A Crown of Lights Read online

  ‘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.’

  3

  Loved Like That

  ‘SO, 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.’

  Gomer glanced at Merrily. She moved to follow him, but Cullen put out a restraining hand. ‘Not for you, Reverend. You’ve got your God to keep your spirits up. Spare me a minute?’

  ‘A minute?’

  ‘Pity you’re out of the uniform... still, it’s the inherent holiness that counts. All it is, we’ve got a poor feller in a state of some distress, and it’ll take more than special tea to cope with him, you know what I’m saying.’

  Merrily frowned, thinking, inevitably, of the first time she’d met Eileen Cullen, across town at Hereford General, which used to be a lunatic asylum and for one night had seemed in danger of reverting back.

  ‘Ah no,’ said Cullen, ‘you only get one of those in a lifetime. This isn’t even a patient. More like your man, Gomer, here – with the wife. And I don’t know what side of the fence he’s on, but I’d say he’s very much a religious feller and would benefit from spiritual support.’

  ‘For an atheist, you’ve got a lot of faith in priests.’

  ‘No, I’ve got faith in women priests, which is not much at all to do with them being priests.’

  ‘What would you have done if I hadn’t been here?’

  Cullen put her hands on her narrow hips. ‘Well, y’are here, love, so where’s the point in debating that one?’

  The corridor had cracked walls and dim economy lighting.

  ‘I’d be truly happy about leaving this dump behind,’ Cullen said, ‘if I didn’t feel sure the bloody suits were building us a whole new nightmare.’

  ‘What’s his name, this bloke?’

  ‘Mr Weal.’

  ‘First name?’

  ‘We don’t know. He’s not a man who’s particularly forthcoming.’

  ‘Terrific. He seen Paul Hutton?’ The hospital chaplain.

  ‘Maybe.’ Cullen shrugged. ‘I don’t know. But you’re on the spot and he isn’t. What I thought was... you could perhaps say a prayer or two. He’s Welsh, by the way.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with the price of eggs?’

  ‘Well, he might be Chapel or something. They’ve got their own ways. You’ll need to play it by ear on that.’

  ‘You mean in case he refuses to speak to me in English?’

  ‘Not Welsh like that. He’s from Radnorshire. About half a mile over the border, if that.’

  ‘Gosh. Almost normal, then.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Cullen smiled. Merrily followed her into a better lit area with compact, four-bed wards on either side, mainly elderly women in them. A small boy shuffled in a doorway, looking bored and aggressively crunching crisps.

  ‘So what’s the matter with Mrs Weal?’

  ‘Stroke.’

  ‘Bad one?’

  ‘You might say that. Oh, and when you’ve said a wee prayer with him you could take him for a coffee.’

  ‘Eileen—’

  ‘It’s surely the Christian thing to do,’ Cullen said lightly.

  They came to the end of the passage, where there was a closed door on their right. Cullen pushed it open and stepped back. She didn’t come in with Merrily.

  She was out of there fast, pulling the door shut behind her. She leaned against the partition wall. Her lips made the words, nothing audible came out.

  She’s dead.

  Cullen shrugged. ‘Seen one before, have you not?’

  ‘You could’ve explained.’
/>   ‘Could’ve sworn I did. Sorry.’

  ‘And the rest of it?’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Quite.’ What she’d seen replayed itself in blurred images, like a robbery captured on a security video: the bedclothes turned down, the white cotton nightdress slipped from the shoulders of the corpse. The man beside the bed, leaning over his wife – heavy like a bear, some ungainly predator. He hadn’t turned around as Merrily entered, nor when she backed out.

  She moved quickly to shake off the shock, pulling Eileen Cullen a few yards down the passage. ‘What in God’s name was he doing?’

  ‘Ah, well,’ Cullen said. ‘Would he have been cleaning her up, now?’

  ‘On account of the NHS can’t afford to pay people to take care of that sort of thing any more?’

  Cullen tutted on seeing a tea trolley abandoned in the middle of the corridor.

  ‘Yes?’ Merrily said.

  Cullen pushed the trolley tidily against a wall.

