Phil Rickman - The Wine of Angels

Jane sat up. ‘What’s an executor?’

‘Someone responsible for seeing that the wishes of the deceased are carried out to the letter. Normally, just a formality. Somehow, I suspect this is going to be more complicated.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s me, flower. Things get stranger. Why would she do that? Someone who’s had so little to do with her. It’s weird. I’m supposed to look over her possessions for any indications of her last wishes ... As vague as that. There’s a clerk from McCready’s office driving over with a key to her house. Have either of you ever been in there?’

‘Just the shop,’ Jane said. ‘Mum, you have to take this very, very seriously. She said you might get cold feet and want to leave. Because of what happened in the church and stuff. She said you mustn’t. She also said you should change your mind about not letting that play go on in the church. She said—’

‘Flower—’

‘I’m just a kid,’ Jane said. ‘Does executor mean the same as catalyst?’

‘DISASTROUS,’ DERMOT CHILD said into the early evening stillness. ‘Totally disastrous. By the end of the afternoon it was fairly conclusive. About three dozen genuine ones, the rest were rubberneckers hoping for a body bag. When the police cars dwindled to one, they took themselves off home.’

He stood on the corner of Church Street looking out to the square, where the last stallholder was packing up, spreading stains of armpit sweat on his polo shirt uncomfortably reminiscent, for Merrily, of the menacing dream-Dermot.

‘The bloody Press, too. Not an arts journalist among them. Ten people went into the exhibition, none of them bought a thing. Thirty tickets sold for the string quartet. Is it even worth it? Come and have a drink, Merrily. Do your understanding-vicar bit. Tell me you’ll offer a prayer for the festival.’

‘Priest-in-charge,’ Merrily said dully. Lack of sleep was already corroding her resolve. The last thing she needed was a cosy drink with Dermot Child. ‘Understanding-priest-in-charge. I’m sorry, I can’t, Dermot. I have an appointment. I’ll try and make it to the concert.’

‘Perhaps it’s telling us something. Controversy certainly attracts attention, but this was the wrong kind of controversy. Pulls in the wrong element.’

‘The gossiping classes, as distinct from the chattering classes.’

He smiled. ‘Clearly, the morris dancers were a mistake. Terrence’s idea. Falls between two stools. The cultured consider it quaint but a little simplistic, the working class find it more than a bit of a yawn. Terrence is all for harmless tradition. I think we need to be a touch more avant-garde.’

‘Like your Old Cider thing?’

‘Ah.’ His eyes went to sly slits and he tapped his nose. ‘You haven’t seen that yet, Merrily. And neither has Terrence, thank God. It might seem tame, but what you have is this very male celebration of fecundity.’

‘Fascinating,’ Merrily said. ‘I’m sorry, I do have to go.’

‘Approached it the wrong way at first, you see. I was looking for singers when I should’ve been seeking out untamed virility. Chaps who, with a little training, can learn to sing not from the throat, not from the stomach but from the, ah, loins.’

‘Yes,’ Merrily said. Dermot talking dirty only made her feel more exhausted. ‘Well, good luck with tonight – I’m sure you’ll get lots of people turning up on spec’

She walked across the street, but carried on down past Miss Devenish’s house, not wanting him to know where she was going. At the junction with Old Barn Lane, she turned, and he was gone. She walked back to Lucy’s terraced black and white, taking out the key. As she pushed it into the lock beside the goblin knocker, a gruff and loaded male chorus sang in her head. Auld ciderrrrrrrrrr.

Dermot’s choral work was going to be a kind of aural hard-on.

She shuddered.

She was several feet into Lucy’s living room when the door twitched shut behind her.

She started and turned her head, but no one was there. The silence, in fact, was almost companionable, and she understood that she was more afraid of Dermot Child having crept in behind her than she was of Lucy’s ghost. Would almost have welcomed the jolly, ponchoed apparition.

To advise her, for a start, on what the hell she was supposed to be doing in here.

The muted evening light was a soft presence in the single, small window, leaded and lace-curtained. But not in the room, which was well into its own dusk. Merrily went back to the door and found a light switch, an old metal one like a pewter pip.

It activated two Victorian bracket lamps over an ornate, ebony desk which sat under the window and dominated the room like an altar. The beams above it were stained as black as the exterior timbers. There was a rigid-looking armchair and a Victorian chaise longue. All four walls were half-panelled, to waist level, white-painted above, between glass-fronted bookcases. There was a single etching – two Victorian fairies, elegantly pool-peering – in a thin black frame. And some framed photographs.

Merrily stood, for a moment, hands by her sides. Trying for quietness inside, receptivity.

The solicitor’s clerk from McCready’s office had arrived on a red Honda motorbike just before six, handing her a brown envelope containing only the front-door key and a smaller one. No instructions, no advice.

Jane had wanted to come across with her, but she’d felt that would be wrong. This apparently was between Miss Devenish and her. Although it would have been useful having Lol in here, the person who’d known her best of late, but who dare not be seen on the streets.

She was still reluctant to touch anything without at least a sensation of having permission. It was all so tidy. As though Lucy Devenish had actually walked out of here this morning under a premonition that she might not be returning.

Merrily folded her arms. ‘What do you want me to do, Lucy?’

It didn’t seem foolish to ask aloud. She’d always had the slightly unorthodox idea that the dead were not fully gone until after the funeral service. Sometimes she’d look at the coffin in the church and sense a relief, a gratefulness, emanating from it. Occasionally, a sense of indignation.

‘What do you want me to know?’

Nothing happened. The lights did not go out. No bat-winged, hook-nosed spectre peeled itself from the panelling. Neither did she feel anything, nor hear any inner voice.

She went to look at the photographs on the walls. One, in blurry black and white, showed a much younger, bushy-haired Lucy in a summer dress sitting on a bench. A young, smiling man in cricketing clothes was leaning over the back of the bench, hands on her shoulders. Lucy wore a sad half-smile, as though she knew it wouldn’t come to anything. In another picture, a shorter haired, middle-aged Lucy, trousers rolled into riding boots, held out a feed bucket for a piebald pony, while a younger woman looked on. She looked curiously familiar. Sister? Close friend?

Merrily peered into the bookcases without opening the doors. There was a surprising number of volumes on English and Welsh history, from the old, popular favourites, like Arthur Mee, to modern classics, like John Davies’s History of Wales and, more specialist, Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic. With the slump in congregations and the growth of New Age cults, somebody should have written one called Magic and the Decline of Religion. Someone like Lucy, perhaps.

She turned back to the desk.

There was a box on it. A Victorian writing box which should open out into a small, sloping desk-surface. Merrily saw that both bracket lamps had been angled to focus on it, pooling it in light.