Phil Rickman: The Smile of a Ghost

‘Wow,’ Jane said, ‘if it goes on like this, they’ll be inviting you to run for the Parish Council.’

Lol looked down from the stepladder, the overloaded paint-roller in his hand dribbling burnt orange onto the flagstones. Jane had chosen the ceiling colour; it looked wrong now, but she was never going to admit that. Lol just looked uncomfortable. He had orange smudges down the front of his Gomer Parry Plant Hire sweatshirt, tiny spots on his round, brass-rimmed glasses.

‘Then again,’ Jane said, ‘maybe not.’

There was a card from the Prossers at the Eight till Late and one from Gomer Parry and Danny Thomas – Welcome back, boy – with a sheep on the front driving a JCB.

Finally, one from Alice Meek. God bless you in your new home, Mr Robinson . Big letters full of stroke victim’s shake. Alice was only alive because of Lol, and the village knew it, and that was why he was so welcome here now.

And, of course, it was making him wary. Lol didn’t wear medals. Finding the old girl half-frozen over a grave in the churchyard, carrying her into the vicarage, and all the heavy stuff that had happened afterwards… he didn’t even like to talk about any of that. It could easily have ended so differently.

The verdict at the inquest on the guy who’d wanted Alice dead had been Accidental Death – totally correct – although most of what had happened had not come out, the villagers closing ranks around Lol. No longer an outsider, even if it wasn’t publicly acknowledged that he was Mum’s… whatever.

Couldn’t have worked out better, really. His first album in many years was out, he had respectable gigs scheduled. And he was about to abandon his temporary flat at Prof Levin’s recording studio at Knight’s Frome – like, thirty miles away – for this little terraced house a one-minute stroll from the vicarage. So, like, if his star, for once, was accelerating towards the high point of the heavens… well, nobody could say it had been easy.

Jane looked up at him. It was getting too dark to paint, and the electricity was still disconnected, but he was going at it like, if he stopped, somebody would come and take the house away and maybe take Mum, too… and then the tour would be cancelled and the album would be savaged in the Guardian or Time Out , and…

‘Come on down, Lol. Tomorrow is another day.’

‘Need to finish this corner.’

‘You can’t even see the corner. Let’s go and get some chips, otherwise I won’t get to eat till breakfast. If Mum gets through with the po-faced gits on the Deliverance Committee before eleven, it’ll be a certifiable miracle.’

‘Hate going in the chippie now,’ Lol said. ‘They won’t let me pay.’

Jane laughed.

‘It’s not funny, Jane.’

‘Lol, they like you. That’s—’

‘Unsettling.’

Jane sighed. ‘When’s the next gig?’

‘Next Thursday. Bristol.’

‘Wooh, bigger and bigger. Glastonbury next year?’

‘Jane, you trying to make me fall off?’

Oh God, Nick Drake Syndrome; it never really goes away.

‘Bad enough that there’s this guy from Q magazine coming to interview me on Saturday,’ Lol said. ‘I mean, if I’d thought—’

‘What?’ Jane went to the foot of the ladder, shouting up like he was on a mountain. ‘Did you actually say… Q magazine? Like, did I hear that correctly? And did you say, “That’s bad enough”? And are you insane?’

‘Just there are things I don’t necessarily want people to read about.’

‘So like’ – Jane spread her hands wide in frustration – ‘don’t talk about them! Talk about any old crap. Lie. They won’t care, they’re a music mag. When will it be in?’

‘Dunno. It’s a monthly. Guy said they work weeks in advance. Maybe it won’t be in at all. They probably do a lot of interviews that get overtaken by better stuff.’

‘This diffidence is worrying.’ Jane shook her head. ‘I think I preferred the paranoia.’ She went to put Alice’s card back on the window sill, and found another one lying face down. ‘What’s this, Lol?’

Actually, this one wasn’t a card, as such: it was a folded paper, lined, like from a writing pad. She opened it out and held it up to the lamp, saw crude line drawings done in thick fibre-tip, of a big house and a little house with two parallel lines between them, suggesting a road. Across the big house was scrawled:

VICERAGE

Jane looked up at Lol. ‘Vice-rage?’

‘Vicarage.’ Lol started rolling hard at the ceiling. ‘Could be a double meaning there, I suppose, but I wouldn’t think whoever sent it was that smart.’

There was a double-pointed arrow connecting the two houses across the road. Underneath the drawing was written:

RECKON YOU CAN FIND YOUR WAY IN THE DARK?

‘Bloody hell,’ Jane said. ‘It’s a poison-pen letter.’

She looked up the ladder. Lol went on painting.

Jane smiled thinly. So this was the problem.

Well, there was always going to be one spiteful bastard, somewhere. Mum got along with most people in Ledwardine, but not everybody approved yet of women priests. And it was a safe bet that not everybody who did approve would accept the idea of the female clergy having intimate relationships unsanctified by marriage – like the clergy was supposed to stay in the Victorian era, Mum and Lol walking out together, with a chaperone.

This would be one of the areas of his life that Lol would prefer to be kept out of Q magazine.

‘Who sent it?’

‘I don’t think that’s supposed to be obvious, Jane. That’s possibly why it isn’t signed.’

‘But there’s an element of threat. I mean, I realize it’s probably just some semi-literate tosser…’

Lol came down from the stepladder, ducking under the beam that divided the room. The beam was dark brown oak, well woodwormed – a big chocolate flake. The hurricane lamp swayed, shadows rolled. Jane wanted to crumple up the paper, but on the other hand…

‘Can I keep it?’

‘What for?’

‘Might be an opportunity to compare the writing. Like with the parish noticeboard? The cards in the shop window? Or even the prayer board in the church. I mean, it’s always useful to know who your friends aren’t. Anyway’ – she folded the paper – ‘nothing really to worry about. I don’t think Mum’s worried. I mean, the Bishop knows.’

Jane picked up a paint rag and dabbed up some blotches from the flagged floor, recalling the first time she’d seen Lol, when he was looking after Lucy Devenish’s old shop, Ledwardine Lore. Lol peering out between racks of apple-shaped candles in the orchard-scented air. Like a mouse. He’d been really messed up back then.

Jane had been fifteen, just a kid. Now she was facing A levels and a driving test, and she wasn’t a virgin, and Lol and Mum were some kind of tentative, nervous item.

And Lucy Devenish was dead.

Hard to accept that, even now. No matter what colours the crooked walls and sloping ceilings were repainted, this was Lucy’s house and always would be. When you stood in the hall you could imagine you still saw her old poncho hanging over the post at the foot of the stairs. If it was really dark when you came in, you could imagine Lucy herself there, wearing the poncho, her arms lifting it like batwings.

The people from London who’d agreed to buy the house when it first came on the market last year had given back word after their five-year-old asthmatic kid had asked who the old woman was on the landing.

Scary. Lucy hadn’t been scary, not really. Formidable, certainly. Maybe a little witchy, in the best, most traditional sense, and…

… OK, she had been a little scary. But she’d liked Lol and supported him when he needed it, and she’d been some kind of mentor to Jane, and…