Jago E-Book

Kim Newman

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Paul, a young academic composing a thesis about the end of the world, and his girlfriend Hazel, a potter, have come to the tiny English village of Alder for the summer. Their idea of a rural retreat gradually sours as the laws of nature begin to break down around them. The village, swollen by an annual rock festival of cataclysmic proportions, prepares to reap a harvest of horror.

Leseprobe

ALSO BY KIM NEWMAN AND AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

Anno Dracula

Anno Dracula: The Bloody Red Baron

Anno Dracula: Dracula Cha Cha Cha

Professor Moriarty: Hound of the D’Urbervilles

COMING SOON

Anno Dracula: Johnny Alucard

JAGO

KIM NEWMAN

TITAN BOOKS

JAGO

Print edition ISBN: 9781781164235

E-book edition ISBN: 9781781164242

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: March 2013

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Kim Newman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Copyright © 1991, 2013 Kim Newman

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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For the people of the village of Alder, in Somerset. A much nicer crowd than the inhabitants of the village of Alder, in the strictly imaginary county of the same name.

‘I’ve heard all this stuff about consensus reality, and you honestly expect me to believe that we’ve just been maintaining this fragile structure of reality based on an agreement between people who can’t agree upon anything?’

LISA TUTTLE

Contents

Prologue

Part I

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Interlude Seven

Part II

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

Interlude Six

Part III

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

Interlude Five

Part IV

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

Interlude Four

Part V

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

Interlude Three

Part VI

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Interlude Two

Part VII

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Interlude One

Part VIII

Interlude Zero

Part IX

Afterwards

Acknowledgements

…And Other Stories

Ratting

Great Western

The Man on the Clapham Omnibus

PROLOGUE

Under blood-red clouds, the Reverend Mr Timothy Charles Bannerman touched a lucifer to his sexton’s torch. Flames curled like instantaneous ivy about the pitch-clogged cotton. When Old Jerrold held it up, wind-whipped fire was briefly transparent against the sky.

‘Quickly,’ said Bannerman, ‘before it goes out.’

He pulled his ulster tight against the ice caress of winter, and wished he had thought to save his gloves. A pile of combustibles towered three times a man’s height in the centre of the clearing. Jerrold thrust the torch between dead branches into the straw, cloth and paper heart of the structure. Bales in the middle—good hay which in other years would have lasted until spring—caught easily. Epileptic flickers lit the insides, and dancing black bars of shadow were cast upon the villagers. Deep in the belly of the fire, wood began to crack and spit. The burning heap shook, and settled for the first time.

‘It would be as well, I think, if we all stood a little back.’

Others followed the vicar’s lead, but the heat reached further, unwilling to free them. Bannerman’s hands were pleasantly warm now. He admired the bonfire. The vicarage library was in there. The collected sermons of his predecessors could serve no better use, and there would be little further call for novels, tracts or bound periodicals. His flock had looted their homes, scavenging anything that would burn. Clothes and books were easiest to bring up the hill; but those whose households were equipped with neither had taken axes and split doors, beds, tables, fences. The sparse furniture of a double handful of lives was cast away, leaving souls the purer for the sacrifice.

They had been gathering fuel for some weeks now, with the enthusiasm usually reserved for Guy Fawkes’ Night. Neighbouring villages had mocked over mulled wine and mince pies on the 5th of November. The story had been that the people of Alder proposed to set light to their own houses by way of honouring the failure of Gunpowder Treason. There had doubtless been no little measure of disappointment in the taverns and taprooms of Achelzoy and Othery when this had turned out not to be so. Bannerman’s flock had its ambitions set higher than the preservation of Parliament. No effigy in a tall hat perched atop this fire. The clothes crammed into it were Sunday best or workaday sturdy, not worn-through scarecrow castoffs.

‘How the stuff of this world burns, sir,’ said Jerrold. ‘How the things that are dear to men and women are as nothing in the sight of the Lord.’

‘Quite,’ Bannerman replied. ‘Should it be deemed necessary that we pass through the eye of the needle, we shall have no need of Mr Lewis Carroll’s fabulous elixir.’

‘Indeed not, vicar,’ replied the sexton, who (Bannerman at once realized) could have understood but half his allusion, ‘indeed not.’

The faithful of Alder had begun to gather on the hillside in the middle of the afternoon. Now they stood about, uncertain. Most were quiet, some doubtless inwardly afraid, some radiant in prayer. All were wrapped in the solemn business of putting away from themselves everything they had known. Fields had been neglected for days, tools abandoned on the bare earth, bewildered livestock left to wander. Down in the village, a dog was howling for its supper. A few had brought house animals with them. The Graham child struggled with an armful of kittens.

Bannerman turned away from the fire. He saw the familiar view as if for the first time, knowing this was his last look at the Somerset levels. The red in the sky spilled across the horizon, staining the wetlands as they had once been stained with the blood of the Monmouth rebels and King’s men who fell at Sedgemoor. Until tonight, that had been the last battle fought on English soil. An older rebellion, Bannerman thought, was about to be put down. Out on the moors, just visible from the clearing, a lone farmer stood with his cattle. Jem Gosmore had chosen to be with his beasts at the last, not his wife and children.

Occasionally, a ripple of talk would run around, as of the crowd clearing its shared throat. But mostly the flock was quiet. Quieter even than they were wont to be of a Sunday morning, during Bannerman’s sermons. He sensed barely suppressed elation among them, but also unconquerable unease. The widow Combs was silently weeping. He could not tell whether her tears were for Geoffrey Combs, dead three weeks too soon to be here, or for her front curtains, reluctantly yielded and just now crumpling in the flames.

He had assumed they would sing hymns, but did not think it ought to fall to him to propose the notion. Bannerman could feel the strength of his congregation’s faith when their voices were raised in ‘He Who Would True Valour See’ or ‘How Amiable Are Thy Tabernacles, O Lord of Hosts!’ Granver Shepherd had brought his fiddle, but seemed undecided whether to play an air on it or pitch it into the fire. Often, after a strenuous bout of bowing, Shepherd remarked wistfully, ‘I don’t know, when the time comes, as I should care to exchange this old instrument even for a harp.’

