The Fever of the World, page 26
‘Normal.’
Crossing the Ledwardine boundary, she broke the law, but not badly. With the phone on loud-speaker, she pushed it through the steering wheel onto the ledge below the illuminated dials and drove into the empty night.
‘I’m on my way,’ she said loudly at the phone when it was answered. ‘Would you mind telling me again what you saw… where you saw it.’
‘At the hospital,’ Maya said. ‘They just wanted somebody quickly who knew him and there are no relatives living within a hundred miles. They took me to… to where they take dead people. He was covered up. There’ll be a proper identification but not tonight. I just… I saw his face. They… found him in the river. He… his body was wearing his church vestments, and they were all wet through. Soaked.’
Merrily’s foot slipped from the accelerator pedal and the car almost stalled. It didn’t matter; there was no other traffic, probably none this side of Hereford, except ambulances and police cars. She might get stopped, but what could she do about that, apart from keep trying to get through to Frannie Bliss and thinking about Arlo wearing his vestments for the river.
I don’t feel good about myself or what I’m doing. I’m throwing myself into this role, but I know I should say no… and I should be conducting this afternoon’s funeral. Obviously I can’t now, and I can’t come to the service and apologize to the family.
Said in Goodrich that he was going to find somewhere quiet by this sacred river to make his apologies to God. Hadn’t said what he was going to do then.
She took the Ross road out of town. He hadn’t sounded that despairing. No element of finality had been there. Nothing to say he wouldn’t be around in the morning.
But, with his ankles roped together, it could hardly be an accident.
They’d found him. And they’d…
Merrily didn’t get stopped, not even in the city, where all the streets were so deserted and out-of-time that she kept expecting to hear horses’ hooves alongside and was surprised that the lights above her car were electric.
Feeling disconnected from Hereford, she drove south across the river and down its valley.
46
Still, sad music
MAYA MADDEN, DRESSED in a brown cord tunic and jeans, looked dark-eyed and shaded with dark emotions. One small light was on in her downstairs office. The book on the sofa in the window was open at a photo of Tintern Abbey and the poem that took its title from the abbey but didn’t mention it, not once.
‘It’s his day,’ Maya said emptily.
Merrily nodded.
In all kinds of ways it was over.
‘Exactly two hundred and fifty years since he was born,’ Maya said. ‘On the seventh of April. Does it matter anyway? I don’t really think it does, but these coincidences occur, as if to underline things for us.’
‘Maya.’ Merrily closed the hall door behind her. ‘I’m so very sorry. When you told me about Arlo, I didn’t really believe it at first.’
‘I shouldn’t have asked you to come.’
‘I’m glad you did. I feel I have to try and unscramble things while it’s still possible. There has to be some sense here, some reason behind why the world’s changed.’
‘There’s no logic any more,’ Maya said. ‘And my own feelings about Arlo and Wordsworth are mixed.’
After what she’d heard from Siân Callaghan-Clarke, Merrily had wondered about Maya’s relationship with Arlo, whether there’d been another reason for his acceptance of the central role in this drama-documentary. But it wasn’t her business, she admitted, and it had slumped from triumph to tragedy.
‘Wordsworth considered a career in the Church,’ Maya said. ‘He thought he needed a safe income.’
It wasn’t safe any more. In Wordsworth’s day, the pandemic would have cemented faith, brought people fearfully together. Now it drove them further apart.
They’re saying the clergy are here to help, not investigate, and shouldn’t ask too many questions to which they know they won’t get answers. Huw Owen’s assessment of the C of E hierarchy’s current policy on the night she’d first been drawn into this. Merrily felt a burst of anger. How did they know they wouldn’t get answers?
Merrily accepted a mug of tea from Maya but didn’t add sugar. The etching of Wordsworth in his 1960s rock star jacket was alone on the wall.
She was fed up with making excuses for senior clergy. Fuck the bastards.
Never thought she’d be talking/thinking this way. This really was it. Everything closing down.
‘I’ve been a working exorcist in this diocese for several years.’ She sank into the sofa, did not feel sleepy. ‘But now it might soon be over.’
Had she said that aloud? She felt the night was now quietly alive around the grey village church you couldn’t see from this window.
‘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.’
She sat up.
‘This house isn’t actually called Churchyard Cottage, is it, Maya? You had that sign made as part of your plan to convince Arlo to take the job. Recreate Wordsworth.’
Maya said nothing, looked close to tears.
‘But you didn’t need to, really, did you?’ Merrily said. ‘Siân must have told you about his… problem.’
She wasn’t enjoying this at all.
But it was time.
‘It’s this area,’ Merrily said sadly. ‘It somehow tells us to do things. I don’t know if, in this job, I should be working for or against the area.’
Maya slowly came down on the sofa, sitting next to Merrily, wiping her swollen eyes. The area had much more power over her because of the way it had dominated William Wordsworth in perhaps the most vivid years of his life, messed with his consciousness.
But Arlo…
I still don’t feel his intellect submitting to what you’re calling call a ‘trance state’.
There would have been discord. Arlo would have refused to accept that the energy of nature – no mention of God – was the power behind Wordsworth’s greatest poetry.
