Phil Rickman - The Remains of an Altar

On the road, Merrily driving the Volvo, he told her about Jane and Coleman’s Meadow. The ley line and the luxury executive homes. Something about all this seemed to bother him but, for once, Merrily couldn’t see a major problem.

‘Kid’s been involved in far worse things. I mean, I don’t like the idea of an ancient trackway to the top of Cole Hill being obliterated to accommodate luxury executive homes. We’ve had two new estates in eighteen months.’

‘Small starter homes would be OK?’ Lol said.

‘We need a few starter homes. I’m just not sure we need any more…’

‘Sedate, comfortable middle-class people?’

‘Let’s back away from that one for the moment. Whatever we need, there have to be better places to put them. OK, so Jane gets up a petition to the council. Fair enough. She’s seventeen. Next year she gets the vote.’

Lol polished the lenses of his brass-rimmed glasses on the bottom of his T-shirt.

‘Far be it from me, as a failed psychotherapist, to try to tell you about your daughter, but, like… do you think maybe it goes deeper? Bored with A levels, not lit-up by the idea of university, because everybody does that.’

‘You think she doesn’t want to leave home?’

‘Maybe she’s afraid to. Afraid that she’ll come back to find everything destroyed. Lost a lot, over the years. Her dad. Lucy…’

‘Mmm.’

Jane’s dad, her mother’s unfaithful husband. Dead in a car crash, but Jane had still been little then. When the formidable Lucy Devenish, the kid’s first real friend in Ledwardine, had been knocked off her moped and killed on the outskirts of the village, that was worse, an idyll badly chipped. Jane, town-raised, had bonded with the countryside very quickly, thanks to Lucy and her rural folklore and her – OK – possible paganism.

And it was in Lucy’s old shop, Ledwardine Lore, that Jane had been the first of them to encounter a damaged musician, trying to reassemble his life after a criminally unjust court conviction, a family breakdown, a bad time in a psychiatric hospital. So many daughters could barely tolerate their mothers’ boyfriends, but Jane had virtually engineered this relationship. Lol putting down a deposit on Lucy’s cottage in Church Street, just across from the vicarage… that was the final piece in Jane’s mosaic.

And Lucy Devenish was still a presence for all three of them.

Lucy’s primary raison d’etre had been the defence of old Ledwardine against misguided incomers and the slashing scythe of crass development.

Uh-oh.

Merrily glanced at Lol, trying to look like a respectable companion for a vicar in a dark jacket over a dark T-shirt with no motif. Jane and Lol were, in their own way, also an item. Jane knew how to work him.

‘So the imminent destruction of Coleman’s Meadow and the ley line

… you think she sees that as something that would’ve sent Lucy ballistic. What’s she going to do, do you think?’

‘She wanted to know who to complain to.’

‘Councillor Pierce?’

‘What else could I say? She’d only find out somewhere else.’

‘Well. I instinctively don’t like Lyndon Pierce much…’

‘But at this moment you could almost feel sorry for him, right?’

‘It’s going to be an experience for him, certainly.’

Merrily drove into Ledbury, with its oak-framed market hall, its clock and its sunny old bricks. Last town before the Malvern Hills, the eastern ramparts of Here-fordshire reflecting the Black Mountains of Wales in the west. Between these purple-shadowed walls, the county was a twilit, peripheral place.

Normally, she liked that. The out-of-timeness of it.

Bloody Jane.

The Malverns were so familiar, an eleven-mile ripple on the horizon, that it was easy to miss how strange they were. They were sudden hills, a surprise happening in an otherwise eventless landscape

Driving in from a different side tonight, Merrily watched the scenery acquiring scaled-down Alpine dimensions: sunlit, serrated ridge, inky valley. Eleven roller-coaster miles with a long history of recreation, ever since they’d been reserved as a hunting ground by the conquering Normans.

Never more famous, however, than in Victorian days when the healing waters of one-time holy wells had briefly been more sought-after than champagne and Great Malvern had become a fashionable resort.

The guidebook she’d bought in Hereford and checked out over tea explained how these hills had been given special protection, for one reason or another, throughout recorded history.

But it hadn’t stopped the quarrying.

‘Apparently, George Bernard Shaw remarked that so much stone was being taken away that the Malvern Hills were in danger of becoming the Malvern Flats.’

‘But they’ve stopped it now?’ Lol said.

‘Not that long ago.’ Merrily slowed, approaching a green-bearded cliff face. ‘But at least quarrying’s good for concealed car parks.’

A segment like a slice of layered cake had been cut out of the hillside, and someone had built a shambling stone house on raised ground at the apex. A house which, at some stage, had grown into a country pub. Lol inspected it with no discernible awe.

‘This is the gateway to hell?’

Maybe there had once been a tiered garden in front; now it was this huge parking area with walls of natural rock, partly curtained with conifers. Merrily pulled onto its edge, under the discoloured swinging sign on a pole in the entrance: an archaic-looking painting of a squat tree and Royal Oak in faded Gothic lettering. Below, another sign, plain white, pointing at the pub.

Inn Ya Face››››

Nine or ten vehicles on the car park but no people around. She wound her window down. No sound other than birdsong. No visible litter. No smell of moral cesspit.

‘If the gateway to hell was jammed with people burning, nobody would be tempted into sin,’ Lol said.

‘That a new song?’

‘Not yet.’

‘OK, let’s go and talk to people about a ghost on a bike.’

The Volvo jangled on the long incline.

It was half a steepish mile further on, towards the top of the hill. Coming in from the south-west, you could see how the community had been constructed on the ravages of quarrying, houses and bungalows forming alongside new forestry, on their separate levels.

More than half hidden, it was like the shadow of a village.

But tonight it was sprinkled with gold dust.

Both their windows were down as they drove in, and, on the cusp of evening, the warm air around Wychehill was glistening with the moist and luminous soundtrack of medieval heaven.

Nearness

A ribbon of road under hunched, conifered shoulders. Like Spicer had said, no evidence of community or enclosure: no shop, no pub, no kids on bikes, no dog-walkers. Only on the top of Herefordshire Beacon, maybe two miles away, could you see figures moving, like flies on a cow-pat.

At just after seven p.m. Merrily pulled into a long bay in front of the church behind five other cars.

The church was set well back from the road but the distance was reduced by its size. At the end of an aisle-like path from the bay, its porch door was closed, its squat tower had no window slits. It stared sightlessly towards the road and couldn’t see the lushness of the valley which opened up below it on the other side.

And yet this unpromising, sullen hulk – post-Victorian-Gothic, built of still-unmellowed stone blocks – was… exalted.

Merrily shut her car door as softly as she could.

‘It’s got to be a record… a CD.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Lol said.

He stood in the church entrance by the black sign with gold lettering: St Dunstan’s. Above it, a heavy lantern on a wrought-iron bracket, one of its glass panels shattered.