Shepherd tossed first his bow, then the fiddle itself, on to the fire, and stood back. As the wood buckled and smouldered, the catgut snapped with eerie, high-pitched sounds. Granver backed into the crowd and received the sympathy of those who had likewise surrendered their dearest possessions. Many had given up the tools of their trades, thus their earthly livelihoods. Despite the heat, Bannerman shivered. His first doubt worried gnatlike at him; he hastily brushed it away.

The people of Alder were not wrong. He was not wrong.

There was an outbreak of chattering as the Misses Pym, pretty Alice and prettier Grace, arrived, trailed by their father. Tom Pym was bent double under a wicker hamper. Several younger men came forward to relieve him, and, opened, the hamper gave testimony to his daughters’ well-proven talent for the manufacture of cakes, tarts and sundry sweetmeats. In a burst of excitement, suddenly hungry queues assembled, and the Pym girls began to distribute their produce.

Alice came to him, bearing a fat cream horn, and smiled with deliberation. She was trying to show her dimple to its best advantage.

‘Mr Bannerman, would you care…?’

‘Thank you, Alice. I believe I would.’

He took the confection out of politeness, but found it disappeared in three bites. His normal appetites, which he had thought reduced to insignificance by the momentousness of the occasion, were running strong. Of late, he had neglected the trivial necessaries of a life soon to be abandoned. Now he rather regretted his absent-minded abstinence from the honest pleasures of the table. Other abstinences, not quite thought of, bothered him too, but…

Alice fluttered around, inquiring after the cream horn. He rewarded her with a kind word, which he instructed her to halve and share with her sister. When she gave no sign of practising the prescribed generosity, he called Grace over and bestowed the demi-compliment in person. Miss Alice shone a little less than previously, and Miss Grace’s habitually pert expression shaded microscopically into smugness.

There was no doubt but that the Misses Pym were the local beauties. Attentions, thus far unrewarded, had been paid to them by young men from as far away as three parishes. Had things been otherwise, Bannerman might have been disposed to consider either as a suitable match himself. In addition to his living, he had holdings from his late father. The girls could not find a more marriageable prospect within the county boundaries. Tradition would seem to indicate that he pay his attentions to Alice, the elder Miss Pym, but he suspected that his inclination would be rather towards Grace, the younger. But things were not otherwise.

He caught Jerrold frowning disapproval as the Misses Pym pressed more food upon him. The sexton had lived sixty-six years and never married.

The girls let him be, their father having summoned them elsewhere to be praised for a particularly successful jam pastry. Bannerman wiped traces of cream from his moustache with his handkerchief, and threw the balled linen into the flames. It was alight and gone like a mayfly. He tried to think about anything but the Misses Pym, and found it easy. The coming events bulked large in his mind. He could not help but regret in some small way the need totally to abandon the life he had made for himself. He tried to compose himself, to lose the tautness in his throat. He stepped away from the heat that excited his exposed skin and warmed his clothed flesh.

As the sun dipped below the horizon, he consulted the halfhunter his father had presented to him upon his graduation from Lampeter College. ‘Make something of yourself,’ he had exhorted. He snapped the watch shut and pocketed it. From this moment onwards, he would have no more use for his father’s gift, but he did not think to toss it to the fire.

The almanac entry for the day—Tuesday 8th November 1887—had been proven correct. The sun had gone down at precisely eighteen minutes to five o’clock. The book was in the fire now, never to be right again. By its reckoning, the sun would rise again at fourteen minutes to seven tomorrow morning. In this, Bannerman knew the almanac to be wrong, for tonight was the Last Night of the World.

* * *

Throughout his short career in the Church, Timothy Bannerman had thought of himself as a ‘modern’. Given a choice between the account of the Creation set out in the Book of Genesis and that which might be inferred from The Origin of Species, he was apt to agree with the bishop who remarked that the one was dictated to Moses by the Lord God, while the other was the work of a far less distinguished gentleman. However, he was willing, more willing indeed than the majority of his parishioners, to concede that a literal interpretation of the Bible led to arguments more troublesome than those into which he cared to enter. And he was of the decided opinion that miracles, visions and angelic visitations were the province of the Roman rather than the Anglican Church. Bleeding statues, portents in the skies and nuns speaking in tongues he believed the province of sensational romances of an earlier century, not of current religious thinking.

Therefore, when Jas Starkey—hardly the most devout of his flock—wakened half the village with hysterical tales about a burning man in the woods, Bannerman had not instantly deduced that his parish was regularly playing host to the Angel Raphael. Indeed, his next sermon had been a largely humorous warning against the evils of strong drink, in which Starkey’s fable was instanced as an unfortunate result of inordinate fondness for the rough cider brewed in the locality. Those who had spent a fine summer night dashing up and down the hillside paths with pails of water, drenching perfectly good trousers, had laughed appreciatively. It still seemed singular that the Angel should choose to reveal himself first to a tosspot who would greet the Apocalypse with a head befuddled by scrumpy from the bed of a woman not his wife.

And yet, that was precisely what had happened.

The village stopped laughing at Starkey when others began to see the burning man, and to give more detailed descriptions of the apparition. It was not easy to discount the testimony of Thomas Pym, lifelong abstainer and church warden, or Geoffrey Combs, farmer and respected local sage. Nor could they deny the account of Louisa Gilpin, a girl whose eagerness to talk about the Angel that had come to her exceeded her reluctance to explain the nature of her nocturnal excursion into the woods with Jem Gosmore’s second eldest. Finally, no one could doubt the word of the Reverend Mr Bannerman, vicar of the parish and soi-disant ‘modern’.

Bannerman had been with the first party deliberately to enter the woods by night in the hope of seeking out the apparition. It had seemed larkish, accompanying superstitious locals to chase the resident ghost. With others more credulous, he thought, than himself, Bannerman waited in the clearing where the figure had most often been seen. He examined the burned patches that bore witness to the spectre’s late presence, and personally put them down to careless handling of night lanterns. His own light burned low, needless under the unclouded, new-shilling-bright half-moon. He took the odd nip from Dr Skilton’s hip flask.

