Phil Rickman - The Wine of Angels

‘He has to give his permission, does he? That’s the Bishop of Hereford, right?’

‘It’s just ... it’s protocol. You know. I’m sorry, but there’s really no story. You know?’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said Craig Jamieson blandly.

Coffey, Merrily thought. This is Coffey. He wants to force the issue.

Perhaps it was time to call his bluff.

Replacing the phone, she saw Lol’s fist connecting with the table. He was staring down at the scrawl in Mrs Leather’s book.

‘Young Alison,’ he said. ‘ Young Alison. ’

IN A CORNER of the bar at the Swan, Gomer Parry sniffed suspiciously into his poncy glass. Not that he was any kind of connoisseur, see, but there was something ...

‘Stop that,’ Minnie hissed down his ear. ‘It’s not French wine, you know. You’ll be showing us up.’

‘En’t right, somehow.’ Gomer shuffled uncomfortably inside what he’d always thought of as his laying-out suit. ‘Nothing wrong with it, like, but it en’t right.’

‘The rubbish you talk, Gomer. Can’t you just drink it?’

There was a free glass of the so-called Wine of Angels for everybody attending the string quartet concert – recital, Minnie kept stressing, I think it’s a recital, Gomer – served in thin champagne glasses. Bottles of the stuff, with the picture of the church on the label, were set out on a special table, Emrys, the wine waiter, doing the honours to make everybody think this was a real privilege, like. ‘Fermented in the bottle,’ he kept telling the arty buggers from Off, whose Land Rover Discoveries were clogging up the market place – not that there was many of them, but a few of that sort went a long way, in Gomer’s view.

On account of the tickets not going as well as they’d figured, Dermot Child’s festival flunkeys had been doing the rounds, offering half-price seats to locals and finally fetching up at Gomer and Minnie’s bungalow, the bastards. ‘Oughter be called off, I reckon, in respect of poor Lucy,’ Gomer had mumbled, but Minnie had shelled out for the tickets straight off, though neither of them’d know a string quartet from a dustcart crew.

There were other people you wouldn’t expect to see at this kind of do. Brenda Prosser, from the Eight till Late shop, and Bernard and Norma Putley, from the garage, putting a brave face on it ‘spite of their boy being grilled by the Law over drugs. Oh, and Bull-Davies with his blonde floozie.

No sign of the vicar, mind. Gomer was worried about that little lady. Needed friends, she did, and all that was happening was folk getting turned against her. Too many mischief-makers. Life was boring in the country now, for folk born and raised locally. No jobs worth getting up for, less they moved away, the telly always showing them what they were missing, the Sun telling them they ought to be having dynamite sex twice a night and different partners at weekends, drug dealers showing enterprising youngsters like Mark Putley how they could earn enough for a smart motorbike.

And no characters any more. Gomer fiddled in a pocket of his stiff, blue jacket for a cigarette he daren’t bring out. No characters, now poor Lucy was gone. All gloss and no soul. The string quartet was made up of professional musicians from London with weekend cottages hereabouts.

And the so-called Wine of Angels, even that had no character. All this talk about the Pharisees Red and it tasted like supermarket cider. Whatever the old recipe was, the Powells had lost it.

‘En’t right,’ Gomer mumbled, following Minnie into the big dining room, done out as a concert hall. ‘Artificial’ That was the word. Whole village was artificial nowadays, but the cider, that needed checking out.

‘Here for the concert, Reverend?’ asked the fifty-something man at the hand dryer. Bank-manager type.

‘Yes, I er ... I’m staying with friends in Hereford.’ Try and project your voice more. Always sound confident. ‘I gather the Queen’s Arms Quartet are building up quite a reputation.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ the bank manager said. ‘I believe they are. Well ... enjoy it’

As the toilet door wheezed into place, the face of Sandy Locke came up in the mirror. The Reverend Sandy Locke. Whose parish was in Hampshire, who was spending a couple of weeks with some old college friends in the cathedral city and who, this evening, was indulging his fondness for chamber music.

In the mirror, the Rev. Sandy Locke produced a surprisingly encouraging smile. It scared him how plausible he looked. How confident, how relaxed. He actually wouldn’t have recognized himself. A natural vicar’s face, Merrily had told him. Kind of fresh and innocent.

God forbid.

The ponytail had had to go. It was quite reasonable for a vicar to have long hair these days, Merrily said, but in Ledwardine it would make some people look again. Jane had cut his hair, finishing off with nail scissors so that it looked neat and groomed. Merrily had produced the black jacket and black cord jeans, the black T-shirt thing and the dog collar, all out of her own wardrobe. Everything was very tight. The jacket buttoned the wrong way, but it wouldn’t button anyway.

He froze momentarily when, on leaving the Gents’, he brushed against a woman who turned out to be Detective Inspector Annie Howe, severely youthful in her business suit. Howe glanced at him and they both smiled and he was terrified, but Howe moved on, and that was the clincher: the Rev. Sandy Locke bore no resemblance to the police picture of the young Lol Robinson, sex offender.

He went to the bar. He ordered a Perrier, carried it over to the window and stood there and watched the beautiful Alison Kinnersley, in a low-cut, wine-coloured velvet dress he didn’t recognize, flashing smiles across a table at her lover, and he felt no longing.

Where he’d thought he’d be feeling ridiculous, in fact he felt controlled. It was a strange and powerful sensation, everything now tightly wrapped around this deep and focused curiosity. Wild. Exhilarating. And, in the garb of a church minister, entirely and ironically unexpected.

He stood there, by the long, floral curtains, the opulent scene before him glimmering with artificial candlelight from the oak-pillared walls, and he looked at Alison Kinnersley, as though he was seeing her for the first time and saw that she was focused, too. Every smile she flung at Bull-Davies had a weight of history behind it. Or was he imagining that because of what he now knew?

He went on looking at Alison Kinnersley, whose name just happened to be the name of a straggling village in North Herefordshire which you might pick off a map and think how solid and convincing it would sound as a surname.

He went on looking at Alison Kinnersley but he thought about the Reverend Merrily Watkins.

Look. She’d held the dog collar to his throat. It’ll work. This is the only way. It’ll work.

She’d seemed exhilarated by it, fussing around, attending to details.

She was very lovely. He only wished she hadn’t seen Lol Robinson at his most pathetic.

Alison and Bull-Davies finished their drinks together and stood up together and walked together through a double doorway under a sign saying dining room.

In his strange, controlled way, the Rev. Sandy Locke followed them.

Where Lol Robinson would have hung around outside in the bar, hoping she’d need to go to the toilet, the Rev. Sandy Locke would take the seat right next to Alison.

Controlled?

Jesus, could it possibly last?

‘You are happy to discuss this in front of your little daughter?’ Richard Coffey said.

He wore a black leather waistcoat over a grandad vest. A rather good plaster facsimile of Michelangelo’s David flaunted itself on a plinth beside his chair. On the flock-papered walls were some artfully lit but fairly blatant black and white photos of naked men.