Sacrament

CHAPTER V

It was only a fifteen-minute walk back to the Cunningham house, but by the time they arrived at the gate they'd already lost any initial tentativeness and were talking in the easy manner of old friends. Will had given Frannie a quick summary of the events in Balthazar (she'd read about the accident, as she called it, in a magazine article Sherwood had found), and Frannie had prepared him for the reunion with Sherwood by filling in a little of her brother's medical history. He'd been diagnosed with a form of acute depression, she explained, which he'd probably been suffering since childhood. Hence his see-sawing emotions: his sulks, his rages, his inability to concentrate. Though he now had pills to keep it manageable, he was not, nor ever would be, entirely cured. It was a burden he would bear to the end of his life. 'It helps to think of it as a test,' she said. 'God wants us to show Him how tough we are.'

'Interesting theory.'

'I'm sure He approves of you,' she said, not entirely joking. 'I mean, if anyone's been through the mill, it's you. All those terrible places you've had to go.'

'It's not quite the same if you volunteer though, is it?' Will said. 'You and Sherwood haven't had any choice.' 'I don't think any of us have got much choice,' she said. She dropped her voice. 'Especially us. When you think of what happened ... back then. We were children. We didn't know what we were dealing with.'

'Do we now?'

She looked at him with a gaze suddenly shorn of joy. 'I used to think - this probably sounds ridiculous to you - but I used to think somehow we'd met the Devil in disguise.' She laughed nervously at this. 'That does sound stupid, doesn't it?' Her laugh disappeared almost immediately, seeing that Will was not laughing with her.

'Doesn't it?'

'I don't know what he is,' he replied.

'Was,' she said quietly.

He shook his head. 'Is,' he murmured.

They'd reached the gate. 'Oh Lord,' she said. There was a little quaver in her voice.

'Maybe I shouldn't come in.'

'No, you must,' she replied. 'But we shouldn't talk about this any more. Not in front of Sherwood. He gets upset.'

'I understand.'

'I think about it a lot. After all these years, I turn it over in my head. I even did a bit of research a few years ago, trying to get to the bottom of it all.'

'And?'

She shook her head. 'I gave up,' she said. 'It was bothering Sherwood, and it was churning everything up all over again. I decided it was better to leave it alone.'

She unlatched the gate and started down the path, which was edged on either side by sprays of lavender, towards the front door. 'Before we go in,' Will said, 'can you tell me what happened to the Courthouse?'

'It was demolished.'

'That I saw.'

'Marjorie Donnelly had it done. Her father was the man who was murdered. I remember.' 'She had to fight tooth and nail to get it done. There was some Heritage Committee said it was of historical interest. Eventually she hired a dozen slaughterhouse men from Halifax, at least this is what I heard, it might not be true, but I heard they came with sledgehammers in the middle of the night and they did so much damage the place had to be levelled for safety concerns.'

'Good for her.'

'Don't mention it, please.'

'I won't.'

'I'm making Sherwood sound worse than he is,' she said, digging for her key in her purse. 'Most of the time he's fine. Just once in a while something strikes him the wrong way, and he gets so down in the dumps I think he's never going to snap out of it.' She'd found the key, and now unlocked the door, calling for Sherwood as she stepped inside. There was no reply. Will followed her in, while she went to look for him upstairs. 'He must have gone out walking,' she said, coming back downstairs. 'He does that a lot.'

They talked for the next hour or so over cold chicken, tomatoes and home-made chutney, the conversation ranging ever more widely as it progressed. Frannie's ebullience and sheer good nature charmed Will thoroughly: she had become an eloquent and deeply compassionate woman. More than ever, as she related her history, he sensed a regret that she'd not been able to move out of this house and find a life for herself, apart from Sherwood and his problems. But that regret was never explicit, and she would have been upset, he guessed, if she'd thought he'd recognized it in her. She was doing her Christian duty caring for Sherwood: no more nor less. If it indeed was a test, as she'd said at the gate, then she was passing it with flying colours.

Not all the talk was of events in Burnt Yarley, however. She ferreted after the details of Will's life and loves with no little gusto, and though he was at first reticent, her sheer persistence won him over. He gave her, in a somewhat bowdlerized version, an account of his emotional adventures, interlaced with a potted history of his career: Drew and Patrick and the Castro, books, bears and Balthazar.

'Do you remember how you were always wanting to run away?' she said to him. 'The first day we met, that's what you said you were going to do. And you did.'

'It took me a while.'