Dr Skilton of Yeovil, Bannerman’s frequent dinner guest and conversational companion, was the sole outsider on the expedition. The medical man had lately returned from the interior of China, and was full of amusing accounts of the superstitions he had met there. Tom Pym viewed Skilton with open suspicion, especially when the brandy was in view, but the rest of the company were by no means against a brief suckle at the little silver bottle. The best of the village was there, Bannerman supposed: Pym, Granver Shepherd, Combs, Winthrop of the Manor House, and two or three of the ‘newer’ landowners, whose families had farmed their acres for less than three generations. Although still September, the night was cold. Skilton was joshing Bannerman with facetious comments about looking up the rites of exorcism when…

…when the burning Angel appeared.

The heat was tremendous. All present were browned as if from the summer sun for days afterwards. Bannerman covered his eyes, then forced himself to look…

…at the beautiful form of the man in the halo of fire. White vestments hung from perfect limbs. His hair was a smooth sheet of flame. His outstretched arms were tipped with blazing balls in which fingers could barely be discerned. Bannerman knew at once this was an Angel.

The apparition opened his mouth, and a tongue of fire flickered. His eyes, too, were ablaze. And the Angel spoke, ‘Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils…’

The Angel continued, but Bannerman knew the words anyway. The words of Chapter 18, Verse 2, of the Revelation of St John the Divine.

‘…and the hold of every foul Spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.’

Skilton went forward to touch the Angel, and, in an instant, burned the flesh from his hand.

Bannerman did not hear the doctor scream or smell the cooking of his meat. The clergyman was on his knees in worship, in wonderment. This was the moment he had been awaiting in ignorance all his twenty-seven years. His mind stretched like a balloon, expanding with the revelation that had been granted to him.

To him! Not St John the Divine, but Timothy Charles Bannerman of the parish of Alder in the county of Somerset!

As one entranced, he saw it then. He knew without doubt that the Day of the End was at hand, its very date burned into him by the glance of the Angel. He felt it raise in fire on his forehead, then sink into his brain. The 8th of November. Had he lived, it would have been his father’s sixtieth birthday.

Day of Judgement. Day of Atonement. Day of Armageddon. Day of Apocalypse.

When the Angel was gone, his image danced before Bannerman’s eyes, burned into his sight as if his retinae were photographic plates.

Bannerman knew his Bible and his history well enough to gather that being the Chosen People could be uncomfortable, and he acted accordingly. Knowledge of the privileges due to his parish was to be kept within its bounds. He preached no sermons on the Angel’s announcement, and did not alert his bishop to the divine manifestation. He believed the revelation to be for the benefit of his parish only. Or else, why grant a foretaste of it to Jas Starkey who had nothing, apart from his theoretical membership of the Alder congregation, to recommend him?

Bannerman abandoned the scheduled services. He did not need to spread the word. Within days, everybody in the village knew. Others saw the Angel in the clearing, others received the news. He had no trouble convincing his flock when the burning Raphael could be seen every other night in the shimmering flesh. Only Skilton, his useless right hand baked through, disbelieved the divinity of the apparition, and he retreated to London in search of a doctor who might give him back his fingers. The doctor was not disposed to spread the news.

In Bridgwater and Taunton, there were distorted tales of an Alder ghost and a parson gone mad, but when they reached Bath and Bristol they seemed to blend in with other, similar stories. There was no need for another Spirit presence or another crazed cleric in a half-century already overstocked with both commodities. Bannerman’s bishop wondered if he should do anything about whatever was going on in Alder, but decided to wait until after Christmas on the assumption that it would blow over long before that. A few—very few—people vanished from their homes and went to stay indefinitely with relatives in Alder. Others with kin in the village were either not offered, or refused, the chance of salvation.

The flock were at first bewildered, then frightened, then delighted, then bewildered again by the knowledge that the End of the World was due directly, and that they alone of humanity had been vouchsafed a definite absolution for any and all sins and selected to sit at the right hand of God. But they respected their young vicar, who had never before misled them, and most followed him. Some who had not hitherto been overly dedicated became sudden converts. The more devout put aside their daily toils and spent their time in and around the church, singing, praying, contemplating.

Louisa gave up whatever functions she performed on her parents’ farm and transformed into Bannerman’s unofficial maid-of-all-work. Wherever he was, she could be found a respectful fifteen yards behind, hunchbacked by the huge family Bible she carried everywhere in a shawl slung around her shoulders. As she prepared the parson’s occasional meals or desperately sought to see some pattern in the letters that made up the words of the Book, several young and not so young men of the village felt cause to regret her current distraction. Bannerman was amused and moved by the girl who thought she had been given a free pass to Heaven, and was trying to scrape together in good works enough coin to pay her way above board.

The idea of the bonfire came from nowhere. Perhaps it had started as the usual Guy Fawkes’ celebration but been taken over by the more significant event. In any case. Bannerman approved, and what Bannerman approved was as close as spit to the will of the Angel Raphael.

So it was that the Righteous gathered on the hillside, sure of a good view of the devastation of the rest of the world. They could see at least as far as Glastonbury Tor from the clearing, and the spectacle was bound to be magnificent. Word had spread of the desolations to be visited upon the unrighteous, and opinion was divided as to whether the sinners of blighted Bridgwater—whose lights could be seen on the horizon—would be burned up by a rain of fire and brimstone or swallowed down by the opening of the earth. Either calamity would be no more than the harlots, swindlers, gin dogs and municipal thieves of that notorious town deserved.

So it was that the End was near.

* * *

The fire swept upwards, fifty feet or more. Embers funnelled towards Heaven like mad stars. None could endure the heat within ten feet of the blazing pile. Bannerman’s underclothes were sweated through. His face was grimed, and his heavy ulster had a fine dusting of ash. Withal, he was jubilant.

The hour of the Angel was approaching. All the hosts of Heaven and Hell were soon to be let loose in this place.

He stripped his cape and twirled it from his hand. It sailed on the hot wind of the fire, an albatross taking wing. In the flames, it writhed like a man afire and was gone in seconds.

Bannerman was giddy.

The flock followed his example, and ventured nearer the fire, pulling off winter coats and woollen shawls that would never again be needed. It was warm enough. Hands helped Bannerman with his frock coat. He was comfortable in his waistcoat and shirtsleeves, able to feel again the not quite dispelled bite of November night. He wiped his face with his hands, and wiped his hands on his trousers.

Some of the men were stripped to the waist, dark streaks of soot on white skins. The Misses Pym wore only cotton shifts and stockings. They were without sin. The whole flock was without sin.

