The Fever of the World, page 18
‘When did you tell her all these things?’
‘I’d… followed her into a coffee bar, and I was telling her things about myself— like about a relationship I had that was causing me some distress and people who… I mean if someone was telling me all this would I believe any of it?’
‘I think you might,’ Merrily said cautiously. ‘But you said this was in a coffee bar?’
‘Starbucks. Outside Ross, on the bypass. Seemed quite normal. She was there and I went in to join her. It seemed an obvious thing for me to do. Afterwards, I had the feeling of having been invited in.’
Merrily nodded. This made a kind of sense.
‘And then there was the office in Corpse Cross Street,’ Vaynor said. ‘I remember going because she’d given me the impression her husband was likely to be there and I could find out from him some things the DI wanted to know.’
‘You’re saying you willingly told her… private things?’
There was the sound of the dining chair rocking back, as his body subsided into it. A long silence outside was interrupted by a woody thump, indicating a rising wind at work in the vicarage garden.
‘I’ve told you what I know. I can’t tell you any more. I haven’t tried to find anything else because I know that if I get too close again… I— I only know what she did when… when she came down on me. What I think I remember her doing. In a hazy way… but also strangely urgent.’
He talked about some other irrational things that had happened that same night. How – shocked at what he might have done with the woman and fighting to restore calm and reason – he’d gone into a pub that looked warm and welcoming and bought himself a big drink, the way he hadn’t done since Oxford nights, when he used to drink quite a bit because it was expected.
‘You know what this sounds like?’ Mum said. ‘What you remember her doing with you?’
‘I told you. Like mental imbalance.’
‘Can a man be raped?’ she asked suddenly.
Shocked, Jane clutched at her chair. Had Mum really asked that?
‘It’s late,’ Vaynor said.
He stood up. Merrily also rose.
‘What I meant, of course, is… by a woman. I didn’t used to think that was possible. But that’s a glib, thoughtless reaction, isn’t it? Maybe I’m being naive. Just tell me what you think.’
Vaynor stared over her head.
‘I could say a word that might fit,’ he said. ‘But… I can’t.’
‘Yes you can.’
‘It’s from a fairytale.’
‘If it’s an adult fairytale,’ Merrily said, standing completely still, ‘I think you’d better just tell it.’
32
Not just Mum’s case
‘THE KID.’
‘My kid, Jane.’
She considered the number of times Mum had used that word, almost dismissively. There was a mere nineteen years between them. The older you got, the less that seemed. In years to come, when they both were the wrong side of thirty – Jane thirty-one, Mum an attractive fifty – it would seem minimal. Several people in the past year had commented, the way people always liked to, that they could be sisters, which Mum had appeared to find quite amusing. Jane remembering how, at the age of fifteen, she’d quite fancied Lol for herself until Mum had grabbed him.
They were now both grown women, but one day, in the distant future, while Jane was still a grown woman, Mum would be old and frail and ought now to be thinking about the implications of that. And how they needed to work together more easily to deal with the world.
Jane flopped back on her bed, listening to Vaynor’s car backing out of the drive, watching its headlights carving out grey wedges in the air. She noticed there was still a light on upstairs in Lucy’s cottage, where Lol lived.
If you could call this living, with the constant closeness of a pandemic death you couldn’t see coming for you.
*
It didn’t take long to find it online. Not when you had the author’s pseudonym, Al Fox, derived from Alfoxden, the house in Somerset which Wordsworth had leased towards the end of the eighteenth century. From which base he’d discovered this area with his adoring sister, Dorothy, after spending time with his friend and fellow romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
‘The Wye in Wordsworth’ was the title of Vaynor’s thesis, and Merrily found it compulsive. It opened up a side of the poet that people rarely heard about these days. Away from his home ground in Cumbria, according to Al Fox, an alternative figure had emerged: Wordsworth, the proto-hippie.
