Death in the Cotswolds Page 5

  ‘But that’s only men, isn’t it,’ said Ursula, the granny of the group at forty-five, with a mild stare at Kenneth through her bifocals.

  I interposed. ‘We’re following a wrong path here. For a start l’amour means love not sex. I think we ought to concentrate on the importance of Samhain as a time of cleansing and preparation for winter. We clean our houses, and our minds. We put away the pleasures and indiscretions of the hot seasons, and turn to serious matters of survival.’ The language came naturally to me, the words dropping into my mind like those of an experienced priest’s prayers. It delighted me to give these homilies at our moots, to keep everyone’s attention where it ought to be. It made me feel that I’d tapped into the true meaning of life, constantly stressing the rootedness of all living creatures in the realities of the soil. A pity, then, that the great mass of human society so obstinately ignored or resisted my doctrine.

  Even, sometimes, my own fellow pagans. ‘Survival,’ Pamela echoed in a tone that suggested a whiff of scorn.

  I faced her squarely. ‘I know what you’re thinking. There’s no need to struggle any more, to find enough food for the winter, to keep warm, to protect our livestock. That’s true. And – ’ I glared at her ‘ – and it’s the reason we so often sound mad to most people. Most people think it doesn’t matter any more what season it is, what the weather’s doing, how we relate to other species. They think all that’s old-fashioned and obsolete.’ I sighed. ‘And they become diminished, their spirits withering, as a result.’

  Pamela wriggled rebelliously. ‘I wasn’t thinking that at all, actually. I was thinking about what we need to survive these days. Like money.’

  An inhalation of breath from Kenneth drew everyone’s attention. ‘Pam,’ he said, sounding weary and apprehensive.

  ‘Well it’s right, though, isn’t it? Without money we can’t do anything. It didn’t used to be like that. People could live and eat and travel around without needing any actual cash.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘But where’s this taking us?’

  Kenneth clutched his hands together, though not too tightly. ‘Nowhere,’ he said. ‘I’m more interested in your ideas about what happens to people who abandon all contact with the seasons and the soil.’

  ‘They become Freemasons,’ said Daphne bitterly. She had the air of someone who had been waiting to speak for some time. ‘All allegory and symbols and totally ignorant about anything solid and real.’

  Everybody groaned. Then I smiled and said, ‘Hey, Daph, that’s almost a record. Fifteen minutes before you mentioned the Craft. You must be getting over it.’

  It was a risk. Daphne saw nothing to joke about in the subject of the Brotherhood. Her husband had joined several years previously in the face of her strident objections. She had made it as difficult for him as she possibly could, given that the active cooperation of the wife was one of the central requirements for membership. But Eddie had been determined. He was the ideal type for a society of the self-important. He loved the dramatics of it, the bonding and the ritual. As Daphne became more hysterical, he became more committed, until the inevitable happened. He left her with two teenage children, and moved to Gloucester where he quickly gained initiation to the third level at one of the big Lodges there. Daphne followed his progress obsessively on their website, broadcasting his activities everywhere she went, with caustic mockery. He was a recurrent presence both actually and figuratively, visiting his children, and driving between the Cotswold towns and villages in a bright yellow convertible that everybody knew.

  His profession was Town Planner, and he had a senior position on the Council that involved writing influential reports for planning appeals, inspecting doubtful extensions and offering expert guidance on the quality of differing types of Cotswold stone. Eddie Yeo was a man everybody claimed as a friend, but nobody ever took for granted.

  When Phil and Thea and I had found the Masonic artefacts in Helen’s attic, my first thoughts had turned to Eddie. He might well have been afraid to store his regalia and equipment when he was still living with Daphne at home, knowing that his wife was quite capable of destroying it when his back was turned. Perhaps he had sneaked into Greenhaven to use it as a secret storage place. But the timing didn’t work. Helen’s attic had been used only days ago, and Eddie had been a free agent for over a year, with no need to hide anything from anybody. When Phil had made his guess about a clandestine Mason, it had rung all too true to me. There had to be other couples like Eddie and Daphne. My problem was discovering just who they might be.

