The Lamp of the Wicked (36 page)

‘Were you there?’

‘No. Neither of us was there. I remember I went out to fill the coal scuttle about teatime and I thought I could hear something from down the hill, but I thought it was just kids. It was about ten o’clock before the police even came and told us he was dead. We didn’t know what to do. Nobody else came. We didn’t know everybody had seen him… electrocuted. We just… Tony and me, we just sat there and talked about it until the early hours. But then the next day he didn’t want to know, and that’s how it’s been since. That’s how the old man would’ve been. And then it was in the papers and on the telly – the videos people’d taken. Our neighbours, so-called.’

‘How long’ve you been married?’

Wanting to take her away from those images. The car, swaddled in fog, was warming up inside now and Cherry was talking freely. It emerged that she and Tony had met through a dating agency for farmers. Born in Newport, where her parents had a shoe shop, she’d always dreamed of life on a farm. They’d been married twenty years, since she was twenty-seven, and had two sons, both now working in Cardiff and loving it. If Tony Lodge left them the farm, it would only be sold off. He had a decision to make and fairly soon. He didn’t need
this
on top of it all, his wife said.

And when they’d turned up at the door last night, the villagers, the
new
villagers, telling him he ought to do the decent community thing and have Roddy tidily cremated…

‘I don’t think I’m quite understanding this,’ Merrily said. ‘All this talk of the “new” Underhowle. Would this be something to do with the Development Committee?’

‘They don’t even like to call it Underhowle any more. “Oh, it’s a nowhere sort of name,” one of them said once, when they had a public meeting about it. “A neither here-nor-there name”.’

‘Meeting about what?’

‘Ariconium. That’s what they call the project. Ariconium was an old Roman town that was supposed to be further down the valley towards Weston, but Mr Crewe, who bought the Old Rectory, he reckons it was more this way, and he found a little statue of a Roman god and they all got excited, and that’s how it started, really. I can’t see it myself – I mean, there’s nothing there. It’s not like as if there were walls and ruins, things you can walk round. It’s just marks in the ground.’

‘I saw a stone plaque thing in the village hall, with the word Ariconium carved into it.’

‘They wanted to put it on the signs at the entrance to the village, but some historical organization objected because they said it wasn’t proved, but they’re fighting that. They’re setting up a museum of things people’ve found and maps and audiovisual stuff – in the old chapel. They’ve had a grant from the Lottery, lots of things like that.’

‘ “They”?’

‘Well, Mr Crewe and Mr Young at the school and the chap who has the computer factory. People like that. Seem to be more of them every day. But they’ve done a lot for the village, kind of thing, put a lot of people in work, so everybody’s going along with it. And they make it all sound so exciting for the future – more tourism, more jobs. They’re planning this big launch next Easter, with leaflets and articles in the papers and television and that. The last thing they want is for the village to be associated with a mass murderer. Oh, dear God, no, not
now
.’

‘Pretty tactless, however, coming to your husband, so soon afterwards.’

‘Had to come in good time for the funeral. They were nice enough about it, I suppose. Said they’d help keep it discreet. Keep the press away. How it was in everybody’s interests to develop an upmarket tourist economy kind of thing and until that was established we had to be conscious of our public profile.’

Merrily shook her head at the crassness of it. ‘Not, even in normal circumstances, the best thing to say to a traditional farmer.’

Cherry Lodge managed a smile. ‘That’s true.’ She was actually quite pretty; there had probably been a time, before the reality of it all started to wear her down, when Tony Lodge hadn’t been able to believe his luck. ‘All tourism means to my husband is people tramping across his land, leaving gates open. That’s what he’s doing up there now – repairing fences, tightening the barbed wire. Battening down the hatches.’

‘That’s not good, is it?’ Merrily said carefully, and collected another grateful look.

