Powys smiled.
But Fay had stiffened, feeling the tiny hairs rising on her bare arms. Her father's face was turned towards the pulpit. He had never glanced at the woman by his side. Fay thought, I can see her, but can he?
'… a little world, where, if we feel we are suffering a certain starvation of the soul, we need not give up our Sunday mornings to come to church. Because all we need to do is to go for a stroll along the nearest ley line and expose ourselves to these famous cosmic rays.'
Fay heard him as if from afar. She was looking at her father. And at the woman. Neat, small-boned, wide-brimmed hat concealing her hair and neck. And unnaturally still.
The church was darkening around Fay. The muted colours had drained out of the congregation. Everything was black and white and grey Nobody moved. Murray Beech, flickering like an ancient movie, black and white in his surplice, was gesturing in the pulpit, but she couldn't hear him any more.
She stared hard, projecting her fear and – surprised at its strength – her uncontrollable resentment. Until she felt herself lifting from the pew, aware of a sudden concern in the eyes of Joe Powys, his hand reaching out for her from a long, long way away, but not touching. Fay rising on a malign wave while, at the same time, very slowly, the woman sitting next to her father began, for the first time, to move.
Began, very slowly, to turn her head.
And Fay was suddenly up on her feet in the silent church, shrieking aloud. 'How dare you? Get out! How dare you come in here!'
Gripping the prayer-book shelf so hard that it creaked.
'Why?' Fay screamed. 'Why can't you just get on with your death and leave him alone?'
Then everybody was turning round, but Fay was out of the church door, and running.
CHAPTER VI
When the Mercedes estate carrying Simon and his three young assistants had vanished into the lane, Rachel watched Andy Boulton-Trow, stripped to the waist, supervising the loading of three long stones into the back of a truck. There was a small digger m the back, too, one of those you could hire to landscape your own garden.
'Last ones,' Andy said, jibbing a thumb at the stones. He'd acquired, very rapidly, an impressive black beard, somehow hardening his narrow jaw.
Rachel said, 'The others are in?'
'The ones that are safe to put in, without arousing complaints from the landowners We've got a nice one here for your friend Joe.'
He didn't, she noticed, put any kind of stress on the words 'your friend'.
'And then I'm pushing off for a day or two,' Andy said, stretching.
'Is Max aware of this?'
'I really don't know, Rachel.'
She wondered if perhaps he was pushing off somewhere with Max. 'A very heavy guy,' Max had said once. 'He knows all the options.'
Whereas J.M. had implied that while Andy knew as much about earth mysteries as anybody could reasonably be expected to, it was unwise to trust him too far. 'He takes risks, especially when the potential fall guy is someone else.' The implication being that he, J. M. Powys, had once been the fall-guy. One day, away from here, he would tell her about this.
'What's going on over there?' Rachel had seen a cluster of men emerging from the rear entrance of the Court. Two of them carried a rotting plank which they hurled on a heap of rubbish in a corner of the courtyard.
'Big clean-out,' Andy said. 'Before the renovation proper begins. All the junk from upstairs – the detritus of the various attempts to modernize the Court, anything not in period has to go. Didn't Max tell you?'
'I think he mentioned something,' Rachel said uncomfortably. He hadn't, of course. Increasingly, things had been happening around her without any kind of consultation.
Like the appropriation of Gomer Parry's bulldozer in the night?
Max liked to live dangerously; she didn't. She was deeply glad to be leaving his employ.
'Make a good bonfire,' Andy Boulton-Trow said, nodding at the pile of rubbish. 'Maybe we should organize one for Lammas or something. A cleansing.'
He stretched his lithe body into the truck. 'Have fun,' he said.
Powys raced out of the church, clutching the Uher by its strap She'd left it there, on the pew, still recording, with a motor hum and a hiss of turning spools.
He scanned the churchyard, but she was gone. He ran to the gate, looked both ways, thought he could hear running footsteps, but there was nobody in sight. He glanced over his shoulder and saw a white-bearded, dog-collared old man in the church entrance, also looking from side to side.
Her father. Both of them looking for Fay.
Powys stabbed vaguely at the Uher's piano-key controls until the hum and hiss ceased with a final whirr. Then he slung the machine over his shoulder, stuck the microphone in his pocket and set off towards Bell Street. Or would she have gone to the studio?
Making an outburst in church was a clear sign of instability. People who made outbursts in church were usually basket-cases.
Except in Crybbe. Leaping up and screaming, Powys thought was surely a perfectly natural reaction to the miasma of almost-anaesthetized disinterest emanating from that congregation.
Bloody weird, though, what she'd said.
Why can't you just get on with your death and leave him alone?
Bloody weird.
As he came to the corner of Bell Street, he almost lost a foot to a familiar red Ford Fiesta, shrieking round the corner in low gear, crunching over the kerb.
The driver saw him, and the Fiesta squeaked and stalled. The passenger door flew open and bumped the Uher, and the driver called out, 'Get in!'
Powys climbed in and sat with the Uher on his knee. 'You left this in the church,' he said.
'Thanks.' Fay started the engine and the car spurted into the square.
'Your father…'
'Fuck my father,' she snapped, and she didn't speak again until they passed the town boundary and there were open hills all around and a rush of cold air through the side windows, the glass on both sides wound down to its limits.
Fay breathed out hard and thrust her small body back into the seat, the Fiesta going like a rocket down a lane originally created for horses.
'Got to be something awry,' she said remotely, 'when the most newsworthy item on the tape is the reporter having hysterics.'
Powys said, 'When's visiting time at the vet's, then?'
She turned towards him. 'You want to come?'
'I've got a choice? Watch the road, for Christ's sake!'
She said, 'You want me to talk about it, I suppose.'
'Up to you.'
'Well,' she said, 'I suppose if I can talk about it to anybody, I can talk about it to you. Don't suppose I'll be telling you anything you haven't heard before.'
'That's right,' Powys said. 'I'm an accredited crank. And I'll be a dead crank if you don't…'
'Yet so cynical.' Fay slowed down. 'You didn't used to be cynical. Unless that wide-eyed, wow-man-what-a mind-blower feel to The Old Golden Land was a put-on.'
'Well,' he said, 'the light-hearted element kind of dissipated.' He closed his eyes and the past tumbled down to him like a rock slide.
Joey goes round the Bottle Stone
And he goes round ONCE.
What's happening is you're developing a link with the stone, in an umbilical kind of way. You're feeling every step you take, bare feet connecting sensuously with the warm, grassy skin of the earth. And all the while the terrestrial magnetism – let's imagine it exists – is seeping up through the soles of your feet…
And he goes round TWICE.
Stop it.
He rubbed his eyes. 'That was your dad, was it, with the white beard? Rachel told me about him. She said he was, er. something of a fun guy for his age.'