Jago Read online

  4

  The kitchens were the oldest part of the Agapemone, vaulted caverns at the back of the building. On the ground floor, they were robbed by the rise of the hill around the foundations of all windows but a row of glassed horizontal slits near the ceiling. If Beloved ever had to feed a multitude, he would have earthly facilities to back up His divine powers. Brass pots hung on one wall, arranged from largest to smallest like a percussionist’s fantasy. Fine china, some of it over a hundred years old, was stacked and locked away in a huge, much-beaten dresser. There were enough deep sinks to service a morgue, and a yardage of work surfaces that could accommodate an attempt to break the world record for sequentially knocking over dominoes.

  It was well past the ghosts’ high noon, but Jenny was still working. Being able to serve made her content. Her days were full now, with not a moment wasted. The confusions she felt only a few months earlier were as solved and remote as the teething and toilet troubles of her babyhood. Exams, rows with her parents, universities, jobs, boys. That was over; now she could get on with things. She’d found the faith to realize that the choices which had bothered her were false. She could only do what was right. Nothing else was possible. She suspected some of doubt, but their feelings were as mysterious and unfathomable to her as her certainties now were to her parents.

  She loved her parents as she Loved her Brothers and Sisters in the Agapemone, as she Loved the Righteous who would be Saved, as she Loved the Unrighteous who would be Cast Out, as she Loved, most of all, Him. Despite Love, her parents were lost to her. She could not waste time on regrets. It was the way it was to be. She hoped, in the end, they’d see truth and join the communion. He was infinitely merciful.

  As she ran the cold taps to get the rust out of the water, she hummed to herself. When she had first learned the tune, at school, it had been called ‘Lord of the Dance’, and the words had been about Jesus (H.) Christ. Now, as she hummed, she thought of the older, lovelier lyric. Susan told her the song was associated with an American sect of the last century who believed dance a sacrament, that the expression of joy was the worship of God.

  ’Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free,

  ’Tis the gift to come down where you ought to be.

  And when you find yourself in the place just right,

  It will be in the Valley of Love and Delight…

  The Valley of Love and Delight. She touched herself, feeling the heat of her body through her dress. She was learning, all the time, about the Gift. She was fortunate to have so many Gifts.

  The water ran pure. She shut off the creaky tap to lift the bucket from the sink. She put it down by two others, full of the washing-up slops. In the drought, water was precious. It could be used in the garden or to flush the toilets.

  She slid the big enamel basin into the sink and twisted the tap. Noisily, the oval bowl began to fill. There were echoes in the pipes. The basin was soon brimful with water, as she was with the Love of the Lord. It was good to be a sound vessel. She looked at herself in the mirror of the water, and seemed to feel her face waver as a ripple disturbed it. She turned the tap again, stopping the drip, and lifted the basin out of the sink. Water shifted but did not spill. She did not feel the weight. Strength of the spirit had a way of making up for the weakness of the body.

  She put the basin down on a table by the door, flicked the light switches off, picked up her burden again, left the kitchens and steadily walked to the staircase. As long as she kept to her preordained path, it was like floating. The basin was insubstantial. Her feet hardly touched the carpeted stairs, though her long dress dragged a little. If she were to let go of the basin, she felt it would bob slightly in the air but remain more or less where it was, drawn as she was upwards, towards Beloved. But if she were to suffer, as Sister Wendy did or even the self-possessed Susan, from the slightest of doubts, the basin would fall, soaking her from the waist down, waking the household. Then, she might have to face the man in the leather jacket who stood in Wendy’s shadow, waiting to take advantage. But, of course, her faith was unshakable.

  The house was quiet. The library door was not showing lines of light, so Susan must have gone to bed. Everyone else who had no duty would have turned in at eleven o’clock. She should be the only person awake except for Beloved, who was always watching over His flock. He was on the top floor, up three flights of stairs. In one windowless room under the roof, there was a strange apparatus inherited from the house’s former owner, a camera obscura. Jenny had been allowed up there once. With the device, Beloved could create in miniature an image of the house and the village. Even without it, He knew most things. Otherwise, His rooms were sparsely furnished. He had no need of luxuries.

