Phil Rickman - The Wine of Angels

‘You obviously can’t go home tonight.’ Teapot and cigarettes between them on the kitchen table. ‘You need to give this guy a chance to sober up and realize what he’s done. So if you don’t mind a sleeping bag, you could stay here. We’ve got masses of bedrooms, no beds.’

Lol said that was really nice of her, but it was OK, really, he’d got a car down the road. Merrily thought the state he was in he’d probably pile it into a tree.

‘Look at it this way. One of the oldest traditions of the Church is offering sanctuary. I’ve always liked to do that. I’m not good at much else. I write lousy sermons, my voice is too tuneless to lead the hymns, I get upset at funerals and I’ve had a really bad night. So just give me a break, huh?’

‘I heard about that,’ Lol said.

‘Heard what?’

‘That you ... weren’t well.’

Merrily felt for another cigarette. ‘Who told you that?’

‘I ... overheard somebody talking about it.’

‘Saying what?’ She bit on the cigarette, fumbled for her lighter.

‘That you were ill. At your inauguration service.’

‘Word travels fast in a village.’ By tomorrow half the county would know. She stood up. ‘Let’s get this sleeping bag sorted out.’

‘You’re still not well, are you, Mrs Watkins?’

‘I’m Merrily. And I’m fine. Just need to eat sometime, but it’s a little early for breakfast. I’m trying to think where we put the sleeping bags. I think Jane’s room. Jane’s apartment!

He followed her upstairs, the main stairs this time.

‘It’s a big house, isn’t it?’

‘You could say that.’

‘Would it be OK if I slept downstairs?’

‘Wherever you like.’ She waited for him on the upper landing. Glad he’d said that, she didn’t quite like the idea of a stranger up here with Jane.

The sleeping bags weren’t in the kid’s bedroom. Which left the sitting room/study, into which Merrily had been forbidden to go until the completion of the famous Mondrian walls. Well, this was an emergency, and it was Jane’s fault, so she’d have to slip in there, grab one of the bags and just not look at the walls.

But the door was locked. ‘Damn. The kid is so exasperating sometimes. I like to think I’ve never been the kind of mother who spies, you know?’

Lol said tentatively, ‘I think there was a key on the bedside table. In Jane’s room.’

‘Makes sense. She’d hardly take it to Colette’s party.’

Feeling a need to explain, she said, ‘Jane’s had this long-term plan to paint the plaster squares and rectangles between the wall-beams in different colours, so it’d be like sitting inside this huge Mondrian painting. You know Mondrian. Dutch painter? We had a couple of days in London last year and we went to this exhibition of his stuff, and when we came here she got this ambitious idea. It probably looks terrible.’

The key fitted. The sleeping bags were rolled up behind the door. Merrily could have gathered one up, brought it out with barely a glance at the Mondrian walls. Maybe she’d have done that. If they’d been Mondrian walls, nice plain squares of colour.

‘What ...?’ She froze in the doorway.

‘You OK?’

‘No.’ Merrily put on the lights.

The walls had been painted all one colour. Blue. Midnight blue, divided by the timber-framing. But the timbers were part of it. Painted branches were made to protrude from them, thicker ones closer to the floor, becoming more plentiful as they neared the ceiling where they all joined together in a mesh.

As though she’d tried to bring the timbers in the wall alive, turn them back into trees.

‘I don’t understand.’ Merrily fought to keep her voice level.

‘Must have taken her a long time,’ Lol said.

‘Must have taken her whole nights. Why? What does it mean?’

He didn’t reply. He was looking at the ceiling. Among the beams and the intertwining branches were many small orbs of yellow and white, meticulously painted. Lights in the trees.

‘Little golden lanterns,’ Lol said. ‘Hanging in the night.’

She thought he must be quoting some line of half-remembered poetry.

The police left their car on the square and walked towards the church gates. Jane followed them, about thirty yards behind.

‘Some back-up, you reckon, Kirk?’ one said.

‘In bloody Ledwardine, in the early hours? Let’s take a look around first. It turns out they’ve just gone in there for a smoke and a shag, we’re gonner look like prats.’

The first two people to come out of the orchard walked straight into the two policemen. They were Danny Gittoes and Dean Wall. They were both drunk.

‘Aw shit.’ Dean put up his hands. ‘I never done it, officer.’

‘Over by the wall, lads. Let’s have your names.’

Dean and Danny were having their pockets turned out when Jane slipped behind a row of graves and past them into the orchard. Moving not stealthily but with great care, excusing herself as she passed between the trees. Respect is the important thing, Lucy Devenish said. Individual trees can be trimmed and pruned and chopped down when they are dying, but you must always show respect for the orchard as an entity. Never take an apple after the harvest. Never touch the trees in spring. Never take the blossom. Never ever bring any into the house.

Spending hours with Lucy and Lucy’s books, there wasn’t much she didn’t know now about apples and orchards. Knowledge was the best defence, Lucy said. Knowledge or felicity. Thomas Traherne had learned felicity. Had discovered, against all the odds, the secret of happiness through oneness with nature, with the orb.

Sometimes over the past week, usually in the daytime, Jane’s worldly self had told her other self that this was all absolute, total bollocks.

But now, with the white-clothed apple trees all around her, the blossom hanging from them like robes, it was Lucy’s world that seemed like the real world.

The moon had come out, and its milky light bathed the Powell orchard, and Jane felt she was on the threshold of a great mystery.

If Dean Walls and Danny Gittoes were refusing to come quietly, Jane wasn’t aware of it. If the bassy music was still booming from Dr Samedi’s black box, she could no longer hear it. If the guests at Colette’s party were making their stoned, confused way among the tangle of trees, she couldn’t see them.

Although there were figures here, she was sure. Pale and glistening, moonbeam shapes interweaving amid the blossom branches, as though each blanched petal had a ghost, and all these spirit petals had coalesced into translucent, dancing figurines.

And you wanted to join them in the dance, far finer and more fluid than the grossness on the square. The further into the orchard you went, the lighter you felt. As though you too were made of petals and could be fragmented and blown away by a breeze, dissolving and separating, a snow of molecules, until you were absorbed into the moonbeams, disappearing from the mortal sight.

A bump. A bump stopped her.

A bump and a bouncing.

Jane bent down as it rolled almost to her feet. She picked it up. It was small and its skin was soft and puckered and withered like the cheeks of a very old woman.

She held it in the palm of her hand. It was no bigger than a billiard ball, though only a fraction as heavy. It must have been up on the tree all winter. Perhaps the only one. All winter through, and the birds had left it alone.

In most parts of Britain, according to Lucy’s books, a single apple that remained on a tree all winter was a harbinger of death.

A bloom on the tree when the apples are ripe

is a sure termination of somebody’s life.