  Daphne was a compulsive proselytiser. She gave talks about paganism to any group she could persuade to have her. She wrote articles for mainstream magazines, correcting misapprehensions and claiming nothing less than the future of humankind and the entire planet rested in the beliefs and values of pagans. She was a good writer, able to convey serious points with an accessibly light touch, and I had great admiration for her. My only reservation was that much of what she did and said came as a direct reaction to Eddie and his behaviour. Eddie liked secrecy so Daphne threw everything open to the public gaze. Eddie liked abstractions, so Daphne got physical. Daphne, by nature rather academic and bookish, killed hens and rabbits with her bare hands and prepared them for the pot in true medieval fashion, guts and severed heads all over her kitchen. Daphne went out along the hedgerows gathering sloes and blackberries, getting scratched and chilled, long after I had given up and retreated to the fireplace. She collected slugs and snails in messy traps and tried to feed them to my pig, nicely spiced with the beer she’d used to drown them. The fact that Arabella steadfastly rejected them seemed a mere detail. Daphne had recently established a tannery in a large shed in her garden, in which she cured sheepskins. The smell of animal fat and saltpetre never quite left her. She let her black curly hair grow long and seldom tied it back from her face. Her children saw her as deeply embarrassing and her friends trod warily. On a personal level I found her scratchy and unpredictable, but this didn’t stop me from teasing her.

  I was fortunate this time. She merely tapped a finger on the table in front of her and sat back in her chair. The message was one of suppressed impatience.

  We went on to plan the ceremony for Samhain, which required careful preparation. It was to take place in the very convenient Long Barrow at Notgrove, which was an ancient Megalithic burial ground dating back to 3,000 BC or thereabouts. As old as Stonehenge, anyway, or so Kenneth claimed from something he read. For a ritual centred on death and the passage between the different realms, it was perfect. The bodies once buried there had long ago disappeared, but the atmosphere remained – or so we assured ourselves. English Heritage, nominally in control of the site, paid us no heed, so long as we left no obvious damage. The local people were mostly unconcerned about our activities, despite Daphne’s attempts to awaken their interest. They had their own bowdlerised version of the great festival, all the dafter for being over and done with long before midnight – the moment when its entire meaning was made manifest.

  Hallowe’en – as Samhain has become known in the general population – is a festival of contradictions: silence and feasting, sacrifice and survival, fire and blood. It overflows with material for effective and focused rituals. Children dressing as caricature witches and knocking on doors with empty threats is a bewildering corruption. Their confused parents and teachers, timidly dodging anything ‘incorrect’ make no attempt to explain what lies behind. Even references to ghosts carry nervous over-the-shoulder glances, for fear the authorities will accuse them of needlessly frightening the little ones. The idea that in times of acute hardship and bitter winters superfluous infants themselves might have been despatched to the spirit world hadn’t for a moment occurred to the merrymakers. Even in our own wiccan circles, I never heard it mentioned.

  We agreed timings and the wording of the incantations and prayers, and then I produced the food. Shy Leslie, the youngest of the group, who had barely said a word during the business part of the even
ing, followed me into the kitchen, and without having to be told, began to arrange the cold meat, coleslaw and cheese on plates. It took me a moment to remember where his name had recently cropped up, in some quite different context. Then the snippet from Gaynor about his partnering Oliver at bridge came back to me. I almost said something, but it seemed intrusive, irrelevant to the moment.

  He was a pleasant boy in his mid-twenties, much cleverer than at first appeared. His pagan convictions ran as deep as could be, brought up as he’d been by a wiccan mother who had never attempted to conceal her beliefs or way of life. He was married to a pretty girl a year or two older than himself, who came to our moots from time to time, but plainly held none of the required convictions. ‘No Joanne today?’ I said, just to make conversation.

  He shook his head, without meeting my eye. ‘Nope,’ was all the reply I got.