  With an extended foot, she pushed His door open, managing not to spill the water. She stepped inside and gratefully set her burden down on a stand. The gable windows were uncurtained and let in the thin moonlight. Beloved lay on a wooden pallet on the floor. In the pale light, His skin shone. His eyes were closed and He was still but Jenny knew He wasn’t asleep. He never really slept. He shifted His head as if to look at her, but His eyes didn’t open.

  She took a fresh flannel and dampened it in the cool water. Kneeling, she began to wash Beloved, starting with His feet. He’d bled a little again, from the ankles. She had to be gentle, taking care not to rub too roughly the many times healed and opened wounds. The dry blood came away easily. Reverentially, she tried to touch Him only with the flannel. Whenever she failed and her fingers met His flesh, she felt a little start ofjoy deep inside. When she reached His face, His eyes were open. When she dabbed near them, He didn’t blink. Beloved was beautiful.

  The first of her ministrations complete, she stood. There was a damp patch on her dress, clinging to her stomach where the fabric was wet. She looked the Lord God in the face she had known for ten years, mainly in secret. The face He had worn the first time they had met. He had changed His name and was not bothering with the beard and long hair now, but He was otherwise eternally the same. She undid the drawstrings at her neck and waist, and loosened her dress. The wet patch peeled from her skin. She pulled the garment over her head. Her hair was caught, and swept upwards over her face as the dress turned inside out. Then it fell back into place, lying lightly over her shoulders. She felt strength in her body, aware that she was becoming a temple, a vessel for the Love of the Lord. Naked, she knelt on the floor by Him, and waited for the coming of His touch.

  5

  There were huge, tentlike canvas sheets tethered over the three main outdoor stages to protect the sturdy iron and wood structures from the elements. Bleached almost white, they’d been bone dry since early spring. To Lytton they looked like knocked-over chalk monoliths. Surrounded by circular arrangements of lesser lumps, also part of the permanent skeleton of the festival, the stages were the ruins of a pre-Christian temple. In a sense, these were the post-Christian altars, upon which the high priests of rock would perform their rituals, sacrifices and fed-back blasphemies. He didn’t even like that sort of music, but had long since given up wondering how simple surveillance had sprouted into the guardianship of a houseful of incomprehensible fanatics and the organization of a pop festival.

  He had put in ten years on this posting. Started as a combination of sorry-we-fucked-you-over sinecure and second chance, it now threatened to become a life. His last assignment had ended through a press exposé allowed by his superiors as a trade for the paper not running an extremely damaging titbit about snake activities during the Wilson government. They had to sustain some acceptable damage, and he was elected. The hell of it was he had been getting interested in his journalism, just as he was now interested in the business of the festival. The same paper that stripped his snakeskin had commissioned an in-depth piece from him about the Québecois liberation movement. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d been a snake in Hungary or an emergent African nation or somewhere neutral like Norway. It was just that Britain was not supposed to have an intelligenc
e presence in Canada.

  For him, the chief pleasure of the Alder festival was the opportunity to deal with people not from the Agapemone. The musicians and their complex entourages might not be the most sane and dependable individuals he had ever met, but compared to Jago’s crew they were refreshingly normal. Despite some of the daffier statements they made to the New Musical Express, none of them really believed they were on a mission from God.

  Lytton had been found at Cambridge, and delicately offered a career opportunity in a vague department of the Foreign Office. When he accepted, the snakes wove a skin for him. Articles were carefully planted in the right intellectual and student publications, and he’d had to take a crash course in genuine journalism, including two months on a provincial paper, in order to be able to write the pieces printed under his name. The secret of a snakeskin was that it had to fit comfortably, as if it, not the thing underneath, were the real person. A generous subsidy, routed through several banks, allowed him to set up as a freelance in Montreal. Then, all he had to do was keep an eye on things and make his monthly reports to a man in the local office. It was mostly harmless. He didn’t know what was done with it, but he assumed his Québec Libre findings were fed back to the Canadians as part of a share-and-share-alike scheme, in return for tips about IRA activity in North America. He was fairly sure people high up in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police knew what he was and let him get on with it. The British Commonwealth was chummy like that.

