The Fever of the World, page 13
The Archdeacon pinched out her cigarette, half-smoked, and then dropped it in the tin.
‘I needed to tell you this, because I want you to trust what else I may say.’
‘I always have.’
Siân shook the tin, watching the stub roll around.
‘Arlo and I were doing a post-graduate theological course together at a college in the West Country. We didn’t see one another for a while after it ended, and I didn’t know he’d applied for the parish of Whitchurch after his Bristol curacy. When he came here, we decided not to disclose to anyone that we’d met before. Although he occasionally rings me… for advice. Which is how he came to tell me about the woman at Goodrich and this supposed haunting he was being asked to address.’
She didn’t seem aware of lighting another cigarette.
‘I think we were both seeing warning lights. It wouldn’t be long before it was out of his control.’
‘Siân, can you clarify this a bit?’
‘I’ll tell you.’ Siân tossed the tin back into her open bag. ‘But if this ever gets out…’ She shut the bag. ‘The bottom line is, until I discovered the extent of his problem, Arlo and I became what you’d probably call… an item.’
Bloody hell.
‘I do realize he’s quite a few years younger than I am. To say I was flattered is using absolutely the wrong word. The fact is that we were only together, if you like, for a few intense weeks. After which, it was… just friendship. An increasingly cautious friendship on my part, I have to say.’
‘Erm…’
‘It was a mistake, of course it was,’ Siân said. ‘But these things happen at theological colleges, as you probably know. Something telling ordinands it’s their last chance to behave… irresponsibly, if you like.’
Merrily sank back. Exploding revelations were becoming another feature of the current pandemic: people no longer concealing secret history.
‘But what I’ve learned about Arlo Ripley,’ Siân said, ‘tells me that the lower Wye Valley is not the best place for him to function as a priest. And not only because I’m not far away and very much don’t want him here. There are other reasons which you would understand.’
‘I really…’ Merrily’s right hand squeezed her left wrist. ‘I don’t really know what to say. Can I take it the Bishop doesn’t know any of this?’
‘Not from me he doesn’t!’
‘You didn’t need to tell me anything, either,’ Merrily said. ‘It’s not my business.’
‘Isn’t it?’ Siân’s eyes glittered. ‘You won’t immediately thank me for saying this, Merrily, or fully understand what I’m saying, but… that valley is steeped in a history that somehow doesn’t recede. As I’ve been discussing with Maya Madden, the young TV woman who approached Arlo Ripley.’
‘Why did you see her? I’m a bit confused.’
‘Maya is, of course, a producer with a TV company. And very attractive. Both valid reasons for Arlo to keep his distance. Which I think he realized… and did the sensible thing, asking me if I thought her problem should be addressed. I told him it could be dealt with, if necessary, not by him but by someone like you. It’s a deliverance issue.’
‘You think she really has a problem?’
Siân uncoiled from Sophie’s desk and wandered over to the window overlooking Gwynne Street, where Canon Dobbs used to live.
‘Yes, I think she does. And I think you should look into it.’
‘Without telling the Bishop?’
‘I very much doubt you’ll need to tell him.’
Having formally sealed the can of worms, the Archdeacon took a small, thick book from her bag and brought it over. It looked like a prayer book, but evidently wasn’t.
‘This includes the poem “We Are Seven”, in which the Goodrich girl makes her appearance. You should read it before you talk to Maya.’
‘I’ve read it.’
‘Well, read it again.’ She put the book on an arm of Merrily’s metal chair. ‘And there’s something else. Perhaps I’ll see you there myself later.’
She returned to Sophie’s desk and sat down again.
‘Go and see her now. I’ll call her and say you’re on your way. And I’ll call you, later. Leave your mobile switched on.’
23
Intruder
A STARTLED BLUE tit was flapping up and away from the car. Startled because the black Freelander was the only mechanical device in sight on the road, the only visible vehicle in a landscape licked by the knotted river that seemed to rule everything in these parts.
Early wild flowers were glittering in the grass, including some which Merrily didn’t think she’d seen before. Verges were ablaze with big new daffodils, all fluttering and dancing the way daffs had done in past centuries alongside the sprawling fields… fields which were conspicuously alive between trees stretching out their new boughs bristling with twitching twigs and bulging buds in an air-city of birds involved in family-planning, becoming louder and more insistent as if under the roving hands of some big sound-mixer in the sky.
Merrily slowed the old Freelander, letting its windows down, and nature in.
The unseasonally warm air helped her out of the car into a day that was not as dark as her thoughts. Inside the car, she’d become aware of church bells: the mobile phone on the passenger seat doing its familiar chimes, introducing a new call.
It hadn’t stopped.
She put the phone on speaker and released the call.
‘No number, just a name,’ Siân said now, in her left hand. ‘The house is called Churchyard Cottage. Park by the gate to the footpath leading to the church, where we came the other day, and you’ll see it not far way. She should be in.’
‘She knows I’m coming?’
‘I gather you’re going to be told about something,’ Siân said. ‘I can’t say anything about it on the phone. The Bishop seems to have ways of monitoring calls.’
