Marion's Angels Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  About the Author

  Also by K. M. Peyton

  Copyright

  About the Book

  People come from all over the world to visit Marion’s village, and to see the beautiful fifteenth century church, adorned with exquisitely carved angels. Marion, always an outsider, almost feels she knows the angels; and when the church is threatened with demolition, she is desperate to save them.

  Marion’s Angels

  K. M. Peyton

  Chapter One

  AFTERWARDS, EVERYBODY SAID things like, ‘We might have guessed!’ or, ‘I don’t know why it came as a surprise, not with Marion.’ ‘Well, she’s always been like that, hasn’t she?’

  At the time it was awful, a disaster of the first order, especially for her father, although he took it more calmly than anybody. If bringing a whole orchestra to a complete standstill in the middle of a sold-out performance could actually be taken calmly by anybody, it was by him.

  ‘It was the angels!’ Marion sobbed. ‘The angels—the angels flying—’

  He knew what she meant, although not many would have.

  ‘Well, that’s what it’s for, isn’t it? The performance is for the angels, in a way. It’s not the end of the world.’

  He knew that they, the two of them, in spite of being the main characters in the drama, would in fact forget it very quickly, being feckless by nature (like father like daughter), but the village wouldn’t forget it for a long time. They already thought Marion was cracked, and this incident wouldn’t help. There were not, after all, many girls who had a church of their own—or as good as—and kept the keys and guided the tourists and cleaned up and did the flowers and directed the workmen who came occasionally in ineffectual efforts to hold it together. And not any old church at that, but a large, impressive and very beautiful fifteenth-century church built with medieval bravado on an eminence overlooking a river marsh.

  ‘She keeps goldfish in the font,’ they complained to the vicar.

  ‘And there’s a model railway set running through the choir. It’s not right.’

  ‘No,’ said the vicar. He had his own church in the village proper, two miles away, and used that. Nobody used Marion’s. And to himself he added, ‘God bless her. What harm does it do?’

  Once the church had been the pride and glory of a busy quayside and a rich village, but the river had silted up, trade had been diverted and the village had gone with it. All that was left was a row of old cottages outside the church. Marion lived with her father in the cottage nearest to the church gate.

  ‘If Marion didn’t care for the church, who would?’ the vicar gently scolded the complainers.

  ‘But it doesn’t belong to her,’ they said.

  ‘It belongs to God, and so does Marion.’

  A typical, vicarish remark, they said, snorting and tossing their heads. But they weren’t at heart unkind, only a bit shocked about the goldfish, and they all had a soft spot for Marion’s father Geoff, who was only a lad himself, having married and fathered Marion in his teens. When his wife Liz had died 7 years later he had accepted what everyone else considered the burden of bringing up ‘that queer little Marion’ without recognizing it as a burden. They rubbed along together, in a necessarily unorthodox but perfectly unstrained relationship, Marion learning to cope in adult fashion with keeping house, and herself, and shopping and cooking, and her father accepting that he was no longer free to go out with his cronies or down to the pub at night; growing up lonely, independent, but not in any way resentful. Not even growing up at all, in the opinion of many people.

  ‘They’re like two children together,’ was a common remark.

  Marion was quite naturally a different creature from her school friends, so aloof and capable in many ways, and yet curiously childish too, with her secret games and her strange fears. She saw ghosts; she would wake in the night, crying out about things Geoff could make neither head nor tail of. But he would go to her and sit on her bed and talk to her, quite matter of fact.

  ‘He should take her to a psychiatrist,’ they said at the Women’s Institute, but he just sat and talked about what he would do next on his boat and if Andy came over on Sunday perhaps they might go for a row up the river as far as the bridge to see if the swans had hatched their eggs yet. Marion, wild-eyed with her nightmares, would lie with his calm chat flowing over her uncharted fears, coming back to reality.

