Death in the Cotswolds (5 page)

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 evening, 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.

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 notes 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.

After nearly an hour of that, I was ready for some air. Outside the trees were blowing about, the first autumn leaves coming off in clouds, banking up
along the sides of the street and collecting in gateways. The villagers didn’t like that. They brushed and gathered and burnt great sackfuls, adding to the misty smoky atmosphere on windless days.

I set out towards the north, past the village church, up the lane to the little gate that opened into the beech avenue.

It was noisy under the trees, but fairly sheltered, considering the wide exposed sweeps of land on either side. Farming had grown to an industrial scale in our area, with fifty-acre fields a commonplace. Hedges and copses had been ripped up, gateways widened or removed entirely, for the massive machinery required to harvest the corn and other crops.

Ahead of me lay Notgrove, a smaller village than Cold Aston, with a very different history. Notgrove had a special claim to my attention during Samhain, because of the Barrow. The burial chambers had been excavated a long time ago, exposing the stones that were part of the construction. But then the powers that be had deemed it prudent to protect the site from vandals, and had covered everything up again. They called it
backfilling
, which seemed an oddly technical word for what they’d done. Many of us considered it little better than another form of vandalism. I had never seen the stones, except in photographs. Ursula, and one or two others,
disagreed with my point of view on the subject. ‘It’s much more authentic as it is now,’ she said. And she did have a point, I suppose. All you could see was a small hillock, with grass and wild flowers growing on it. To the south side was an indentation, and all around were big trees. The northern edge was bordered by the A436 – a horrible road, with traffic zooming along and no proper footpath.

People came to see the Barrow in all seasons, courtesy of English Heritage, who put no restrictions or charges on visitors. The mere fact that it dated back 4000 years was enough to attract Americans and other tourists, although I daresay they found it disappointing when they got there.

I went in through the small gate, with my head full of death and the clever inventions that people have used to make it bearable. I thought about this burial place, the care lavished on the bodies, the impossibility of ever truly understanding the ideas and hopes of those who constructed the place.

I walked to the top of the hummock, where the summer grass now lay limp and mushy. Hogweed seedheads rose eerily all over the site, the brittle stalks bare of leaves by that time, looking like the skeletons of triffids. In summer, you could see flattened circles where people had picnicked or had sex – or both. In October, such activities had ceased and the place had an abandoned air, despite the unseasonal mildness and the surprising greenness of
the trees. The Samhain ceremony would be conducted at the highest point, in full view of traffic from the road, if they chose to look. Almost nobody ever did, being far too intent on overtaking each other on the sudden thrilling section of straight.

Then I did what I usually did, which was walk down the side of the hillock, towards the bowl-shaped hollow that had formed to the south, probably unintentionally, giving shelter from observation.

My mind was still on death, so it seemed at first no more than a slightly more concrete manifestation of my thoughts when I observed a form, lying tidily in the hollow, frosted slightly with the morning’s drizzle. A hedge sparrow perched on its shoulder, as if on a tree stump. I blinked and looked again, and my heart thumped huge and loud in my chest.

Facing away from me, on her side, was the inert body of a woman. When my brain finally informed me of this fact, I had to sit down on the wet sloping edge of the depression, fighting a giddiness I’d never known before, summoning the courage to move closer. I had to see the face, to know exactly what I was looking at. Until then it could be a dummy, or a living person sleeping off drink or drugs. But a living person wouldn’t lie like that on the wet grass, so utterly unmoving, offering a perch to a wild bird. With a sick horror I gave thanks that it hadn’t been
a crow or a magpie, seeking the unexpected bounty of a juicy eyeball. In February it would not have taken them so long to snatch such a prize.

Moving at a bent, crabbed angle, as if suffering from acute stomach ache, I skirted the perimeter, keeping a few feet between me and the thing in the grass, until I was staring down at its profile. Half hidden by hair and a few dry stalks of dock, it was still quite easy to identify.

My friend Gaynor was lying dead in Notgrove Long Barrow, with a long slender piece of metal protruding from her body. Her hands were folded together against her throat, her feet precisely parallel to each other and at right angles to her lower legs. The knees were tightly bent. It was the attitude of a sacrificial victim.