The Lamp of the Wicked Read Online Free Page B

she’d blasphemed in public or something.
    Whatever you said always sounded more strident in the parish hall, the one building in mellow, timber-framed Ledwardine without a soul. The hall had been built in 1964. Its pink bricks and white tiling put you in mind of a disused abattoir; its caged, mauvish ceiling lights made faces gleam like raw meat.
    ‘What I meant’ – Merrily almost squirmed in her plastic chair – ‘is that I’ve never really thought of myself as much of an orator. I’m… not always entirely comfortable in the pulpit. Like, who am I to step up there and lay down the law?’
    Now she’d made it worse. She looked quickly around the table from face to face, aware that she was blushing because it could have been taken as a reference to her private life. She wondered if any of them knew about her and Lol. Maybe they all did. Maybe it was all over the parish.
Harlot.
    ‘Well, since you ask, Mrs Watkins…’ The chairman, James Bull-Davies, looked half-amused. ‘My understanding of the situation was that, for this short period every Sunday, the vicar was supposed to be some sort of mouthpiece for the Almighty. Suffused with the Holy Spirit. Or have I got that wrong?’
    Merrily felt in need of a cigarette. She also felt like laying her head on the table and covering it with her arms.
    ‘That’s a little unfair, Mr Davies.’ The soft, mildly Irish voice of Mrs Jenny Box drifted like scented smoke from the far corner. ‘Mrs Watkins was displaying simple humility, and if that isn’t part of God’s core agenda for us all, then I don’t know what is.’
    ‘Oh Gord!’ James Bull-Davies leaned back abruptly, to vague splintering sounds from his carved wooden chair. ‘Shut your damn mouth, James.’ He waved a hand in exasperation. ‘Anyone object if we drag this discussion back to
our
agenda? Or else we’ll be here till the pubs’ve closed.’
    James was chairing the meeting on military lines, eight tables arranged into a square. You felt that there should be sand trays and little model tanks. But it was good, Merrily had reflected, to have him back. He’d been out of village life for over a year, gathering his private affairs into some kind of order. Now, he and Alison were breeding horses professionally, and Upper Hall farmhouse was getting its leaking roof retiled.
    In the semi-feudal past, it had been understood that the Bull family fortune should also maintain the fabric of the parish church; nowadays it was accepted that the odd crumpled tenner in the collection was going to be James’s limit. The church was on its own now. It needed more income, short and long term.
    ‘Sorry,’ Merrily said. ‘My fault.’ In a roundabout way, she’d been attempting to make the point that, while incorporating a gift shop could be a good idea, the parish church should also be available simply as a quiet, sacred place – that it wasn’t only about hymns and preaching. It wasn’t only about Sunday.
    ‘Look, I’m not…’ Uncle Ted Clowes raised himself up. He looked irritated. ‘I’m not entirely getting this. How does running a small shop in the church prevent it being a place of sanctuary? No one’s suggesting the proposed outlet should be open for business all day and every day.’
    ‘No,’ Merrily said, ‘but the church
itself
should be.… within reason. But what I’m really saying is…’
    And then she lost the thread. The problem was, she was still in two minds about this. She was all for the church becoming more open, less formal. Hadn’t she fought Ted’s plan to lock the doors nightly at six p.m.? Hadn’t she held out against parish purists outraged when she’d let Rex Rosser’s sheepdog, Alice, lie on a back pew next to Rex?
    The harsh lights hurt Merrily’s eyes. There’d been no mention yet of the mobile-phone mast. Maybe Ted was thinking that if he could push the shop through without a struggle then he could slip the mast in near the end or save it for a future meeting