The Prayer of the Night Shepherd (3 page)

Traditional stability: that was a bloody joke.

It occurred to a man who was cycling home to Kington late at night – he’d been working at the munitions factory during the War. Near Hergest Court he saw this enormous hound which he’d never seen before and never saw again. The hound had huge eyes – that’s what impressed him most, the size of its eyes. The hound didn’t attack him, and he just kept cycling and I would imagine he cycled very fast. He had a feeling that there was something that just wasn’t real about it.

1

N
ORMALLY, SHE WOULDN’T
think of fogging the air around non-smoking parishioners, especially so soon after a service. Tonight was different. Tonight, Merrily needed not only this cigarette but what it was saying about her.

The cigarette said,
This woman is human. This woman is weak. Also, given the alleged findings on secondary smoking, this woman is selfish and inconsiderate. This is a serial sinner
.

Only it wasn’t getting through. Brenda Prosser’s eyes were glowing almost golden now. Twice she’d tried to sit down at the kitchen table and been pushed back to her feet by the electricity inside her. She had to hold on to the back of the chair to stop her hands trembling, and then the joy would make her mouth go slack and she’d shake her head, smiling helplessly.

‘Gone.’ Maybe the fourth time she’d said that – Brenda relishing the hard finality in the word: gone, gone, gone.

‘Just like it never was there, vicar,’ Big Jim Prosser said. His light grey suit was soaked and blackened across the shoulders. He stood with his back to the old Aga in the vicarage kitchen, and the Aga rumbled sourly.

And Merrily smoked and wondered how she should be responding. But the inner screen was blank. Just like Ann-Marie’s scan.

‘This is a miracle, sure t’be,’ Jim said.

Oh Christ. Any word but that
.

‘And, see, like I kept saying to Jim, hardly the first one, is it?’ Rain was still bubbled on Brenda’s forehead like the remains of a born-again baptism. ‘Not the first since you brought back the Evensong.’

‘Without the song.’ Merrily sat down, then abruptly stood up again and went to fill the kettle for tea. A dense curtain of rain swished across the dark window over the sink, as though it had been hosed.

They could have waited for her in the church porch, Brenda and Jim. But when the congregation was filing out, umbrellas going up, there they’d been, standing among the wet tombs and the headstones, both of them bareheaded, as though they were unaware of the sometimes-sleety rain. Like they were in some parallel dimension where it wasn’t cold and it wasn’t raining at all.

The truth was, Jim had said, as they followed Merrily to the vicarage, that they didn’t want to talk to anyone else, didn’t want to answer all the obvious questions about Ann-Marie. They thought it was only right that the vicar should be the first to know.

This was the first time that either Jim or Brenda had been to the Sunday evening service. They’d been among those older parishioners who were huffily avoiding it because they’d heard it was all changed, had become a bit unconventional, a bit
not for the likes of us
.

‘I pray we’ll be forgiven for ever doubting what you were trying to do, Merrily,’ Brenda said now.

So much for the experiment in Mystery.

Evensong
.

As in most parishes, the Sunday evening service had been killed a while ago, by falling congregations.

And then Merrily had suddenly brought it back.
Sunday evening in the church. Everyone welcome
. Just that. Nothing about a service.

The truth was that, after what had happened with Jenny Box, she’d been feeling guilty. Deliverance work had been separating her too often from her own parish, from the day-to-day cure of souls. She’d been too busy to notice the anomalous buds in the local flower bed until they were bursting into black blossom.

When she’d put this to the Bishop, he’d waved it away. Congregations were in free fall; it was a phase. Or it wasn’t a phase, but something truly sinister – the beginning of the end for organized Christianity. What about children? the Bishop asked; the new Archbishop of Canterbury was particularly worried about the absence of children in churches. Merrily had raised this issue with Jane, who seemed to have been a child like yesterday, and Jane had wrinkled her nose.

‘Who
needs
kids in church, anyway? Look at it this way – kids are not supposed to drink in pubs until they’re eighteen, so pubs are slightly mysterious... therefore cool. So like, obviously, the best way to invest in the future would be to ban the little sods from the church altogether. That way, they wouldn’t turn out like me.’

‘So the monthly Family Service, with kids doing readings, the quiz...’

‘Totally crap idea, I always said that. It just makes the Church look needy and pathetic. You have to cultivate the mystery. If you don’t bring back the mystery, you’re stuffed, Mum.’

It was worrying: increasingly these days the kid was making a disturbing kind of sense.

OK, then. When she brought back the service, she didn’t call it Evensong because there
was
no song. No hymns, no psalms. And no sermon, definitely no preaching. It was an experiment with Mystery.

She didn’t even call it a service. She didn’t wear the kit – no cassock, not even a dog collar after the first time – and she sat on a car cushion on the chancel steps. The heating, for what it was worth, would be on full, and pews were pulled out and angled into a semi-circle haloed by a wooden standard lamp that she’d liberated from the vestry. It was a quiet time, a low-key prelude to the working week. The first time, only four people had turned up, which partly dictated the form. Five weeks later, it was a congregation of around twenty, and growing, although
congregation
was hardly the word.

It would begin with tea and coffee and chat, turning into a discussion of people’s problems. Sometimes solutions were arrived at before the villagers went home. Small difficulties sorted: babysitters found, gardeners for old people. Sometimes it would quietly feed notions into the village, and issues would be resolved during the following week.

The church as forum, the church as catalyst. The polish-scented air as balm. How it should be.

And the Mystery.

As early as the third week, more personal issues had started to emerge. The ones you wouldn’t hear discussed on the street, certainly not by the people involved: marital problems, anxieties over illness and fears over kids and what they might be getting into. There was a surprising focus to these discussions, and when prayer came into it – as it usually did, in the end – it would happen spontaneously, rising like a ground mist in the nave.

