A Crown of Lights (3 page)

Death with a small ‘d’. No angel tonight.

Merrily was anguished and furious at the suddenness of this occurrence, and the timing – Gomer and Minnie’s wedding anniversary, their sixth.

Cheap, black joke.
Unworthy of You
.

‘Indigestion...’ Gomer was squeezing his flat cap with both hands, as if wringing out a wet sponge, and staring in disbelief at the tubes and the monitor with that ominous wavy white line from a thousand overstressed hospital dramas. ‘It’s just indigestion, her says. Like, if she said it enough times that’s what it’d be, see? Always works, my Min reckons. You
tells
the old body what’s wrong, you don’t take no shit – pardon me, vicar.’

The grey-curtained cubicle was attached to Intensive Care. Minnie’s eyes were closed, her breathing hollow and somehow detached. Merrily had heard breathing like this before, and it made her mouth go dry with trepidation.

It’s rather a bad one,
the ward sister had murmured.
You need to prepare him.

‘Let’s go for a walk.’ Merrily plucked at the sleeve of Gomer’s multi-patched tweed jacket.

She thought he glanced at her reproachfully as they left the room – as though she had the power to intercede with God, call
in a favour. And then, from out in the main ward, he looked back once at Minnie, and his expression made Merrily blink and turn away.

Gomer and Minnie: sixty-somethings when they got married, the Midlands widow and the little, wild Welsh-borderer. It was love, though Gomer would never have used the word. Equally, he’d never have given up the single life for mere companionship – he could get that from his JCB and his bulldozer.

He and Merrily walked out of the old county hospital and past the building site for a big new one – a mad place to put it, everyone was saying; there’d be next to no parking space except for consultants and administrators; even the nurses would have to hike all the way to the multi-storey at night. In pairs, presumably, with bricks in their bags.

Merrily felt angry at the crassness of everybody: the health authority and its inadequate bed quota, the city planners who seemed bent on gridlocking Hereford by 2005 – and God, for letting Minnie Parry succumb to a severe heart attack during the late afternoon of her sixth wedding anniversary.

It was probably the first time Gomer had ever phoned Merrily – their bungalow being only a few minutes’ walk away. It had happened less than two hours ago, while Merrily was bending to light the fire in the vicarage sitting room, expecting Jane home soon. Gomer had already sent for an ambulance.

When Merrily arrived, Minnie was seated on the edge of the sofa, pale and sweating and breathless.
Yow mustn’t... go bothering about me, my duck, I’ve been through... worse than this.
The TV guide lay next to her on a cushion. An iced sponge cake sat on a coffee table in front of the open fire. The fire was roaring with life. Two cups of tea had gone cold.

Merrily bit her lip, pushing her knuckles hard into the pockets of her coat – Jane’s old school duffel, snatched from the newel post as Merrily was rushing out of the house.

They now crossed the bus station towards Commercial Road, where shops were closing for the night and most of the sky was a deep, blackening rust. Gomer’s little round glasses were
frantic with city light. He was urgently reminiscing, throwing up a wall of vivid memories against the encroaching dark – telling Merrily about the night he’d first courted Minnie while they were crunching through fields and woodland in his big JCB. Merrily wondered if he was fantasizing, because it was surely Minnie who’d forced Gomer’s retirement from the plant hire business; she hated those diggers.

‘... a few spare pounds on her, sure to be. Had the ole warning from the doc about that bloody collateral. But everybody gets that, ennit?’

Gomer shuffled, panting, to a stop at the zebra crossing in Commercial Road. Merrily smiled faintly. ‘Cholesterol. Yes, everybody gets that.’

Gomer snatched off his cap. His hair was standing up like a small white lavatory brush.

‘Her’s gonner die! Her’s gonner bloody well snuff it on me!’

‘Gomer, let’s just keep praying.’

How trite did
that
sound? Merrily closed her eyes for a second and prayed also for credible words of comfort.

In the window of a nearby electrical shop, all the lights went out.

‘Ar,’ said Gomer dismally.

Through the hole-in-its-silencer roar of Eirion’s departing car came the sound of the phone. Jane danced into Mum’s grim scullery-office.

The light in here was meagre and cold, and a leafless climbing rose scraped at the small window like fingernails. But Jane was smiling, warm and light inside and, like,
up there
. Up there with the broken weathercock on the church steeple.

