Crybbe (AKA Curfew) (46 page)

   
Powys slid the Uher into the
empty pew next to Fay and stepped in after it. Fay kept on looking directly
ahead, over the prayer-book ledge, seeing, near the front of the church, the
heads of Jack Preece and Jimmy Preece. One of the few places you ever saw these
heads uncapped.

   
'And we pray, too,' Murray
intoned passionlessly, 'for the Preece family in its time of sorrow and loss. .
.'

   
Fay saw young Warren Preece,
head nodding rhythmically now and then, as if connected to some invisible
Walkman.

   
Saw Mrs Preece, Jimmy's wife,
hands clasped in prayer, expecting to see a damp tissue crumpled in her palm.
But Mrs Preece, seen side-on, looked as dry-eyed and stern as her husband. They
seemed to have their eyes open as they prayed - if indeed they
were
praying.

   
Looking around. Fay found that
even-one's were open, everyone she could see.

   
Crybbe: a place where emotions
were buried as deep as the dead.

   
Wisely, perhaps, Murray didn't
make a big deal of it. He went into the Lord's Prayer and didn't mention
Jonathon Preece again.

   
Fay relaxed.

   
What had she expected? A
denunciation from the pulpit? All heads turned in mute accusation?

   
Whatever, she breathed again.
And became aware of the significance of something she must surely have noticed
already -
 
the presence of her father, on
the end of a pew two rows in front of her and Powys.

   
The Canon went to church every
Sunday, sometimes attending both the morning and evening services. He sat near
the front and sang loudly - 'Bit of moral support for young Murray - boy needs
all the back-up he can get.'

   
So what was he doing further
back, a couple of rows behind the nearest fully occupied pew? Could it be
something to do with there being only one other person on Alex's pew and the
person being at the same end of the pew as Alex? And being a woman?

   
'Bloody hell,' said Fay to
herself. 'He's found a totty.'

Guy Morrison woke up into the greyness of . . . 5.a.m., 5.30?

   
He found his watch on the
bedside table.

   
It told him the time was 11.15.

   
For crying out loud! He turned
over and found he was alone in a king-size bed of antique pine, in a
pink-washed room with large beams in the ceiling and a view, through small
square panes, of misty hills. He'd never seen this view before.

   
Guy lay down again, regulating
his breathing.

   
He saw a door then, and a
glimpse of mauve tiles told him it led to an
en suite
bathroom, which put him in mind of another bathroom, full
of seeping yellow.

   
With a momentary clenching of
stomach muscles, everything came back.

   
He remembered peeing on his
shoes in the dark paddock because she wouldn't let him return to that bathroom
- not that he needed much persuading.

   
He remembered them staying in
the kitchen for a long time, drinking coffee - him not talking much and not
listening much either, after she'd been gushing like a broken fire-hydrant for
an hour or so - until it was nearly light and she'd decided it was safe to go
to bed. This bed. He remembered waking up periodically to find her hanging on
to him in her fitful, unquiet sleep and wondering how he could ever have found
her so attractive.

   
Guy pushed back the duvet to
find he was naked, and he couldn't see his clothes anywhere. If he went downstairs
like this it would be just his luck to find the vicar and the entire bloody
Women's Institute having morning coffee in the drawing-room.

   
He went into the
en suite
bathroom, looked at himself in
the mirror and was horrified at the state of his hair and the growth of his
beard, detecting a distressing amount of grey and white stubble. He looked
around for something to shave with - normally, he used a state-of-the-art
rechargeable twice a day - and could find only a primitive kind of safely
razor.

   
Remembering, at this point, the
old man with the cut-throat razor in the other bathroom. And hours later in the
well-lit kitchen, thrusting aside his fourth cup of coffee, asking her
directly, 'Are you telling me it was a
ghost
?'

   
He'd once done a documentary
about ghosts. They were, the programme had suggested, nature's holograms.
Something like that. You might get images of the dead; you could just as easily
have images of the living. When the phenomenon was eventually understood it
would be no more frightening than a mirage.

   
This one was frightening, he
supposed, only briefly, in retrospect. What had he really felt when he saw the
glow around the door and then walked into the bathroom and the old man had
looked up and met his eyes? Fear, or a kind of fascination?

   
Did this old man have eyes? He
must have had. Guy couldn't recall his features. Only a figure bent over the
wash-basin, shaving. The image, perhaps, of a man who had lived in this house
for many years and perhaps shaved thousands of times in that very basin - well,
perhaps not that actual basin, but certainly in the room. And this mundane,
everyday ritual had imprinted itself on the atmosphere.

   
The apparition was frightening,
Guy decided, because it happened at night during a power cut. Also, because he
feeling a few misgivings about what he'd got himself into a was perhaps a
little jittery anyway.

   
Guy shaved with the razor, his
first wet-shave in years, and cut himself twice, quite noticeably - no
pieces-to-camera for
him
for a couple
of days. Perhaps this chap didn't have an electric shaver because he couldn't
rely on one with all the power cuts they apparently had. Jocasta had gone on
and on last night about the power cuts and the exorbitant electricity bills.
How living in the country wasn't a simple life at all and certainly not cheap.
How she couldn't get out of here fast enough. How her poor husband was weak and
naive beyond comprehension.

