The Wine of Angels Read Online Free PDF Page A

is someone more sophisticated, more attuned to the, ah ... is Zeitgeist the word I’m looking for?’
    ‘They’d prefer a woman priest because it’s cool and state-of-the-art? Jesus.’
    ‘Not merely a woman.’ Ted shuffled about a bit. ‘I mean, when they saw you at the wassailing and somebody put two and two together ...’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Oh, Merrily, don’t make me spell it out. You’re young and you rather, as someone said, rather smoulder ... in black.’
    ‘Oh no. Oh, hell. Who said that?’
    ‘Not going to say. Told you I shouldn’t have said anything.’
    ‘Bloody hell, Ted.’
    Merrily awoke just as it was growing light. Above the timbered gables, a wooded hill had formed.
    She was brightening with the sky. What had been outrageous last night seemed quite funny now. Smoulder. Who’d said that? And where? Hopefully, not at the bishop’s palace. Things really had changed, hadn’t they? Used to be schoolgirls falling for the new curate.
    Merrily smiled, feeling younger than she had in quite a while. She looked across at Jane, who was still asleep. Hey, what the hell? If she wanted to set up some kind of apartment under the eaves, why not? The kid had given up enough these past years: two changes of school, becoming single-parented, coping with a mother who spent whole nights fuming about some of the crap they threw at you in theological college.
    And, for Merrily – she glanced at the thick-beamed ceiling – it would take away the irrational, background stress connected with an empty third storey.
    She went to the window which was set into a wall divided into irregular, white rectangles by huge varicose veins of Tudor oak. Jane, who was into fine art these days, said those white areas were just crying out for something interesting with acrylics. Oh dear.
    Merrily gazed out over the inn-sign, across to the intimate market square with the squat, crablike, oak-legged shelter they called the market hall or cross. Overhung with shape-shifting black and white houses, every crooked beam and truss preserved and presented with pride.
    The village wore its past like a row of glittering horse-brasses over an inglenook fireplace. Defined by its past, shaped by invaders. The Norman church with Saxon origins at the end of a Roman road. The cramped, cobbled alleyway where the gutters had once overflowed with pig-blood and piss, now a bijou arcade, soon to be scented with fountains of flowers from a score of hanging baskets.
    For the new invaders, the Cassidys of this world, were here not to pillage or desecrate or change, but only to preserve, preserve, preserve. And wallow. Preserve and wallow.
    Merrily looked down into the still-shadowed street, saw Dr Kent Asprey, heart-throb GP and fitness-freak leading his jogging party of sweating matrons past the new tourist information office. Saw Gomer Parry, the retired digger-driver, kick a stone into the road and stand on the kerb, hands rammed deep into his pockets, cigarette jammed between his lips. He looked aimless. What, after all, was there to do in this village but stand and stare, appreciate, absorb, be enriched?
    Ideal, her mother had said. After what you’ve been through, you need somewhere quiet with no stress and no drug addicts and homeless people to make you feel guilty. Somewhere you can sit back a bit and take stock.
    Merrily knelt before the window to pray. She thought, No need for homeless people to make me feel guilty.
    According to dream analysts, the one about the realization of a third storey was an indication of a whole new area of yourself which remained unexplored. A higher consciousness.
    ‘Dear God,’ Merrily whispered, her palms together, angled on the rising sun.
    From behind her, she heard the squeak of Jane’s bed as the kid sat up.
    ‘Oh shit,’ her daughter muttered, sleepy and cross. ‘Do you really have to do that in here?’

 
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    Black-eyed Dog
     
    L OL PLANNED HIS suicide with all the precision missing from his