Fairy tales
MERRILY LEFT AT twenty to seven to prepare the church for the Sunday evening meditation, having waited until the last minute for Jane to come downstairs. She’d spent what must have been a couple of hours upstairs in her apartment, presumably deciding what to wear to meet Eirion, though you wouldn’t have thought it when she eventually came down wearing perhaps her third best white hoodie, cursory make-up and a sad, defiant smile.
‘That’s what you’re wearing?’
‘Aren’t you going to be late, Mum?’
‘I thought Eirion was picking you up to go somewhere.’
‘No. I’m meeting him here.’
‘In the Swan?’
‘The Ox. Less public. Unless Dean Wall is there, but I expect I can deal with him.’
‘Right. Flower…’
‘Mmm?’
‘I was going to say, it’ll be fine, and good luck and… all that.’
‘Thank you.’
She flung on her parka and slumped out into the icy night.What would Eirion see after all this time, at the end of a fractious period during which Jane appeared to have embraced adulthood but not with any conspicuous joy or relief?
What a strange kid she was.
Kid: no apology. Merrily didn’t recall going out on anything approaching a date without striving to look her best. That was part of it. Eirion, she recalled, had been doing work experience at the South Wales Echo, mixing a lot with journalists. The adult world, the city. Jane could well be back home before the pubs closed, with Eirion consigned to the flat file marked friends. Was that what she wanted?
Had to put it out of her mind. Off to the church and The Cloud of Unknowing. She’d left them in darkness last week but, at this time of year, the Middle Ages would have been ready to light solstice lamps. St Lucy’s Night was a festival of light, celebrated these days more in Scandinavian countries – Denmark, Sweden, with their long, long winters. In the third century, Lucy had brought food to Christians hiding in the catacombs, wearing a wreath of candles around her head to light her way, leaving her arms free to carry more goodies. Reminded Merrily, slightly uncomfortably, of the crown of lights worn by women in certain witchcraft ceremonies.
At least there wasn’t much else here for Jane. Having died at the age of twenty-five, all St Lucy shared with the seventy-something Lucy Devenish was a kind of demonstrative courage: when they tried to burn her she wouldn’t stop talking even when a Roman soldier stuck a spear into her throat.
They never ended well, these stories, but a good St Lucy’s night, well celebrated, would ensure sufficient light for the long dark months to come.
The wind was down, the street deserted, the night air quiet, and something landed like a cold moth on Jane’s face.
Snowflake. First of the year?
She was walking slowly down Church Street in the direction of the river, hands deep in the pockets of her parka. More lights across the river now, with the expansion of what Gomer called the hestate. Jane scowled. According to the Hereford Times, over ten per cent of dwellings in Ledwardine were now second homes, used just a few weeks a year by rich Londoners who brought their fancy food with them and would never drink in the Ox. Result: need for more local housing, erosion of the countryside.
She looked up. Three of them this time, one in her eye, almost certainly snowflakes. She just wanted to stay out in it, let it come, but a door on the left of the street was hanging open to mustard walls and sallow light and the whizz and clink of gaming machines.
Some incomers apparently wondered why nobody bought the Ox and turned it into a swish bar with tables spilling into the street.
Only a matter of time. Jane walked in and wasn’t sure whether to feel good that nobody looked up from the pool table. She gazed around, under the sagging beams, past the sagging beer guts, the beer-stained sporting posters and the jukebox loaded with country and western classics, and he wasn’t there.
Wasn’t there.
Oh well…
There were other people she recognized, including Ledwardine’s iffy councillor Lyndon Pierce, accountant and crony of builders committed to turning Ledwardine into a pink-brick hell twice its current size. What was Pierce doing deserting the Black Swan for this dive? He glanced at her and pretended not to recognize the woman who’d once publicly called him a bent bastard. And who was—?
‘Jesus!’ Jane said.
Someone rearing up in front of her, a hand reaching out and then hesitantly drawing back.
‘Damn. I’d always hoped you’d never discover my middle name.’
Jane collapsed into a wild grin. She genuinely hadn’t recognized him. A bunch of gigantic teenage males standing around the bar had concealed the table he was saving in the corner. Time was he wouldn’t even have fitted in that corner.