‘Like he’s accepted that we’re supposed to be hermits now, for the rest of our lives. Not show our faces down there ’cause we’re going to be tarred with it for ever.’ A glimmering of tears. ‘And this family’s been here longer than any of them. Longer than
any
of them.’ She leaned forward in the seat. ‘You know what
I
’d like to do – sell our story to the papers. We had the reporters here, loads of them, and Tony was ready to get his gun out to them. But I’d like to get them back, tell everybody what he was really like, how weird he
really
was – that’d teach—’ She blinked. ‘I keep forgetting you’re a vicar. I don’t get to talk to many women. You must think—’

‘No. Not at all.’ Merrily focused rapidly, glad that Jane’s duffel was still toggled over the dog collar. ‘What would you tell them, Cherry? What would you tell them about Roddy? Weird how?’

‘Oh…’ Cherry looked uncomfortable again.
Too eager. Blown it
. ‘All sorts of things. Tony used to talk about him a lot at one time – all the things he couldn’t understand. There’s always somebody in a family you talk about, isn’t there? Somebody you always despair of. Always, “Oh what’s he gone and done now?” Black sheep kind of thing.’

‘What kind of things
did
he do?’

Cherry’s hazel eyes flickered. ‘You’ve put me on the spot now. I’m not sure I should—’

‘It’s OK.’ Merrily nodded quickly, pushing her cigarette into the ashtray. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t’ve asked.’

‘Anyway, I’ve taken up too much of your time already. I’ve got the lunch to make and everything. Not that he’ll eat much.’

‘I’ll take you back down.’ Merrily let out the clutch, biting her lip.
How to play this
… ‘Look, you can take up as much of my time as you want, whenever you want. Any time you feel this is getting on top of you and you want to talk.’

She backed into some bushes in the fog – more scratches – before managing a clumsy three-point turn, dragging the Volvo back onto the track, crawling down the hill in second gear, foot on the brake, headlights on, until the farmhouse imprinted itself drably on the clogged air. Cherry was silent the whole way, and when Merrily pulled up, she made no move to open the door.

‘You’re not an ordinary priest, are you?’

‘Well, most of them are bigger…’

‘Mr Banks, it was, who told Tony. About what you do.’

‘Well, whatever Mr Banks said, I don’t think it’s anything to do with why I was asked to take over the funeral.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘If it is, nobody’s told me.’

Cherry stared out of the window. ‘You on e-mail, are you?’

‘Yes. Well, no… actually the computer’s crashed at home, but you can reach me at the office in Hereford.’

‘Write down the address for me, can you? Don’t look so surprised, I’m not a peasant, I’ve been doing the accounts on an IBM computer for four years now. Listen, if I write all this out for you and send it, no one will see it? You promise me that?’

‘Except possibly my secretary. Who’s also the Bishop’s secretary. Who you could trust like your mother. But—’

‘I don’t know what good it’s going to do – except I think we should’ve told the police and Tony wouldn’t do that. It was when the police told us about all these pictures on his wall, and they asked could we throw any light on it, and Tony said no, we couldn’t. And afterwards he was going, “What difference is it going to make now, anyway – except everybody thinking,
Oh they’re all like that, all the Lodges
. Mental. Sick.” ’

Merrily’s throat was dry. The fog seemed, if anything, thicker now; it felt like when you were a kid burrowing under the bedclothes with a pencil flashlight. Cherry opened the car door, got out and then leaned back in.

‘It torments me. I keep thinking, maybe we should have tried to get him to see a psychiatrist, we might’ve saved those girls. I mean, he went to his doctor, with the headaches, and
he
didn’t spot anything.’

‘Whatever it was, I think a lot of people failed to react to it,’ Merrily said. She was thinking of the Rev. Jerome Banks. She was thinking of her own wimpish relief at being denied access to Roddy Lodge at Hereford police headquarters.

Cherry said, ‘This is going to sound stupid, but what it comes down to is Roddy and dead people. From an early age, this thing about the dead.’ She leaned on the door frame, looking around, listening perhaps for the putter of the quad bike. ‘Maybe I’m making too much of it.’

T
HE SCHOOL BUS
was actually starting up when Jane looked out of the window and saw Eirion standing there by his car, in his school uniform, in the fog. And her heart pulsed the way it used to when he drove all the way from the Cathedral School in Hereford because he just like
had
to see her. Serious turn-on.

And today he’d come all this way in terrible driving conditions.

But when she scrambled down from the bus, dragging her flight bag full of books, she saw that he wasn’t smiling. From the beginning, the most amazing thing about Eirion had been his smile, and when it wasn’t there he looked pasty, a bit jowly, even. These days, anyway. Especially through the fog.