‘Siân…’ Merrily squeezed the phone. ‘What the hell’s happening?’
She stood on the grass verge and stared dumbly at the iPhone as if she was seeing it for the first time. It had no function here. It was ugly, unnatural. It had come out of the car which had come out of the future.
‘She knows you’re coming,’ Siân said, ‘but not when. Ripley thought it better we didn’t make it too official. So you’re starting from scratch, as an exorcist. But you should know the patter by now. Merrily, are you all right?’
‘Yes, I’m…’
‘You sound disconnected,’ the Archdeacon’s voice said out of the anachronism.
‘I am. Suddenly, everything is.’
She looked down at the river, far more polluted now than it looked. The whole valley is steeped in a history that remains with us, Siân said in her head.
In spite of the closure of churches, she’d read that more people were thinking about spiritual issues, wondering if there was some vast plan behind this upsurge of mortality – this, in effect, was what some bishop had said on a radio breakfast programme a couple of days ago, with no suggestion of how lesser clerics might use it. He hadn’t suggested why people like Merrily were waking in the dark hours of the morning, asking with bleak irreverence, what the fuck am I doing in this job?
Merrily ran a cold forefinger around the inside of her dog collar. It felt constrictive, wouldn’t be required for this job. But she was stuck with it now. It was what she did.
She got back in the Freelander, let it roll downhill towards Goodrich, managing to remember how, with Sophie, she’d found the church.
She wedged the car in the grass verge leading to the footpath that provided access to the rough field bordering the graveyard and leading to the Meyrick tomb. It all looked very bright in the sunshine, actually cheerful.
She gathered up the mobile and rang Sophie at home.
‘I’m going back to Goodrich,’ she said. ‘So I thought I’d ask if you’d heard anything else.’
It was Andrew, her husband, who’d learned about the anguished animal-roaring in the dawn on two consecutive days. He didn’t believe it, Sophie had said. Well, of course he didn’t. People heard noises, made connections.
Sophie coughed.
‘And yet you thought I should be aware of it,’ Merrily said.
‘I’d thought – quite suddenly, I thought you should be aware of everything, no matter how unlikely I’d considered it.’
Merrily said nothing. This didn’t sound like Sophie.
‘So I… told you.’
No it didn’t sound like Sophie.
‘Sophie, are you…?’
‘I’ve just got an annoying cough,’ Sophie said.
‘And your voice…’
‘Sophie coughed then was silent.
‘Sophie…’
‘All right!’
A long silence, then…
‘Andrew’s rung the surgery,’ Sophie said calmly.
And then Merrily was talking to Andrew Hill, who said unconvincingly that he wasn’t too worried about Sophie, although she did appear to have symptoms and they’d know more this afternoon, when perhaps Merrily could…
Yes, yes, she’d call back this afternoon, as soon as…
Oh God.
While Merrily was still processing the flat, deadening news, another call came through on the mobile.
It was from Jane who was across the road at Lol’s, both of them trying to interpret an eight-year-old girl’s understanding of infant mortality.
24
A sleep and a forgetting
‘BLOODY HELL, MUM,’ Jane said on the phone. ‘You’re saying this kid had the Sight?’
Merrily switched the mobile to speaker and laid it on the passenger seat, next to the poetry book the Archdeacon had pressed on her.
‘All the signs are here.’ Jane’s voice had gone lower, was more controlled. ‘Is it only me who hears them? Look… If she’s, like, actually seeing and talking to her dead siblings – at least, her brother – in the churchyard… and if she’s chatting to them over her supper… like, what’s all that telling us?’
It was the first time Jane had sounded this excited in weeks. Calling her in the car from Lol’s cottage, energised by a borderline-mystical William Wordsworth poem from over two centuries ago. Ever since discovering that Wordsworth, as a young man, had been a near-pagan, Jane had felt obliged to enlighten Lol and Merrily about the unearthly secrets she was finding in his work.
Merrily pictured her standing by Lol’s sunny sitting-room window, following the narrative in the book, as the poet recalled his conversation with the little girl he’d encountered walking down from the ruins of Goodrich Castle. The girl telling him about her family, not drawing a distinction between the ones she still saw, and the ones grown up and gone to sea, or wherever… and…
‘Two of us in the church-yard lie,
My sister and my brother;
And, in the church-yard cottage, I
Dwell near them with my mother.’
‘Don’t you get it?’ Jane said. ‘She knows they’re dead, but she isn’t sad, because she knows exactly where they are.’
‘Goodrich churchyard?’
Merrily looked through the car windscreen at the haphazard, sloping gravestones a few paces away, most of them with the names worn off.
It couldn’t have changed much here since the late eighteenth century. Merrily summoned the image of a yellow-haired child skipping between the bent-over headstones in the untrimmed grass.
‘…and knows how to get through to them,’ Jane said.
My stockings there I oft en knit,
My kerchief there I hem;
And there upon the ground I sit,
And sing a song to them.
Lol had said he’d thought about what kind of song this kid might have sung to the dead… and found himself starting to write it. That sort of thing was what made him an interesting songwriter and might one day make him famous. One day.