'The point is, you went,' she said, eyes shining. 'We all have dreams when we're children, but most of us give up on them. But you didn't. You went to see the world, the way you said you would.'

'Do you get away at all?'

'Not really. Sherwood hates to travel; it makes him nervous. We've been down to Oxford a couple of times, and we pop over to Skipton to see Mum in the hospice, but he's much happier when he's here in the village.'

'And what about you?'

'I'm happier when he's happiest,' she said simply.

'And you never talk about what happened?'

'Very, very seldom. But it's always there, isn't it? I suppose it always will be.' She lowered her voice, as though the walls would report the conversation to Sherwood if they heard it. 'I still have dreams about the Courthouse,' she said. 'They're more vivid than any other dream I have. Sometimes I'm there on my own, and I'm looking for his journal. Just going from room to room, knowing he's coming back, and I've got to be quick.' The expression on his face must have been the perfect mirror of his thoughts at that moment, because she said: 'It is just a dream, isn't it?'

'No,' he said softly. 'I don't think it is.'

She put her hand to her mouth. 'Oh Lord...' she breathed.

'It isn't your problem,' he said. 'You two can stay out of it and be perfectly

'Is he here?'

'Yes.'

'You're sure?'

'Yes.'

'How do you know?'

'He's the reason Hugo's in hospital. Steep beat him senseless.'

'But why?'

'He wanted to get a message to me. He wanted me back here, to finish what we started.'

'He's got his bloody journal,' Frannie said. 'What more does he want?' 'Separation,' Will said. 'From what?'

'From me.'

'I don't understand.'

'It's hard to explain. We're connected, him and me. I know it sounds ludicrous when we're sitting here talking and drinking tea, but he never quite let go of me.' Then more quietly: 'And maybe I never quite let go of him.'

'Is that why you went to the Courthouse? To find him?'

'Yes.'

'Lord, Will. He could kill you.'

'I think we're too close for that,' he said.

Frannie took a little time to absorb this remark. 'Too close?' she said. 'If he touches me, he may end up seeing more than he wants to see.'

'There's always Rosa to do the harm for him.'

'True,' he said. This was an option he hadn't really considered, but of course it was perfectly plausible. Rosa had proved her skills as a murderer half a mile from here; if Steep wanted to keep his distance from Will he could simply set the woman on Will's neck and be done with him that way.

'Rosa made quite an impression on Sherwood, you know,' Frannie went on. 'He had nightmares about her for years after. I never got him to talk about what happened, but she made her mark.'

'And you?' Will said.

'What about me?'

'I've had Steep. Sherwood had Rosa.'

'Oh ... well, I had the journal to obsess over.'

'And did you?'

She nodded, looking through him, as though in her mind's eye she was picturing the thing she'd lost. 'I never solved it, and that bothered me for years. Did you ever see what it contained?'

'No.'

'It was beautiful.'

'Really?'

'Oh yes,' she said, breathing with admiration. 'He'd made all these drawings of animals. Perfect they were. And on the opposite page to the drawing-' she was miming the act of opening the book now, staring down at its contents '-there was line after line of writing.'

'What did it say?'

'It wasn't in English. It wasn't in any language I've ever been able to find. It wasn't Greek, it wasn't Sanskrit, it wasn't hieroglyphics. I copied a few of the characters down, but I never deciphered any of it.'

'Maybe it was nonsense. Something he'd just made up.'

'No,' she said, 'it was a language.'

'How do you know?'

'Because I found it in one other place.'

' Where?'

'Well, it was strange. About six years ago, just after Dad died, I started to take night-classes in Halifax, just to get out of the rut I was in. I took courses in French and Italian, of all things. I think because of the journal really; I was still looking for a way to decipher it, deep down. Anyway I met this chap there, and we got on quite well. He was in his fifties, and very attentive I suppose you'd say, and we'd talk for hours after the classes. His name was Nicholas. His great passion was the eighteenth century, which I've never really had any interest in, but he invited me to his house, which was extraordinary. Like stepping back in time two hundred and fifty years. Lamps, wallpaper, pictures, everything, was, you know, of the period. I suppose he was a little crazy, but in a very gentle kind of way. He used to say he'd been born in the wrong century.' She laughed at the folly of all of this. 'Anyway, I went to his house three or four times and I was browsing in his library - he had a collection of books and pamphlets and magazines, all about the seventeen hundreds - and I found this little book with a picture in it, and there in the picture were some of the hieroglyphics from Steep's journal.' 'With an explanation?'