  Since his wife’s death Geoff had channelled both energies and emotions into building a boat. He worked as a computer programmer by day and as a boat-builder in the evenings and at week-ends, and the life satisfied him, and Marion fitted in as well as could be expected, thank you. He had never looked for another girl-friend, and the village had given up making plans for him. A slender, gold and brown man, he had a way of not seeming to use words very much. The village was fond of him and helped where it could, but he was oblivious of their concern.

  He had got dragged into the concert business without much wanting to, being amiable by nature and recognizing that he was needed. The orchestra, together with a young, up-and-coming pianist, had agreed to give a concert in the church, the proceeds to go towards the roof fund. The roof, still in its original state, of timber decorated by six pairs of carved angels in the centre of the main beams, flying back to back, magnificently, was of countrywide renown, and some influential people from London had arranged the charitable evening.

  ‘Arranging it is easy,’ the village said with great contempt. ‘What about the work involved?’

  ‘It is our church,’ the vicar said sharply. ‘We are surely not incapable of doing the labour, given such a generous offer?’

  ‘Church? White elephant, more like,’ they said, grumbling, but not wanting to miss anything.

  The Women’s Institute came down and swept away Marion’s jarsful of buttercups and cow-parsley and brought their homegrown delphiniums and queer blue roses in armfuls and started vying with each other in flower arrangement. Geoff, living next door, had to watch out for the arrival of the grand piano and direct it to the required spot under the lectern, and see that it was protected from any possible drips should it rain during the night. He brought his winter boat-cover up from the garden shed for the purpose, avoiding the Women’s Institute as best he could.

  ‘You’d better lock up tonight, Marion. That piano’s worth three thousand quid, they say. And my cover’s worth a bit too.’

  ‘No one’s going to run off with a piano,’ Marion said scornfully.

  ‘My cover then.’

  Marion didn’t like locking the church. She felt the church belonged to the land outside, and one should be free to come and go, lifting the heavy latch and passing from the great arcades of white stone inside to the tumbled hillside, lush with summer growth that fell down to the river. Her church was light inside, and high and bare, like a great barn; and the angels’ wings fanned across the roof, pale and incisive in the light from the clerestory windows, just as if they were passing through, not nailed down at all, a part of the sky, drifting over the marshes like celestial herons. Marion didn’t want to lock them in.

  ‘Later,’ she said, not intending to.

  She got the tea, toasting some pancake things out of a packet, and unwrapping a large wedge of cheese. Her father never complained about the food.

  ‘This concert,’ she said, ‘I’ve worked it out—it will make one thousand, eight hundred
and fifty pounds for the restoration fund.’

  ‘Less expenses,’ Geoff said. ‘Peanuts, considering what’s wanted.’

  ‘One hundred and fifty thousand,’ Marion said.

  ‘It’s ridiculous to think—’ Geoff hesitated, shrugged. ‘Well, they’re getting older all the time, all of them, not just ours, but Canterbury and York and Winchester and all of them, all wanting money, all the time. What do you do? Ours won’t get a look in. It’s too far gone. This concert will keep the rain out for another winter, that’s all. A few patches.’

  ‘You can’t let it fall down.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because—’ Because it was a part of everything that mattered, because it belonged, it had been there for five hundred years, it was the landscape.

  ‘A whole town’s gone, just down the road. What’s another church?’

  ‘But that was the sea that took it. The sea won’t touch this.’

  ‘In a sense, it already has.’

  The silting up of the river had taken the trade; the village had died, and there was no one to bother about the church. Marion knew what he meant. She knew about the town too, eaten at by the sea, the sandy cliffs eroded, the buildings falling one by one into the sea. In eleven hundred, it had been a city with walls, market places, several churches, a monastery and a harbour which did a busy trade. Now it was a scumbled beach with a few fishing boats on it, a shed where crabs were put into boxes, a car park for the nosy, and some sandy cliffs scrambling up into the woods. If you walked through the silent woods with a guide book, you could stand on a narrow track through the sycamore, grass and brambles waist-high on either side, and read: ‘This is the former main street, leading from the market square to St. James’s church, now three hundred yards out to sea.’ Just standing there, thinking about it, Marion could feel the hair rising up on the back of her neck. She had described this phenomenon to her father, but he had just laughed.

