The Man in the Moss (55 page)

           
'Aye.' Leaving the lights off, Sam undid the bolts on the
back door. It was raining out, and cold enough for sleet.

           
When he'd gone, Esther, shivering in her nightie, said,
'Right,' and went to the phone.

           
The phone was dead. He'd ripped out the wire and pulled
off the little plastic plug.
         
Esther
ran to the back door and screeched, 'Sam ...
Sam!
' into the unresponsive night.

The nights were the worst
times, but in a way they were the best because they hardened Lottie's intent to
get out. By day - local customers drifting in around lunchtime, nice people -
she got to thinking the pub was an important local service and there weren't
many of those left in Bridelow and if she didn't keep it on, who would? And
Matt. Matt would be so disappointed with her.

           
But at night, alone in the pine-framed bed which kept
reminding her of her husband's coffin, enclosed by the still strange, hard,
whitewashed walls, she felt his stubborn obsessiveness in the air like a
lingering, humid odour. And she knew she'd paid back all she owed to Matt, long
since.

           
If indeed he'd ever given her anything, apart from
headaches and Dic.

           
She lay down the middle of the bed, head on a single
white pillow; for the first time entirely alone. Dic had gone off - relieved,
she knew - to his bedsit in Stockport; back on Monday to the supply-teaching he
was doing in lieu of a real job. Dic looking perpetually bewildered all day,
saying little, mooching about rubbing his chin. Offering, in a half-hearted
way, to stay here until Sunday night, but Lottie briskly waving him out - fed
up with you under my feet, moping around, time I had some space for myself.
           
To do what, though?

           
Well ... to try and find a buyer for the pub, for a
start. That would be a picnic. Best she could hope for was to flog it to some
rich Cheshire businessman with romantic yearnings, for conversion into a luxury
home with an exclusive view of peat, peat, peat.

           
Bloody peat. In the mornings she'd draw back the bedroom
curtains and the first thing she'd see would be black peat and on to the scene
her mind would superimpose Matt in his wheelchair, sinking into the Moss and
fighting it all the way, and every bloody marsh-bird banking overhead would be
imitating the Pennine Pipes of blessed memory.

           
All I want is Bridelow Moss behind me. To be able to draw
back the curtains on to other people's gardens, parked cars, the postman, the
milkman, no hills in view over the tops of the laburnums. (In other words, the
view from the bedroom window in Wilmslow which Matt had despised and which she
carried in her mind like a talisman of sanity.)

           
With the bedside light on, she gazed unblinking at the
ceiling, a single hefty black beam bisecting it diagonally so that half the
ceiling was light, half shadow.

           
'Ma ...'

           
'... aye, gone.'

           
'... agstaff... dead...you didn't
know?'
           
'... God, no. . :

           
If walls could record voices and mood and atmosphere, The
Man's ancient stones would have been crumbling tonight under the dead weight of
suppressed emotion. The death of Ma Wagstaff: the underlying theme below all
the trivial tap-room chat about Manchester United and the sodding Government,
and the more meaningful analyses of working conditions under Gannons.

           
Lottie saying nothing, playing barmaid, pulling Bridelow
Black for those committed to preserving the brewery and lager and draught Bass
for those who'd been made redundant.

           
So Ma Wagstaff had gone.

           
Well, she was old, she was half-baked, she'd clung to her
own loopy ideas of religion; let them be buried with her.

           
Not that anything stayed buried round here. The bogman
rising again after who could say how many centuries, to cause torment and to
haunt Matt's latter days. And now poor Matt himself rising again to help the
police with their inquiries.

           
Which - jaw tightened, both hands clenching on the sheet
for a moment - was none of her business, and none of Ma Wagstaff's any more.
Just let it be all over. Just let them have found what they wanted and put Matt
back m his grave and stamped down the soil.

           
What they wanted. She knew, of course, that it had to be
the bogman. How honoured Matt would have been to know he'd be sharing his grave
with his illustrious ancestor.

           
Most likely, she conceded, he
did
know. Matt always could keep a secret. Even from his wife.

           
Especially from his wife.

           
And that does it, Lottie thought. I'll talk to estate
agents first thing Monday morning.

           
She put out the lamp and shut her eyes.
           
She was not lonely.

           
She was relieved at last of the horror and the pity of
Matt and his illness and his all-consuming passions.

           
And relieved, too - now that Moira had been here, now
that she'd received his taped begging letter - of the responsibility of
overseeing the completion of Matt's magnum opus, his Bogman Suite. Moira's
responsibility now. Poetic justice: one obsession taking care of another.

           
Not that Moira, presumably, had ever wanted to be Matt's
obsession.

           
Lottie opened her eyes and stared searchingly into the
darkness.

           
Or perhaps, obscurely, perversely, Moira
had
. She kept her ego under wraps, but
it was there; it existed.
           
Maybe it is poetic justice.
           
You've been relieved. You're
free to go.

The lino was as cold as
flagstones under Ernie's bare feet, and although his bedroom slippers were
under the bed, he didn't fetch them out; the cold was better.

           
I don't want comfort. I want the truth. An answer. What
must I do? What is there left I can do?