Merrily was still so alert after that originally unpromising session with the thesist, if that was how he thought of himself, that she was still awake after finishing her first reading.
‘If you were a woman and she was a man,’ Mum had told Vaynor, ‘it would amount to something not far from rape.’
Jane’s whole body jerked, remembering. Vaynor had said, ‘It’s one reason I can’t say anything about this – especially telling anybody at Gaol Street.’
‘You think a man can’t be raped by a woman?’
Remember, Jane thought, that this, if it actually happened, was not in the back of a car. It was in King Arthur’s Cave.
On the map, which couldn’t easily convey height differences, the cave looked very close to the widening River Wye, but when you were there, no sign of the river was obvious, no sensation of its nearness. The only water was dripping from the stones in the ceiling. Outside, you could see only countryside. She’d been just the once, with Mum. An autumn evening, clambering over the rocks at the bottom of the cliff. There’d been two adjacent front entrances, leading into the same central chamber. And here, amid the ragged rocks in King Arthur’s Cave up in the shorn-off hill called the Doward, this cop believed he’d lain and had things done to him by a woman. And done again, later, in an office in the streets of the town of Ross-on-Wye. Had King Arthur’s Cave been carried there with him, in his head, or what?
She was going to try to believe it. Same things, same woman. Jane just couldn’t imagine being that woman. Wasn’t there a sense of intended invasion about what he reckoned had happened to him? Dominance? Could a man be raped by a woman? She thought back to when she was much younger and well into some lush guys on TV. That had been physical desire, no question, but didn’t rape mean the victim was being in some way passive? That the victim didn’t fancy it – quite the reverse? That he was getting no pleasure out of this, was actually very afraid of it?
This was a tough one. It couldn’t have been easy for Vaynor coming out with all this to an attractive woman who was also an ordained priest.
She knew, from the thick silence following his crazy story, that Mum wouldn’t be expressing a firm opinion on whether it had or hadn’t happened. That wasn’t how exorcists operated. You didn’t ask the paranormally-challenged punter if he was sure he’d experienced it, or openly suggest he might’ve made it all up. You didn’t get him to repeat the story to hear if his narration of it had changed in any way – this wasn’t a police interview. Mum, the exorcist, would just be nodding silently, letting him finish in his own way.
Did she have the littlest sense that he was perhaps telling or not telling the truth?
Mum did not have an easy job.
*
After a patchy sleep, as the sun expanded, Jane blinked it in through the window and found Wordsworth’s Goodrich girl in her head. In at least one of the books, a biographer had described the kid as one of the most inspiring people the poet had ever encountered. The way he kept returning to her insistence that those dead siblings had not actually gone away from Goodrich. The ghost story element in ‘We Are Seven’, how important had that been to the poet? Had he wanted to find out if the girl, by then probably middle-aged, still felt herself to be in contact with her dead brothers and sisters?
And were they still children? Before sliding into bed, she’d Googled Wordsworth/death on her laptop and discovered the lines:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star…
Quite cool. Birth and death part of the same cycle. Wordsworth had connected with that but maybe didn’t want the public to think he had. So he had it all coming from this little girl and had himself in there, too, questioning what she took for granted, being all adult and critical. Scared to admit wanting to believe in ghosts. No wonder his sceptical mate down in Bristol had said he’d regret publishing ‘We Are Seven’.
One day, Jane decided, she and Eirion would take a drive down there and see if they could find the two kids’ graves. It seemed that the village of Goodrich was hard to get away from, even when you died. It was one of those places.
Jane slid out of bed and, finding it pleasantly warm, moved across her apartment to the back wall with its large-scale map of the diocese and parts of the adjoining ones. Goodrich’s thirteenth century church was marked with a cross – twelve steps or more from my mother’s door.
The graves… were they still there? And how was she going to find out? If she asked him, Gomer Parry would take her over there.
She went back to bed, saw from the alarm clock that it was only five-forty-five, fell half-asleep and half-dreamed about the young William Wordsworth, who, in those sketches and engravings, looked surprisingly contemporary.
