The Fever of the World, page 14
‘Yeah, that could be close,’ Lol said. ‘There was a lot of literary criticism of “We Are Seven” in the next century and most of it’s predictable, lofty stuff about kids needing to get real and come to terms with mortality.’
Jane was audible in the background, sounding wistful.
‘It’s a simple, clockwork poem – a kid’s poem – which is why some people didn’t like it. But it’s far from naive. This girl’s outsmarting Wordsworth all the way, and he knows that, although he’s not admitting it. And the religion… Like, I don’t know whether a village kid would even’ve gone to school much in the 1790s… but she’s throwing the orthodox religious stuff back at him.’
‘He’s going, Oh, their spirits are in heaven,’ Lol said. ‘And she’s saying, Huh… that’s all you know…’
Merrily could hear Lol beginning to side with Jane, and Jane identifying with the child, like she’d been there too.
Lol said, ‘Wordsworth’s subtext appears to be that the little maid has… or thinks she has…’
‘The Sight.’ Jane’s voice was suddenly more alive. ‘Sharing her supper with the dead in Goodrich churchyard? What’s she really saying?’
‘You might be pushing it a tiny bit,’ Merrily said. ‘Or more than a bit.’
‘No, I’m not, Mum. The poem’s pointing out that, as you get older, you gradually lose what you once instinctively understood although you were too young to put it into words: the knowledge that when your human body stiffens and rots and stuff, it’s… actually not the end. Young children are closer to all this life and death stuff. They always have been.’
Or maybe they aren’t.
Silence. A breeze was trying to awaken budded daffodils in the small field approaching the graves.
Lol said, ‘Something was certainly making Wordsworth sit up. Throughout his life, he kept trying to find this girl again. He was in Goodrich nearly fifty years later and regretting he couldn’t find any trace of someone he’d found so interesting.’
‘If she was still round by then, she’d be in like late middle-age,’ Jane said. ‘As old as…’
Sophie, Merrily thought.
‘She made a serious impression on him. You could have thought he’d made up this whole conversation to show that the facts about death and dying are something that all children have to come to in time, but…’
‘But there was obviously more. This kid knew she could still communicate with the brother and sister who were said to be dead and buried in the churchyard at the bottom of the garden.’
That was Jane’s expected interpretation, and it would actually be good to think it wasn’t entirely baseless, if only to annoy the Bishop, who made no secret of his blanket dismissal of alleged paranormal phenomena.
Lol said, ‘Wordsworth wrote a poem called “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”. As close as he came to declaring an opinion on this issue. I remembered a couple of lines.’
‘Yes…’
Merrily remembered them, too: Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. The Soul that rises with us, our life’s star, hath had elsewhere its setting and cometh from afar…
Suggestions of reincarnation?
Don’t go there. Don’t fire Jane up.
‘Listen…’ She lowered her voice. ‘I’ll call you back later. I’ve someone to see about this. It shouldn’t take long.’
As soon as she tossed the mobile onto the passenger seat, it chimed again.
‘Yer all right, Merrily?’
‘I hope so, Frannie. Listen, I’m in the car, but I swear to God it’s not moving.’
‘Yeh, but you’re holding the phone, see. That’s more than borderline, vicar. Luckily… I need a bit of help. On the quiet. Very much so.’
He was calling on his mobile, which meant this was private.
‘You’ve done this before for me – talked to somebody in a way I can’t. I’ve gorra copper who’s going through stuff they don’t tell you about at police college. Or university, come to that.’
25
Husks
THE FRONT DOOR of Churchyard Cottage was oaken and studded, no more than fifty years old. When she began to tap on it, she saw that it was ajar, as if she was expected.
‘Just leave them on the step, will you, Paula, hands are wet.’
The voice was educated English, smooth but airy. A professional voice. A moment later Merrily saw tight jeans and a nylon gilet over a chunky sweater with big pink stars on it. Dense, dark hair.
‘Ms Madden?’