Someone was quoting, ‘Naked you came into this world, and naked you shall pass into the Kingdom of Heaven.’

Bannerman clutched his throat, and twisted away his white collar. He felt freer without it, better able to breathe.

On the other side of the flames, Louisa Gilpin danced. She was naked as a newborn child. ‘See, oh Lord, how we have put aside the things of this world,’ she shouted.

Somehow, Bannerman was still shocked. He understood, and tried to purge himself of feelings he knew to be a part of the world well lost. He had never seen a woman naked, and Louisa was not like his imaginings. The phantoms of his night thoughts were cleaner, more like classical statues than this substantial, galumphing girl. He wondered whether he should take steps to curb the faithful lest joy give way to licentiousness.

But there was no sin.

‘It don’t matter any more, do it?’ asked Jerrold. He was naked himself, his body like sourdough hung in lumps on a skeleton. ‘We’re saved?’

Bannerman hesitated, but the Spirit of the Lord was within him and guided his words.

‘We’re saved, Jerrold! We of all are Chosen! We are without sin!’

‘Without sin,’ echoed the sexton. The cry was taken up, and became a sing-song chant. ‘Without sin! Without sin! Without sin!’

Clothes flew to the fire and were consumed. Shirts danced in the updraught and flamed like crepe paper. The chanting went on, and there was dancing. It might have been a festival of the South Sea Isles, but Bannerman knew true Christianity when he saw it. Flesh glowed in the firelight.

Bannerman backed away from the dancers, but the Misses Pym came to him, breasts bobbing, and tugged at his remaining clothes. He helped the Pym girls, plucking buttons, shrugging out of his waistcoat, kicking his boots away. Finally, he stood naked as Alice and Grace, close to them. Beneath the warmth of the fire, he could feel—even without touching—the warmth of their bodies.

They had kisses for him. He touched the secret places of their bodies, and felt their flesh pressed close against him. First one, then the other. Alice, then Grace. Then he could no longer tell which was which. Inside his head, he heard the Angel Raphael whispering. More familiar words. ‘Let him kiss me with kisses of his mouth, for thy Love is better than wine…’

His knees buckled, and he sank to the ground, the Pym girls with him. A sister—which one?—rolled apart, and the other was beneath him. They joined with strange ease. By the red light on her face, Bannerman saw it was Grace. Prettier Grace. His head close to hers, he could hear her whispering a disjointed, distracted prayer.

Still moving with the girl, he looked up. In a series of photographic flashes, he gathered that Grace and he were not the only ones among the flock who had taken this last opportunity to pleasure in the flesh they would soon leave behind. There would be a resurrection in the flesh, but it would be better, cleaner stuff than this.

The Angel was smiling upon all: Granver Shepherd fumbling with the widow Combs; Tom Pym—Tom Pym!—kneeling behind Louisa Gilpin, the girl on hands and knees, her hair over her face, his hands working her hips; Jerrold and Jem Gosmore’s youngest son, conjoined in an unimagined act of love; Winthrop, still in his breeches, kissing Jem Gosmore’s wife, his hands on her breasts; Bannerman and Grace…

Grace!

She gasped under him and collapsed, crying his name as he spent. They lay cooling together for a minute, and then she rolled away. He lay on his back, grass and earth beneath him, stung all over from the spark-spitting fire. He sucked in great gulps of cold air, and tried to shake fevers from his brain, but a Pym girl—Alice, this time?—came to him, hot hands stroking, and he was lost...

* * *

Bannerman woke up warm between bodies. A blanket or something had been thrown over them.

A horror came upon him.

He sat up, elbowing one of the Misses Pym in the process. She groaned, and pulled the blanket. Bannerman was cold now.

‘Have I…?’

‘Missed it?’ came a voice. ‘No, vicar.’

He looked around. The voice had been Jerrold’s. The verger was cross-legged by the fire. Jem Gosmore’s boy slept with his head in the old man’s lap. Bannerman got his eyes to focus. Few of the faithful were standing, most were dozing. The fire had collapsed and spread, but still burned fiercely. Louisa Gilpin squatted, her unbound hair tented about her. She held out a cloth-wrapped arm.

‘I burned myself, Mr Bannerman.’

‘You must have it seen to, child.’

‘No point to it. I won’t have no use for this poor carcass when the Lord comes. He’s a greater healer than you’ll find in Yeovil. Or in London either.’

The clouds had gone, and the moon illumined the hillside. The firelight was dimmed by comparison. The night was half over. He had no way of knowing the exact time. His watch was in his waistcoat, and his waistcoat was gone to the fire.

Someone was sobbing. It was Tom Pym, wrapped in someone else’s coat.

‘What happened to us, Mr Bannerman? To be so close, and yet to throw it all away…’

Others looked at him. Other unhappy faces. Bannerman stood up, confused for a moment. What had happened?

Then he remembered.

‘This is only flesh, Tom, and of no consequence. You know that. You all know that. We have been taught well. There will be no shame, for there can be no sin among us. We are the Chosen of God. The old ways are hard to put aside, but we must.’

Bannerman was not sure the words were right, but the Spirit was still strong in him. He cloaked himself in the blanket. The Misses Pym, awake now, shook in the cold, and huddled together. He saw the dirt on their bodies, in their hair; and the blood…

He opened the blanket, and invited them to the warmth of his body. Grace slipped in quietly and was enveloped, but Alice drew back. She was pouting, not playfully. She did not make a dimple.

She touched herself, and her fingers came away bloody, ‘I’m hurt.’

‘No, Alice —’

‘Yesssss!’ It was a cat’s hiss, venomed with loathing. Alice darted lithe as a naked Indian into the bushes. He heard her fighting branches and thorns. Then she was gone.

The fire crackled and burned lower. It would have been perfect for baking potatoes. For a long while, no one said anything.

‘Daughter,’ said Tom, ‘let us go home.’

Grace, snug next to Bannerman, pretended not to hear. She pressed herself to him, kittenish and coy. Tom looked death at his vicar, then turned and left. He found a path from the clearing and trudged after Alice.

It was as if Bannerman had been slapped, hard. He knew this was the Last Night, yet the faithful were divided among themselves. They had been Chosen, but they imperilled the privilege, spurning the Lord’s favour. It would be a tragedy to suffer eternal perdition because of a lapse of belief scant minutes away from the sure and certain hope of.