  ‘We used to collect bones out of the cliffs when we were kids,’ he said. ‘Skulls and all. Where the graveyards used to be. There’s still some in the shed, I think. There’s still one or two to go yet, graves, I mean, if you look along the edge. Maybe gone by now. I don’t know.’

  Marion, looking hard, found a stone very close to the edge, indecipherable. If it was truly a grave, it would go fairly soon, and another skeleton with it. It fascinated her.

  ‘It might be a man who was alive in fourteen hundred. He might have helped build my church.’

  ‘He might have, yes.’

  ‘He might be the man that carved the angels. Swithin. He carved all twelve of them, for five shillings each. They took him three years.’

  ‘Pass the cheese.’

  ‘He lived in that town. He walked here every day along the river, six miles, and back again at night, six miles.’

  ‘Are you making it up?’

  ‘No, it’s true. He had nearly finished the last one when he fell off the scaffolding and broke his leg and he died sixteen days later. The angel’s wing isn’t finished. You can see, if you get up there.’

  ‘When’ve you been up there?’

  ‘The builders took me. I wanted to see if it was true. I asked them.’

  ‘And you found the wing was unfinished?’

  ‘Yes. The feathers aren’t carved, like on all the others. It’s just smooth.’

  Geoff was quite impressed, but didn’t say anything. It was a bit odd in a child, he had to admit. Liz, her mother, had studied medieval history at university and got a degree. He preferred boats himself.

  ‘The vicar says the angels are going to have to come down fairly soon, before they come of their own accord and brain somebody.’

  ‘Yes. The builders said. It’s what the concert’s for, isn’t it? The roof.’

  ‘It’ll need more than a concert.’

  Marion didn’t lock up. She went to bed at nine o’clock and lay thinking about the money it would take to repair St. Michael’s. It wasn’t possible, she thought. The roof was really bad. For the concert they had had to spend two hundred pounds on a scaffolding protection beneath the most precarious of the angels, like a safety net for a trapeze act, in case it might choose that auspicious day to fall and do damage to the visitors. But the profit from the concert would pay to renew their fastenings and fix them properly . . . for the time being. Their cottage, minuscule by comparison, kept eating up money to keep in repair, and it was a mere infant compared with the church; two hundred years old as opposed to five. From her bed she could see the church through the window, framed in bird-riddled thatch. It was the anchor of her life, dominating her horizons. It was her friend, her retreat, her key to centuries past, her home.

  An hour later, still awake, she heard a car go past and stop outside the church. The lane to the church was a cul-de-sac, curving down a couple of hundred yards from the main road between thick hedges. Of the people who lived in the three cottages in the lane, only her father had a car, and it wasn’t his. It was a fast and snorty-sounding car, stopping sharp in a spraying of gravel. Marion got out of bed and looked out of the window. In the dusk she saw the car parked, and a figure walking across the churchyard towards the east door. Mindful of her responsibilities she got out of bed, pulled on some clothes and followed. Her father was still working on his boat down by the river at the bottom of the garden, but she didn’t intend to disturb him. Church business was hers. She only had to check that the stranger had no evil intentions towards the Steinway, also her father’s tarpaulin. She could wait, watching, until he drove away. People quite often drove down from the road to visit, or even to pray. It wasn’t unusual. But tonight was a bit special.

  She went outside, through the tangle that was their garden, across the lane and the gravelled sweep of the car park and into the churchyard. It was cool and still but the stones of the wall were warm to the touch after the day, and familiar smells, rank and rich, sifted up through the long grass from the river, through the creaming elder trees and across the mown grass. Marion walked on the grass, silently. She knew how to open the door without making a sound, to push it only so far, before the squeak. She could slip in like a shadow and stand unseen, the church’s keeper. But she waited outside for a while, sitting on a tombstone (Edward Tonkin, 1761–1795). No doubt the visitor was genuine and she didn’t want a confrontation, being shy by nature.