She was in her mid-twenties. A lecturer in English Lit at Southampton University when the Wikipedia entry Merrily had read last night had been submitted. Now apparently freelance, working mainly for TV, on programme research, occasional presentation.
‘My apologies,’ Maya Madden said. ‘I thought you were the postperson.’
Merrily stayed outside the door.
‘Sorry to just arrive like this. If you’re busy…’
‘No, it’s fine.’
Ms Madden fully opened the front door, came down from the step. Her mother, according to Google, was an Indian nurse, her father from an English military family. Her voice suggested private school.
Behind her, Merrily saw St Giles’s Church fully daylit for the first time. So close it might have been a garden feature, its steeple plain and straight, beyond the mid-twentieth century semi-bungalow with one tall chimney and its name on the frayed sign hanging from a rustic archway. To reach the door, Merrily had followed a light-green conifer hedge that wound into a turning circle divided by a projecting double garage.
She decided to give Ms Madden the opportunity to end this quickly.
‘Arlo Ripley, the vicar at Whitchurch, asked me to come and see you, but yesterday I was with someone who’s now believed to have the virus. We can talk outside or through an open window if you like. I’m not used to the pandemic rules yet. I’m Merrily, by the way.’
‘Yes, I know who you are,’ Maya Madden said. ‘Found you online, under a rather blurred likeness, when the Reverend Ripley’s archdeacon called to say she was bringing in an expert…’ Hands on hips. That’s a pure conceit, though, isn’t it? There are no experts in this field, whatever the Church likes to claim.’
‘The Church tends not to make any claims of that nature any more,’ Merrily said. ‘Most of us – the ones left – are just people who accept that unlikely things sometimes happen.’
‘And your job is to exorcize them?’
‘That’s considered too spooky a word these days. We’re usually just known as deliverance consultants.’
‘Deliver us from evil,’ Maya Madden said solemnly. ‘You think the “unlikely things” that happen are actually evil?’
‘Well…’ Merrily stepped onto the edge of the lawn and said what she’d always wanted to say to Bishop Craig Innes. ‘I think if we decide that everything we don’t understand is evil, we’ll never understand anything.’
A silence, then…
‘I see.’ Maya Madden stepped to one side, exposing the doorway. ‘In that case, you’d better come in. Don’t worry, I’ll open windows.’
‘Let the dogma get wafted away with the rest of the infection?’ Merrily said.
*
‘I met Mr Ripley when I was simply looking for someone with local knowledge,’ Maya Madden said. ‘I was told the nearest vicar could usually help.’
She drew back a floor-length velvet curtain, uncovering a French window framing a walled garden, the churchyard and the steeple, the long hill behind it topped by scrub, and a line of trees. On the other side of the glass was a narrow lawn.
‘You particularly wanted him to remove it?’ Merrily said.
‘I wanted some advice. I was told he was minding this parish alongside his own.’
‘If something psychically disturbing comes up, he’s expected to report it. Deliverance then opens a file which usually stays open until we’re satisfied nobody’s in any distress, or likely to be. Which is why I’m here. Health and Safety. The Church of England has to cover itself.’
‘I’m sorry…?’
‘I expect the C of E would’ve warned Jesus not to walk on water,’ Merrily said, ‘if some impressionable little kids had been around.’
Maya Madden took some books off a sofa for Merrily to sit down.
‘Look, I’m sorry…’ Her hair had come unclipped. ‘I am working for a TV company, but I’m probably not what you were starting to think. Would you like me to sign something to satisfy your people that I’m in no great distress?’
‘You’re not?’
‘As you’ll have heard I’m compiling an arts feature, to be made largely around this village.’ She extended an arm along the window. ‘It’s no secret. This property might be on part of what used to be the parish churchyard. It’s at least the third dwelling to occupy this spot, and many generations of people are thought to have been buried in what became its foundations.’
‘I’m assuming that doesn’t bother you a lot, because you think it’s all rubbish?’