'Not really,' she said, the brightness in her voice dulling. 'It was frustrating really. He gave me the book as a gift. He'd got it in a job lot from an auction and he didn't care for the pictures very much, so he said to take it.' 'Do you still have it?'

'Yes. It's upstairs.'

'I'd like to see it.'

'I'm warning you, it's very disappointing,' she said, getting up from the table. 'I pored over it for hours.' She headed on into the hall. 'But I ended up wishing I'd never seen the bloody thing. I won't be a minute.' She headed up the stairs, leaving Will to wander through to the livingroom. Unlike the kitchen, which was newly painted, the room might have been left as a shrine to the departed parents. The furniture was plain, eschewing any hint of hedonism; the plant-life (geraniums on the windowsill, potted hyacinths on the table) well-tended; the designs of hearth-rug, wallpaper and curtains a calamity of fuss and mismatched colour. On the mantelpiece, to either side of the solid clock, were framed photographs of the whole family, smiling out from a distant summer. Tucked into the frame of one, a yellowed prayer card. On it, two verses:

One with the earth below, Lord, One with the sky above, One with the seed I sow, Lord, One with the hearts I love.

Make earth of my dust, Lord, Make air of my breath, Make love of my lust, Lard, And life out of my death.

There was something comforting about the prayer's simplicity; the hope it expressed for unity and transformation. It moved him, in its way.

He was setting the picture back down on the mantelpiece when he heard the front door open, and then quietly close. A moment later a man with ill-shaven features, pinched and woebegone, his thinning hair grown to near shoulder length but unkempt, appeared at the living-room door, and stared at him through his round spectacles.

'Will,' he said, with such certainty it was almost as if he'd expected to find Will there.

'My God, you recognized me!'

'Of course,' Sherwood replied, proffering his hand as he crossed the room. 'I've been following your rise to notoriety.' He shook Will's hand, his palm clammy, his fingers bone-thin. 'Where's Frannie?'

'She's upstairs.'

'I've been out walking,' Sherwood said, though he had no need to explain himself. 'I like to walk.' He glanced out of the window. 'It's going to rain within the hour.' He went to the barometer beside the living-room door and tapped it. 'Maybe a downpour,' he said, peering at the glass over his spectacles. He had the manner of a man twenty or thirty years his senior, Will thought; he'd moved from an adolescent to an old man without a middle-age. 'Are you here for long?'

'That depends on my Dad's health.'

'How is he?'

'Getting stronger.'

'Good. I see him at the pub once in a while. He knows how to start an argument, your Dad. He gave me one of his books to read, but I couldn't get through it. I told him too: I said, it's beyond me, all this philosophy, and he said, well then there's hope for you yet. Imagine that: there's hope for you yet. I said I'd give him it back but he told me to throw it out. So I did.' He grinned. 'I told him next time I saw him. I said: I threw out your book. He bought me a drink. Now if I did that they'd call me daft, wouldn't they? Not that they don't anyway. Here comes Daft Cunningham.' He chuckled. 'Suits me.'

'Does it?'

'Oh aye. It's safer that way, isn't it? I mean people let you alone if they think you're three sheets to the wind. Anyhow . .. I'll be seeing you later on, eh? I've got to go soak me feet.'

As he turned to go, Frannie appeared behind him. 'Isn't this wonderful,' she said to Sherwood, 'seeing Will again after all this time?'

'Wonderful,' Sherwood said, without any great measure of enthusiasm. 'See you again then.'

A look of bemusement crossed Frannie's face. 'Aren't you staying to talk?'

'Well actually I should be on my way,' Will said, glancing at his watch. It was indeed time he was off; he'd promised Adele they'd make an early visit to the hospital today.

'Here's the book,' Frannie said, passing a slim, dun volume to Will.

Sherwood was meanwhile slipping away up the stairs. 'Would you mind letting yourself out, Will?' Frannie said, apparently concerned about her brother's behaviour. 'I'll give you a ring tomorrow, and maybe you can come back down when Sherwood's feeling a little bit more sociable.' With that, she was gone, up the stairs to find out what was amiss.

Will let himself out. The cloud-layer had thickened and darkened; rain, as Sherwood had predicted, could not be far off. Will picked up his pace, flipping through the book Frannie had given him as he walked. The pages were as stiff as card, the printing too small to be read on the move. The reproductions were in black and white, and poor. Only the title page was readily legible, and the words upon it brought him to a halt. A Mystic Tragedy was the main title. And underneath: The Life and Work of Thomas Simeon.