James backed off a little. 'There are some who say it strengthens the Church. Have my doubts about that, but there's nothing I can do now. You're here, and you at least seem like a reasonable sort of woman, head screwed on.'

'Thank you very much,' Merrily said acidly.

'But you must understand my position, Mrs Watkins. Where my family stands. We have a role. That role, regardless of how we may feel as individuals, is to resist change. It's what we do. We defend. And so I opposed your appointment, made no secret of it. Well, all right, that battle's lost, it's over. You're here. Generally speaking, under most circumstances, you can now count on my support.'

Merrily said nothing.

'So long,' he said, 'as you remain sensitive to the best interests of this village.'

'I see. And if' Merrily prised herself painfully from the Aga 'on some significant and controversial issue, we don't agree on what those best interests might be?'

'I really don't think,' said James Bull-Davies, 'that you would ever be so short-sighted.'

'But say there was. Say there was an issue on which your idea of what was in the best interests of the village was in conflict with what I considered to be morally and spiritually right.'

He sighed. 'You make it hard for me, Mrs Watkins. And perhaps for yourself.'

Merrily took a deep breath. 'You haven't answered my question. How would you react in a situation where we found it impossible to work out our differences?'

'All right. Depending on the seriousness of the, er, matter under discussion, I should be obliged to use what influence I have. To get you out of the parish.'

Like your wretched ancestor did with Wil Williams? Merrily didn't say it.

She didn't say it.

'Thank you for your honesty,' she said.

He nodded to her and left before she could pour his tea.

When Jane came back with the fish and chips, she found her mother white-faced and furious, hands wrapped around the chrome bar of the Aga and twisting.

'Mum ...?' Jane stood in the doorway, holding the hot paper package. 'What ...?'

'Put them in the warming oven.' Mum's voice was a small, curled-up thing. 'We'll go and get the car.'

'Car?'

'And the sleeping bags, if you want.'

'We're staying the night?'

'Yeah. We bloody are.'

'Oh. What changed your mind? Something he said?'

'We're getting our feet under the bloody table. We're letting the good folk of Ledwardine know we've arrived.'

Mum's hands had stopped twisting on the bar. She was very, very still now.

'No more shit.' She'd never used that word to Jane before. 'No more shit.'

14.

Grown Women, or What?

TRUST NOBODY.

OK, not a very Christian maxim, but ...

Merrily dragged a bulging suitcase through the Black Swan's porch and out on to the steps.

Remembering being in this very spot on Saturday night, in the frozen moments before the James Bull-Davies drama, when Dermot Child had so confidently slipped an arm around her waist, shortly after explaining to her how Cassidy and Powell, politicians both, had nominated her for the role of parish scapegoat.

Stitched up, sexually patronized ... and now, openly threatened.

Stuff them all.

Even less Christian. What was this place doing to her? Were all rural parishes this stifling?

Jane had already carried down a bag full of toiletries and overnight stuff, a few clothes. Merrily had stopped at reception to leave a message for Roland, the manager, who, with the approach of the real tourist season, had been mildly indicating that he could use their rooms more profitably. As a tourist venue, Ledwardine was finally taking off.

Just at the moment, and for the first time, Merrily felt like taking off too. They'd been in Ledwardine over a month, and the only resident she'd felt entirely relaxed with had been Miss Devenish. Of whom the cautious Ted Clowes had once said, Delightful old girl, may be some sort of witch. Don't be tempted to get too close.

Plaintive music drifted across the residents' car park, in the yard behind the inn. It was coming from the Volvo, their onetime 'family car later spurned by Sean for something smaller and faster and, as it turned out, less resistant to impact. The Volvo still had the eight-speaker stereo with built-in CD-autochanger presented to Sean, as such items often had been, by A Client. As Merrily got in, a wispy male voice sang low and breathy over an acoustic wash.

Walked her up and down the garden in the rain.

I called her name.

She didn't know it ...

'Turn it down, huh, Jane.'

'Isn't it great? It's like really moving. His girlfriend's a junkie and he doesn't-'

'It's OK. Sounds like, what's his name? He killed himself Nick Drake?'

'Nick Drake killed himself?'

'We had all his albums when I was a kid, courtesy of your Uncle Jonathan in his morose phase. Listen, I said we wouldn't be back tonight, but we'd get the rooms cleaned out by tomorrow night, so that Roland can charge twice as much for them. So don't make any other arrangements, all right?'

'Would I?'

'No, flower,' Merrily said. 'You wouldn't. You're my very best friend.'

'Oh please!' Jane made a vomiting sound. 'You can't be that sad!'

Merrily turned on the engine for the first time in days. All she had to do was drive out of the yard, across the square and about thirty yards down Church Street to where the vicarage drive was overhung by a weeping birch. Although she didn't even get out of second gear, it felt like driving across some distant frontier into another country. A foreign country where no one could be trusted.

'Oh, I can, flower,' Merrily said.

Through the eight speakers on the dashboard, the rear parcel shelf and all four doors the same voice sang another song, its muted chorus concluding, ... and it's always on the sunny days you feel you can't go on.

