The Lamp of the Wicked Read Free Page B

him… What I’m saying is, if you want to arrange a little
tryst
, you have my blessing. And, er…’ jabbing a thumb towards the ceiling. ‘His too, I’d guess. He’s not inhuman. Presumably.’
    Jane sat back, arms folded. For a moment, Mum was almost smiling. Then she said brusquely, ‘Don’t you have homework?’
    ‘Done it. Double free period this afternoon. However, if that’s code for you want me to leave the room so you can call back, exchange a few steamy intimacies, I’d be happy to—’
    ‘Don’t push it, flower,’ Mum said mildly.
    ‘Push it? Jesus, if anybody ever
needed
a good push…’ Jane subsided into her chair, drumming her fingers on the refectory table. This was not the time.
    ‘Look at the time.’ Mum closed her eyes, the childlike bit dropping away. She was thirty-seven now, no getting around that – heading for the rapid slide into cronehood, with her prospect of happiness, which had seemed so close, receding again. ‘Parish meeting at half-seven, and we haven’t eaten yet.’
    ‘Not a problem.’ Jane stood up. ‘Why don’t I go down the chippy?’
    ‘I thought you were boycotting the chippy.’
    ‘They’re now claiming they’ve stopped using animal fat. I can live with that.’
    ‘Would you?’ Mum looked grateful, dragging her bag from the dresser, pulling out her purse.
    ‘You want mushy peas, too?’ Jane asked.
    After the kid had left, Merrily went into the scullery-office, closed the door, switched on the Anglepoise and sat down, pulling her black woolly cardigan over her alb. She thought about calling Lol back but then –
parish meeting: income, cash flow… pressure
– phoned Huw Owen instead.
    ‘You know everything,’ she said. ‘What line do I take on a mobile-phone mast in the spire?’
    Huw said, ‘Cold over there, is it?’
    ‘Not by your criteria.’ Huw’s rectory was well up in the Brecon Beacons, above the snowline, where spring and autumn would wave to each other from either side of July.
    ‘I were only thinking about you earlier,’ he said. ‘You and your rock star. Serious, is it, or just a fling?’
    Rock star
: a touch of irony, there. She didn’t rise to it. ‘We’re permitted flings now?’
    ‘Merrily,’ Huw said, ‘these are the days of sex-change clergy, transvestite clergy, bondage clergy, cocaine clergy. I’d say, as long as it doesn’t involve Alsatian dogs… What’s Bernie Dunmore’s view?’
    ‘Up to the individual conscience. Between the individual and God.’
    ‘Nice. You can tell why he made bishop. And what’s God say?’
    ‘He says to get on with it or Jane’ll be back with the chips.’
    She pictured Huw slumped, shoeless and shaggy-haired, in front of his fire of coal and logs, the uncurtained window a cold blue square in the whitewashed wall. From the edge of his sheep-shaven lawn, you could see the site of the cottage where Huw had been born a bastard, as he liked to phrase it, two years before his mother took him off with her to Sheffield, to grow up a Yorkshireman with a weight of Welsh on his back.
    Huw Owen: the mongrel come home to the hills. Merrily’s Deliverance-tutor, her spiritual director.
    ‘Aye, go on, then,’ he said. ‘Mobile-phone masts? The tips of the Devil’s horns.’
    Crossing the market place in the damp dusk, Jane looked back once. Through the heavy, dripping autumn trees, the lights of Ledwardine Vicarage were blurred, as though seen through tears, and she was wondering about Mum and Lol and how it could possibly be going wrong so soon.
    All through the late summer, Mum had seemed brilliantly light and girlish, maybe for the first time since she’d been ordained. Twice, she’d actually worn this provocatively low-cut top Jane had brought back from a summer sale in Hereford as kind of a joke.
    Jane had imagined the skimpy thing lying on the floor of Lol’s loft and was entirely cool about the notion. Mum had been a widow for over six years now and, although the crash that had