She had to sit down, a quivering in her chest. She remembered a tarot reader, called Angela, who had said to her,
You will have two serious lovers before the age of twenty.

As she put out a hand for the phone, it stopped ringing. If Mum had gone out, why wasn’t the answering machine on? Where
was
Mum? Jane switched on the desk lamp, to reveal a paperback New Testament beside a newspaper cutting about
the rural drug trade. The sermon pad had scribbles and blobs and desperate doodles. But there was no note for her.

Jane shrugged then sat at the desk and conjured up Eirion. Who wasn’t
conventionally
good-looking. Well, actually, he wasn’t good-looking at all, in some lights, and kind of stocky. And yet... OK, it was the smile. You could get away with a lot if you had a good smile, but it was important to ration it. Bring it out too often and it became like totally inane and after a while it stopped reaching the eyes, which showed insincerity. Jane sat and replayed Eirion’s smile in slow motion; it was a good one, it always
started
in the eyes.

Eirion? The name remained a problem. Basically, too much like Irene. Didn’t the Welsh have some totally stupid names for men? Dilwyn – that was another. Welsh women’s names, on the other hand, were cool: Angharad, Sian, Rhiannon.

He was certainly trying hard, though. Like, no way had he ‘just happened to be passing’ Jane’s school at chucking-out time. He’d obviously slipped away early from the Cathedral School in Hereford – through some kind of upper-sixth privilege – and raced his ancient heap nine or ten miles to Moorfield High before the buses got in. Claiming he’d had to deliver an aunt’s birthday present, and Ledwardine was on his way home. Total bullshit.

And the journey to Ledwardine... Eirion had really spun that out. Having to go slow, he said, because he didn’t want the hole in his exhaust to get any bigger. In the end, the bus would’ve been quicker.

But then, as Jane was climbing out of his car outside the vicarage, he’d mumbled, ‘Maybe I could call you sometime?’

Which, OK, Jane Austen could have scripted better.

‘Yeah, OK,’ she’d said, cool, understated. Managing to control the burgeoning grin until she’d made it almost to the side door of the vicarage and Eirion was driving away on his manky silencer.

The phone went again. Mum? Had to be. Jane grabbed at it.

‘Ledwardine Vicarage, how may we help you? If you wish to
book a wedding, press three. To pledge a ten-thousand-pound donation to the steeple fund, press six.’

‘Is that the Reverend Watkins?’

Woman’s voice, and not local. Not Sophie at the office. And not Mum being smart. Uh-oh.

‘I’m afraid she’s not available right now,’ Jane said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘When
will
she be available?’

The woman sounding a touch querulous, but nothing threatening: there was this deadly MOR computer music in the background, plus non-ecclesiastical office noise. Ten to one, some time-wasting double-glazing crap, or maybe the
Church Times
looking for next week’s Page Three Clerical Temptress for dirty old canons to pin up in their vestries.

‘I should try her secretary at the Bishpal tomorrow,’ Jane said.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘The Bishop’s Palace, in Hereford. If you ask for Sophie Hill...’

Most of the time it was a question of protecting Mum from herself. If you were a male vicar you could safely do lofty and remote – part of the tradition. But an uncooperative female priest was considered a snotty bitch.

‘Look.’ A bit ratty now. ‘It
is
important.’

‘Also important she doesn’t die of some stress-related condition. I mean, like, important for me. Don’t imagine
you’d
have to go off and live with your right-wing grandmother in Cheltenham. Who are you, anyway?’

Could almost hear the woman counting one... two... three... through gritted teeth.

‘My name’s Tania Beauman, from the
Livenight
television programme in Birmingham.’

Oh, hey!
‘Seriously?’

‘Seriously,’ Tania Beauman said grimly.

Jane was, like,
horribly
impressed. Jane had seen
Livenight
four times.
Livenight
was such total crap and below the
intelligence threshold of a cockroach, but compulsive viewing, oh yeah.

‘
Livenight
?’ Jane said.

‘Correct.’

‘Where you have the wife in the middle and the husband on one side and the toyboy lover on the other, and about three minutes to midnight one finally gets stirred up enough to call the other one a motherfucker, and then fights are breaking out in the audience, and the presenter looks really shocked although you know he’s secretly delighted because it’ll all be in the
Sun
again. That
Livenight
?’