‘You’re actually wrong.’ Maya Madden pushed the curtain back as far as it would go. ‘When I agreed to rent this house, I did think it had something I might be able to use in the programme… as it supported the Wordsworth connection. I was taken on for the contract because of my knowledge of the romantic poets. William Wordsworth is believed to have had an encounter near here which he never forgot. It became the basis for a famous poem. With which – for my sins – I now live.’
‘Here in Goodrich?’
‘Possibly even in this house – or what was here before it. The encounter was with someone who may have lived long ago in a cottage on this site. I don’t know her name and neither did he, and when they met she was only about eight years old.’
She reached out for a key emerging from the middle of the French window and turned it. When the long window swung open, she rose and pushed it and stepped outside onto the lawn, clearing her throat.
‘“Their graves are green, they may be seen,”
The little Maid replied,
“Twelve steps or more from my mother’s door—”’
Merrily looked beyond her, over the patch of lawn. Was this the site of the little maid’s mother’s door… lawn weighed down with fat evergreens, the path snaking between them to a wooden gate set into a head-high stone wall. Over the gate, you could see a short, crooked corridor of graves, sloping towards the church. Maya Madden stepped back into the room, closing the French window behind her. Merrily said nothing.
Maya said, ‘It’s been suggested the girl was poetic invention, but I don’t think so. I’m told there’s considerable evidence that Wordsworth did actually meet someone like her. And I think… I think I actually saw something. Last week, not long after I moved in.’ She sighed. ‘I only wish it was someone else thinking they’d seen it.’
Merrily felt her eyes widening, her dog collar tightening.
‘We always prefer a little distance, don’t we?’ Maya said. ‘Academics need distance to establish a perspective.’
‘They do?’
‘Well, I do. I’ll tell you what I may have seen, all right? As I would have told Mr Ripley. You’re a priest, you’ve heard all this stuff before. You’ll maintain a certain discretion? Accepting that I don’t want to alarm the neighbours?’
‘I always assume that. But… may have seen? You’re not certain about it?’
‘I’m trying to see the story from your point of view. How often do you listen to someone’s story and think, yes, I fully accept that as the unvarnished truth?’
‘It’s happened,’ Merrily said.
‘All right then. I’ll tell you what I was briefly convinced I’d seen.’ Maya sat down again. ‘Please… imagine that it’s late afternoon. Approaching dusk.’
*
Through the dimming glass of the French window, it seemed you were hearing childish laughter, Maya Madden said, her voice holding a softness and yet also a precision.
‘Shrill cackles and words you didn’t recognize, although you understood what they were conveying. As if two kids out there were playing quite roughly, and one had pushed the other so hard it had torn a membrane in the air.’
A membrane in the air. Maya’s actual phrase for it, as if this was part of a lecture she was giving. As if she’d already thought it out, choosing the right words to say something extra.
‘Then,’ she said, ‘two or more voices were coalescing into the hollowness of… I don’t know, let’s just say somewhere else – I was looking at the garden, but the voices were not coming from it.’
She tried to laugh but quickly gave up, as if she was realizing this was not actually funny.
Merrily said, ‘Are there many children round here?’
‘None of my immediate neighbours appears to have children. Well, one neighbour does get occasional visits from grandchildren, but never after dark, they’re too young. On this occasion I leapt up at once and opened the French window to chase these two off. But, as soon as I opened it, the laughter just… stopped, along with all the other sounds in the atmosphere.’
It was as if the wind had been stifled, she said. All sounds of motion extracted from the atmosphere. Merrily understood what she meant by that – it was something that occasionally happened inside your ears – and now she was aware of an intelligent young woman, groping for rationality. Had begun to relate to her, as someone she might be able to work with. Might.
