Phil Rickman - The Wine of Angels

‘Interesting sermon of yours, yesterday, Mrs Watkins. Wrote that after the meeting, I suppose.’

‘Didn’t write it at all,’ Merrily said brusquely. ‘Came off the top of my head, more or less. Sometimes you have to busk it.’

‘Really. Don’t recall Hayden “busking”.’

‘Perhaps he was just better at it than me,’ she said sweetly. ‘Er, I think I can cobble together a mug of tea, if you have the time. Can’t do any better than that at the moment.’

He looked down at her with suspicion. Perhaps wondering if she’d heard about him being rolling drunk in the square on Saturday night, offering to lay his concubine on the cobbles. She walked through to the kitchen, which had fitted units now but still some of the old formicaed shelves and white tiles. She wrinkled her nose. Not yet her kind of kitchen.

James Bull-Davies shuffled awkwardly in the middle of the flagged floor. She was clearly not his kind of vicar. He didn’t know what to do with her. He wasn’t even happy looking at her, preferred the ceiling.

‘Used to be two rooms, this, as I recall. When I was a boy. That section over there used to be a pantry or buttery or something.’

‘Did you come here often?’ Someone had left a tiny kettle for the Aga; Merrily filled it over the open sink, with all the pipework visible underneath. ‘I mean recently.’

‘Only when there was business to deal with. Parish business.’

Don’t offend anyone called Bull-Davies, Ted had said. The church would be rubble but for them. Strange how things changed; from what she’d heard, Upper Hall was closer to rubble these days. Not a great deal left from the old days. His divorce, presumably, had not helped. Were there children, or was that another source of pressure, the inheritance factor?

Perhaps, after the parish business had been dealt with, he’d have discussed some of his problems with Alf. As his priest, his padre. The way a man like James would never be able to do with a woman because women were mothers or aunts or sisters or you fucked them.

Merrily set the kettle on the stove. Perhaps she was wrong. ‘Sorry, there’s nowhere to sit. We’ll have to lean on the Aga.’

It occurred to her that this was the first time they’d been alone together, the squire and the parsoness he didn’t want in his village. She hoped Jane would stay out.

James Bull-Davies propped himself stiffly against one end of the big stove’s chromium bar, leaving a good two feet between them. A woman in a cassock? Perverse, surely.

Or did it secretly turn him on, like, say, the matron at his public school? Merrily suspected she would never know.

‘That sermon ...’ She squeezed the warm bar. ‘I suppose I was just stalling for time.’

‘Message seemed to be that you were going to lay the whole vexed issue before the Almighty, let him sort it out.’

‘If you want to look at it that way, yes, I suppose that’s what I’m going to do. In the end.’

‘Way I look at it,’ he said, ‘it has bugger-all to do with God. Question of honour. And responsibility.’

‘Meaning your honour, my responsibility?’

Merrily looked sideways at him, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes, stared across the kitchen, his full lips in a kind of pout. A surprisingly powerful shaft of evening sunlight brutally exposed his bald patch and put a shine on his tightly shaven jaw – he’d shaved again, before coming here?

‘Why did you walk out the other night, Mr Davies? I’d’ve thought you’d have wanted to stay and confront the enemy.’

He lowered his gaze to the stained flags. ‘Perhaps I couldn’t trust myself not to smash his smug face in.’

‘Oh, I think you could. Disciplined, military chap like you.’

He exhaled a short laugh.

‘I mean, I can see your point,’ Merrily said. ‘If he’s got to make a statement about the treatment of gay people, why use a real character who might not, in fact, have been—’

‘It’s personal. It’s political’

‘Yes. Obviously.’

‘Oh, I don’t mean poo/politics. Though obviously that’s the other chip on his shoulder. Coffey fell in love, if you like, with the village, the area. Wanted the keeper’s lodge, bottom of my drive. Wasn’t for sale, but it was empty – had to dispense with the keeper’s services year or two ago, matter of cash flow. But that’s the nearest dwelling to Upper Hall and I wasn’t letting it go for peanuts. Made him pay. Made him pay. ’

‘And he resents that, does he?’

‘Look ...’ Bull-Davies levered himself from the stove. ‘ He wanted the lodge. I wasn’t touting. Never told him he wouldn’t have to spend a substantial amount of money on the place.’

‘Oh.’

‘Didn’t need that much to make it perfectly habitable. Of course, to turn it into the kind of perfumed brothel he wanted – I mean, the water supply was perfectly fine – nobody has to have a ... a whirlpool bath. ’

Merrily tried not to smile. His father would probably have said the same about hot water. ‘So it’s a personal vendetta because of what you’ve cost him. That’s what you’re saying?’

‘I think it’s a probability you should consider.’

‘That he’s written a whole play to get back at you?’

‘Hardly a whole play ... Vicar.’

‘I’m a bit lost here,’ Merrily said. ‘I don’t even know for sure why this would hurt you so much. I know your family’s well-embedded in the village, but, I mean, was one of your ancestors seriously involved in the persecution of Williams?’

Bull-Davies didn’t answer. He looked down at the flagstones and bit his upper lip with his lower teeth, which made him look momentarily feral, and it was at that moment that dear little Jane decided to stroll airily in.

‘Mum, I ...’ As if she hadn’t been listening outside the door. As if she’d had no idea there was a visitor. ‘Oh, hello.’

Bull-Davies looked at the kid and nodded. Merrily said, thinking fast, ‘Jane, if we’re going to spend the evening here, we need to eat. Why don’t you get some money out of my bag and pop over to the chip shop?’

‘They won’t be open.’

‘Yes,’ Merrily said grimly. ‘They will.’

Jane’s eyes had the mutinous look of one who’d been stitched up; she shrugged. ‘OK, then. Can I have a pickled egg?’

‘Get two.’

When the front door slammed, with a vaultlike echo, Merrily turned and faced the Squire. ‘I think we have enough time before she gets back for you to tell me what all this is really about.’

The wooden clock in the fish-and-chip shop window indicated that it wouldn’t be open for another quarter of an hour, so she’d lied again. Mum lied all the time. Like vicars had some kind of special dispensation.

The chip shop was on the corner of Old Barn Lane and the Hereford road. On the edge of the village and therefore outside the main conservation area, which probably explained why it was allowed to exist. It was still a dull-looking joint, denied the brilliantly greasy illuminated signs you found on chippies in Liverpool. Jane turned away and strolled back towards the village centre, wondering if there’d be time to nip into the Black Swan and ditch the uniform.

Circumstances dictated otherwise. As she emerged into Church Street, Colette Cassidy was walking down from the square.

Colette seemed to be studying the texture of the cobbles, and neither of them acknowledged the other until they were about to collide.

‘Hi,’ Jane said, kind of throwaway.

‘How’s it going?’ Colette wore jeans and a black scoop-necked top under a studded leather jacket. But no make-up, no nose-stud. She carried a small brown-paper bag.