Alice and Tom had not been the first to leave. Others had crept away while he slept. Winthrop was gone, taking Jem Gosmore’s wife—whose name was Katy or Kitty, one or the other—with him. There were more than a few faces missing, and those that remained were shadowed with despair. Shame, even.

The faithful were sadly depleted. He began to preach to them, to recite rather, taking the Revelation as his text. He had most of it by heart, and his voice was good. The words came easily. He had read them so many times at Lampeter, and they had been given new fire by the Angel. He sounded strong. But his flock still drifted away in ones and twos.

Hastily, shamefully, defiantly, in disgust, in anger they left. Many cursed him out loud. Others were too exhausted to say anything. Still, he preached. Until there were only three beside him, and his voice faltered. Old Jerrold, pity in his eyes; Grace, asleep on her feet; and Louisa, face shining with madness, he realized, not divine light.

The fire was a circle of ashes. The sky was light in the east. The moon was low. It was nearly dawn. A dawn that should not be, but was.

The Reverend Mr Timothy Charles Bannerman wept for all he had lost. Even Jerrold was gone now, to face the things he had found within himself. Grace was curled up, an unburned dress over her like a bedspread.

Only Louisa was there to witness the very end. The End of All Things. She knelt, adoring the Lord, adoring him, waiting with him, aching for his dreams to be the truth…

‘I seen him too,’ she said. ‘Raphael. Angels tell no lies.’

He had nothing more to say. There was a half-circle of sun on the horizon. His eyes watering, he kissed the girl on the lips. Perhaps, underneath everything, she was prettier even than the prettier Miss Pym. Maybe madness made her beautiful.

Gingerly, Bannerman stepped over the fireline and felt soft hot ash under his soles. He half knelt and scooped up a handful of cinders, rubbing them into his skin, smearing chest and limbs and face. There were a few hot coals. He ignored them, feeling burns less than itches.

He straightened and walked towards the centre, the last of the flames nipping at his ankles, scorching the hair off his shins. He did not know where he was going.

…but when he got there, Raphael was waiting.

Bannerman was closer than he had ever been to the burning Angel, and in daylight. He saw the dead cores of its flaming eyes.

He opened his mouth to ask a question, but the Angel—light dimmed by the dawn—took him in his arms and kissed him. The eternal fire bit deep into his back and spread over his body, raising great blisters as it spread in irregular patches. Hot breath crept down his throat.

The Angel’s empty face was near, and Bannerman’s eyes popped with the heat. He felt himself being burned alive, and was not sorry...

Louisa watched him until he fell in pieces from the Angel’s embrace. The burning figure stood over the pool of stinking, steaming oil that had once been a man, and faded in the sunlight. To a yellow ghost, then to nothing. She found rags to cover herself, and went back to her father’s farm.

Grace Pym slept until someone came for her.

PART

I

1

When they first came to Alder, the big heat had already been on for over a month. In the daytime, the house, built to weather centuries of winters, was like a Casablanca gambling hell. Paul had tried working upstairs and almost come down with heat stroke. Luckily, there had been a wobbly rolltop desk on the verandah. Hazel helped him set it up surreally on the lawn, under the fairly constant shade of a survivor elm. He replaced the missing foot with a nonessential book—William LeQueux’s nigh-unreadable Great War in England in 1897—and now had a decent workspace. The extension cord of his IBM electric snaked back into the house through the kitchen window. Papers flapped under makeshift weights, which was irritating, but even the slightest breeze was better than still heat. The typewriter hummed, but he didn’t even have a sheet of paper in the roller. This was one of his ‘thinking’ sessions, which meant he was stalled, letting his mind wander until his unconscious sorted out what he should do next and passed the message upstairs.

The converted cow sheds had big folding doors that opened to turn the studio into a cutaway diagram. Hazel was hunched over her wheel, working a lump of clay. She pushed her longish hair out of her eyes with a dry wrist, then got her wet fingers back to the emerging pot. Clay rose and fell, a mushroom cloud, a vinegar bottle. Throwing pots was hypnotic, almost erotic, to watch. Sometimes the process appealed more than the result. Paul knew nothing about ceramics but could tell Hazel relied too often on what her tutors told her. In the shop attached to the studio, her pots were distinct from the Bleaches’, wax fruit among the real. But she was improving. Certainly, she had been the more productive of them so far this summer. She applied herself with enviable concentration, a strength he hadn’t expected.

He had been going out with her since Easter, and it was now mid-July. Paul supposed he loved her, although he was always uncomfortable with the ‘L’ word. She was named Hazel for hazel eyes, naturally. In fact, almost almond eyes. She had very slight epicanthic folds. Her father had been in the Navy. Maybe a seafaring ancestor once took a Chinese wife. Otherwise, he guessed she was just pretty. She was Paul’s first major affair since Sally the Psychotic—she had liked skunk music and torn up T-shirts for a rock-merchandising company—and they had arranged to spend the summer together before deciding whether she should move into his flat back in Brighton. He’d thought this a formality, but now the possibility of it not working out was starting to tickle the back of his mind. While the countryside was very obviously burning up, they were almost imperceptibly cooling off.

The crisis had been official since spring, and the harvest was set to be a disaster. The land was ailing. Around him, the grass was piss-yellow. Up in the orchard, the property was a post-holocaust wasteland. The apples had ripened early, but under shiny skins the fruit had been sour and hard. This morning, Hazel had had to get up at six to phone the Bleaches, on their lecture tour in Canada until September, and break the bad news. Their garden was suffering a slow, lingering death. Mike and Mirrie were understanding. The instructions were to do the best to limit the damage. Paul had only met the couple once, but liked them very much. Mike was external assessor for the polytechnic, and one of Hazel’s tutors recommended her as a working caretaker for the summer. The Bleaches were right not to shut up shop while they were away; agriculture might be down, but tourism was up. The shop was so busy some mornings that Paul had to fill in for Hazel with customers so she could get a few uninterrupted hours at the wheel.