He wasn’t from this area, but had spent significant time here. His brother-in-law, Tom Hutchinson, was at Brinsop and before that, at Hindwell Farm, right on the Welsh border, where William and his wife, Mary, stayed and loved it. On William’s last visit, he was still trying to track down the spooky Goodrich girl… and that was nearly fifty years after he met her.
She’d be well into middle age, Jane thought as dawn crawled hesitantly into Ledwardine. Maybe a granny. How would he know her?
‘It remains interesting,’ Vaynor had said.
Why had he referred to the kid as spooky? One of his words. He’d also applied it to the Doward. Some very narrow roads up there. And steep. With long drops into the River Wye or its banks. Either way, a bad wrench of the wheel could put you into history. But there was next to nothing to be uncovered within the word doward; there appeared to be no other places with the same name, although it showed up very occasionally as a surname.
What, then, was the nearest sizeable community to the Doward, with its dense forestry and limestone caves? The nearest substantial town, four or five miles away, was Monmouth – in Wales, just. In England, with the A40 dual carriageway crashing through it, was Whitchurch. And then – very haunted, it seemed to Jane – the medieval, or earlier, village of Goodrich.
It all came back to Goodrich. She had to go there. This was not just Mum’s case. Not any more.
33
A decent horror film
THE FEW PAGES torn from the sermon pad were spread on Jane’s shop table. On the last one, the felt-pen scrawl, done last night in near-complete darkness, was uneven, a name given serious emphasis.
Diana PORTIS
Now that Mum was unlikely to walk in on her, Jane made sure that nobody could, locking herself into the shop and activating her laptop. Wondering how she would react if she found nothing at all, if it all turned out to have been another vivid fever-dream.
However, Googling the name Portis she quickly landed on the recent report of a senior Hereford estate agent’s death-fall in the Wye Valley which, it seemed, his firm now owned much of.
There were two or three pictures of Peter Portis’s son, Royce, one of them including his recently acquired daughter-in-law, Diana Venus Portis. Register office wedding less than three years ago.
The photo showed a woman a few years older than Jane, with mid-length dark hair that was dense like seaweed, coming down to roundish but penetrating eyes like an owl’s and then – not very city estate-agent, if she still wore it – a silver nose-ring with a little emerald in it. The face had a knowing humour and what Jane saw as a shaded sexuality.
Succubus
She hadn’t put the word into the laptop until this morning. Here, at the shop.
a demon or supernatural entity in folklore, in female form, that appears in dreams to seduce men, usually through sexual activity. According to religious traditions, repeated sexual activity with a succubus can cause poor physical or mental health, even death.
It was the female version of the incubus, a priapic creature that introduced sex into nightmares.
That’s mental-patient stuff—
Vaynor last night. What frightened her was that Mum also knew a fair bit about it.
She clicked succubus into oblivion, to bring up the website of the curious little store that was still in King Street, Hereford. She found the phone number and just hoped that the Pod shop hadn’t completely closed for the duration of the pandemic as, sooner or later, it would have to. Even people like Jane didn’t consider it an essential outlet.
Another triumphant morning for the virus, Lol Robinson was thinking. It would have been the fiftieth anniversary of the Glastonbury Festival. A significant milestone in music. ‘I can get you maybe three tickets,’ Lol’s manager Prof Levin had said only yesterday. ‘Merrily, Jane and… is it Irene? Jane’s friend?’
‘Eirion,’ Lol had told him. ‘He’s Welsh. Jane calls him Irene. He hates it. But yeah, he’d probably love to go to Glasto. He was in a band at school. I expect he plays better than me, now.’
Now Lol sadly switched off the radio, unplugged the phone. He’d have to take a call from Prof sometime this morning, but please, not yet.
