December (73 page)

      
Periodically, she'd go and stand at the big picture window and
gaze out towards the wind-scoured hills stubbled with bare trees. Knowing that,
sooner or later, tonight or tomorrow night, she would go to the Abbey.

      
She'd not yet even seen the Abbey, but she'd dreamed of it
last night. In the dream, the Abbey had soared marble-white into a starry night
sky. The Abbey was magnificently floodlit by its own inner incandescence.

      
Such a contrast to the hunched-up grey cottages of Ystrad Ddu
crowding under their rocky canopy like old women under an umbrella.

      
The dream had been around her all day. This, she knew, was
what had made her so restless. The dream meant that when at last she went to
the Abbey, when she allowed herself to respond to its magnetic tug - a tug she
experienced every time she left the house and walked into the lane, knowing
where it ended - it must be at night, when the Abbey was at its most splendidly
amorphous. And then, even if there was no soaring marble, it would still soar
for her as it had in the dream.

      
Now the dream had come to the vicarage door in the form of a
small, dumpy child with telescope glasses and the brown uniform - unmistakable,
if creased and dusty - of a Gloucestershire convent school.

      
Meryl couldn't breathe as she put out a hand, expecting it to
slip through the brown blazer, through the child.

      
And the shock of the real, of the dream made flesh, made her
cry out.

      
'Oh my lord! It
is
you. It's ...' Frantically rummaging in her brain for the child's name.

      
'Vanessa,' the child said, in that voice that told you
something was wrong with her. Not wrong,
different.
She had a different type of mind, a differently organised body.

      
For the first time, to Meryl, a Down's Syndrome child seemed
as exotic as some extra-terrestrial being.

      
There was a great tumbling of Meryl's senses. Where had the
child, Vanessa, come from? How did she get here? How and why had she come
here?

      
When the miraculous occurred in your life, it was never the
way you imagined it would be. Not the Lady Bluefoot but a hideous spirit with a
torn face. Introduced not by a white-haired lady in veils but by a hulking,
rough-spoken cockney guitarist with psychic agoraphobia.

      
The child looked up at Meryl.

      
The child said, 'I'm awfully cold.'

      
'Come in at once, my sweet,' Meryl said effusively. 'Come and
get warm and I'll make you a lovely dinner.'

      
The child said, 'Can Grandad come in as well? And Weasel? They're
awfully cold, too.'

IX

AA

WEDNESDAY,
7 DECEMBER

Several times in the night,
Simon had gently lifted the Bible from his chest and placed it on his pillow.
And then, in rubber-soled sandals, had crept down the spiralling stairs by the
light of a pencil torch.

      
He'd placed himself in the smallest, topmost room. A cell with
a slit, and more than fifty steep stairs to reach it: a penance, of sorts. It
was also the room which the others were least likely to visit. So they wouldn't
see the other little Bibles - one at each corner of the bed.

      
Moira's room was immediately below his, along with a bathroom.
Then Dave, then Tom. Then another bathroom and also Prof Levin's room, which
was Simon's destination.

      
Very quietly, shading the torch, he would ease open Prof door
and peer in. Prof would be on his back and snoring. Or on his side and not
snoring. Or on his stomach with a pillow over his head.

      
No smell of wine. Only the ancient aroma of stone and dust on
the stairs.

      
No baluster jar tonight.

      
It never happened when you were prepared for it. Each time he
returned to his bed and his Bibles and slept fitfully.

      
Now, in the minutes before dawn, Simon, in his oldest jeans
and his sheepskin coat, let himself out of the tower by the studio entrance.
Into the dark groundmist.

      
Under his arm he carried the glazed Stamford-ware baluster
jar.

      
Under his sheepskin coat he was naked between the waist and
the white band of his clerical collar.

      
There was a hard frost under his trainers as he crossed the
grass to the other tower, the ruined one. The beam from his torch made a cold,
white spot the size of a ping-pong ball on the ground and then the walls of the
tower.

      
The lower stones in the walls were green with moss and peppery
with lichen, the colours almost lurid in the thin, bright beam. The walls
reared up on three sides. In the farthest right-hand corner was a black gouged
area, as though masonry had been ripped away by a giant
 
claw. Across this ruined, cavelike opening,
to waist-height, were three iron bars, modern, and a half-toppled sign, which
said in red: DANGER. KEEP OUT.

      
or you might wind up
running an accounting business from an electric wheelchair.

      
Behind the bar, steps led up into the tower.

      
Stones lay in jagged piles on the grass at the bottom of the
tower. Perhaps some of them had been winched from Isabel's lap and others from
the smashed skull of Gareth Smith, dead with his trousers around his ankles.

      
Simon looked up into the thick air, still blue-black between
the Gothic arches like hands steepled in prayer.

      
Then he set down the baluster jar underneath the lower iron
bar and climbed over the bar and into the well of darkness where the stairs
were.

      
He tucked the jar under his arm and shone the torch on to the
steps, greasy with moss and ice-trickles. It was just like the stairway in
their restored tower, a spiral.