And oft en aft er sun-set, Sir,
When it is light and fair,
I take my little porringer,
And eat my supper there.
Seeing these words on paper gave the poem a spooky sense of reality that hadn’t emerged when Merrily had been checking it online for the name Churchyard Cottage.
‘OK, they died, as we say,’ Jane said. ‘But the kid doesn’t think of them as bodies rotting in the earth, because she’s like… still communicating with them.’
The first that died was sister Jane;
In bed she moaning lay,
Till God released her of her pain;
And then she went away.
Merrily thought of Sophie, who would be in bed by now. She had all the symptoms. Her breath was getting weaker. Her sense of taste had been gone some time. She could be in hospital before long.
‘And then she went away, but she didn’t go far,’ Jane said.
Hereford Hospital was five or ten minutes away in an ambulance with the siren turned on. Would they use the siren? It’s just precautionary, Andrew Hill had told Merrily. But that was what they always said.
Merrily said, ‘You’re pushing it a bit, flower. It’s just a poem about children’s understanding of everyday mortality.’
‘Exactly. The introductory verse of “We Are Seven” is generally seen as explaining everything. The child that “feels its life in every limb – what should it know of death?” Oh, it’s about a little girl developing an understanding of mortality. But she’s eight years old and a country kid! Her dad almost certainly keeps livestock and the fields and the woods are full of sheep bones. She doesn’t wear pretty dresses and sleep in a nursery. She lives next to a graveyard and she knows lots of village families who’ve lost children. Of course she knows what death is.’
‘Isn’t Wordsworth – born and raised in rural Cumbria – just playing the part of the dim townie to get her talking?’
‘Of course he is.’
‘And the child’s being literal, the way kids are,’ Merrily said. ‘Her sister and brother are in the churchyard. She goes to talk to them over her supper.’
‘And don’t you think they understand more than we can imagine?’
So in the church-yard she was laid;
And, when the grass was dry,
Together round her grave we played,
My brother John and I.
‘“We played”,’ Jane said. ‘Get it? They’re having fun. The living and the dead. Having fun together. In those days, mortality in the average family was much more commonplace. And, as a young child she’s closer to it. She’s eight years old… just a few years away from… not living. Like… inhabiting the great void.’
And when the ground was white with snow,
And I could run and slide,
My brother John was forced to go,
And he lies by her side.
‘You’re seeing more than he wrote,’ Merrily said carefully.
‘The great void,’ Jane said, ‘which you can enter from either side. Now she’s had a few years on this side. She isn’t sad. She has a foot on each shore of the great divide. Young children do.’
‘You remembered that?’
‘I don’t think I wanted to. Kids don’t. Life’s so exciting they want to seize the future. I can remember wanting that. And maybe that’s what Wordsworth’s trying to find out, the way he’s questioning the kid: if she actually remembers! Interrogating her, approaching the same conundrum from different directions.’
‘You run about, my little Maid,
Your limbs they are alive;
If two are in the church-yard laid,
Then ye are only five.’
‘How many are you, then,’ said I,
‘If they two are in heaven?’
Quick was the little Maid’s reply,
‘O Master! we are seven.’
‘Seven,’ Jane said. ‘The most mystical number in the old days – seven stars, seven days, seven sisters. I won’t go on. But “We are Seven”? That’s all I can say, Mum. Look, talk to Lol. He knows all the social background.’
A small clatter as the phone was transferred, then Lol’s voice.
‘Sorry about this. I really am.’
‘How did Jane get involved?’
‘I… borrowed a couple of books she’d taken to her shop. Including one that explores Wordsworth’s early years as a poet. When his beliefs were closer to Jane’s. And when he was living around here. You remember?’
‘Yes. In full colour.’
Merrily thought back to when she and Lol had visited the ornate Brinsop church, a few miles from Ledwardine, which had a window devoted to Wordsworth, ‘a frequent sojourner in this parish’. Wordsworth and Mary, his wife, had buried a faithful servant here, at considerable expense – with the most lavish stone in the churchyard. Jane Winder had died during one of their holidays at Brinsop, where Mary’s brother had taken over a farm.
Lol said, ‘Wordsworth and me… I was reading most of that stuff for the first time, and writing songs covering the same ground. In places that had hardly changed since he was wandering around them. I came to feel we were writing about some of the same things, from the same position. Words written against a background of the mysteries of nature. Wordsworth used to think of himself as a latent druid?’
Vaguely remembering, Merrily sighed. This would explain Jane’s intermittent interest in the great poet, whose youthful near-paganism was glossed over in most of the biogs.
‘I guess a lot of people messed with Druidism around the end of the eighteenth century,’ she said. ‘Pre-hippies, basically – Wordsworth’s daffodil-children. A guy who called himself Iolo Morganwg started a kind of druid cult in east Wales in Wordsworth’s time. I don’t think they met but…’
‘Then there was a scientific revolution,’ Lol said, ‘and an industrial surge that put spiritual stuff on the back-burner until the early years of the twentieth century.’
‘And threatened Wordsworth’s continuing reputation…’ Jane was grabbing the phone from Lol ‘…if he stayed on his sacred nature path into the new era…’