  Away from the house, in the fields with the stages, Lytton felt the claustrophobia he’d learned to live with evaporate. He was beyond range of Jago’s camera obscura, so he knew the Lord God wasn’t snaking on him. At least, not conventionally. Derek and his team of trustworthies should have recruited sufficient early arrivals to assemble a workforce strong enough to start tackling the bigger jobs. He wanted the stages uncovered and checked out this morning. With a few screws tightened and planks repainted, they’d be ready for the specialist crews with their skyscraping ranks of amplifiers. In previous years, bands had played with lasers, holograms and an assortment of unwieldy, spectacular and (sometimes) disastrously dysfunctional stage effects. This year, the Heat, a reformed Seventies supergroup making a comeback near the top of the bill, wanted to have a full-size, completely articulated mechanical Godzilla airlifted in to add a bit more punch to their opening number, a reworking of their monster hit—ha, bloody ha, Lytton thought—‘Leaping Lizard’. He remembered hating the song when it’d been in the charts for what seemed like fifteen consecutive years.

  The Montreal exposure had been embarrassing, and head office hadn’t had the decency to warn him. The detective who came to his flat was accompanied by a pair of Mounties in full dress uniform. The red tunics couldn’t help but alert the neighbours, and were obviously intended to rub it in. While he was in jail, awaiting charges or a negotiated release, there were protests of lynch-mob proportions outside. Francophones sang songs and waved placards. Anti-monarchists burned Union Jacks and effigies of the Queen. The Canadians got rid of him on a late-night flight, handcuffing him to the folddown table for a bladder-abusing seven hours, and an insincere diplomatic row dragged on. He then spent years in a decommissioned safe house in Putney Bridge Road, waiting for a call from Garnett, an associate of Sir Kenneth Smart. His new snakeskin, the minister’s man finally told him, would represent Lytton as a burned-out, cynical former intelligence officer with unfulfilled spiritual yearnings. It was a tighter fit than ever, although his subsequent ten years with the spooks had convinced him that whatever Jago was, he was far more of the flesh than the Spirit.

  Derek was waiting at the gate that fed into the main field. He was twitchy and, as always when separated from Wendy, seemed lost. He wore a Mr Spock T-shirt with a Vulcan platitude on it.

  ‘James,’ he gulped, ‘we’ve got a problem.’

  That was a catch phrase during the run-up to the festival. Lytton was getting tired of it.

  He strode across the field, Derek stumbling to keep step beside him. There was a ragged crowd of kids in front of the main stage, milling about aimlessly as if waiting for the acts who would not be tuning up for days. Or maybe this was what a Mongol horde looked like the minute after Kublai Khan decreed the immediate erection of a stately pleasure dome. Gary Chilcot was doing samurai sword exercises with a crowbar, providing swishing whistles to augment the sound effects. When he saw Lytton, he stopped and grinned like a clod.

  ‘That’s how people get hurt, Gary.’

  The boy mumbled an insincere apology. Lytton gathered Gary had been showing off for the benefit of one of the new girls, the petite redhead who’d been in the pub last night when he had had to separate Danny Keough and Terry Gilpin. Well, no real harm in that. It might even do Gary good to be thumped by an irate boyfriend at some formative point in his romantic career. It could save him grief later on. Several of the kids—some older than kids, actually—who’d been with the girl last night were also there: a junior macho man with a red cockatoo cut, a posy prat in a bright-blue jump suit and a panama hat, a glum girl with several sets of cutaway clothes overlapping enough for decency, and some Sixties hold-outs. Most of his locals were there too, nothing better to do thanks to school holidays or rural unemployment. The Gilpin brothers were missing. He could well do without Terry, and would have ordered him off the site if he had turned up, but he’d like to have Teddy around. Partly because he was a good lad, partly because it would mean he wasn’t off being dragged into trouble by his dead-loss brother. Some kids have it stacked against them from the start and Teddy, following in Terry’s dreadful wake, had a lot to overcome.

