Safe ground
TUESDAY MORNING. A white sky. Powdery overnight snow in the cracks between the cobbles on the square, and Lol was at his desk in the window, messing with his wintry song, changing a few words.
The old year turns…
No, hangs was better. There might be a need for turn later in the song, and hanging suggested uncertainty. Hanging, yes…
The old year’s hanging on a rusting hinge
Kids in the city on a drinking binge
And I can hear some ancient engine grinding
Maybe grinding wasn’t right. Would depend on what the ancient engine was actually for. He didn’t know, but the word engine insisted on being there. Hinge, binge, engine – closer to an anagram than a rhyme, as if it had formed out of the other words. It had been in his head when he awoke, along with the rhythm, the heavy clockwork, insistent, thumping, and when he’d rolled out of bed his leg muscles had been aching, as if he’d been walking all night.
He found his head was in his arms on the desktop.
What was the point? He needed to make some money again; ‘Camera Lies’ was no longer going to pay off his mortgage on Lucy’s Cottage. But very few people were making money in this business any more. Kids were no longer obsessed with music, and what music they needed they could get free. The day of the Big Stereo was over. The vinyl revival was a comparatively small, elitist fad. There were no longer songs that everybody knew, with words embedded in the zeitgeist.
As for Merrily… He’d become aware of stories in the papers that at one time would have had no personal significance for him. One had said the Church of England would be moribund long before the end of the twenty-first century. Victim of the forces of economics and entropy. Part of a long-expired England where one son would join the army, the other would remain to run the farm and the third, the loser, would go into the Church.
hinge, binge, engine… who was likely to give a shit?
Lol sat up. It was a job and the only one he had. And it might need an extra chord change to accommodate engine. He was fumbling the Boswell on to his right knee when the phone rang.
‘Hello.’
Never gave the number any more, not sure why.
‘Robinson?’
‘Um…’
‘Darvill. Kilpeck.’
Shit. Lol stood up, kicking the chair back, stretching the phone wire to lay the Boswell on the sofa. Hadn’t been expecting this. Half expecting something, but not this.
‘You phoned Mrs Brewer.’
‘Yes.’
‘And she told you about me.’
‘She mentioned you.’
An oil delivery tanker had stopped right outside, the driver leaning down to talk to Brenda from the Eight Till Late, probably asking directions to somewhere. The engine noise meant Lol had to strain to hear.
‘—like most of these Nick Drake tributists, you don’t sound an awful lot like him, do you? On your albums.’
Lol sat down at the desk, cupping the phone. Sir Lionel Darvill had listened to his albums?
‘I was in a band that took its name from one of his songs. We were young and we’d discovered him. It was just a mark of respect.’
‘My old man was at school with Drake,’ Darvill said. ‘Marlborough.’
‘Oh?’
It figured. Nick Drake had come from a wealthy family.
‘Used to enjoy telling me,’ Darvill said, ‘how they once shared a spliff in the shadow of one of those enormous prehistoric stones at Avebury.’
‘Those were the days,’ Lol said.
Trying to fit an image to the voice. It had a roll. You’d hear some aristocrat or a minor member of the royal family who’d dragged his cut-glass vowels through Estuary mud; Darvill’s accent had been dipped in cider. Lol couldn’t picture him in a wheelchair.
‘Don’t know if that’s true or not,’ Darvill said. ‘Or it might’ve been some years later.’
‘Unfortunately, Nick Drake didn’t have too many years later.’
‘I gather he went on to make more liberal use of cannabis. Which they say might account for his subsequent mental imbalance.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Some people, it comes without herbal assistance. You’d certainly know about that.’
Lol felt a prickle of sweat on his forehead; Darvill went breezing on.
‘Brewer tells me you were asking his wife about the Kilpeck Morris. For some local fete.’
‘Folk festival.’
‘And she told you the Kilpeck Morris didn’t do other people’s events.’
‘I hadn’t realized that.’
‘I just… I have to report back to the festival committee.’
There was no festival committee, only Barry.
‘Don’t know what you’ve heard, Robinson, but you probably need to forget it, don’t you think?’
Lol didn’t reply. You might forget what you’d heard, you never forgot what you’d seen. On a cold night. In a grave.
‘Forget you ever heard of the Kilpeck Morris, hey? That’d be a start. Message getting through to you? The KM… en’t public property.’
Lol gripped the edge of the desk; in his mind it was a coffin lid, slick with cold clay.
‘The morris side I was once with… briefly… that was all about being public.’
‘Which morris side?’
‘It was Cotswold. You wouldn’t know it. But I kind of interpreted it as being about spreading energy. About life, as distinct from—’
‘Robinson. Listen to me.’
It went quiet. The oil tanker had moved on.
‘You don’t really want to get on the wrong fucking side of me,’ Darvill said. ‘Do you?’
Clunk.
He found Merrily alone in the vicarage kitchen, wearing an apron and an oven glove to push the emptied ash-tray back into the woodstove.
‘It was actually a threat?’
‘They don’t usually stoop to threats, these guys, do they? However—’
‘These guys?’ She tossed the block into the stove and spun round. ‘Lol, he’s just… another bloke.’
Her apron rising like a tutu in a shower of wood ash.
‘He said his dad was at school with Nick Drake,’ Lol said. ‘Marlborough College.’
‘He also seemed to know I’d done a stretch in a loony bin.’
‘He Googled you.’
‘Plus, he’s from here – like his ancestors for eight or nine centuries – and I’m from Off. Therefore, it would be very much in my interests to let this go. It was a threat. Trust me, I’m a failed psychotherapist.’
‘Like we agreed, it was a mistake to ring Mrs Brewer. Because Jane was pushing you to do something, and you find it hard to say no to Jane – I’m not blaming you for that, she was always a manipulative kid.’
‘Where is she?’
‘Food shopping at Jim Prosser’s. We have the special privilege of filling a trolley and wheeling it across the road, on the basis that a vicar will always bring it back. How little he knows about the clergy. Listen… Darvill… he’s in a wheelchair. Disabled people feel vulnerable. In a showdown they tend to fire first. Wouldn’t you?’
‘It wasn’t a showdown. Didn’t get that far. I’m not the showdown type. You know that.’
Merrily closed the stove door, brushed ash from her oven glove.
‘I’m going to see Julie Duxbury this afternoon.’
‘Perhaps you could ask her why they have a private morris side.’
‘That doesn’t make sense, does it?’
‘It’s always had its secretive aspects. Black faces, all that. But no, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.’ He felt suddenly helpless. ‘What would happen if we just let it lie? It’s the Sticks, weird things happen.’
Merrily frowned.
‘Jane isn’t going to let it lie. She’s feeling displaced. No control over her own life. People doing things under her nose for their own reasons in a place she thinks she knows. If not owns. No, look, suddenly, I’m in a safer position than either of you. I haven’t actually committed an imprisonable offence.’
‘You vicars are so smug.’
She gave him the sardonic smile.
‘I told Julie I was looking for Aidan Lloyd. Chasing a ghost, I said, in my mysterious exorcist voice. She came back about twenty minutes ago. Mrs Watkins, she said, I think I’ve found your ghost. And I said, What does that mean, exactly? And she said, I’m not going to dress this up, I think we need your advice. Some very peculiar things have been happening.’
Merrily let the smile go, but there was a change in her, a bit of electricity, an indication to Lol of just how much she needed what she called the Night Job. How reduced, as a person, she’d be if it were taken away.