Phil Rickman - The Wine of Angels

Bloody Dermot. Bloody Ted. She wondered what else they’d discussed. Her delinquent daughter, product of a disastrous marriage to a crook?

She felt the vicarage looming behind her, huge and ancient and forbidding like someone else’s family seat.

‘Merrily,’ Ted said, ‘you’ll come to love it. I’ve been in some really awful, draughty old mausoleums, but this place has such a lovely, warm, enclosing sort of atmosphere that you’ll simply forget how big it is after a while. Especially when Jane has her Own Apartment. Eh?’

Jane grinned. Merrily said, ‘We’ll see.’

Ted vanished into Church Street, Merrily wondering when she would get to meet his widow. Jane disappeared eagerly into the vicarage. Merrily was about to follow her, somewhat less eagerly, when Gomer Parry appeared in the drive, blinking through his glasses, unlit cigarette wagging in his teeth. For a pensioner, Gomer had a surprising amount of half-suppressed energy.

‘Removals, Vicar. What you got planned?’

‘Erm ...’ She’d given more thought to how they were going to spread the stuff around to make the vicarage look less like a derelict sixteenth-century warehouse than the method of actually getting it here.

‘Only, if you en’t made arrangements, see, you don’t wanner go botherin’ with no expensive removals firm when I got a very clean truck entirely at your disposal.’

When you thought about it, it was going to be a bit complicated. ‘It’s all around Cheltenham, you see. All over the place. Some bits in store, some at my mother’s house, some at—’

‘No problem, Vicar. Couple hours’ round trip. Piece o’ piss-cake. ‘Sides which’ – Gomer leaned closer, taking out his cigarette, confidential – ‘keeps the ole truck in business, know what I mean? Minnie, her says the place looks like a bloody scrapyard, I says you never know what you’re gonner need in life.’

‘How many vehicles have you got there, Gomer?’

‘Oh, no more’n four now. And Gwynneth, the digger.’

The mind boggled; it was only a bungalow with a garden.

‘Her’s given me three months to get ’em out, see. But Minnie’s a bit more, like, you know, religious than what I am. So I tells her, if this yere plant-hire equipment is in the service of the Lord ... Get my point?’

‘Understood. Bless, you, Gomer. Look, I’ll pay you in advance—’

Gomer backed off, outraged.

‘All right, the petrol, at least the petrol. Diesel. Whatever. How many gallons – ten, twelve?’

‘Full tank in there already, Vicar.’ He looked up at the house. ‘Three floors, eh? Gonner take a bit o’ manoeuvring about. What I’ll do, I’ll get my nephew, Nev. Big lad. What day you want us? Any day but Thursday, which is Nev’s day for the cesspits. Oh, and tomorrow. Inquest tomorrow, see.’

‘Inquest?’

‘Edgar Powell. Opened back in January then adjourned. Took ’em long enough to get it sorted. Ole Edgar’ll be compost by now.’

‘You’re a witness, Gomer?’

‘Oh hell, aye. Me and about half a dozen others. Prob’ly drag on till flamin’ teatime. ‘Specially if it’s true Rod’s gonner get Doc Asprey to stand in the box and tell ’em his dad was halfway round the twist.’

‘Why would Rod want him to do that?’

‘Stigma, Vicar. No way do he want his ole man put down as a suicide. So if they got evidence of Edgar bein’ three bales short of a full stack, it’s more likely he done it by accident, see?’

‘Right.’ She did, come to think of it, remember Alf saying Garrod Powell was insisting his father hadn’t taken his own life. ‘And what are you going to tell the coroner, Gomer?’

“Pends what they ask me. All I can say is what I seen. Which is not a lot, on account my glasses got all bloodied up. But before that, I do recall as when the others put up their guns, Edgar, he just didn’t. Now make of that what you like.’

‘I suppose it’ll be a question of whether he just had a funny turn and got all confused, or ...’

‘Or he had it all worked out. Gotter say that don’t ring true to me. He wasn’t no kind of show-off, farmers en’t, as a rule. You’d think if he wanted to do away with hisself, he’d do it in the barn. Yet ... I dunno ... He weren’t daft in any respect, ole Edgar. How ‘bout Wednesday?’

‘That would be brilliant. This is above and beyond, Gomer.’

Gomer slipped his cigarette into his grin. ‘You don’t owe me nothing, Vicar, never think that. But there may be one small thing one day, just one ... How’s the kiddie, now?’

‘Oh God, does everybody know?’

‘Hell, Vicar, don’t go worryin’ about that. They all knows what that Cassidy girl’s like. Too promiscuous by half, Minnie reckons.’

‘I just hope she means precocious,’ Merrily said.

‘Aye,’ Gomer said. ‘That was prob’ly it.’

Jane stood on the first landing, looking up.

‘Hey, listen. Why don’t we just move in? Like tonight.’

Her voice echoing in the emptiness. She was still in her school uniform, the dark blue blazer, the pleated skirt. Merrily, at the foot of the stairs, felt a heart-pang of love and fear that she wouldn’t have been able to explain.

‘How can we do that? Even with Gomer’s help, it’ll be nearly the weekend before we can get all the stuff in and sorted out. Besides, with the Diocese paying for the hotel, it means we can get everything right, for once. Instead of being in the usual chaos.’

Going to be a disaster, she was thinking. You could get all their stuff, beds included, into two rooms; they’d be rattling around like two peas in a coffee tin.

‘We’ve got sleeping bags, Mum. We could spread them out in the drawing room. Get the feel of the place. Go on. It’d be fun.’

‘On those flags? Jane, you are joking.’

Jane stared down the stairs at her. ‘You don’t really want to move in at all, do you?’

‘That’s stupid,’ Merrily said uncomfortably.

All around her, doors. Above her, doors. All of them half open, to signify empty rooms. She wanted to rush from door to door, shepherding Jane before her, banging each one shut and then finally the front door, behind them, as they ran into the square and the sanctuary of the Black Swan.

‘I can tell by the way you talk about it,’ Jane said. ‘Always going on about how big it is. At the Swan it’s kind of temporary, like a holiday. In here you’ve got to face what you’re taking on. Like the full burden.’

God, the perceptiveness of this kid was frightening.

‘Come on, Mum, there’s no shame in admitting it.’

‘I just want to do it efficiently, I ...’

Did it remind her of moving from the flat into the four-bedroomed – it seemed enormous at the time – suburban villa that Sean had suddenly acquired, at an amazingly modest price, from A Client? Somewhere for her to organize, decorate. Somewhere to keep her occupied while ...

‘... I just want it all to be, you know, right, ’ Merrily said.

Which, right now, seemed an impossible dream.

‘For a major-league Christian,’ Jane said, ‘you don’t half lie a lot.’

Merrily felt her face darken. The doorbell saved them both.

‘Heard you were finally taking up occupancy. Called to see if I could be of any help.’

No, you didn’t.

‘That’s kind,’ Merrily said. ‘But we’re just giving the place the once-over. We won’t be actually moving in for a couple of days yet.’

James Bull-Davies looked around the empty, dusty hall. Sniffed once, like a pointer on a heath. He’d obviously waited until Gomer Parry had gone. Damn. She’d as good as told him to leave it for a while; he was either dense or simply didn’t believe his family was obliged to bow to the wishes of anyone in Ledwardine.