‘Yes,’ Tania said tightly.

‘You want her on the programme?’

‘Yes, and as it involves next week’s programme we don’t have an awful lot of time to play with. Is she in?’

‘No, but I’m Merrily Watkins’s personal assistant, and I have to warn you she doesn’t like to talk about the other stuff. Which is what this is about, right? The Rev. Spooky Watkins, from Deliverance?’

Tania didn’t reply.

‘I could do it, of course, if the money was OK. I know all her secrets. I’d be
very
good, and controversial. I’ll call
anyone
a motherfucker.’

‘Thank you very much,’ Tania said drily. ‘We will bear you in mind, when you turn twelve.’

‘I’m sixteen!’

‘Just tell her I called. Have a good night.’

Jane grinned. That was all Eirion’s fault. Making her feel cool.

In the silence of the scullery, the phone went again.

‘Jane?’

‘Mum. Hey, guess wh—’

‘Listen, flower,’ Mum said, ‘I’ve got bad news.’

‘S
O
,
LIKE
...
HOW
long will you be?’

‘I just don’t know, flower. We came here in Gomer’s Land Rover. It was all a bit of a rush.’

‘She was never ill, was she?’ Jane said. ‘Like really
never
.’ The kid’s voice was suddenly high and hoarse. ‘You can’t count on anything, can you? Not even
you
.’

Merrily sighed. Everybody thought she could pull strings. Gomer and Minnie’s bungalow had become like the kid’s second home in the village, Minnie the closest she’d ever had to an adopted granny.

‘Flower, I’ll have to go. I’m on the pay phone in the corridor, and I’ve no more change. As soon as I get to know something...’

‘She’s not even all that old. I mean, sixty-something... what’s that? Nobody these days—’

Jane broke off. Remembering, perhaps, how young her own father had been when his life was sliced off on the motorway that night. But that was different. His girlfriend was in the car, too, and the hand of fate was involved there, in Jane’s view.

‘Minnie’s strong. She’ll fight it,’ Merrily said.

‘She isn’t going to win, though, is she? I can tell by your voice. Where’s Gomer?’

‘Gone back in, to be with her.’

‘How’s he taking it?’

‘Well, you know Gomer. You wouldn’t want him prowling around in your sickroom.’

Gomer, in retirement, groomed the churchyard, cleared the ditches, looked out for Merrily when Uncle Ted was doing devious, senior-churchwarden things behind her back. And dreamed of the old days – the great, rampaging days of Gomer Parry Plant Hire.

‘He’ll just smash the place up or something, if they let her die,’ Jane concurred bleakly.

Meaning she herself would like to smash something up, possibly the church.

How many hours had they been here? Hospitals engendered their own time zones. Merrily hung up the phone and turned back into the ill-lit passage, teeming now: visiting hours. Once, she’d had a dream of purgatory, and it was like a big hospital, a brightly lit Brueghel kind of hospital, with all the punters helpless in operation gowns, and the staff scurrying around, feeding a central cauldron steaming with fear.

‘Merrily?’

From a trio of nurses, one detached herself and came across.

‘Eileen? I thought you were over at the other place.’

‘You get moved around. We’ll all end up in one place, anyway, if they ever finish building it, and won’t that be a fockin’ treat?’ Eileen Cullen put out a forefinger, lifted Merrily’s hair from her shoulder. ‘You’re not wearing your collar, Reverend. You finally dump the Auld Feller, or what?’

‘We’re still together,’ Merrily said. ‘And it’s still hot.’

‘Jesus, that’s disgusting.’

‘Actually, I had to leave home in a hurry.’ Merrily spotted Gomer coming out of the ward, biting on an unlit cigarette, for comfort. ‘I came with a friend. His wife’s had a serious heart attack – unexpected. You won’t say anything cynical, will you?’

‘What’s his name?’ Sister Cullen was crop-haired and angular and claimed to have left Ulster to escape from ‘bloody religion’.

‘Gomer. Gomer Parry.’

‘Well then, Mr Parry,’ Cullen said briskly as Gomer came up, blinking dazedly behind his bottle glasses, ‘you look to me to be in need of a cuppa – with a drop of something in there to take away the taste of machine tea, am I right?’ She beckoned one of the nurses over. ‘Kirsty, would you take Mr Parry to my office and make him a special tea? Stuff’s in my desk, bottom drawer.’