The bell by the showroom steps jingled. He looked across the lawn. Hazel was sliding off the seat of her wheel, brushing off her apron. The visitors weren’t customers. They hadn’t gone into the shop. Hazel joined them on the steps. Paul realized immediately they were a pair of Jago’s peace-and-love zombies. In their Woodstock-era outfits and beatific living-dead expressions, they were unmistakable. He’d seen a few of the species around the village, but had never had to speak to any of them. Until now. He’d heard of Alder before this summer, of course. The Village Where God Lives. Thered been a piece on cults in the Independent, and an acid profile of Anthony Jago in The New Statesman. The Agapemone was well away from the village but could be seen from the moor, a prime sample of early Victorian megalomaniac architecture halfway up its own little hill.

‘Hi,’ said the broad-hipped woman, ‘my name’s Wendy, and he’s Derek. Welcome to Alder. Wed have been round before, but it’s been hectic.’

She had brought flowers, miraculously unshrivelled, and handed them into Hazel’s arms carefully, as if passing a baby. The Lord God evidently outranked the parish council when it came to water regulations. Paul had been yearning to violate the local authority’s sprinkler ban and give emergency aid to the lawn, but water laws were being enforced with the zeal eighteenth-century revenue men had employed sniffing out lace smugglers.

‘Hello, I’m Paul Forrestier.’ They’d come over to his desk. Hazel had provisionally put the flowers in a vase in the showroom, and was wiping clay-grey hands on her caked apron. ‘This is Hazel.’

‘Chapel,’ she added, smiling. Her name was Chapelet actually, but she didn’t like it. ‘Hi, thanks for the flowers.’

‘We’re from the Agapemone,’ said Wendy, ‘that means—’

‘Abode of Love,’ said Paul.

‘Right. I’m impressed. I heard you were a brain of some sort. Are you a Greek scholar?’

‘No,’ he said, embarrassed. ‘English Lit. I read an article…’

‘Oh.’ Wendy dropped a hint of defensiveness. ‘Well, never mind. Don’t be put off. Jesus Christ didn’t get a good press either. We’re not really like the Manson family, honest.’

Wendy’s cheeriness was suddenly unconvincing. The New Statesman had compared Jago with Sun Myung Moon, L. Ron Hubbard and, tactfully, Jim Jones, but Paul let it pass. He didn’t want to go into a discussion of the tenets of the Acid Gospel. He had Wendy and Derek pegged as old hippies, but Wendy’s conversational daintiness was almost conventional. She wore CND, Animal Rights and Legalize It patches on her embroidered waistcoat, and her grey-touched hair was frizzed and long. However, she’d have been as happy representing the Women’s Institute as a fringe cult which worshipped God in the flesh. Under multicoloured skirt and tie-dyed blouse, she was creeping chubbily into middle age.

‘Tony’s amazing,’ said the man, Derek. He was thin and worn, his Midlands-accented hesitance suggesting he did little of the talking. ‘He’s got the whole world sussed.’

‘Oh yes.’ Wendy took over again, digging leaflets out of her Rupert Bear shoulder bag. Hazel took one. ‘He’s helped us sort ourselves out. We used to be really screwed up.’

Paul cringed inwardly. He was afraid Wendy was going to ramble on about their Messiah.

‘He’s far out,’ said Derek, without apparent irony. If this went on much longer, Paul was going to have trouble keeping a straight face.

Hazel sat in one of the garden chairs and picked through the handout. Wendy and Derek sat on the ground, cross-legged. Derek plucked a few straw-coloured blades of grass, and started braiding them. ‘The earth is dying,’ he said. Or was that ‘The Earth is dying’?

‘Yeah,’ said Paul. ‘Time for the big red sunset and the giant crabs.’

‘The Time Machine, right?’

‘Yes.’ Paul was surprised. He would assume Derek was remembering the film, but Hollywood had left out the giant crabs.

Hazel was excited, brighter than he had seen her since spring. ‘Can we go?’ The tiny overlap of her front teeth, which she hated and he quite liked, showed, as it did whenever she forgot not to smile broadly. She handed him a leaflet. It was for the summer festival. He did not realize how big it was going to be. Hazel pointed out the names of several groups he had never heard of. One of the headline acts was Loud Shit, a skunk band Sally had taken him to last year. He didn’t think they’d get involved in anything remotely religious, and grinned at the idea of how well they would go down with the Tory-voting farmers of Alder. The nearest they came to a love song was a number called ‘Fuck Off and Die’. He’d broken up with Sally shortly afterwards, when she’d had one of her breasts tattooed.

‘We were going to ask you…’

‘(Because you make pots)’

‘…if you’d like a stall to sell stuff from. We’ve got all sorts of crafts people. Weavers, woodturners, jewellers. And some really good theatre groups. And things for kids. We’ve been scheming for months. It’ll be even better than last year.’

Hazel went ‘umm’. She was unhappy with her recent work.

‘I’ve only had one gloss firing, and there was a hiccough with the glaze. Too many things came out dingy brown. I haven’t got much sellable stuff. A few things from last term.’

‘I’m sure it’ll be lovely.’

‘Most people will be stoned anyway,’ said Derek, nearly giggling. ‘They’ll make up their own colours.’

A pause. Wendy’s lips thinned momentarily. Derek would get a reasonable talking-to later, Paul was sure. He felt sorry for the man, intuiting that he’d been dragged by his girlfriend into Jago’s sect and was liable to be stuck with it. Until the Reverend gave the Beatles’ Double White one spin too many and called for a bloodbath, or, depressed by an income-tax investigation, decided it was time to try out the Kool-Aid and cyanide cocktail on his congregation.

‘But I’m firing again tonight. I think I know where I went wrong. I’m not used to this big kiln. If it turns out okay, I’ll have some pretty things. I hope. I’ve also got a couple of boxes of Mike and Mirrie Bleach’s pots. They’re supposed to replace the work that sells from the shop, but nobody will mind if they go during the festival.’

‘That’s great.’ Wendy clacked her beads. ‘We’ll put you down for a table. Come over to the Agapemone when you can, and pick a site. We don’t lock up or anything. We try to be really open, and anyone can come to one of our meals or Tony’s services. There’s no real mystery. We’d like to have you. Both.’

‘Thanks, I’m a bit busy with my thesis, but—’

‘We’d love to drop over,’ said Hazel. ‘There’s blow all else to do out here.’

