Phil Rickman: The Wine of Angels

She’d nearly always awaken before she made it to the top of the stairs. Either disappointed or trembling with relief. Just occasionally, before her eyes opened, she would glimpse a gloomy, airless landing with a row of grey doors.

In reality, if you excluded flats, she had never lived in a three-storey house.

Now, however ...

‘Jesus,’ Merrily said. ‘We can’t live in this. ’

‘Yes, I suppose it is big,’ Uncle Ted conceded. ‘Didn’t think about that. Never a problem for Alf Hayden. Six kids, endless grandchildren ...’

It was big, all right. Seventeenth century, timber-framed, black and white. Seven bedrooms. Absolutely bloody huge if there was just the two of you. Very quaint, but also unexpectedly, depressingly grotty; nothing seemed to have altered since about the 1950s.

‘Of course, it’s church policy these days to flog off these draughty old vicarages,’ Uncle Ted said. ‘Replace them with nice, modern boxes. Worth a lot of money, your old black and whites. Well ... not this one, at present, not in the state it’s in after thirty-odd years of Alf and Betty.’

There was quaint, Merrily thought, and there was horribly old-fashioned. Like the steel-grey four-bar electric fire blocking up the inglenook. Like a kitchen the size of a small abattoir with no real cupboards but endless open shelves and all the pipes coiled under the sink like a nest of cobras.

‘Besides,’ Ted said, ‘we haven’t got any nice, modern boxes to spare. Three applications for housing estates’ve been turned down in as many years. Not in keeping.’ He frowned. ‘Conservation’s a fine idea, but not when it turns a nice, old village into an enclave of the elite.’

In his habitual cardigan and slippers, Ted Clowes, two years retired, didn’t look at all like a lawyer any more. His face had gone ruddy, like a farmer’s, and his body had thickened. He looked as seasoned and solid as one of the oak pillars holding up the vicarage walls.

As senior church warden, Ted had made himself responsible for getting the vicarage into some kind of shape. Negotiating with builders and plumbers and decorators. But, well into April, the work had hardly begun; it looked as though Merrily was going to have to spend the first month of her ministry in a bed-and-breakfast.

She was relieved, in a way. A place this size – it was ridiculous. And an unoccupied third floor, full of dust and echoes.

She stood on the first-floor landing, miserably looking up. ‘All these staircases.’

‘Yeah,’ Jane said thoughtfully. ‘This puts a whole new perspective on the entire scenario.’

‘It does?’

Merrily watched warily as the kid took off up the stairs to the third storey. She’d been sulking, on and off, for three days. She’d quite enjoyed the two years in Birmingham while Merrily was at college, loved the time in Liverpool when Merrily was a curate. Big-city woman now. On the way here, she’d said that if Cheltenham was an old people’s home, rural Herefordshire looked like premature burial.

‘ Yes. ’ Jane paused halfway up, looking around.

‘You like this?’

‘At least we’ve cleared all those rooms now,’ Ted said. ‘Alf and Betty were generous enough to leave us a quarter of a century’s worth of junk. Yellowing newspapers with pictures of the first moon-landing.’

Jane had a forefinger placed pensively on her chin. ‘Far more rooms than you’d need, Mum, right?’

‘Mmm ... yes.’

‘Even for all your Bible classes and parish meetings and visiting evangelists from Nigeria.’

‘Ye ... es. Unless, of course, they’re travelling with their extended families.’

‘So this whole storey is, in effect, going spare.’

‘Conceivably.’

Her daughter was starting to operate like a slick barrister. (The barrister Merrily might have become had it not been for God’s unexpected little blessing. Would she still eventually have wound up in the Church if Jane hadn’t come along?)

‘Don’t look at me like that, Mum. All I’m saying is I could have a kind of group of rooms up here. Like a suite. Because ... because ... if you think about it, those back stairs come off a separate entrance ... a third door, right?’

Ted chuckled. He knew all about daughters.

‘Right,’ Merrily said. ‘And?’

‘So it would be kind of my own entrance. It would be ... in fact ... like my own flat. ’

‘Oh. I see.’

The third door with its own illuminated bell and a card under perspex: Flat One. Ms Jane Watkins. She was fifteen.

‘And you’d pay the heating bills for this, er, suite, would you?’

‘Oh God.’ Jane glared down over the oak banister. ‘Here we go. Mrs bloody Negative.’

‘Or maybe you could sub-let a couple of rooms.’

Jane scowled and flounced off along the short passage. Oak floorboards creaked, a door rattled open. That empty sound.

‘Could be a double-bluff,’ Merrily said, her daughter pacing bare boards overhead, probably working out where to put her stereo speakers for optimum sound. ‘The picture she’s feeding me is that she’s going to be so bored here she’ll have to invite half the young farmers’ club over for wild parties. All these rural Romeos popping pills on the back stairs.’

Ted laughed. ‘Young farmers aren’t pill-popping yet. Well ... none that I know of. Pressure job, now, though. Diminishing returns, EC on your back, quotas for this, quotas for that, a hundred forms to fill in, mad cow disease. Suicide figures are already ... Sorry. Bad memories.’

‘What? Oh.’

‘I seem to remember saying, “If you want an informal picture of village life, why not pop along to this wassailing thing?” Not quite what I had in mind. Awfully sorry, Merrily.’

She looked through the landing window, down into a small, square rose garden, where the pink and orange of the soil seemed more exotic than the flowers. Over a hedge lay the churchyard with its cosy, sandstone graves.

Oddly, that awful, public death hadn’t given her a single nightmare. In her memory it was all too surreal. As though violent death had been an optional climax to the wassailing and, as the oldest shooter in the pack, Edgar Powell had felt obliged to take it.

‘You know, standing in that orchard, covered with that poor old bloke’s blood, that was when I decided to go for it. I clearly remember thinking that nothing so immediate and so utterly shocking ever happened quite that close to me in Liverpool. That maybe, in some ways, this village could actually be the sharp end. I thought, am I going to wash off his blood and walk away?’

‘It always affects you more in the country.’ Ted came to stand beside her at the window. ‘Everything that happens. Because you know everybody. Everybody. And you’ll find, as minister, that you’re regarded as more of a ... a key person. Births and deaths, you really have to be there. Even if nobody from the family’s been to a church service since the war.’

‘That’s fair enough. Far as I’m concerned, belonging to the Church doesn’t have to involve coming to services.’

‘And you’ll find that hills and meadows are far more claustrophobic than housing estates. You see somebody coming across a twelve-acre field towards you, you can’t dodge into a bus shelter.’

‘Fine.’

Ted raised a dubious eyebrow. ‘And everybody gossips,’ he said. ‘For instance, they’ll all tell you Edgar Powell’d been handling that shotgun since for ever.’

‘Making it suicide?’

‘What it looks like, but they haven’t got a motive. Money worries? No more than the average farmer. Isolation? Hardly – not living on the edge of the village. Depression? Hard to say. Perhaps he’d just had enough. Or perhaps he simply wanted to ruin the Cassidys’ olde English soiree. Been a spiteful old bugger in his time.’