  ‘James,’ said Derek, tugging his sports-jacket sleeve, ‘look at this.’

  Someone had attacked the main stage with a knife. The canvas would be easier to get off this year because it was in pieces. Several patches had been slashed into tatters, and all the guy ropes had been hacked through. A stretch of matte-black hardboard fronting had been exposed and brutalized. There were brown asterisk cracks where it had been kicked with heavy boots, and a foot-high FUCK scratched into the paintwork.

  ‘It must be one of the few words he can spell properly,’ said Lytton.

  ‘Who?’ asked Derek.

  ‘Bloody Terry Gilpin, of course. He might just as well have scrawled his signature at the bottom while he was at it.’

  ‘What should we do?’

  ‘Fix it, of course. We were going to have to replace a couple of these hardboards anyway. Lucky for him there wasn’t anything more expensive lying about.’

  ‘Lucky for us, you mean.’

  Lytton snorted. ‘No, him. At least, this way I’ll let him live.’

  6

  Paul was squatting by the pond, which was behind the kiln shed. It was green and unhealthy, evaporated down to a Second World War British bath level; nothing moved in its depths, and it was beginning to smell. Plants flopped listlessly in the murk. It was mid-morning and Hazel had gone for a walk, the first time she’d done that during potting hours. He guessed he wasn’t the only one having trouble with self-set work assignments.

  Their first week, she’d started at 9.00 sharp, barely took time off for coffee (11.00 a.m.), lunch (1.00 to 1.40 p.m., back to the wheel in time for The Archers), or tea (3.30 p.m.), and worked into the evening. After a waning of initial enthusiasm, and a few delicate complaints about how hungry he got waiting for her to be available for supper, she’d decided to stick to a knocking-off time of 6.00 p.m. That advanced to 5.00 and lunch expanded to an hour so she could take advantage of the sun. In retrospect, it sounded like creeping indolence, but actually she was diligent. Until now, she’d always kept to her preset rules, weighing each revision carefully before putting it on the statutes.

  He couldn’t work while Hazel was off in the woods. After an hour or so, he was getting concerned. This was the real country, not the Sussex Downs. She’d had to keep getting up in the night to check the kiln. The cycle took about thirteen hours. She had cut it off early this
morning, but the bricks and the pots wouldn’t be cool enough for her to unpack until late afternoon. It must be like opening a pyramid, to find treasures or grave robbers’ leavings. Maybe she needed the break before she could face her handiwork. He had just come from the kiln shed. It was like an oven in there, and he could hear little tinkling and shifting noises from inside the kiln as the temperature came down.

  The bell in the showroom rang and Paul straightened up, feeling the strain in his knees. He brushed a bush that overhung the pond, and noticed a strange fruit hanging from a grey branch. Looking closer, he saw it was a dead goldfish, bloated and still wet. He plucked it, feeling the suckerlike stem break, and dropped it into the brackish water. The fish sank, raising a cloud of mud as it touched bottom.

  The bell jangled again. Paul looked around the shed, seeing the garden dark through his sunglasses. There was someone in the shop, and a girl by his desk, coming across the dead lawn towards him.

  ‘Hi,’ he said, walking to meet her. ‘Can I help you?’

  She had waist-length dark-brown hair. With the sun behind her and through his dark glasses, she had an eyeholed shadow for a face. Her eyes shone like those of an M. R. James ghost, liquid and unhealthy.

  ‘It’s Allison,’ she said, accent instantly marking her as local. ‘From next door.’