Hazel took Paul’s hand. Hers was dry, and he felt slip-clay powder between their palms.

‘You must come. He’ll like you. And you’ll like Him. Tony.’

Paul had known whom Wendy meant. The Reverend Anthony William Jago. In photographs, he had eyes like Robert Powell as Jesus and the three-weeks-dead expression Paul associated with William S. Burroughs.

Post addressed to ‘The Lord God, Alder’ was apparently delivered to him.

‘We must be going,’ Wendy said. ‘So much to do, so little time to do it in.’

When Wendy and Derek had gone, Hazel got a different vase for the flowers and filled it with precious water. Then she went back to work, and Paul was left to his books.

2

Leaning on his cherry-wood stick, Danny Keough rested. Not wanting to strap himself into his old Volkswagen because of the heat, he had decided to go round the outlying farms on foot. Inside, the car smelled like burning tyres. Still, it might have been better than punishing his trick knee on this long hike. The old wound was playing up, and a permanent haze had settled on his brain. He had not been smitten by the sun like this since 1947, his stint in Palestine.

Maybe somebody would give him a lift to the Maskell farm. It was unlikely. On the levels, you could see cars coming from a long way away. There was nothing in sight except a blue van pulled up on the verge a hundred yards down the road. This was a B-route anyway, not wide enough for two vehicles to pass each other without one having to back up into a lay-by. It was only here to serve Maskell and a few smaller farmers. The tarmac was springy, the patches laid down in spring to fill in potholes were bitumen black and tacky. Across the ditches, rubbery fields were moistened only by rancid remains of long-dead grass. The ditches were mainly muddy depressions streaked with pale, cracked earth. Although these were the wetlands, there wasn’t much wet this year.

It would be a bad year. And Jago’s jamboree would only make it worse. Last Christmas, they had sent him an anonymous present. Inside the thin square parcel was a gramophone record. ‘Don’t Stop the Carnival’ by the Alan Price Set. He should have laughed. This was not a carnival, this was a zoo. The hippies were animals. Despoiling the countryside, breaching the peace, disturbing the livestock, interfering with people, raising a racket.

He was late with his petition because he’d been laid up by the heat, but he had hopes it would be longer than ever. He mightn’t stop them this year, but he was making a dent. Next year, or the year after, maybe. He didn’t care if he was grappling with the Lord God. Danny Keough had dealt with a campaign of terror before, and this time he would brave it out. His country had let him down in Palestine, running away from the Jew-boy killers. Things were different now. It was all up to him. There were no politicians to chicken out when things got hairy.

Four years ago, he’d been sweet-talked along with the rest of the village. But when he saw the first carload of teenage tearaways come up the road, he knew what it would be like. They didn’t call themselves hippies any more, but that was what they were all right. And hippies were no different from gypsies, savages, vermin. Nomadic trash with no hopes, messing up one place and going on to the next.

It was an invasion. An occupation. A week of unrelieved din, litter, harassment and degradation. Naked and painted kids using the street as a toilet. Drugged freaks running riot. And the noise. It wasn’t music, any more than a plane crash was music. Afterwards, Alder looked as if a Panzer division had rolled through, followed by an Apache war party.

The next year, and every year since, Danny had been making a din of his own, trying to put a stop to the festival. He began with letter writing. He remembered with pride the headline the Western Gazette printed over his first published letter, ‘“Hippies Should Be Stopped” Writes Decorated Veteran’. He sent copies to the district council, the county council, the Sedgemoor and District Preservation Society, his Member of Parliament and the bishop of Bath and Wells. He’d been in the Gazette again regularly, also the Bridgwater Mercury, the Western Daily Press and the Bristol Evening Post. HTV West came and interviewed him in his front garden, but they had cut up what he said and also had on some posh-voiced drop-out from the Agapemone to make him look an intolerant old fool. Even then, the television station had letters in support of him.

But the festival happened again. And it had been even worse. Every year, it got worse. Five weeks before the second festival, the last of his cats had been run over in the road. Danny was sure the car was from the Agapemone. It was part of some obscene rite which demanded sacrifice. Over the years, indignities had mounted up. His front garden had been trampled over, his stretch of white fence pissed on and spray-painted. The side of his house had been flyposted with so many advertisements for groups with disgusting names that it looked like a modern art collage when he tried to rip it down. He wasn’t the only victim. Mrs Graham, who lived alone, had been terrorized by young thugs who pitched a tent in her garden with not so much as a by-your-leave, and had passed away the next winter. Mr Starkey’s youngest, Tina, had been lured into the festival; she had come back half-naked, doped up to the eyeballs. The family had to send her away to an approved school, and Danny heard she had to get rid of a baby. There was also damage to crops, animals, roads and private property.

It had to be stopped.

This used to be beautiful countryside, but since Jago came to the Manor House it had turned, like milk left in the sun.

He started walking again, trying to keep the weight off his knee. There was pain in each step. Lately he was more aware of his old wounds, and thinking of how he had got them.

It must be the heat, taking him back. During the Gulf War, he had grudgingly raised a brandy in salute every time one of Saddam’s Scuds got through to the Jew-boys. Every time he read in the Telegraph about the PLO blowing up people in Israel, there was a little holiday in his heart. That was what an American writer had said about Palestine, ‘Every time a British soldier is killed, there’s a little holiday in my heart’. The Jews invented terrorism and he relished the thought of them choking in Tel Aviv on their own medicine. Some time soon, when he’d stopped the festival, Danny was going to get back on their case. He’d been prodding the army and government for years. He had a scrapbook. He knew how many Irgun killers held high office in the Israeli government. They hadn’t paid their debt to Britain, their debt to Danny Keough, yet. But there was time.

He’d walked as far as the blue van, and was in sight of the Maskell house. There was a group of people in the nearest field, standing among some skinny cows. One of the animals was down, and a man knelt by it. Maurice Maskell stood over them, eyes shaded by a tweed cap, hands on hips, listening. The farmer looked now as his father, Major Maskell, had done in the 1950s, weathered and authoritative. But he wasn’t the man the Major had been. He had never been to war, never faced the enemy.

Danny found a concrete bridge, not that he needed one to get across this ghost ditch, and walked into the field. He waved his stick, but no one turned to take notice. He joined the group.