  ‘There now,’ she said. ‘Well, the situation, Merrily, is that he’s been doing that kind of thing for her ever since she came in, three days ago. Wouldn’t let anyone else attend to her if he was around – and he’s been around most of the time. He asks for a bowl and a cloth and he washes her. Very tenderly. Reverently, you might say.’

  ‘I saw.’

  ‘And then he’ll wash himself: his face, his hands, in the same water. It looked awful touching at first. He’d also insist on trying to feed her, when it was still thought she might eat. And he’d be feeding himself the same food, like you do with babies, to encourage her.’

  ‘How long’s she been dead?’

  ‘Half an hour, give or take. She was a bit young for a stroke, plainly, and he naturally couldn’t come to terms with that. At his age, he was probably convinced she’d outlive him by a fair margin. But there you go: overattentive, overpossessive, what you will. And now maybe he can’t accept she’s actually dead.’

  ‘I dunno. It looked... ritualistic almost, like an act of worship. Or did I imagine that?’ Merrily instinctively felt in her bag for her cigarettes before remembering where she was. ‘Eileen, what do you want to happen here?’

  Cullen folded her arms. ‘Well, on the practical side...’

  ‘Which is all you’re concerned about, naturally.’

  ‘Absolutely. On the practical side, goes without saying we need the bed. So we need to get her down to the mortuary soon, and that means persuading your man out of there first. He’d stay with her all night, if we let him. The other night an auxiliary came in and found him lying right there on the floor beside the bed, fast asleep in his overcoat, for heaven’s sake.’

  ‘God.’ Merrily pushed her hands deep down into the pockets of Jane’s duffel. ‘To be loved like that.’ Not altogether sure what she meant.

  Cullen sniffed. ‘So you’ll go back in and talk to him? Mumble a wee prayer or two? Apply a touch of Christian tenderness? And then – employing the tact and humanity for which you’re renowned, and which we’re not gonna have time for – just get him the fock out of there, yeah?’

  ‘I don’t know. If it’s all helping him deal with his grief...’

  ‘You’re wimping out, right? Fair enough, no problem.’

  Merrily put down her bag on the trolley. ‘Just keep an eye on that.’

  Well, she didn’t know too much about rigor mortis, but she thought that soon it wouldn’t be very easy to do what was so obviously needed.

  ‘We should close her eyes,’ Merrily said, ‘don’t you think?’

  She put out a hesitant hand towards Mrs Weal, thumb and forefinger spread. The times she’d done this before were always in the moments right after death, when there was still that light-smoke sense of a departing spirit. But, oh God, what if the woman’s eyelids were frozen fast?

  ‘You will,’ Mr Weal said slowly, ‘leave her alone.’

  Merrily froze. He was standing sentry-stiff. A very big man in every physical sense. His face was broad, and he had a ridged Roman nose and big cheeks, reddened by broken veins – a farmer’s face. His greying hair was strong and pushed back stiffly.

  Without looking at her, he said, ‘What is your purpose in being here, madam?’

  ‘My name’s Merrily.’ She let her hand fall to her side. ‘I’m the... vicar of Ledwardine.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I was just... I happened to be in the building, and the ward sister asked me to look in. She thought you might like to... talk.’

  Could be a stupid thing to say. If there ever was a man who didn’t like to talk, this was possibly him. Between them, his wife’s eyes gazed nowhere, not even into the beyond. They were filmed over, colourless as the water in the metal bowl on the bedside table, and they seemed the stillest part of her. He’d pulled the bedclothes back up, so that only her face was on show. She looked young enough to be his daughter. She had light brown hair, and she was pretty. Merrily imagined him out on his tractor, thinking of her waiting for him at home. Wife number two, probably, a prize.

  ‘Mr Weal – look, I’m sorry I don’t know your first name...’

  His eyes were downcast to the body. He wore a green suit of hairy, heavy tweed. ‘Mister,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Oh.’ She stepped away from the bed. ‘Right. Well, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you... any further.’

  There was a long silence. The water bowl made her think of a font, of last rites, a baptism of the dying. Then he squinted at her across the corpse. He blinked once – which seemed, curiously, to release tension, and he grunted.

  ‘J.W. Weal, my name.’

  She nodded. It had obviously been a mistake to introduce herself just as Merrily, like some saleswoman cold-calling.

