Phil Rickman - The Wine of Angels

Because it was so quiet. Whether it was the trees all around or whatever, you wouldn’t know you were near the centre of the village.

After Sean’s death, before she’d gone to college, she’d sold all the fancy new furniture, the rich-lawyer toys. This is tragic, her mother had said, all these nice things ...you may find you regret it one day when you have a big house again.

I’m never going to have a big house again, Merrily had said very calmly.

‘Still,’ Jane said. ‘We’re seeing it at its very worst. It can only get better and better, can’t it?’

‘It can, flower. And it will. Look, let’s forget this idea. Mrs Peat’s coming tomorrow, the cleaner. Why don’t we let her have a go at it first? Come on, let’s go back to the pub.’

Jane hesitated. She was standing by the window in the drawing room made mauve by dull twilight through the surrounding trees. Across the room the inglenook yawned like an open tomb, its lintel two feet thick. There’d been an archaic, coal-effect electric fire in there when the Haydens were here; now it was just blackened stone, and you couldn’t light a fire because the wide chimney had been sealed off for insulation.

‘Buy you dinner, OK?’ Merrily said. ‘We could extend to that. Not in the bar. I mean in the restaurant. Those chips’ll be all stuck together by now, anyway.’

It was just stone flags underfoot, like the ones in the church but without the memorials and carved-out skulls. You could spend a year’s stipend just carpeting the downstairs.

‘What do you say, flower?’

‘No.’ Jane stamped a foot on the stone. ‘We should stay. It’s stupid to be scared of your house. Are we grown women, or what?’

In the end, they slept in the bedroom Merrily had used that first night. At least it had a wooden floor. They spread out the red and blue sleeping bags bought for a camping holiday in the Lake District, a holiday which never happened, the summer after Sean died.

It was still cold at night, especially in here. The sleeping bags were a couple of feet apart, up against the wall with the door in it. Two kids in a haunted house.

‘Isn’t it funny,’ Jane said into the darkness, ‘how, when you finally get to bed on a cold night, you always want to go to the loo?’

‘All in the mind. Which means I’m not going with you.’

‘Did I ask you to?’

‘Think of something else,’ Merrily said. ‘It’ll go away.’

‘OK.’

Silence. Odd, really; a place this old, you expected creaks and groans. Didn’t timber-frame houses kind of settle down for the night?

‘Mum ...’

‘Mm-mm.’

‘You ever know anybody who committed suicide?’

The kid had always been good at choosing her moments.

‘I can’t think,’ Merrily said. ‘Nobody close, anyway.’

There was Edgar Powell, of course, whose inquest was to be concluded tomorrow. But she hadn’t really known him, only seen him. In the last hour of the last night of his life. Go to sleep, Jane.

‘What happened to Nick Drake?’

Merrily sighed. ‘I don’t know if that was suicide or not.’

‘You said he killed himself.’

‘Well, he died of an overdose of antidepressants, so he must have taken them himself. Whether he actually intended to take an overdose seems to be questionable. He was just a sad, withdrawn young guy whose career wasn’t taking off, that’s all. It was before you were born, anyway.’

Before you were born. Another lifetime. Before Jane was born, Merrily had been almost a child. In a few years’ time, Jane would be older than Merrily had been then. Was probably already, in some ways, more mature. Over the congealed chips, she’d explained how James Bull-Davies had made her so angry, and Jane had said, If he’s so sensitive to the best interests of the village, what’s he doing shacking up with that woman?

What indeed? Merrily rolled on to her side.

‘Mum.’

‘What?’

‘If Dad hadn’t been killed, would he have gone to jail?’

God almighty. Dark Night of the Soul, or what?

‘I don’t know. It’s possible. He might just have been struck off. Wasn’t a criminal. As such. He was just frustrated and he could see people around him making lots of money in unorthodox ways. And they became his clients. You know all this.’

‘When did you find out?’

‘When it was too late to stop him.’

‘Why didn’t you leave him then?’

‘I expect I would have.’

‘And would you have still got into theological college?’

‘Sure.’

‘But would you still have been acceptable as a vicar?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did you feel sort of ... soiled? Because we’d benefited from dirty money.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Did that make you all the keener to get into the Church? To throw yourself into it?’

‘You make it sound like a canal.’

‘Did you love him? Even when you found out he was bent?’

‘You don’t stop loving people just like ...’

‘What about when you found out about his affair?’

‘I don’t know. I hated him then, I suppose. I thought I hated him. I mean, I’m not Jesus, am I?’

‘You forgiven him now?’

‘I like to think so.’

‘If he hadn’t been killed, would you have?’

‘ I don’t know. Would have depended on what he did next.’

‘If he was sorry.’

‘Yeah. If he was sorry. Jane, what’s all this about?’

Jane’s thin, white arm came out of the sleeping bag. ‘I just keep going back over things. Everything seems ... not real. Like a dream. I have to keep working out how we got here. Just in case this is a dream. I don’t really like it.’

Merrily didn’t know how to respond.

‘Is it because I got drunk? Is it the cider? Does it go on affecting you for days?’

Merrily had to smile. ‘No.’ She reached out and took the small, cold hand. ‘And I’m afraid this is not a dream. Janey, love, is all this anything to do with that record? The CD you had in the car. Where’d it come from?’

‘Oh. A friend gave it to me.’

‘Right.’

Merrily closed her eyes. She was determined they weren’t going to do this again tomorrow. She’d make a deal with Roland for another couple of nights, until they had their own beds in here.

‘I told you about Lol,’ Jane said. ‘It’s his old band. He was apparently very influenced by Nick Drake.’

‘Only musically, one hopes.’

Jane didn’t reply. Merrily opened her eyes and lay on her back, gazing through the long window, pondering on this Lol, about whom Jane seemed to know a little too much. A small, yellow light, as from a candle or a child’s nightlight, shone between the thickening trees from a window across the street.

Later, much later, when she awoke to a tugging on her hand, the only light through the window was from a misty quarter moon, which turned the room grey.

Damn. Why can’t she hold out till morning?

Merrily squirmed, not half-awake, out of the warm sleeping bag into the damp air. The bedroom door was already ajar and she slid cautiously through the gap. She didn’t need to do this, of course; but she knew that Jane, for all her bravado, would not like wandering alone around the not even half-known rooms of the big, empty house.

Outside, there was the passage with doors and doors and doors, and one must be the bathroom, she couldn’t remember which, only that it was a stark, sixties bathroom with a black, plastic lavatory seat and cracked tiles everywhere.

She’d left her dressing gown at the Black Swan, and it was pre-dawn cold out here in just a short nightdress, bare feet on oak boards. Across the stairs, the landing window was an oblong of flat aluminium.