Jane picked up the CD box from the dash, running her finger down the track list as the Volvo wobbled over the cobbles. The track was called Sunny Days, and it was followed by one called Song for Nick.

By nightfall, they must have walked all over the vicarage about four times, trying to make it seem smaller. And failing, as Merrily always knew they would.

Yeah, sure, it was a big mistake, coming to camp here a futile gesture of defiance from Merrily, a silly adventure for Jane.

They were both overwhelmed. Even small houses looked enormous without furniture. Even small, new houses. This place without a TV set, a microwave, even a bookcase full of paperbacks was oppressive with age. In the light of naked bulbs, the walls looked grey and damp. Upstairs, where wardrobes had stood, there were great meshes of cobwebs, big as fishermen's nets.

'Before ...' Jane said. 'Before ... it just looked big. You know what I mean?'

Merrily nodded. Freshly vacated, the house was huge and naked and dead, its skeleton of woodwormed oak exposed the shrunken remains of trees, killed half a millennium ago, embalmed and mummified in the walls. How, with their minimal furniture, their token pots and pans, could they possibly get its blood flowing again?

'I wonder if I'm allowed to take in lodgers,' Merrily said gloomily. 'Maybe one of those guys who sit in the middle of Hereford with a penny whistle and a dog.'

'Or four of them,' Jane said. 'All with dogs. Barking.'

Because it was so quiet. Whether it was the trees all around or whatever, you wouldn't know you were near the centre of the village.

After Sean's death, before she'd gone to college, she'd sold all the fancy new furniture, the rich-lawyer toys. This is tragic, her mother had said, all these nice things ...you may find you regret it one day when you have a big house again.

I'm never going to have a big house again, Merrily had said very calmly.

'Still,' Jane said. 'We're seeing it at its very worst. It can only get better and better, can't it?'

'It can, flower. And it will. Look, let's forget this idea. Mrs Peat's coming tomorrow, the cleaner. Why don't we let her have a go at it first? Come on, let's go back to the pub.'

Jane hesitated. She was standing by the window in the drawing room made mauve by dull twilight through the surrounding trees. Across the room the inglenook yawned like an open tomb, its lintel two feet thick. There'd been an archaic, coal-effect electric fire in there when the Haydens were here; now it was just blackened stone, and you couldn't light a fire because the wide chimney had been sealed off for insulation.

'Buy you dinner, OK?' Merrily said. 'We could extend to that. Not in the bar. I mean in the restaurant. Those chips'll be all stuck together by now, anyway.'

It was just stone flags underfoot, like the ones in the church but without the memorials and carved-out skulls. You could spend a year's stipend just carpeting the downstairs.

'What do you say, flower?'

'No.' Jane stamped a foot on the stone. 'We should stay. It's stupid to be scared of your house. Are we grown women, or what?'

In the end, they slept in the bedroom Merrily had used that first night. At least it had a wooden floor. They spread out the red and blue sleeping bags bought for a camping holiday in the Lake District, a holiday which never happened, the summer after Sean died.

It was still cold at night, especially in here. The sleeping bags were a couple of feet apart, up against the wall with the door in it. Two kids in a haunted house.

'Isn't it funny,' Jane said into the darkness, 'how, when you finally get to bed on a cold night, you always want to go to the loo?'

'All in the mind. Which means I'm not going with you.'

'Did I ask you to?'

'Think of something else,' Merrily said. 'It'll go away.'

'OK.'

Silence. Odd, really; a place this old, you expected creaks and groans. Didn't timber-frame houses kind of settle down for the night?

'Mum ...'

'Mm-mm.'

'You ever know anybody who committed suicide?'

The kid had always been good at choosing her moments.

'I can't think,' Merrily said. 'Nobody close, anyway.'

There was Edgar Powell, of course, whose inquest was to be concluded tomorrow. But she hadn't really known him, only seen him. In the last hour of the last night of his life. Go to sleep, Jane.

'What happened to Nick Drake?'

Merrily sighed. 'I don't know if that was suicide or not.'

'You said he killed himself.'

'Well, he died of an overdose of antidepressants, so he must have taken them himself. Whether he actually intended to take an overdose seems to be questionable. He was just a sad, withdrawn young guy whose career wasn't taking off, that's all. It was before you were born, anyway.'

Before you were born. Another lifetime. Before Jane was born, Merrily had been almost a child. In a few years' time, Jane would be older than Merrily had been then. Was probably already, in some ways, more mature. Over the congealed chips, she'd explained how James Bull-Davies had made her so angry, and Jane had said, If he's so sensitive to the best interests of the village, what's he doing shacking up with that woman?

What indeed? Merrily rolled on to her side.

'Mum.'

'What?'

'If Dad hadn't been killed, would he have gone to jail?'

God almighty. Dark Night of the Soul, or what?

'I don't know. It's possible. He might just have been struck off. Wasn't a criminal. As such. He was just frustrated and he could see people around him making lots of money in unorthodox ways. And they became his clients. You know all this.'

'When did you find out?'

'When it was too late to stop him.'