  ‘How long had you been married, Mr Weal?’

  Again, he didn’t reply at once, as though he was carefully turning over her question to see if a subtext dropped out.

  ‘Nine years, near enough.’ Yerrs, he said. His voice was higher than you’d expect, given the size of him, and brushed soft.

  Merrily said, ‘We... never know what’s going to come, do we?’

  She looked down at Mrs Weal, whose face was somehow unrelaxed. Or maybe Merrily was transferring her own agitation to the dead woman. Who was perhaps her own age, mid to late thirties? Maybe a little older.

  ‘She’s... very pretty, Mr Weal.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t she be?’

  Dull light had awoken in his eyes, like hot ashes raked over. People probably had been talking – J.W. Weal getting himself an attractive young wife like that. Merrily wondered if there were grown-up children from some first Mrs Weal, a certain sourness in the hills.

  She swallowed. ‘Do you, er... belong to a particular church?’ Cullen was right; he looked like the kind of man who would do, if only out of tradition and a sense of rural protocol.

  Mr Weal straightened up. She reckoned he must be close to six and a half feet tall, and built like a great stone barn. His eyebrows met, forming a stone-grey lintel.

  ‘That, I think, is my personal business, thank you.’

  ‘Right. Well...’ She cleared her throat. ‘Would you mind if I prayed for her? Perhaps we could—’

  Pray together, she was about to say. But Mr Weal stopped her without raising his voice which, despite its pitch, had the even texture of authority.

  ‘I shall pray for her.’

  Merrily nodded, feeling limp. This was useless. There was no more she could say, nothing she could do here that Eileen Cullen couldn’t do better.

  ‘Well, I’m very sorry for the intrusion.’

  He didn’t react – just looked at his wife. For him, there was already nobody else in the room. Merrily nodded and bit her lip, and walked quietly out, badly needing a cigarette.

  ‘No?’ Eileen Cullen levered herself from the wall.

  ‘Hopeless.’

  Cullen led her up the corridor, well away from the door. ‘I’d hoped to have him away before Menna’s sister got here. I’m not
in the best mood tonight for mopping up after tears and recriminations.’

  ‘Sorry... whose sister?’

  ‘Menna’s – Mrs Weal’s. The sister’s Mrs Buckingham and she’s from down south and a retired teacher, and there’s no arguing with her. And no love lost between her and that man in there.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Don’t ask. I don’t know. I don’t want to know.’

  ‘What was Menna like?’

  ‘I don’t know. Except for what I hear. She wasn’t doing much chatting when they brought her in. But even if she’d been capable of speech, I doubt you’d have got much out of her. Lived in the sticks the whole of her life, looking after the ole father like a dutiful child’s supposed to when her older and wiser sister’s fled the coop. Father dies, she marries an obvious father figure. Sad story but not so unusual in a rural area.’

  ‘Where’s this exactly?’

  ‘I forget. The Welsh side of Kington. Sheep-shagging country.’

  ‘Charming.’

  ‘They have their own ways and they keep closed up.’

  The amiable, voluble Gomer Parry, of course, was originally from the Radnor Valley. But this was no time to debate the pitfalls of ethnic stereotyping.

  ‘How did she come to have a stroke? Do you know?’

  ‘You’re not on the Pill yourself, Merrily?’

  ‘Er... no.’

  ‘That would be my first thought with Menna. Still on the Pill at thirty-nine. It does happen. Her doctor should’ve warned her.’

  ‘Wouldn’t Mr Weal have known the dangers?’

  ‘He look like he would?’ Cullen handed Merrily her bag. ‘Thanks for trying – you did your best. Don’t go having nightmares. He’s just a poor feller loved his wife to excess.’

  ‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ Merrily said. ‘I think he’s going to need help getting his life back on track. That’s the kind of guy who goes back to his farm and hangs himself in the barn.’

  ‘If he had a barn.’

  ‘I thought he was a farmer.’

  ‘I don’t think I said that, did I?’

  ‘What’s he do, then? Not a copper?’

  ‘Built like one, sure. No, he’s a lawyer, as it happens. Listen, I’m gonna have a porter come up and we’ll do it the hard way.’