The kneeling man was Donal Goddard, the local vet. Danny had taken his cats to him. Goddard was finishing a depressing diagnosis, which Maskell was doing his best to take on board.

‘It’s the heat,’ Goddard concluded, standing up, brushing dry dirt off his knees.

‘Umm,’ Maskell was thinking. The two other men in the group looked at the tall farmer. They were farm labourers, Reg Gilpin and Stan Budge. Everyone was worried.

No one said anything, so Danny piped up. ‘Maurice, if I might have a word?’

Maskell looked as if he didn’t recognize him for a few seconds, then snapped out of it. He grasped Danny’s hand and took hold of his shoulder, steering him slightly away from the others.

‘Danny, hello, good to see you. I’ve got something on right now. I’ll be with you in a moment. Go up to the house, and Sue-Clare will get you something cold. Okay?’

‘Righty-ho.’

Maskell gave him a slight push, sending him across the field, toward the house, keeping him out of the group. Danny heard the vet talking. ‘There’s not much more I can do here, Maurice. Keep on as you have been, and I’ll give you a ring tomorrow.’ Maskell mumbled a goodbye, and Goddard started toward his van. When Danny got to the gate that separated Maskell’s concrete yard from the fields, he looked back.

Maskell was talking to the men. Budge gestured angrily. Voices raised. The workman spat on the ground. It was obviously a rough day all round.

In the yard, Maskell’s wife was greasing a saddle. She dressed like the land girls Danny remembered from the war, tight trousers and a loose man’s shirt. Her eyes were covered by beetle-black glasses. She smiled to see him coming, and waved a cloth.

‘Good morning, Mr Keough.’

‘Is it?’

She ignored the comment. ‘Maurice sent you over, eh? I’ve got a jug of lemonade chilling in the fridge. Join us.’

‘I shan’t be stopping long.’

Sue-Clare Maskell had her top two buttons undone. In the sticky heat, her shirt outlined her breasts. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Danny found it hard to understand. These days, this was the way a respectable woman dressed.

‘I’ve more calls to make,’ he said, holding up his new folder. ‘The petition.’

‘Excuse me, will you. I’ll get the juice. Maurice is coming. Be right back.’

She went indoors, to her kitchen. Danny watched the seat of her riding trousers as she walked. She must be years younger than her husband. Their children, a weedy boy called Jeremy and a robust girl named Hannah, were barely old enough for school. Jeremy was the beginnings of a nuisance, wandering around in a dream, falling in ditches, having tantrums. Danny had heard that Sue-Clare Maskell had strange interests. Crystals and acupuncture, stargazing. She wasn’t from around here.

He remembered the girls in Jerusalem who crowded the barracks, bodies like ripe fruit. One of them had brought in the bomb. Perhaps one he’d been with? The heat had been driving everyone crazy. It was almost a relief to be in the fanned cool of the hospital. And he remembered the other woman from the other war. The German parachutist. No one talked about her. Danny might even be the last man alive who had been there the night the Nazis tried to bomb Alder.

Maskell was right in front of him, talking. ‘…brings you here?’

‘Pardon?’

‘Danny, you were miles off. Somewhere cool, I hope.’

‘Uh, sorry.’ Danny drew breath, preparing to say it all over again. ‘Maurice, it’s about the—’

He had to swallow his speech. Sue-Clare Maskell was back, with a tray. Maurice took a glass of thin green drink and forced it into Danny’s hand. The glass felt like a thick icicle. He took a swallow. It was bitter, not the sweet fizzy stuff he called lemonade. Maskell rolled his glass between his palms, then put his chilled hand to his forehead.

‘Wonderful, Suki. Just what I needed.’

‘Was it bad?’ she asked him, setting the tray down on a broad windowsill. The side of their house was thickly covered with none too healthy ivy.

‘Uh-huh. Donal thinks we’ve lost more of the herd. It’s not a virus, really. Just rotten grass, and the heat.’

‘Oh no…’

‘And I had to let Gilpin and Budge go. Budge hollered “union”, but there’s no case. We can’t keep them on the roster. There’s nothing for them to do. Still, it wasn’t any fun.’

‘Shit.’

Danny flinched. It was wrong, a woman using language like that. A respectable woman. He opened his folder.

‘What about compensation?’

‘Nothing doing,’ Maskell said. ‘At least, not yet. It’s not a real disease, Donal says. Just the heat.’

The woman frowned, brow wrinkles above her sunglasses.

‘By the way, he said to keep giving Fancy the horse pills, and hope for the best.’

‘Terrific,’ she said acidly.

‘It’s not his fault, Suki.’

Sue-Clare Maskell drank her lemonade.

From the house, Danny heard a dog whimpering and children arguing.

‘Stop it, you two,’ Sue-Clare shouted. ‘Hannah’s been frightening Jeremy again,’ she explained. ‘She keeps telling him Jethro’s got AIDS and is going to die.’

Jethro was the dog.

Maskell glowered. ‘We’ll have to see about that,’ he said. ‘Sounds like too much television.’

Danny saw Jeremy, a large-eyed little boy of about seven, in the kitchen door, lurking. Realizing the visitor could see him, he vanished inside.

‘Maurice,’ said Danny, ‘I’m trying to put a stop to all the trouble.’

Maskell stared again, as if looking at a madman. ‘What?’

‘The trouble. The hippies. The festival.’

‘Oh, that. Sorry, I thought you were going to do something about the drought.’

Danny’s knee started to throb.

‘If you and your wife would sign this…’

Maskell took the folder and cast his eyes down to the statement taped to it. Danny knew it by heart. He had spent a lot of time experimenting with different wordings.

We the undersigned, year-round residents of Alder, take objection to the so-called festival organized by the Agapemone. We charge A.W. Jago with failing to properly keep order at said event, and protest the considerable hardship, nuisance and financial loss it causes us. We entreat the authorities to prevent the festival from taking place on the grounds of flagrant violations of the law.

On an attached sheet, Danny had put details of the specific laws broken over the years. It was an impressive and frightening document, the upshot of long days in Bridgwater Library with newspaper files and law books, and an expensive half-hour with a Langport lawyer.

Maskell took a long time reading the basic proposition. His wife leaned over, sunglasses up in her hair, and read too.

‘Maurice,’ she said, ‘we can’t.’