‘You been ill?’
Well, it broke the ice.
‘I just lost weight, OK?’ Eirion raising his eyes, addressing the ceiling. ‘You’d prefer it if I got diabetes or wound up taking statins for rampant cholesterol?’
‘It’s just… not Welsh, Irene.’
Jane started to laugh and smothered it, but he was smiling and his eyes hadn’t changed, and – bugger – she’d called him Irene.
He was inspecting her.
‘Still sweet cider, is it?’
‘No, I’ll have a Manhattan, please. With extra tequila.’
‘Jane, there’s no tequila in a Manhattan.’
‘I knew that,’ Jane said.
She sat down at the wobbly table, damp with cider and beer, Eirion’s beanie on the driest corner.
He said he’d driven over to see a guy he’d been at the Cathedral School with, just out of hospital after being badly hurt in a car accident. Could’ve been killed. It had, he said, made him think. The guy had just got engaged in hospital. Didn’t want to wait any longer because he’d realized you just didn’t know what might happen tomorrow.
Jane pushed her chair back, alarmed. Eirion got it at once, rose up.
‘Oh no… look, I didn’t mean—’
‘I know you didn’t, I was just—’
‘On the other hand, I didn’t not mean… Oh, shit.’
‘I, erm…’ She was suddenly serious. ‘I’m not saying I never want to get married or live with somebody, just that I don’t want any kids.’
‘You always used to say that.’
‘Nothing’s changed. Not for the better anyway, and it isn’t going to on a horribly overcrowded planet where everything gets built on, layer after layer, and anyway I want to do something, I want to find something, I need to stop things—’
This was ridiculous. She was just talking, faster and faster –lecturing him, for God’s sake – creating distance between them and dragging the conversation, as rapidly as possible, to the point of no return.
She looked across at Councillor Lyndon Pierce, who’d been joined by an older man in a leather jacket who she recognized from somewhere but couldn’t immediately put a name to.
‘… like him. And the rest of his disgusting council? They just want to pile more and more people into Hereford – more council-tax payers. He’s still got plans for a supermarket and a big estate where the Ledwardine henge is. Well, where I think the henge is.’
‘You getting any further with that?’ Eirion asked.
‘Erm… there’s… there’s…’ Oh God, she’d done it, put herself slap in the centre of the target area. ‘… there’s this archaeologist I met in Pembrokeshire, at the dig, who thinks maybe she can interest one of the universities in sponsoring an exploratory excavation.’
‘Excellent,’ Eirion said.
‘Yeah, it’s, er… it’s pretty good.’
The sounds of the Ox – clink, whizz, raucous laughter, pool-clink and beerpump-gasp – exploded in Jane’s ears then faded.
‘If I tell you something… something personal.’
‘I was hoping you might get around to that.’
‘To what?’
‘Something personal.’
‘Yeah. Right. Well, I can think of two possible reactions to what I’m going to say. One’s you putting your glass down and quietly walking out.’
Jane looked for his eyes, but his face was distorted behind his cider glass. She thought, ludicrously, that his old face wouldn’t have fitted behind a cider glass.
She moistened her lips.
‘And the other’s all sleazy jokes and like, can I watch next time? Only there isn’t going to be a next time, and I’m not sure there was a last time, due to me being very pissed.’
Eirion said nothing.
‘And grateful,’ Jane said, avoiding his eyes. ‘That she was on my side. My wavelength.’
‘Wavelength. How very pre-digital of you, Jane.’
‘You—’ A surge of interior heat drove her chair back hard into the corner. ‘You bloody hate me already, don’t you? She’s a good archaeologist and a nice woman. Who happened to believe in the same fairy tales as me. Ley lines, earth energies, dowsing.’
‘Unless you’ve changed a lot, Jane,’ Eirion said, ‘you don’t think they’re fairy tales.’
‘Only I’m not sure if she actually did – does – believe in them. And I’m not sure if I did anything else. Other than actually sleep with her.’
She looked frantically around to see if anyone else had heard.
No sign of it. She looked across the sticky table at Eirion and then away. Through the glaze of desperate tears, she looked back at Eirion, but he was already on his feet.
‘Time to go, I think,’ he said.