Just like Ellis, she didn’t seem to have been listening. ‘Robin, what kind of service?’
‘He said it would be no big deal – not realizing that any kind of damn service here now, was gonna be a big deal far as we’re concerned. And if it’s no big deal, why do it? Guy doesn’t even like churches.’
‘What kind of service?’ Betty was at the edge of her chair and her eyes were hard.
‘I don’t know.’ Robin was a little scared, and that made him angry. ‘A short Eucharist? Did he say that? What is that precisely? I’m not too familiar with this Christian sh—’
‘It’s a Mass.’
‘Huh?’
‘An Anglican Mass. And do you know why a Mass is generally performed in a building other than a functioning church?’
He didn’t fully. He could only guess.
‘To cleanse it,’ Betty said. ‘The Eucharist is Christian disinfectant. To cleanse, to purify – to get rid of bacteria.’
‘OK, let me get this...’ Robin pulled his hands down his face, in praying mode. ‘This is the E-word, right?’
Betty nodded.
An exorcism.
9
Visitor
THE ANSWERING MACHINE sounded quite irritable.
‘Mrs Watkins. Tania Beauman, Livenight. I’ve left messages for you all over the place. The programme goes out Friday night, so I really have to know whether it’s yes or no. I’ll be here until seven. Please call me... Thank you.’
‘Sorry.’ Merrily came back into the kitchen, hung up her funeral cloak. ‘I can’t think with that thing bleeping.’
Barbara Buckingham was sitting at the refectory table, unwinding her heavy silk scarf while her eyes compiled a photo-inventory of the room.
‘You’re in demand, Mrs Watkins.’ The slight roll on the ‘r’ and the barely perceptible lengthening of the ‘a’ showed her roots were sunk into mid-border clay. But this would be way back, many southern English summers since.
Walking through black and white timber-framed Ledwardine, across the cobbled square to the sixteenth-century vicarage, the dull day dying around them, the lights in the windows blunting the bite of evening, she’d said, ‘How quaint and cosy it is here. I’d forgotten. And so close.’
Close to what? Merrily had made a point of not asking.
‘Tea?’ She still felt slightly ashamed of the kitchen – must get round to emulsioning it in the spring. ‘Or coffee?’
Barbara would have tea. She took off her gloves.
Like her late sister, she was good-looking, but in a sleek and sharp way, with a turned-up nose which once would have been cute but now seemed haughty. The sister’s a retired teacher and there’s no arguing with her, Eileen Cullen had said.
‘I didn’t expect you to be so young, Mrs Watkins.’
‘Going on thirty-seven?’
‘Young for what you’re doing. Young to be the diocesan exorcist.’
‘Diocesan deliverance consultant.’
‘You must have a progressive bishop.’
‘Not any more.’ Merrily filled the kettle.
Mrs Buckingham dropped a short laugh. ‘Of course. That man who couldn’t take the pressure and walked out. Hunt? Hunter? I try to keep up with Church affairs. I was headmistress of a Church school for many years.’
‘In this area? The border?’
‘God no. Got out of there before I was twenty. Couldn’t stand the cold.’
Merrily put the kettle on the stove. ‘We can get bad winters here,’ she agreed.
‘Ah... not simply the climate. My father was a farmer in Radnor Forest. I remember my whole childhood as a kind of perpetual February.’
‘Frugal?’ Merrily tossed tea bags into the pot.
Mrs Buckingham exhaled bitter laughter. ‘In our house, those two tea bags would have to be used at least six times. The fat in the chip pan was only renewed for Christmas.’ Her face grew pinched at the memories.
‘You were poor?’
‘Not particularly. We had in excess of 130 acres. Marginal land, mind – always appallingly overgrazed. Waste nothing. Make every square yard earn its keep. Have you heard of hydatid disease?’
‘Vaguely.’
‘Causes cysts to grow on internal organs, sometimes the size of pomegranates. Originates from a tapeworm absorbed by dogs allowed to feed on infected dead sheep. Or, on our farm, required to eat dead sheep. Human beings can pick it up – the tapeworm eggs – simply through stroking the sheepdog. When I was sixteen I had to go into hospital to have a hydatid cyst removed from my liver.’
‘How awful.’
‘That was when I decided to get out. I doubt my father even noticed I was gone. Had another mouth to feed by then. A girl again, unfortunately.’
‘Menna?’
‘She would be... ten months old when I left. It was a long time before I began to feel guilty about abandoning her – fifteen years or more. And by then it was too late. They’d probably forgotten I’d ever existed. I expect he was even grateful I’d gone – another opportunity to try for a son, at no extra cost. A farmer with no son is felt to be lacking in something.’
‘Any luck?’
‘My mother miscarried, apparently,’ Mrs Buckingham said brusquely. ‘There was a hysterectomy.’ She shrugged. ‘I never saw them again.’
‘Where did you go?’
‘Found a job in Hereford, in a furniture shop. The people there were very good to me. They gave me a room above the shop, next to the storeroom. Rather frightening at night. All those empty chairs: I would imagine people sitting there, silently, waiting for me when I came back from night classes. Character-building, though, I suppose. I got two A levels and a grant for teacher-training college.’
It all sounded faintly Dickensian to Merrily, though it could have been no earlier than the 1970s.
‘So you never went back?’ The phone was ringing.
‘After college, I went to work in Hampshire, near Portsmouth. Then a husband, kids – grown up now. No, I never went back, until quite recently. A neighbour’s daughter – Judith – kept me informed, through occasional letters. She was another farmer’s daughter, from a rather less primitive farm. Please get that phone call, if you want.’
Merrily nodded, went through to the office.
‘As it happens’ – closing the scullery door – ‘she’s here now.’
‘Listen, I’m sorry,’ Eileen Cullen said. ‘I couldn’t think what else to tell her. Showed up last night, still unhappy about the sister’s death and getting no co-operation from the doctor. I didn’t have much time to bother with her either. I just thought somebody ought to persuade her to forget about Mr Weal, and go home, get on with her life. And I thought she’d take it better coming from a person of the cloth such as your wee self.’
‘Forgive me, but that doesn’t sound like you.’
‘No. Well...’
‘So she didn’t say anything about holding a special service in church then?’
‘Merrily, the problem is I’m on the ward in one minute.’
‘Bloody hell, Eileen—’
‘Aw, Jesus, all the woman wants is her sister laid to rest in a decent, holy fashion. She’s one of your fellow Christians. Tell her you’ll say a few prayers for the poor soul, and leave it at that.’