  Just as everybody started eating, I remembered Gaynor’s request. ‘Hang on,’ I said, waving for hush. ‘I forgot to say we’ve had an application for a divination.’ And then, to my shame, I told them who and why and what. Strictly speaking, this was not necessary. More than that, it was breaking a confidence to reveal Gaynor’s feelings towards Oliver Grover. The response was predictable.

  ‘The little fool,’ said Verona. ‘Doesn’t she know he’s gay?’

  Ursula quickly disagreed with her. ‘People can change,’ she said. ‘It’s a complete fallacy to think sexual orientation is immutable. Just a modern fad, that’s all that is. Good luck to the girl, I say.’

  Verona, almost as retiring and silent as Leslie, but immeasurably less shy, gave a little laugh. Everyone turned to look at her. When Verona laughed, it made you stop whatever you were doing. The sound pierced to your marrow, raising ripples on your skin, shivers in your guts. Verona laughed as if to tell you that she had just glimpsed your destiny, and it was as amusing as it was unpleasant.

  Kenneth, in possession of thicker psychological skin than most, raised his eyebrows at her. ‘What’s funny?’ he asked.

  Verona shrugged with a fleeting glance at me, full of her usual sly superiority. ‘Nothing much,’ she said. ‘Only that I hear they’ve been seen around together a few times. We oughtn’t to be so quick to laugh. I vote we do the divination, just as she asks.’

  ‘And I say good luck to her,’ Ursula endorsed.

  I had glanced at Leslie in the middle of these jumbled reactions, and been shocked by his expression. It seemed to me to comprise an unsavoury mixture of disgust and anger. I realised that he knew Gaynor and Oliver rather well, and had had the unique privilege, amongst those in the room, of seeing the two together.

  ‘What do you think?’ I asked him. ‘Does Gaynor stand any chance of winning him over?’

  He said nothing for a long beat. Then, ‘We’ll have to wait and see, won’t we?’ he managed.

  Pamela, sitting next to him, gave him a little nudge with her elbow. ‘Go on,’ she teased him. ‘Commit yourself, why don’t you? Make a guess.’

  He didn’t look at her, but twisted away, staring down at the floor. His mouth moved, but he didn’t say anything.

  Kenneth came to his rescue. ‘What would he know about it?’ he said.

  Leslie lifted his head as if this was a direct challenge, or a final intolerable straw. ‘I know them both,’ he said, rather loudly. ‘That’s not it.’

  He was like a tortured adolescent, embroiled in unmanageable emotions. With one accord, the whole group released him from the painful spotlight of their attention. Ursula got up to take some empty cups out to the kitchen. Verona began talking to Pamela about childhood memories of bobbing for apples at Hallowe’en. Kenneth jingled coins in his pocket and seemed to have some urgent private thinking to do. Leslie’s tension receded, and he was soon himself again, asking for precise timings and duties during the ceremony.

  They left before eleven, going out into the dark night quite quietly. I watched the last car drive away, satisfied that we’d had a good moot, reinforcing our ideas, marking the season, preparing for the climax to come.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Sunday morning was even damper than the previous days had been. A mist hung over everything, and I could scarcely see Greenhaven, only thirty feet away. But regardless of the weather, I heard Phil and Thea load their dogs into the car and drive off before nine. That seemed rather odd. If they wanted to give the beasts a run, they only had to turn right outside their gate and have an ideal cross-country walk to Notgrove. An arrow-straight avenue of young beeches comprised most of the way – perfect for dogs as well as horses. The almost total disappearance of livestock from farming in this part of Gloucestershire made things much more relaxed for dog walkers than they would have done in the era of wholesale sheep husbandry.

  Besides, I remembered I had told Phil I would call in and talk to him about the Masonic things from the attic. Wasn’t it rather rude of him to swan off like that without waiting for my visit?