Real
prayer... and somehow this was a seal of confidentiality. None of the problems raised in the church and distilled into prayer had ever drifted back to Merrily as gossip.

She was elated. It had been
cooking
. What she didn’t need at this stage was anything boiling over into myth-making.

Jim and Brenda Prosser ran the Eight till Late in the centre of the village. Their daughter, Ann-Marie, who last summer had been painlessly divorced, had moved into the flat over the shop, helping out there at weekends before going off clubbing in Hereford, with her mates. Ann-Marie’s illness had been a rumour for some weeks. Pasted-on smiles at the checkout, whispers about
tests
. On a Sunday night two weeks ago, Alice Meek, who had the fish and chip shop in Old Barn Lane, had said,
Brenda won’t talk about it, but it don’t look good. En’t there nothing we can do?

‘Alice,’ Brenda said now. ‘You know what Alice is like.’

‘Calls a spade a bloody ole shovel,’ Jim said.

‘We met Alice when we were coming back from Dr Kent’s house this afternoon, and she seemed to
know
.’

‘Only by your face, love,’ Jim said with affection.

The kettle began to hiss, and Merrily put tea in the pot. Brenda sat down at last. She was in her early sixties, had lost weight recently – no surprise there – and her bleach-blonde hair was fading back to white. Periodically, a hand trembled. Brenda folded both of them in her lap and stared across the refectory table at Merrily, like she was seeing the vicar in a strange new light.

‘Alice told us about the special prayers you had for Ann-Marie.’

‘Well, not—’ Merrily looked down at the table top. Of course it was special; all prayer should be special.

‘Alice said she lost track of time. She said she felt as if everybody there was together. United, you know? And that was also some of the newcomers she didn’t know. All united and they were part of something that was...
bigger
. Said she’d never known anything like that before. Alice said.’

Emotion had brought up the Welshness in Brenda’s voice. The Prossers had moved across from Brecon about fifteen years ago. Merrily felt flushed and uncertain. Happy, of course – happy for the Prossers and Ann-Marie. It was luminously wonderful, and she’d been conscious of reaching an unexpected level of conscious worship, but...

‘What did Dr Kent say exactly?’

‘He phoned for Ann-Marie just after lunch,’ Jim said. ‘He admitted he’d known since Friday, but he was afraid to say in case it was wrong. In case they’d somehow got the wrong medical records or whatever. He said he didn’t think it was possible the new tests had drawn a blank, couldn’t like get his head around it. So he was trying to get the consultant on the phone all of yesterday, and it wasn’t until this morning, see, when he managed to reach him at his home. Couldn’t believe it. Neither of them.’

‘He definitely confirmed that the scan was...’

‘Clear. Nothing there. And it
was
hers, no question of that. No mistake here, Merrily.’

‘What did the consultant say about it?’

Jim shrugged. ‘You know these fellers.’

‘Maybe they...’ Merrily bit her lip.
Made a mistake the first time
.

‘See, to be frank, Merrily, I’ve never been what you’d call a real churchgoer,’ Jim said. ‘I’m a local shopkeeper, struggling to stay in business. Sometimes I’ve come because it seemed to be expected.’

Brenda sat up. ‘Jim!’

‘No, let me say this. I want to. It’s like being a social drinker. I was a... how would you put it?’

‘Social worshipper?’ Merrily smiled. ‘That’s perilously close to martyrdom, Jim.’

‘What I’m trying to say...’ He’d reddened at last. ‘Well, if this isn’t a bloody miracle, Merrily, I wouldn’t recognize one, that’s all.’

Merrily tried to hold the smile. ‘Big word.’

Brenda said quickly, ‘Alice said you also prayed for Percy Joyce’s arthritis and—’

‘Yes, but that—’

‘And now he’s come off the steroids. You’re healing people, Merrily.’

The words echoed once, clearly in her head as the kettle began to scream and shake, and the kitchen lights seemed too bright.

‘I...’ Merrily ground her cigarette into the ashtray, twisting it from side to side. ‘Sometimes, God heals people.’

Sometimes
. It was a crucial word, because most times people were
not
healed.

Big Jim said gently, ‘We understands that. But He do need asking the right way, don’t He? What I’m saying, Merrily... something happened during that service, to concentrate people’s minds on it. Something a bit powerful, sort of thing. It’s a new kind of service, and you’re a new kind of vicar. Not what we was used to. Alice is telling—’

Everybody, probably.

‘Where’s Ann-Marie now?’

Brenda smiled. ‘In the pub, I expect, with her friends. She’ll be coming to thank you, have no doubts about—’

‘No... look...’ Merrily stood up. ‘I’m really, really happy for her and for you, and it does seem like a miracle. But the body’s a wonderful thing, and sometimes... I’d just be really glad if you didn’t say too much about that aspect of it, for the moment. For the time being. Until—’

Until when, exactly?

‘We’ll go now,’ Jim said.

‘You haven’t had your tea. I’m sorry...’

‘We never wanted to embarrass you, Merrily,’ Brenda said.

Most weeks, Lol would pull the property section out of Prof’s
Hereford Times
and toss it on the pile of papers they kept for lighting the stoves.

Wood-burners in a recording studio? Prof had been unsure about this, but the punters liked it. When the sound of a log collapsing into ash had filtered like a sigh into the mix of the final acoustic song that the guitar legend Tom Storey had recorded here last week, Tom had refused to lose it. Tom, who’d left yesterday, was superstitious about these things.

Tonight, Prof would be working in here, tinkering with Tom’s music perhaps until dawn. About eight p.m., Lol went out to the wood-shelter and packed a pile of blocks into a big basket, brought the basket into the stable that now housed the studio and bent to build a fire in the second stove.