Phil Rickman - The Wine of Angels

There was a low but perceptible moan of disappointment from disabled Miss Goddard, sitting next to Minnie Parry, who still kept looking around for Gomer.

Merrily said into the microphone, ‘Perhaps I can save you the trouble, anyway. Does it, perhaps, offer an entirely new perspective on Wil himself?’

A hush.

‘I don’t actually know what you mean,’ Alison said.

‘Like that I am not actually the first woman priest of Ledwardine?’

THE CIDER HOUSE! He took her in the ole cider house, where they say he took all his women. Because the air itself in there, they used to say, the smell of it could make you drunk. So’s you wouldn’t notice. The cider house. It was always the ole cider house. It made you drunk, to be in there. And ... wanton.

The description, with its overtones of the erotic and the forbidden, had lodged in Jane’s mind.

But surely the woman whom Stefan had called Bessie couldn’t have been referring to this hellhole.

Jane was no longer in the least bit drunk. She was far from wanton.

She was frightened of what would happen. She was cold.

The cider house was damp, had no windows, was lit by a fluorescent strip set into the low roof of blackened timber which sent a wobbly, purplish, hospital sort of light up the thick walls of old, discoloured bricks. There was a putrid smell, like rotten potatoes.

The cider house was a nasty place. No one would ever buy a bottle of The Wine of Angels if they thought it had been produced in here. It couldn’t have been. Surely.

Yet all the equipment was here. There was a mill: a big stone-sided tub that you put the apples in so that they could be crushed to pulp by the great stone wheel. It was pulled round by a horse or, in this case, pushed by men leaning on a projecting pole of wood or metal – this one was so dirty it was difficult to tell which.

And there was a press, like a giant printing press: a wooden scaffold with an enormous wooden screw down the middle, to tighten a sandwich of slabs and squeeze the juice from the pulped apples.

Over the mill was a kind of hayloft full of black bin sacks. There was no sign of apples, even rotten ones, but why should there be? The harvest was five months away.

Still, it was all wrong. So filthy that the old, rustic machinery looked like engines of pain from some medieval torture chamber.

Jane sat huddled against a wall, describing the cidermaking process, as if to a party of visitors, going into all kinds of detail, most of which was probably wrong. You had to give your mind something to do, try and think of something normal and interesting. It was useless, in this atmosphere, closing your eyes and trying to put yourself on a beach in Tunisia or a fishing harbour in Greece or an exhibition of nice, clean paintings by Mondrian.

‘Of course, hygiene was never considered terribly important in cider-making in the old days,’ Jane said. ‘Indeed, it was frequently asserted that in some areas a dead rat would always be added to give it a certain piquancy.’

Which was one ingredient they wouldn’t go short of in this dump.

In trying to make herself laugh, Jane only succeeded in crying again and asking herself, between sobs, why a respectable councillor and his son should want to kill a lovable old lady on a moped.

... come up to talk to Father about Colonel Bull-Davies and his ole man, thinking as Father could help her clarify a few points. Got Father in a right state the stuff she was comin’ out with.

It was the way he was so matter of fact about it. Lucy must have gone to see Councillor Powell directly after talking to Jane in the street. What could she possibly have said to get Garrod Powell in ‘a state’? And how could you tell?

Jane started to laugh again. Was this what they called hysteria?

The lock scraped and the great, thick oak door cranked open and Lloyd was standing there, the big key dangling and night behind him.

‘He en’t back, Jane,’ Lloyd said grumpily. ‘Said he’d be back before ten.’ He stared at Jane, suspicious. ‘What you laughing at? What you done?’

Normally, she would have said, Wouldn’t you like to know? – something sarky. Not with Lloyd. Lloyd wouldn’t recognize even sarcasm. It wasn’t that he wasn’t intelligent. He probably was. That was what was so awful. You learned that you had to play everything dead straight. Like when she’d said – in sudden disgust at his sniffy, narrow-minded attitude towards Colette – that she was going to be sick, he’d taken it literally.

She was scared to mention Colette. Didn’t dare ask herself why.

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I haven’t got anything to laugh at, have I? I don’t understand why you’re doing this. You don’t think people aren’t looking for me by now, do you?’

Lloyd looked appalled, insulted. ‘Nobody ever looks yere! Father’s a magistrate. He used to be on the police committee. Grandfather was Chairman of Planning for many years. Great-grandfather was to have been Mayor of Hereford, but he died.’

Like a litany.

‘I expect you’ll be standing for the council, too, then,’ Jane said.

‘When I’m thirty-five.’

‘Jesus,’ said Jane.

‘Nice language from a vicar’s daughter.’

‘Oh, yeah!’ Jane lost it. ‘And how nice is it’ – she sprang to her feet – ‘to keep a vicar’s daughter in this disgusting pit?’

Lloyd’s expression didn’t change.

‘Two things,’ he said. ‘One, my father was not in favour of the appointment of your mother but he was prepared to support her in the interests of local democracy. Two, you wouldn’t be yere if you hadn’t behaved like a little slut, would you?’

Jane pushed her knuckles into her eyes. He couldn’t be like this, really. Not cool, slim-but-muscular Lloyd Powell in his denims and his white truck, not hunky Lloyd, the Young Farmers’ News centrefold. How could genetics be so horribly linear? How could this not be a stupid nightmare?

Not going to cry this time.

She wrenched her fists away from her face and blinked. He was still there.

‘And to think we thought you looked like a young Paul Weller.’

‘Who’s Paul Weller?’ said Lloyd.

‘God.’

‘Anyway,’ Lloyd said. ‘I just come to say Father en’t back yet and when he is I’ll be bringing him in to you and let him decide.’

‘Decide what?’

‘You know,’ he said uncomfortably.

Don’t ask. She bit her lip hard.

‘I don’t know what you’re going on like that for,’ Lloyd said. ‘It’s all your fault. We got that much on now, see, with the festival and all’

‘What did ... what did Lucy tell your father to make him so upset?’

‘Business is that of yours?’ he said sternly.

‘I’m sure she didn’t mean to.’

‘Oh, you are, are you?’

‘It was probably all a mistake. It’s very easy to get things all wrong. If you let me go ...’

She let the sentence trail off because Lloyd had put his hands on his hips and his head to one side.

‘You really do think we’re stupid, don’t you?’

‘No, I ... I don’t’

‘Trying to soft-talk me now, is it, like I’m some mad psycho? Lord above, Jane, it en’t like that. We are ordinary people who serve the local community as best we can and have done for many generations.’

God, he was as much of a museum piece as the cider press.

‘And you always serve the Bull-Davieses, don’t you?’ she said. ‘The Bulls.’

‘Our families have had a close relationship for a number of years, yes. We don’t serve them. That time’s gone. We respect them and they respect us. It’s mutual respect that holds a rural community together in a way you don’t get in the cities, that’s why you got all this crime and drugs and street violence.’