In the old days – March, April – arriving at her school, he’d say,
I was just passing
. Both of them knowing that this wasn’t a place anyone in their right mind ‘just passed’. So it was a catchphrase nowadays, and they’d be touching one another before the car’s doors were properly shut. But tonight…

‘I just needed to see you.’ Eirion making it obvious by his tone that today it wasn’t
that
kind of need. ‘You want a lift home?’

When she got into the new old car, the sky was going dark. It always seemed to be going dark, Jane thought. Life was one long dusk. Eirion just started the engine and when they were through the gates, he said, ‘Jane, do you think we need to talk?’

Like how many crappy soaps did you hear
that
line in, in the course of an average week? Or you would if you watched them. Jane tried to think of a corresponding cliché, couldn’t come up with one.

‘What about?’ she said finally.

‘Well… you.’

He took the back lanes to Ledwardine, prolonging the journey like he used to when they weren’t quite going out together but he was hoping. It could take for ever today, with these conditions. The fog had never really cleared from this morning; they’d had the lights on in the school all day. And what a long and tedious day it had been. In Eng Lit, she’d collected a couple of dagger-glances from Mrs Costello whom she liked really but,
come on
, wasn’t life just a little too short for flatulent prats like Salman Rushdie?

‘I, er, checked out the insurance,’ Eirion said. ‘It’s probably OK for you to drive this car, after all. I mean… when it’s a better day than this.’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘A better day.’

A better day. A bright new beginning.
You’re so young
, people said.
What I wouldn’t do if I was your age again
. When what they really meant was that when
they
were young the idea of a bright new beginning for the world didn’t seem quite so laughable.

In the summer, after she and Eirion had made love for the first time (the first time for both of them, with anybody, it later emerged) it was incredible, like climbing a mountain, and it was all there at your feet: the whole of life a glowing patchwork of endless, glistening greenery.

Jane scowled.
Didn’t ‘make love’. Had sex.

And that was it. Done it now. Done it a bunch of times and, sure, sometimes – before and during and after – it felt as though she was very much in love and didn’t want there to be anyone else ever…

In which case, this was
really
it? Seventeen now, an adult. Now what?

And why? Why bother? It was all going to end in tears, anyway.

‘I’ve been wondering what’s made you so negative lately,’ Eirion said.

‘Oh, really.’

‘And whether there was any way I could help.’

The car heater panted. The dipped headlights excavated shallow trenches in the grey-brownness. It was a situation that, at one time, might have seemed cosily mysterious. As distinct from totally dismal.

‘Because if I can’t,’ Eirion said. ‘You know…’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, if
you
don’t know…’ After a while, Jane stopped noticing the limited views – atmosphere was just a psychological condition, right? She found she was gripping folds of her skirt. What was
happening
to her? She didn’t even want to drive. What was the point? Be gridlock everywhere within about ten years.

‘It’s like you just want to wreck things,’ Eirion said. ‘If things aren’t working exactly as you’d planned them, you don’t want to wait.’

‘Life’s short. Very short for some people.’ Thinking of Layla Riddock, who hadn’t even made it out of school when the big pendulum did it in one blow. Thinking of Nev. Thinking of their day out in mid-Wales, when Eirion had taken her to see this particular standing stone, and it had somehow just looked like… a stone. And Eirion had been dismayed because she wasn’t going like,
Hey, wow, can’t you feel that earth energy?

Jane felt her eyes filling up as the car bumped around a bit. She thought at first he’d just gone over the kerb in the fog, but it was deliberate. He was fully in control. The car stopped, and he switched off the engine. Jane looked out and saw wet grass.

‘Where are we?’ Turning to him, wanting for a moment just to see his old smile in the dimness and then fall into his arms and everything would be all right.

For a while, anyway.

So where does it begin, this clinical depression? At what stage do they prescribe the pills?
She pulled her bag onto her lap, folding her hands on top of it: self-contained, untouchable. Inside, along with the books, was her Walkman with the Nick Drake compilation CD – Nick Drake, who died of an overdose of antidepressants. It could all be really funny. Except it wasn’t.