,’ Lol said.

She let him push the moped down Blackberry Lane, across the square and into the mews enclosing Ledwardine Lore.

Lucy insisted she needed somebody to look after the shop occasionally. When was she to do her own shopping otherwise? Used to be a girl came in two afternoons a week, but she’d had a baby and left the area.

‘Everything’s priced,’ Lucy told Lol, unlocking the door. ‘And if it’s not, you can always make one up.’

She was doing this to bring him out, bring him into the village. He hated coming into Ledwardine on his own. They still smirked at him in shops. Been smirking at him for months. He’d thought it was because he was such an obvious townie and maybe he should grow sideburns below his ears, buy a rusty pick-up truck. Not realizing they all knew what he didn’t, that the entire bloody village knew.

‘And you won’t have to face any of the locals,’ she said, identifying his fears, gathering them up. ‘Only tourists on a Saturday.’

He relaxed. Lucy’s tiny, overcrowded shop had in it the essence of what he liked about this place, what he’d miss when he sold the cottage and cleared out: the red soil and the long, wooded hills and the twisted houses with old bones of blackened oak. And the apples. Why were apples so cheerful and wholesome, while the orchard was so oppressive?

‘Bad for you,’ Lucy was saying. ‘Wrong type of woman entirely. Not that she won’t be bad for him. But that’s his lookout. And he’s stronger than you are.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I never dress things up. Woman’s a destroyer. What you need is a preserver.’

‘We had something,’ Lol said. ‘I know I’m naive, I know I don’t see things. But you don’t set up a home with someone in a new place unless you feel there’s something worth having.’

Lucy shook her head at his short-sightedness. Lol thought of the day he’d come home to find Bull-Davies’s big Land Rover outside the cottage, filled up to the canvas with Alison’s stuff. How cool she’d been, how matter-of-fact about it, sitting him down at the kitchen table and telling him simply and concisely. Apologizing, in an almost formal way. Kissing him calmly, like she was just going off to London or somewhere for the day.

‘If you’d seen her at that Twelfth Night debacle,’ Lucy said, ‘you wouldn’t be so damned charitable. Where were you on Twelfth Night, anyway?’

‘Oxford. With a bloke I’d done some lyrics for.’

‘A cruel woman. And yet curiously shallow. Horse-riding, point-to-point, driving around in muddy Land Rovers, racing up the sweeping drive, being lady of the manor ...’

‘You’re making her sound starry-eyed,’ Lol said. ‘She’s not.’

‘No, indeed. She’s cunning. Manipulative. Knows how to use her looks. And the Bull’s a male-menopausal stooge who’s known only two kinds of women, garrison-town whores and county-set heifers. She’s got his balls in the palm of her hand and she’s not going to let go. And if you think a passing concern that little Laurence might top himself is any sign she may come back when she tires of the Bull’s body then, my boy, you’re even less bright than you look.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I’m a straight shooter, Laurence. You were just a stepping stone to the mansion on the hill. Poor James.’

‘Poor James?’ Lol sat down on the stool behind the counter. ‘ He’s got the mansion on the hill, even if it is crumbling around him. Now he’s got the girl, too, no strings. Yeah, poor old James.’

‘I’m sorry. It’s just that I knew his father. Or at least I knew Patricia Young, who, I suppose, was one of the old man’s Alisons.’

‘Family tradition, huh?’

‘A tradition in most old country families. I say one of the old man’s Alisons, but she wasn’t at all like that. Patricia was bright, but a little naive. Like you. Stablegirl at the Hall who hadn’t realized that part of a stablegirl’s job was to lie down in the hay with her breeches off, as required. For John Bull-Davies.’

Lucy frowned. She took a paperback book down from a shelf, laid it on the counter.

‘Dissolute old bastard, John Bull-Davies. Slave to the flesh, and let everything else slip through his fingers: money, land, public esteem. If he hadn’t died when he did, there’d’ve been nothing left for James. Perhaps that would have been no bad thing, boy seemed to have been on the straight and narrow in the army. Now he’s been forced to pick up the pieces. And seems, unfortunately, to have slipped further into the family mould than I’d have expected.’

‘What happened to the stablegirl?’

‘I warned her to get out and she did. She left. I’m sure he must have found a replacement – or two, or three – before he died. Time that family faded out of the picture, I say. Turn Upper Hall into a nursing home. And that’s coming from an old conservationist. No, I hope your Alison takes him for everything he’s got, forces him to sell up and move away. It isn’t healthy for him here, because James has some sort of conscience. But that’s not your problem.’

He no longer understood what she was on about. She looked down at him, pushed towards him the paperback book she’d taken down.

‘I shall be back by five-thirty,’ she said. ‘Read this between customers. If you don’t get any customers, you’ll be able to read the lot.’

Lol picked up the book. A Penguin Classic. Thomas Traherne: Selected Poems and Prose.

‘This is the man you need,’ Lucy said. ‘Sitting there playing your mournful, wistful records. Do you no damn good at all. It’s spring. Let Traherne into your life. Open your heart to the Eternal.’

Lol had heard of the guy. Seventeenth-century visionary poet, born in Hereford, lived in Credenhill, about seven miles from here, where he was ...

‘He was a priest, wasn’t he? Vicar?’

‘Rector of Credenhill. I know what you’re thinking, but Traherne’s spirituality and your parents’ so-called Christianity are poles apart. That’s the whole point of this. You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crown ’ d with the stars ’

‘That was him?’

‘You have to learn to open up. Let the world flow into you again. Go into the village on your own and go in smiling. That’s what Traherne did. Happiest man in the county. Discovered felicity. His great realization was that God wants us to enjoy life and nature. That if we don’t, we’re throwing it all back in His face. Traherne walked the fields and was truly happy.’

‘Maybe he’d just discovered magic mushrooms,’ Lol said.

Lucy snorted, pulled down her big hat and left him to it.

THE TRUTH OF it was that, from that first solo stroll around the village, Jane had been looking for an excuse to go into Ledwardine Lore.

She’d been up to it several times, but you could see through the window that the place was too small to browse around and escape without buying something. Maybe that was why so few local people seemed to go in – made more sense than all this stuff about Miss Devenish being weird. Like weirdness was something new in the countryside.