Phil Rickman - The Wine of Angels

‘Why couldn’t you tell me about it?’

‘You need to ask that?’

Merrily remembered her anger at the absence of headache, queasy tummy, morning-after contrition. Lucy Devenish’s explanation about the cider and the orchard, Like curing Like. Natural holistic medicine.

Crawl into the centre of the orb and curl up. Let nature do the rest. Wouldn’t work for everyone. The orchard’s a risky place, an entity in itself a sphere. And this is a very old orchard. So it tells you – or rather it tells me – something about your daughter.

‘All that evening,’ Jane said, ‘I’d had this kind of a sense of coming home. First it was Colette. She just like appeared in the Black Swan and we clicked, and that was great. But when I looked up in the orchard I was on my own again and it was like a different kind of bonding with ... I don’t know. I still don’t know.’

‘Something beyond everything,’ Merrily said clumsily.

‘She must have felt excluded,’ Jane said. ‘That was the problem.’

‘Colette?’

‘Yeah. She felt ... That was why she tried to lead them all into the orchard at the party. She wanted to ... I don’t know.’

‘Re-establish control. Inspector Howe said she was shouting ...’

‘ Jane knows. Like it was a secret we had between us. But there wasn’t. It’s not something you can share. She didn’t know anything about it. She was going in mob-handed, trampling on everything. She was going to cause offence.’

‘What?’ Merrily stiffened.

Going to cause offence. Miss Devenish on the night of the wassailing, nose twitching in disdain. Can’t anyone see that? Deep offence.

Merrily said, ‘Offence to whom?’

‘The watchers,’ Jane said. ‘The watchers in ... in the little green orchard.’

Merrily tensed. ‘Who are the watchers, Jane?’

Jane’s mouth opened, but the words wouldn’t come. She saw Lol, standing shyly in the doorway.

‘Poor Karl Windling,’ she said. ‘But you must be awfully glad.’

It was all very strange and cathartic. Merrily and Jane sat on the old sofa, Lol walked around, and they talked about levels of existence and the life-force in nature. The Lucy Devenish Memorial Discussion.

‘So how does the Apple Tree Man come into this?’ Merrily said. ‘I thought he represented the spirit of the orchard.’

‘Oh no,’ said Jane. ‘You haven’t been listening. Lucy said that was wrong. That wasn’t local folklore. She said different places grew their own customs and beliefs according to what was needed. She said Wil Williams knew the reality of it because he was so psychic. And all that about him being seen dancing with sprites, that probably had a basis in fact, because when he was in the orchard the spirits would show themselves to him.’

She and Lol explained about the Pharisees Reds. How, when the old farmers found out they had an exceptional cider apple that was different to the ones growing anywhere else, they thought it was a gift from the spirits of the orchard.

‘Or the angels,’ Jane said. ‘Lucy said that in the seventeenth century if you said too much about fairies, you’d wind up ... well, like Wil Williams.’

‘Oh.’ Merrily sank into the old sofa. ‘I see. The Wine of Angels. Barry Bloom said that was Lucy’s idea.’

‘She wasn’t happy about it though, Mum. She wasn’t happy about the way the orchard had been let go and now it’s all started coming back after the wassailing and old Edgar shooting himself.’

‘Lucy thought things were coming to a head,’ Lol said. ‘And when Jane ... Oh shit, this is really difficult.’

Down in the house, the phone was ringing. Jane exchanged a glance with Lol. ‘I’ll get it,’ she said.

Lol said, ‘She was just there. One second there was blossom on the ground, lots of it, and the next Jane was there, kind of ... enshrouded in it. I don’t know where she came from. I don’t know how long she’d been there.’

‘And what had you taken?’ Merrily said coldly.

Lol sighed.

‘I’m sorry’ She spread her hands on her lap and looked down at them. ‘That was the scary thing, right? The thing you discussed with Miss Devenish. If there was anything calculated to scare you it would be the appearance of a fifteen-year-old girl lying on her back, wearing a school uniform and apple blossom. Could she have been there all the time and you just didn’t see her until you were close up?’

‘I don’t know. It’s possible. She had on this white school blouse. When she sat up, it was covered with petals. She sat up just like she’d been asleep, sunbathing. Except there was no sun. I took her right back to the cottage and phoned Lucy.’

‘She could have been there all day, that’s what you’re saying. Since she failed to get on the school bus.’

‘I don’t know. Lucy said it ... sometimes happened. Though not as often as you might imagine from all the folk tales. She said a day was nothing. Sometimes it could be a year before people came back, although it only felt like a few moments. And sometimes it felt like years but it was only a few moments. She showed me stuff in books.’ He looked sick. ‘You see why I was reluctant to tell you this. You imagine me telling the cops?’

‘Don’t even contemplate it.’ Merrily placed a cigarette on the arm of the sofa, searched around for her Zippo. ‘It’s like these alien abductions. Was it a dream, was it hallucination? You want me to believe that, in some way, the orchard took her. That Jane has – or thinks she has – in some way been possessed by the orchard, which is itself an entity, a sentient thing. And that it’s now taken Colette, maybe?’

Lol shook his head in defeat.

‘Which,’ Merrily said, ‘I suppose could hardly be dismissed as entirely incredible by someone whose profession implies she believes a dead man appeared to his mates, displaying his crucifixion scars. Right?’

Lol shrugged.

‘Except’ – Merrily located her lighter in a cuff of her sweater – ‘that this is paganism.’

‘I suppose it must be.’

‘It really is, Lol. It makes me want to reach for my big cross.’

‘Mum,’ Jane said from the doorway, ‘it’s some solicitor in Hereford called McGreedy.’

‘So you told her. You told her her daughter had been spirited away.’

‘Something like that.’

‘She scoff?’

‘No. But that doesn’t mean she believed it, though. You’re going to have to be patient with her. Supportive, as they say.’

‘That’s what Lucy said.’ Jane pulled the teddy bear on to her knees. ‘She said Mum was the catalyst. I’m not sure what that means.’

‘Means she’s the one who’s going to make things happen.’

‘She’s the one? We could wait for ever.’

‘What for? What do you expect to happen? What happened to you? Where did you go? Did you just fall asleep or what?’

‘It’s a blank. I mean, maybe there’s some part of my subconscious that remembers being prodded about by little green men or whatever, but it must be well buried. Suppose that’s what happened to Colette. What can we do about that? Suppose, because she wasn’t respectful, she’s been received ... less kindly.’

Lol was allowing himself to wonder whether they were really having this conversation or whether he himself had been abducted, slipped back into the hospital, back on to the medication, when Merrily returned, a little out of breath from all the stairs, her forehead furrowed.

‘This your doing, flower?’

Lol, relaxed for the first time in nearly two decades in the company of a teenage girl, let himself think how very pretty her mother was.

‘That was a lawyer called Harold McCready. He is Lucy Devenish’s lawyer. He says she went to his office a couple of days ago to add a codicil to her will, appointing an extra executor. As though she knew she hadn’t long to live, McCready said. A folksy, country lawyer. Seen it before, he said. People often know, even when they’re not ill.’