Merrily said, ‘This is a place where nature-worship, as famously practised by the twenty-something Wordsworth, is… somehow exciting – more exciting than Christianity, my daughter says. More British. And, in Wordsworth’s case, not quite paganism. It involves the spirits of nature, rather than nature spirits, if you see what I mean.’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Doesn’t mean fairies with gossamer wings or big plants with faces.’
Merrily stopped and shrugged.
‘But he stopped practising it, anyway, after it inspired some of his finest work,’ Maya said. ‘“With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things”.’
‘Climactic lines.’
‘That would have been explored in depth in my programme,’ Maya said. ‘I could hear Arlo breathing it out over the titles.’ She looked at the picture of Wordsworth in his rock star jacket. ‘If he’d still had breath. What can we do now?’
‘Mourn him… then find another actor? I’m sorry but he… didn’t really want to portray Wordsworth, did he? A half-pagan. A would-be druid, in a place where druidism lingers. People going into a trance state? Is that what that line’s saying? Is it describing a form of meditation, but deeper?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Maya said. ‘I might be half-Indian, but I’ve never got round to meditating.’
‘And that poem… doesn’t rule out a kind of spiritual possession. A surrender to the forces of nature. Going just a bit further than what he says in the poem about the power of harmony and the deep power of joy.’
‘“An eye made quiet”,’ Maya repeated.
‘It somehow has a soft echo,’ Merrily said. ‘An eye looking inward? What things did he see into the life of?’
‘That’s the big question,’ Maya said. ‘The question to which many people seek an answer in the Wye Valley.’
Merrily looked out into the night.
‘Perhaps it is the Valley that enables people to see. Perhaps that’s what you feel here when it all fuses together for you… the hills, the woods and the river which is joining them all together, with the missing element that finds… the sixth sense. He kept hinting at that.’
Maya gave in to a slow shiver.
‘What’s the missing element?’
‘The human element.’ Merrily smiled, relaxed. ‘He was a hippy, two centuries too early. All he needed was love.’
Some people said that was where Wordsworth went next, after the nature-worship. Adding human feeling. Warmth, depth and what you could get from the vibrations of another person. Was that the life he picked up on?
‘Near the end of the Wye poem,’ Merrily said, ‘he discovers his sister, Dorothy. His best friend. He realizes how close he is to her. Some people say he became too close. I don’t think it came to anything incestuous, but if anything did happen here, on whatever level… In the poem he turns away from his adoring view of nature in “thoughtless youth” to tune into the… the, erm…’
‘“Still, sad music of humanity”,’ Maya said.
‘Yes.’
Merrily conjured the distant soft, moody chord-changing on the guitar she’d paid Al Boswell to make for Lol after someone had smashed his first one in the back of his truck. Nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue. Wordsworth could hit the spot when he wanted to.
The mobile phone chimed its night chime. Softer than its day chime. More still, sad music.
‘I’ll make more tea.’ Maya slid to her feet. ‘Leave you alone with your call.’
‘It won’t be private.’ Merrily took the phone from her poacher’s pocket. ‘Don’t feel you have to go.’
‘Merrily…’ Bliss’s scouse crackle. ‘You hear about this feller we found in the river?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Mate of yours.’
‘I wouldn’t quite say that, but… our paths had crossed.’ ‘I was gonna ask you about it tomorrow, but it keeps coming back to me. Him and Mrs Portis. Did you know about them?’
‘I… I’d been told about his condition.’
‘Is it true he’s a sex addict?’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Somebody who wouldn’t want it talked about. Diana Portis, is she…?’
‘A rather beautiful woman,’ Merrily said. ‘With a powerful magnetism that she likes to use. Mainly on men. I can see them both seizing an opportunity. She probably wouldn’t let her marital status get in the way.’
‘And one final point. Who’s Elohim?’
‘What?’
Bliss told her about a pocket Bible found on Arlo Ripley. About the word handwritten in it, down separate pages.
‘What’s it mean, Merrily?’ he asked. ‘Clearly it means something.’
‘It’s an old Hebrew name for God. I don’t know much about it.’
‘Why’s this feller keep scrawling it in his Bible? The Bible he took with him to his…’
‘To his death,’ Merrily said. ‘I don’t know. Was his death accidental or…?’
‘With his feet tied together?’
‘His feet were tied together? Bloody hell, Frannie.’
‘A way of making it harder to change your mind about suicide once you’ve thrown yourself in,’ Bliss said.
When the call from Bliss ended, for Merrily, the night had gone shaky.
Either this was a courageous suicide, or…
She rang Siân Callaghan-Clarke.
‘Look, I’m sorry. I know what time it is.’
‘I was still up,’ the Archdeacon said. ‘I had an important call to the hospital…’
‘Oh Christ…’
‘Yes,’ Siân said. ‘Yes, it was. People kept telling me to call back in the morning, but I sensed something had changed and persisted…’
‘Oh Jesus…’
‘I’m glad I kept ringing,’ Siân said. ‘Sophie is said to be recovering.’
‘God…’
‘There aren’t many holy names you haven’t yet used, Merrily.’
