Phil Rickman: The Wine of Angels

‘Ah,’ Merrily said. ‘Would it help if I knew who they were?’

Ted didn’t hesitate. ‘Well, James Bull-Davies. He’s the only one counts for anything. Funny sort of chap, James. Career army officer. Then his marriage breaks up and his father dies quite unexpectedly from some sort of embolism following a routine op. James has to give up his career, come back and take over the estate. Catapulted into the situation really.’

‘What situation’s that?’

‘Weight of tradition, I suppose. Had to sell land and property to cover death duties and what have you, in addition to whatever it cost him to pay Sarah off. Left him with Upper Hall. And the burden of tradition. Soldier mentality, you see. Taken on the role of the squire in a way his father never did. Feels it’s his function to stop the slide of country values. Keep the modern world at arm’s length.’

‘I see,’ Merrily said. ‘And that includes ... what’s her name? Alison?’

‘Oh, well, nobody knows what goes on there. Power of the flesh, I’m afraid. Anyway, women in the boudoir, that’s one thing. Women in the pulpit of the church housing the bones of one’s ancestors is something else entirely.’

Merrily slowly shook her head.

‘It isn’t you, my dear,’ Ted assured her. ‘It’s the principle. The tradition. However, to his chagrin, he’s found that, in what was once a little world where the squire was a demigod, there are now other influential parties. Notably the affluent, articulate incomers, most of whom were rather keen on the idea of a lady cleric. Question of image, you see.’

‘Image? Somebody said that?’

‘They tolerated Alf, of course. Fat, scruffy old cove. Not very ambitious, not terribly bright. Always a bit of egg-yolk on the old cassock. But what the parish needs at this stage of the village’s development is someone more sophisticated, more attuned to the, ah ... is Zeitgeist the word I’m looking for?’

‘They’d prefer a woman priest because it’s cool and state-of-the-art? Jesus.’

‘Not merely a woman.’ Ted shuffled about a bit. ‘I mean, when they saw you at the wassailing and somebody put two and two together ...’

‘What?’

‘Oh, Merrily, don’t make me spell it out. You’re young and you rather, as someone said, rather smoulder ... in black.’

‘Oh no. Oh, hell. Who said that?’

‘Not going to say. Told you I shouldn’t have said anything.’

‘Bloody hell, Ted.’

Merrily awoke just as it was growing light. Above the timbered gables, a wooded hill had formed.

She was brightening with the sky. What had been outrageous last night seemed quite funny now. Smoulder. Who’d said that? And where? Hopefully, not at the bishop’s palace. Things really had changed, hadn’t they? Used to be schoolgirls falling for the new curate.

Merrily smiled, feeling younger than she had in quite a while. She looked across at Jane, who was still asleep. Hey, what the hell? If she wanted to set up some kind of apartment under the eaves, why not? The kid had given up enough these past years: two changes of school, becoming single-parented, coping with a mother who spent whole nights fuming about some of the crap they threw at you in theological college.

And, for Merrily – she glanced at the thick-beamed ceiling – it would take away the irrational, background stress connected with an empty third storey.

She went to the window which was set into a wall divided into irregular, white rectangles by huge varicose veins of Tudor oak. Jane, who was into fine art these days, said those white areas were just crying out for something interesting with acrylics. Oh dear.

Merrily gazed out over the inn-sign, across to the intimate market square with the squat, crablike, oak-legged shelter they called the market hall or cross. Overhung with shape-shifting black and white houses, every crooked beam and truss preserved and presented with pride.

The village wore its past like a row of glittering horse-brasses over an inglenook fireplace. Defined by its past, shaped by invaders. The Norman church with Saxon origins at the end of a Roman road. The cramped, cobbled alleyway where the gutters had once overflowed with pig-blood and piss, now a bijou arcade, soon to be scented with fountains of flowers from a score of hanging baskets.

For the new invaders, the Cassidys of this world, were here not to pillage or desecrate or change, but only to preserve, preserve, preserve. And wallow. Preserve and wallow.

Merrily looked down into the still-shadowed street, saw Dr Kent Asprey, heart-throb GP and fitness-freak leading his jogging party of sweating matrons past the new tourist information office. Saw Gomer Parry, the retired digger-driver, kick a stone into the road and stand on the kerb, hands rammed deep into his pockets, cigarette jammed between his lips. He looked aimless. What, after all, was there to do in this village but stand and stare, appreciate, absorb, be enriched?

Ideal, her mother had said. After what you’ve been through, you need somewhere quiet with no stress and no drug addicts and homeless people to make you feel guilty. Somewhere you can sit back a bit and take stock.

Merrily knelt before the window to pray. She thought, No need for homeless people to make me feel guilty.

According to dream analysts, the one about the realization of a third storey was an indication of a whole new area of yourself which remained unexplored. A higher consciousness.

‘Dear God,’ Merrily whispered, her palms together, angled on the rising sun.

From behind her, she heard the squeak of Jane’s bed as the kid sat up.

‘Oh shit,’ her daughter muttered, sleepy and cross. ‘Do you really have to do that in here?’

LOL PLANNED HIS suicide with all the precision missing from his life.

He drew curtains across the small, leaded windows facing the lane and the orchard. The curtains were cheap and thin but they took away the brightness of the morning. And also meant that Alison would not be able to look through the windows for his body.

On the turntable, Lol placed his third, already-worn copy of Nick Drake’s first album, Five Leaves Left. The lush arrangements, the soft and ghostly vocals of a man with only five years to live. All his adult life, he’d identified with Nick Drake, even though Nick had been taller and posher and dead – by his own hand – since 1974.

The album hissed and clicked into ‘Time Has Told Me’, veined through with Richard Thompson’s serene guitar. Lol went outside to check on the milk. With the bright mornings, the milkman had been arriving earlier of late. So the bottle was already on the step.

OK. He went back for another bottle from the fridge – yesterday’s, unopened – and set it down next to the new one. Then he shut the door and went to explain to Ethel, kneeling down on the carpet, looking into the unmoving green-gold eyes.

‘I’m going to have to shut you in. It won’t be for long. Don’t want you looking for me, OK?’

Ethel looked unconvinced, licked red mud from a paw. She was technically a stray, or maybe dumped. He’d heard this piteous mewling two nights running in the middle of January and finally found this thing in the hedge, about five inches long and not much thicker than a piece of black hosepipe. At first, Alison had not been pleased, displaying that hard edge he used to think would eventually wear away in the country. But on the morning she left, she said she was glad Lol had Ethel. Something for him to feel responsible for.

Lol went into the kitchen and didn’t put the toaster on; the smell of hot toast was one of the great scents of life. It would be hard to die with the smell of hot toast in the air. He didn’t switch on the radio either. He didn’t rake out the woodstove. He sat down at the table, facing the pot of Women’s Institute plum jam. He pulled off the rubber band and the parchment top, smelling the sweetness.