The Cure of Souls by Phil Rickman

garden.
    ‘You were in a band? Laurence… Robertson…?’
    ‘Robinson,’ Lol said. ‘Lol, usually. But you probably wouldn’t—’
    ‘Ah,’ Stock said triumphantly. ‘Hazey
Jane
.’
    Lol’s turn to be surprised. Maybe it took one loser to recognize another.
    ‘You did this Nick Drake-y thing,’ Stock recalled, ‘long before the man was rediscovered. All sensitive and finger-picking, when everybody else was crashing about on synths. Brave of you.’
    ‘Didn’t get us anywhere,’ Lol said lightly.
    ‘If ten years too early.’ Stock’s teeth were very white and even – Hollywood teeth. He couldn’t always have been a loser. ‘And now everybody’s discovered Drake, it’s probably too late. A hard and ungrateful business, my friend. You’re probably better off, even in psychotherapy.’
    ‘Unfortunately, everybody’s discovered that, too,’ Lol said. ‘Story of my life.’
    ‘Sad,’ said Gerard Stock, as Simon returned.
    Prof and Lol followed the other two men down the passage and out through the back door, Prof seeming much happier now that he was seeing Stock’s back. The sun was a big white spotlamp, tracking them, and all around the countryside was surging with summer, the meadow lavishly splattered with wildflowers – Mother Nature flaunting herself, happy to be a whore.
    Prof stopped in the yard, and sat a Panama hat on his bald head. ‘He piss you off, Laurence?’ he asked hopefully.
    ‘Not particularly.’
    ‘Give him time.’ Prof rubbed his beard. His baggy American T-shirt carried the merry message
BABES IS ALL
. ‘What’s he want with Simon, that’s what I would like to know. He strike you as a man who feels himself in need of spiritual absolution?’
    Lol smiled. ‘You jealous?’
    ‘I shall treat that with the contempt it deserves,’ Prof said.
    ‘What does Mr Stock actually do? You never said.’
    ‘Nothing! Strolls about like the squire while the poor wife’s at work, temping for some agency in Hereford. She inherits the house, now she earns the money for them to live there. All right, he
was
some kind of a freelance publicist, a term that can mean whatever he wants it to mean on any particular day. He offers to handle my PR. I say, Gerard, watch my lips: I do not want any relations with the public.’
    Lol watched Stock and the vicar crossing the river bridge at the bottom of the meadow, where the line of poplars began. Where he’d walked last night. He told Prof about the hop-kiln he’d seen, with its fairy-tale tower. Prof nodded.
    ‘Yeah, I expect that would be his place. It’s not a prime location, Stock maintains, on account of being blocked in on either side by these two enormous great metal barns. Same situation as this, with the land all around it owned by someone else. He should moan – like he paid a penny for it.’
    ‘They still grow hops there?’
    ‘Used to.’
    ‘Only there was this kind of hop-yard with no hops – well, a few shrivelled bits of bine hanging from the wires. I mean, hops had obviously been grown at one time, in quantity, but it was all barren now. Scorched earth and just these poles. It was… depressing.’
    ‘Hmm,’ Prof said. ‘This would be the wilt, I expect.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Verticulum Wilt… nah, that’s wrong, but some word like that. It’s this voracious hop disease – no known cure. Wipes out your whole crop, contaminates your land like anthrax or something, throwing hop-farmers out of business. You want to know about this stuff, take a walk down to the hop museum by the main road.’ Prof smiled slyly. ‘You’ll like it there – check out the back room.’
    ‘Why?’
    Prof winked. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘apparently that’s how these stables got split off from the farm. The owner has hard times, maybe from the wilt, sells his land bit by bit, flogs off what buildings he can, for conversion. Maybe that’s also how Stock’s wife’s uncle got his kiln, I forget. It’s an ill wind, Laurence.’
    It