  Giving myself a shake, I turned to my morning tasks. Another batch of bread had emerged as crusty and redolent as anyone could have wished. I’d been planning to take some over the street, before realising they were going out. Helen actually had a workable brick oven attached to the rear of her house, but I could hardly expect Thea or Phil to stoke it and get baking when only staying a week. They probably hadn’t even seen it, or if they had they might not understand what it was.

  I wanted to phone Gaynor and get her assurance that the coat would be finished by the middle of the week. Knowing her hesitancy over shops, her stubbornness over the buttons had come as unwelcome news. I worried that she might take ages to work up to choosing and buying replacements. Meanwhile, I had decided to show the finished garment to one of my best-paying customers in Nailsworth, who hadn’t yet seen the coats we made, in the hope that some well-heeled shopping party would be tempted to make some early Christmas purchases. Parts of the Cotswolds were virtually colonised by upper class associates of the Royal Family. Several of them had a gratifying partiality to my products.

  But Gaynor did not answer the phone when I tried her. With a tut of frustration, I turned to other chores.

  All finished by ten-thirty, and noting that the mist had lifted, my attention switched to the undertakings I had given the pagan group. I had a lot of notes about Samhain, the underlying meanings and the more constructive and serious ceremonies that were attached to it. Despite a persistent sense that I was completely out of kilter with the times, I retained a deep commitment to preserving the ancient connections between humanity and the soil. Without that connection, we became aliens on our own planet. Every time I went into a city, I realised that this moment had very nearly arrived. The vast majority of people living in the ‘developed’ world had lost any sense of the rhythms and tides of nature. Sometimes this made me smug about my own awareness, at others it drove me to despair.

  But the pagan group could have a similar effect on me at times. There were always some who believed they could make impossible things happen – usually to do with acquiring great wealth or power. They looked for danger and transgression. They wanted there to be fairies and werewolves and flying broomsticks. They read Harry Potter as if it was literal truth. And the serious ones could be even worse. Some of the men seemed to think they’d signed up for the Freemasons, and made great play of secrecy and hidden signs of other realms. And I could not help but be aware of matching tendencies in both organisations. A lot of pagans dubbed themselves high priests of this or that Egyptian deity, and wandered off to do bizarre researches into wall paintings from some temple or other in the Valley of the Kings. Freemasons also adopted great chunks of esoteric Egyptian flummery, which to the uninitiated would look and sound much the same. The would-be pagans I’m referring to wanted special clothes and symbols and incantations. Most of them moved on quite rapidly when they realised there was no naked dancing on the wold, and no surefire ways of getting promoted beyond their abilities. A few probably ended up in the Masons after all.

  My not
es prompted me to think about that year’s setting for our central ritual, where we confronted death in all its forms. That is the core meaning of Samhain, which stretches back to the days when mankind first kept livestock, and understood the implications of the coming winter. With the turn of the season, many creatures had to die, including human creatures. The weak and dispirited reached their lowest point, finding themselves unable to face the cold hungry months ahead. There was no need to invoke the supernatural to make something large and important of this. Death was in no way unnatural, after all. Despite the universal fear felt by every living thing throughout their lives, death itself was unexceptional. A fly will evade it with all its strength, a rabbit will flee from the fox, pigs scream in terror as the truth becomes clear to them. Everything loves life and resists death. People are only different in the strategies they employ.

  So it seemed to me that the persistent aura of death that manifested in the last days of October and early November arose from thousands of years of custom across the northern latitudes. And whatever the explanation for ghosts and previsions in that season, I had no doubt that they were a part of it. Traces of powerful feelings, perhaps. A slackening of the fortifications we kept in place against the certainty of death, so we permitted ourselves glimpses of truth, in the shape of phantoms and spectres created by our vastly overactive imaginations.

  I mused over these thoughts, trying to turn them into a kind of sermon. That was my role in the group. I distilled meaning for them, aiming for clarity and honesty. I wove in stories, linking ideas together, explaining and illuminating. Nobody had ever labelled me as a priest, and I had remained careful not to be seen as any sort of a leader – but at the major ceremonies, I was usually the one who spoke. I was good at it. I could make them laugh and cry and above all think.