‘I’m sorry. Things are—’
‘Things could be worse. Sophie faces a long recovery, I’m afraid, but I’m told she’s unlikely to expire for some years. She may even be coming home quite soon. Merrily, are you still…?’
‘Yes, I’m… thank you. So much. Best news I could have had.’
There was an uncomfortable pause.
‘But there’s clearly other news…’ Siân’s voice had sunk ‘… that isn’t good.’
‘Arlo Ripley?’
‘The police told me. As his archdeacon.’
Merrily said, without really thinking about it, ‘The name Elohim… was written in the small Bible found on his body.’
‘I won’t express surprise at that,’ Sian said. ‘A plural word implying more than one God is a concept I reject but…’ sound of a cigarette being lit ‘…one that Arlo pondered at length during one of his possible addiction periods. Becoming obsessed by the idea of a plural God.’
‘Two Gods? Or…’
‘Or more. At theological college, people would laugh about it. Arlo never did. It interested him.’
‘He thought there were two Gods?’
‘And two ways of looking at a situation, both of which remain spiritually valid.’
‘Theology is never a straight road, is it?’ Merrily said. ‘To me, two Gods looks close to no God. So… how do you feel about Arlo’s death?’
‘They say it might be suicide. Which didn’t actually shock me as much as it should.’ The Archdeacon was silent for a moment, as if deciding whether to say something else. And then… ‘In this pandemic, lives seem to have become cheaper – even one’s own. They’re lost very quickly, whichever way it happens. Do you know what I’m saying?’
‘I don’t like to think about it.’
‘Or think about what’s happening to…?’
‘What we do?’ Merrily whispered.
She didn’t like to spell it out. And didn’t think Arlo’s death – like Peter Portis’s – was quite as simple as suicide.
*
Maya sat down and poured tea.
‘I have to get back,’ Merrily said. ‘Someone’s waiting for me.’ She sugared her tea, stirred it. ‘I don’t actually mean Jane.’
It was time, she’d decided, to be entirely open, even when it didn’t seem to matter.
‘I’ve wondered,’ Maya said.
‘He’s a songwriter. Even though they’re all out of work, right now.’ She drank her tea quickly. ‘I’m not, yet.’
‘Yet?’
‘It’s no secret that the Bishop wants me out. He thinks exorcists are unnecessary and possibly a liability to bishops who don’t believe in…’
‘While you know what you’ve seen…’
‘No.’ Merrily put down her mug on the table. ‘And I certainly can’t prove I’ve seen anything unearthly. I mean, I may have, and there are people who’ve convinced me that they have. But…’ She picked up her bag and moved to the door. ‘Are you going to be OK on your own?’
‘I’ve a lot to think about. Thank you for coming, Merrily. I’ll call you in the morning. The real morning.’
‘Thanks for the tea.’
She slid out of the front door and moved up the drive to her car, briefly wondering why she couldn’t see any stars above the hedge.
Then, as the Freelander crawled between the gateposts, she saw what was obscuring the night sky and trod heavily on the brake.
*
To Eirion Lewis
Cc
Bcc
From Jane Watkins.
Irene, love.
Listen.
(Or don’t bother if I abandon this. I may have scrubbed it by the morning.)
Right now, it’s late at night, and I’m supposed to be in bed. Only I’m not and won’t be until either Mum comes back or I find out what the score is. So I might as well tell you a few things.
Mum’s ‘gone to bed’ as well, as she told me about an hour and a half ago. I don’t think she went to sleep, though, as she was clearly in a bit of a state because of something I now wish I had decided not to tell her until tomorrow morning. Something about Sir Samuel Meyrick who I won’t tell you about, but you’ll find him online if you’re interested.
Am I worried? Bloody right! The bishop’s still a bastard and it looks like he always will be.
And yes, this IS another deliverance case, which, in the middle of this pandemic, is frankly not what we need. With the church closed down and the bishop off her back for a while, it should be a chance for her and Lol to get things together at last… except, as you know, Lol’s lost Glasto and a bunch of small gigs because of the virus and I reckon he’s on his uppers cash-wise. And now it’s the middle of the night and… shit, she’s getting the car out. I was thinking she’d just gone across the road on foot to bend Lol’s ear about whoever was on the phone a short time ago. It was almost certainly Maya Madden, the TV producer (independent, not one of the big outfits but I suppose it’s a living).
I watched her go, and she’s on her own. Lol’s still at home, and she’s not left me a note.
Right. I’m giving her an hour then I’ll go across to Lol and find out what’s going on. This can be a risky job, and if Lol’s going after her I’m going too.
And just as I was thinking I could actually make a serious concession.
University right? That’s what I mean. I’ve told you about all the rows we’ve had about me saying I’m not going, and taking over Lucy’s old shop – not just for the festival but forever. (I need to make a success of it, but I will!)
Would have.
Unless Mum deals with the bishop situation and doesn’t have to move from Ledwardine.
And… solidifies this thing with Lol.
Like the big M…?
????
You yourself have said they need their arses kicking if they don’t tie the knot. Bloody hell, it’s an easy enough knot to untie these days if it all goes wrong, and if I’m not here…