  She waited.

  The mosquitoes were biting. She slapped at her bare legs, and flailed her arms a bit, then stopped short at an unexpected development in her vigil–the stranger was playing the piano. Above the whine of mosquitoes the notes seeped out on the still evening, spilling with undeniable skill and beauty into the immediate surroundings. Marion, knowing she should be indignant, was enchanted. It was like no piano-playing she had heard before, even from Miss Moore at school. It was real, and perfect. She stood up, but didn’t want to spoil anything, so stayed where she was for quite a long time, listening. He wasn’t supposed to, she was thinking, but it was much too nice to stop. She should walk in and accost him. But she knew she wouldn’t.

  ‘I will go in,’ she thought, ‘and listen.’

  She went in, without a sound, muffling the great iron latch with her handkerchief, settling it back in its bracket, and creeping up the side aisle until she was up as far as the piano, behind a pillar, quite close to the visitor. She could see his back and his bent head, her father’s tarpaulin in a heap on the floor and the lid of the piano opened, so that the playing filled the whole church, echoing and singing through the great spaces, reaching for the angels behind their bracework of scaffolding, caged like eagles, the great wings outspread. Marion could feel it taking her, could feel herself growing wings, taking off. She knew how it was with her, and tried to keep on the ground, not to get into one of her states. She crept along inside the front pew until she was past the piano and into the middle aisle, and she lay on the floor there, her head to the altar, her feet to the belltower.

  ‘Please, God, don’t let him st
op.’

  She could look round the corner of the pew, her head hidden by an enormous vase of flowers, and see the feet on the pedals. The legs wore jeans, she was surprised to see. Looking higher, she could see the man’s face framed between the piano and the lid, pale against the white stone beyond, very grave, almost beautiful by his involvement with the music, although not beautiful in feature. It was a strong, rather fierce face, with a firm, aggressive jaw, untidy locks of hair falling forward when he bent his head towards the keys. He wore a dirty, white T-shirt with an advertisement for beer on the chest. He was quite young, younger than her father, although past being a boy. Marion stared at him through the W.I. delphiniums, in love with the creator of this lovely noise. It was better than the organ, altogether more delicate and airborne. He played without music, for love, she supposed, his expression suggesting it; yet it seemed to her very intricate music, difficult judging by the complexity of it, yet not seeming difficult. Marion held on to the coconut matting and communed with God, strung up by her experience, adrift on the tide of melody.

  When it stopped, quite suddenly, she was left as if in suspension, vibrating like a wire, so alive in every fibre that it seemed impossible to stay hidden. She did not move.

  The man sat still, looking at the keys for some time, then he got up, shut the lid, and heaved the tarpaulin back in place. Marion could have touched his foot with her hand. When he went round the far side to pull the cover straight, she wriggled backwards into the cover of the pew—which was as well, for he came back and stood right where her head had lain, resting his hand on the carved poppyhead. He looked towards the altar, and said, quietly but with great passion, ‘Jesus, make it all work out.’ He wore baseball boots with red laces and the edges of his jeans were frayed.

  Then he went back to the door and let himself out, puzzled by Marion’s handkerchief round the latch. He looked all round the church curiously, and examined the handkerchief, which was a babyish one with the three little pigs printed on it, then laid it carefully on the table beside the church history booklets, made some piglike snorts into the silence, added, ‘Happy rootling, whoever you are,’ and let himself out. In a moment Marion heard the sports car start up, turn round with some very racy accelerations, and speed off towards the main road. It disappeared into the far distance at what sounded like an illegal speed. Marion retrieved her handkerchief and let herself out. She went back to the house for the church keys, and locked the doors, and went back to bed. She lay for a long time thinking about what had happened, not curious, merely appreciative. It had been beautiful. She didn’t question the pearls in her path, cast before her rootling.