‘I stood in the doorway in what seemed like complete silence for about a minute, then went out,’ Maya said. ‘I can’t tell you how still it was. Normally you’ll pick up the sound of distant cars or a door slamming somewhere. This night I realized the whole atmosphere had separated itself. At first I thought I could hear the river – which is not that far away, whichever direction you’re facing, because it goes into loops. But this was in my head, like a child cups a curly seashell to an ear and listens to what sounds like the sea in its chambers, the ambience of a different area of time, filtering into ours. Is that something you’ve been told before?’
‘Yes. Similar.’
Merrily was quietly excited, if not necessarily in a good way.
‘Then there was a movement in the air,’ Maya said. ‘I remember it occurring to me that it might’ve been a late bird flying off to roost. I’m thinking, silly bitch… only a bird. And then… oh God, it was on the ground… a figure. Quite small. Moving towards me. But not in normal movements. In jump… jump-cuts. Like a badly-edited video, you know what I mean?’
‘I think so.’
‘Something hopping towards me, as a small bird does. Or a toad or something.’ Maya swallowed. ‘There were two of them. And they appeared basically human. Sidling up, half-shy but in a self-consciously amused… in a grinning way.’
‘Children?’
‘Didn’t I say? You know the way, when you’ve wandered into some strange part of a town or a village where you’ve stopped to ask directions, and some children just come up and stand there, staring at you? Grinning inanely as if they know you.’
Merrily nodded. It had happened to her in small places, previously unknown to her: quiet villages, inner-city backstreets. Places that didn’t get many strangers but always had kids of seven or eight, who were both curious and proprietorial. And you were unaccountably afraid, realizing that children could be a different kind of humanity.
‘Rags,’ Maya Madden said. ‘They were like rags being blown. Grey cloth… clothing flapping about. One appeared to be wearing a cap of some kind and one had hair blowing out from its head. Like the husks of things.’
‘Husks?’
‘It’s a good word, isn’t it?’ Maya said.
26
Other layers of time
MERRILY HAD FELT the beginnings of goosebumps, trying to picture this young woman relaying the experience to Arlo Ripley and perhaps shivering a little at the memory.
But they were only mild goosebumps, and she kept seeing Ripley fighting his syndromic urge to put a comforting, clergy-manly arm around Maya Madden, and take it from there.
‘These… children… Were they… did they seem aware of you?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Maya said. ‘I’ve heard of these things happening. People walking into other layers of time. Fragmented ghost stories lying around like torn-up newspapers, scattered. Perhaps I wasn’t any more distinct to these… these spectral children… than they were to me.’
Merrily separated herself from the sofa as a book fell to the floor.
‘Or perhaps you made them up?’ she said, because she’d decided she had to. ‘After reading the poem.’
It was the kind of poem you read quickly. And then thought about and discussed and read again.
*
When Maya came back into the room, both hands supported a cracked, grey-brown flat stone.
‘“Their graves are green”,’ she said. ‘“They may be seen”.’
She handed Merrily the stone and closed the French door behind her.
‘We only know their first names from the poem. I’ve no idea – even here in Goodrich – what their family name might have been. And there are no suggestions here.’
Maya put down the stone on the sofa.
‘I found this not far from the back door, in a flowerbed. It’s the size of a small headstone. Maybe… or maybe not.’
Maya sat down in a chair across the room.
‘I’m sorry for… dissing you.’ She smiled. ‘Is that term even used any more?’
‘I’ve not heard it from my daughter for a while.’ Merrily smiled. ‘OK, let’s spell this out. “We Are Seven” was written by William Wordsworth who said it had been told to him by an eight-year-old girl he met not far from here. Did she live where this house is?’
‘Some neighbours think so. I don’t know.’
She weighed the possible-gravestone in her hands.
Merrily said, ‘These children. Did they appear to be approaching you?’
‘They appeared to be getting closer… and hazier at the same time. By the time they reached me, they may have been only visible in my mind. I heard faint laughter a few times. Couldn’t always see them but still… sensed them, I suppose. A moving dampness. The mustiness, the dead vegetation— It was that slightly rank churchyard smell, here in my garden. In winter. It was very wintry while they were here, increasingly cold.’