   
Guy didn't like the sound of
that bit at all, much preferred screwing happily married women whose only need
was a touch of glamour in their lives.

   
The true horror of the night,
now he thought about it, had been the hours he'd spent with a furrowed-faced
Jocasta in the kitchen afterwards, listening to her whingeing on and on.

   
'Guy, where are you?'

   
He looked around the bathroom
door and saw her standing by the bed. She wore a floor-length Japanese silk
dressing-gown and fresh make-up. Facade fully restored. She must have spent an
hour or so in here before he was awake.

   
'Good morning, Jocasta.' Guy
stepped naked and smiling into the bedroom, forgetting about the two cuts on
his face, staunched by small pieces of soft toilet tissue. Perhaps . . .
Perhaps he could afford to give her just one more . . .

   
But she didn't look at him in
any meaningful way. 'Please get dressed," Jocasta said crisply. 'I want to
show you something.'

   
Guy's smile vanished.

   
'Your clothes are in Bedroom
Two, across the passage. Coffee and croissants in ten minutes.'

   
And Jocasta swished away,
leaving him most offended. Women did not turn their backs and swish away from
Guy Morrison.

   
When he arrived in the kitchen
nearly twenty minutes later, he was fully dressed, right up to his olive
leather jacket, and fully aware again of who he was. He accepted coffee but
declined a croissant. He must, he said, be off. Perhaps she would give him a
time for the exhibition opening, keeping it as light as possible because he had
quite a few people to see.

   
Jocasta pushed a large folder
towards him across the kitchen table. 'I'd be glad,' she said, 'if you could
take a look at these.'

   
'Look, I
am
rather pushed . . .'

   
'It won't take a minute.' She
was very composed this morning, probably embarrassed as hell about last night's
tearful sequence. He opened the folder in a deliberately cursory fashion. What
the hell was all this about?
 
Was he
expected to
buy
something?

   
The drawing was pen-and-ink.
The face was inspecting itself in a mirror. Every wrinkle on the face - and
there were many - was deeply etched. The eyes were sunken, the cheeks hollow,
the nose bulbous.

   
Guy inhaled sharply. He looked
up at Jocasta in her Japanese dressing-gown, could tell she was working hard to
hide her feelings, holding a mask over her anticipation. Anticipation and
something else. Something altogether less healthy.

   
He looked down at the drawing
again. He felt a deep suspicion and a growing alarm.

   
'Is this some son of joke?'

   
'Is it him?' Jocasta asked.

   
'I don't know what you mean.
Who did these?'
   
'Is it
him
?'

   
Of course it was him. It was
either him or Guy was going mad. His deep suspicion was suddenly drenched in
cold confusion and a bitter, acrid dread.

   
'Look at the next one.'

   
All the sensation had left his
fingers. He watched them, as if they were someone else's fingers, lifting the
first drawing, laying it to one side, face-down on the table.

   
He didn't understand.

   
A moment earlier, he saw, the
old man had slashed his throat. The open razor had fallen from one spasmed hand
- it was drawn in mid-air, floating a fraction of an inch below a finger and
thumb - while the fingers of the other hand we pushing into the opened throat
itself, as if trying to hold the slit tubes together, to block the tunnels of
blood.

   
The blood was black ink, blotch
upon blotch, spread joyously, as if the pen nib was a substitute for the cut
throat razor.

   
Guy thrust the drawing aside,
came raggedly to his feet. He stumbled to the sink and threw up what seemed
like half a gallon of sour coffee.

   
It was not the drawing, he
thought as he retched. It was the knowledge of what, if he'd stayed a moment
longer in the bathroom last night, he would have seen.

   
He wiped his mouth with the
back of a hand, saw Jocasta watching him in distaste, knew exactly what she was
thinking: that perhaps all men were as pathetic as her husband.

   
'I'm sorry,' Guy said. He
washed his hands and his face, snatched a handful of kitchen towel to wipe
them. No, dammit, he wasn't sorry at all.

   
'I think you owe me an
explanation,' he said coldly.

Murray Beech leaned out of his pulpit, hands gripping its edges, as if
he were sitting up in the bath.

   
'And what,' he demanded, '
is
this so-called New Age? Can there be
any true meaning in a concept quite so vague?'

   
He paused.

   
'The New Age,' he said heavily.

   
He glared out into the church -
late-medieval and not much altered. 'Some of you may remember a popular song,
"This is the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius".'

   
'He's going to knock it, then,'
Powys whispered to Fay.

   
'Well, of course he's going to
knock it,' Fay said, out of the side of her mouth. 'That's why I'm here.'

   
The Uher sat on the pew at her
side, its spools turning, the microphone wedged between two prayer books on the
ledge, she was recording the sermon for her own reference. She wouldn't get
anything of broadcast quality at this range and she hadn't got permission
anyway. She'd talk to him on tape afterwards, throw his own words back at him
and see how he reacted.

   
'"Harmony
  
and
  
Understanding",'
  
Murray
quoted. "Sympathy and Trust Abounding".'
   
Alien concepts in Crybbe, Fay thought
cynically. The vicar's words must be settling on this comatose congregation
with all the weight of ash-flakes from a distant bonfire.