      
Simon began to climb.

      
As he climbed, be found himself imagining the young Isabel
Pugh and Gareth Smith in December 1973. A cold night, but they wouldn't feel
it. They'd be hot with excitement, sharpened, on Isabel's part at least, with a
certain apprehension.

      
Thinking of Isabel in this context, Simon was surprised to
discover he'd developed an almost painful erection..

      
He stopped. He put down the baluster jar on the step by his
feet.

      
It was wrong. He would have to get rid of it. He pressed
himself against the cold, curving wall, dripping with damp; he filled his lungs
with brackish air full of the stench of decay.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
And then he emptied his mind.

      
It didn't work. On the wall above his head came a sudden,
irritable flaring of amber light. Somewhere out there a bird squawked, as
though the light had awakened it before it was ready. Simon snatched up the jar
and clambered up three more steps, until a deepset slit-window came in sight,
about a foot over his head. He climbed another step to reach it and stood
looking out, gulping in fresh, dawn air.

      
Here, just above the level of the mist, the sun was trying to
squeeze through, leaving long, livid bruises in the cloud-mass,

      
'It isn't wrong, is it?' Simon said aloud. And shouted out,
'It isn't fucking wrong at all!'

      
He pulled away from the window and staggered up the remaining
steps until the stone walls, and the dead weight of the Abbey, fell away and
the purple and orange clouds were all around him, parting like long hills for a
sudden bright river of coppery sunlight.

      
Simon pulled himself up to the stone platform, over which
there must once have been a roof. Below him, the countryside was still dark,
buried in black mist.

      
But he was above it, in the light.

      
Simon put down the jar and stood up on the top of the tower.

      
He touched his crotch. He was still hard. He thought of Isabel
and moaned.

      
In the east, above the trees, was silhouetted the point of the
Skirrid, the keel of an upturned boat. Above it, the sun swelling behind the
clouds. It was as if the Skirrid was helping to nudge the sun into view.

      
The swelling from Simon's groin rose into his solar plexus and
then upwards into his chest, expanding there and flooding light into his arms,
down to the tips of his fingers.

      
He held up his hands, and it was as though his fingers were
alight. The brightness throbbed in his chest; he could feel it flaring between
his ribs, pushing at his skin like the sun at the clouds.

      
And when the pale orange ball finally rolled free from the
clouds, a great sob erupted from Simon. For several minutes he stood there and
hung his head, rocking from side to side, tears bleeding from his half-closed
eyes.

      
Without thinking, he took off his sheepskin coat and stood,
naked to the waist in the icy morning.

      
Bent down and picked up the jar. It felt so much heavier up
here in the light. Despite its glaze, it would not reflect the sun.

      
'Figures,' Simon said.

      
A sour old smell drifted out of the jar. An old, old smell.
Baluster jars, sometimes made in Stamford, Lincolnshire, were commonly used in
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to serve wine imported in casks from
Bordeaux and Gascony.

      
Inside the Abbey, the jar had looked new. To Prof Levin, the
wine had seemed fresh.

      
Up here, in the dawn - the
first
light, unsullied by mist, not yet darkened by the Abbey - the baluster jar
had become a valuable antique.

      
Simon lifted it above his head like a trophy.

      
'Richard!'

      
In the dawn, the unsoiled time, there were no shadows around him
on the tower, only light.
      
'Can you hear me, you bastard?'

      
The clouds were edged with copper wire. Down there, in the
Abbey and its grounds, none of this would be visible.

      
'Parting of the ways,' Simon shouted. 'Official.'

      
He hefted the jar, the valuable antique, one last time and
hurled it at the sun.

      
For almost a second, or so it seemed, the jar was a black
stain on the bright morning. And then it dropped into the mist.

      
He didn't hear it shatter among the fallen masonry which had
lain on Isabel Pugh. Perhaps the mist of ages reabsorbed it.

      
Simon turned away from the sun and the Skirrid and looked back
into the black hole.

      
'God help me now,' he said, and lowered
himself back into the darkness.

For some reason - and this
had never happened before - Moira walked into the studio and threw her arms
around Simon.

      
'What happened?'

      
Simon grinned.

      
'Hey.' Moira stepped back and surveyed him shrewdly for about
ten seconds. 'You suddenly realised you're in love or something? Do I know
him?'

      
'Yes,' said Simon. 'Maybe. And no, you bloody well don't know
him.'

      
'Well, I'm pleased for you, Si. Now maybe you could explain
what this is about.'

      
'Wait till the others get here.'
      
'Could be after lunch.'
      
'It won't be.'

      
And he was right. Within ten minutes, they were all standing
around under the heavy white vaulted ceiling looking slightly bemused but not
hostile. One of the guys from the mobile canteen had turned up with a trolley
full of teas and coffees in styrofoam cups. Moira noticed Tom had had a shave
and Davey wasn't wearing his scarf.

      
This was bizarre. The biggest bunch of paranoids in the music
business and everybody looking almost relaxed.

      
Prof arrived last. Everybody cheered.