It was about a month since that first hint that he’d be playing Glasto this year. Then the realization about a week ago that he probably wouldn’t. Waking this morning, before the abandoned festival announcement, feeling himself lying in a dull glow. Prof had promised a week ago that while he wouldn’t be on the Pyramid Stage, he would still get noticed. The acoustic stage was easy to record from and still attracted TV coverage. Always said I would fix it for you, Prof had said.
Now Lol gazed hopelessly across at the Boswell guitar in his living room. At least he hadn’t told anybody apart from Jane, whom he’d seen as needing cheering up by the tickets. He went over and turned the face of the Boswell into the corner. It wouldn’t be heard in Glastonbury. Nobody would this year. It had been on the radio this morning that, because of the virus, the whole festival had been cancelled. It was like a semi-distant but sparkling light in the sky had turned itself off, maybe for ever.
A sign outside Ledwardine’s Eight Till Late limited the number of customers at any one time to two.
*
Jane was remembering how, once, in high summer, she’d been out here at five a.m., with the shops all shut and a good feeling vibrating in the air: anticipation. She could hear no birds singing now, just a lot of noise in her head.
And she had work to do.
She had a missed call from Eirion to return; he’d phoned while she was dressing. She had told him last week that she’d get them both Glastonbury tickets. Saying nothing about Lol appearing there, of course.
But when she rang him back, Eirion picked up the phone and said he had bad news.
‘It was on the radio. Thought I’d better tell you in case you’d missed it. The whole festival’s been cancelled.’
Suppressing the shock and sadness, Jane said it had just been something special for them to look forward to, before the start of summer. Didn’t tell him about this fantasy she’d had of Lol and Mum getting engaged under Glastonbury Tor, in the ambered afterglow of Lol’s gig, which would include the weirdly magical new song he’d started working on about the child in Wordsworth’s ‘We Are Seven’. She’d heard the opening chord sequence yesterday afternoon. It would become immortal, she’d decided.
Meaning it couldn’t die like the festival.
‘…occurred to me this might happen,’ Eirion was saying, ‘that we might not see each other—’
‘Ever again?’
‘Jane, I wasn’t thinking anything that bad…’
‘I’m not joking, Irene,’ Jane said grimly.
In fact she wondered if they were likely to joke about anything again. Kept remembering what Sorrel had said about the future pandemic when it was barely a sniff in the communal nose. Nothing is going to be safe any more. There’ll be violence and damage in the cities, even Hereford.
Sorrel. There was someone she thought Sorrel might know or know about. So she rang the Hereford shop. Through her own shop window, she watched a woman pushing a pram and a man walking up the middle of the road in the slow traffic, as if to protect her social distance. The scene didn’t speak of violence or damage but it was somehow a very medieval image: unclean, unclean, the new plague years.
How many plague years would there be before all this was over, if it ever was, or pushed into the background misery of ordinary life?
‘Pod’s.’
Sharp in her ear. Uncharacteristically impatient.
‘Sorrel?’
‘Jane? Is that Jane? Listen, I shouldn’t be here. We’re not supposed to be open, we—’
‘Sorrel… I just need some information.’ Jane was talking too fast and knew it. ‘If you hadn’t come into the shop that time when I was painting, I wouldn’t’ve thought of asking you about this, but… am I right in thinking you have some long-time members in the lower Wye Valley? Say past Symonds Yat and towards the Forest of Dean?’
‘We’ve always had members there,’ Sorrel said. ‘It’s always been a pagan area. All kinds. Plenty of witches, for a start. Goes back centuries.’
Of course it did. It made sense, with all the moody forestry and the caves. She’d found some pictures on the Net, including one of King Arthur’s Cave, accompanying a few paragraphs written by a guy who’d seen strange lights in there. Which also figured. You saw a reflection of somebody’s torch and you put it down as a strange light because this was King Arthur’s Cave where an outsize human skeleton had once been found and the detective, Vaynor, had somehow given himself to Diana Venus Portis, wife of Royce Portis.