           
Through the window, he could see the churchyard,
gravestones wet with rain and blue under the Beacon of the Moss. Be one for me,
happen, this time next year.

           
He couldn't, from here, see Matt Castle's grave, but he'd
heard about all that from Alfred Beckett, who'd come pounding on his door while
the dregs of the Mothers' Union sat dispiritedly drinking tea in his study.
What can we do, Mr Dawber? Who's going to explain?

           
Me, he'd stated firmly. I'll explain, if necessary.

           
He'd never seen the Mothers in such a state and never
imagined he would. Old Sarah Winstanley, with no teeth, just about said it all.
No Ma. No teeth. No hope.

           
Not for me now, neither, with Ma gone.

           
'Everything's changing,' Millicent had said. 'Hardening.
And now we've lost the Man, for good and all. They'll take him back to London
this time, no question about that. Bad luck on this scale, Mr Dawber - it's not
natural. Mary Lane died, did you hear? Pneumonia. Fifty-three, God forbid.'

           
Shades
, Ma had
said.
Them's what's kept this place the
way it
is
. They started talking about shades again, and it was not really his
province. He'd promised Ma Wagstaff that he'd get the Man back, and now it was
all falling through, and it was his responsibility. What was there
left
, in the time he had?

           
And then Milly had told them about Liz Horridge.

           
'I forgot all about it, wi' Ma being found not long
after. I found her up Ma's front path. First time she's been seen in t'village
for months. Well ... she were in a shocking state, banging her fists on Ma's door
- "please, please", like this, whimpering, you know? I put me hand on
her shoulder and she nearly had hysterics. "I want Ma, I want Ma." I
says, "Ma's not here, luv. Come and have a cuppa tea," I says. She
just looks at me like she doesn't know who I am, and then she pushes me aside
and she's off like a rabbit. I rang the Hall to tell somebody, but Shaw's never
there, is he?'

           
And Moira Cairns staying with young Cathy, in the
Rectory, at the very heart of the village.

           
He looked down at the graves. Why had she come so
secretively? And why hadn't she gone away again? He'd seen her walking down
from the church this morning. Strikingly good-looking lass. Probably in her
late thirties, looking it, because of that white strand in her hair, like the
light through a crack in the door of a darkened room.
           
But what did they know about
her?
           
'Nowt,' Ernie said aloud to
the silent graves.
           
Should he say owt to the
Mothers? He wasn't a stirrer, he wasn't a gossip, he'd always known more than
he passed on, just as
Dawber's Book of
Bridelow
was only ever a fraction of what the Dawbers knew about Bridelow.

           
Who'd take over the
Book
from him? No more Dawbers left in Bridelow. Happen it really was the end of an
era. Happen the Bridelow to come wouldn't have the distinction that warranted a
book of its own. Ernest Dawber, last of the village scribes. Chronicler of the
Fall.

           
Alf Beckett's arrival had saved him. If Alf hadn't turned
up, one of them, or all of them, would surely have sensed he had worries and
sorrows of his own.

           
By 'eck, he'd been scared, had Alf Beckett. So scared, as
he'd told them, that he could hardly keep his spade level when the time came to
shovel the soil back on Matt Castle's coffin.
           
After finding no trace of the
bogman.
           
'They didn't find it?
' Milly Gill up on her feet in a flash, for
all her weight. Alf shaking his head dumbly.

           
'What's it mean, Milly?' Frank's wife, Ethel, dazed.

           
'I don't know.' Milly's voice hoarse, 'I don't
understand.'

           
'But it's good, isn't it?' the youngest of them, Susan,
said. 'We dint want um to find it.'

           
'Of course it's not good,' Milly said. 'You don't
suddenly get a miracle like that in the middle of a lot of bad. It's not the
way of things. What frightens me: if he's not there, where in God's name is
he?'

           
She broke off for a sip of tea. 'I'm sorry, Mr Dawber. I
should've told you earlier. It were finding Ma. Knocked me back. Strange,
though, isn't it? Everything's so terribly strange all of a sudden.'

           
When they'd gone, Ernie had telephoned the Hall himself.
No answer. He'd go up there tomorrow, a visit long overdue.

           
'It must be deliberate, you know, all this,' Milly had
said. 'An attack. Village is under attack.'

           
'Eh?'

           
'Like I said, things go in waves, Mr Dawber. Good times,
bad times. We're used to that.'
           
'Aye ...'

           
Ma had said,
What
this is ... it's a balancing act
.
           
'But this is an attack,' Milly
said.

           
Ernie had been flummoxed for a minute. 'You mean the
curate? Joel Beard?'

           
'Well, he's part of it. We let them disturb the Man in
the Moss. We didn't do right by him. Now we've no protection. All sorts are
coming in. Unsuitable people. Aye - people like
him.'

           
'All my sources tell me,' Ernie said, 'that Joel's
ambitions are being fuelled by the new Archdeacon, who fancies him summat
rotten.'

           
'Joel Beard's gay?'

           
'Not as I know of, but the Archdeacon certainly is.'
Ernie noticed old Sarah looking mystified. 'No, Joel Beard's incorruptible, I'm
afraid. Whatever he's doing, he thinks he's doing it for the good of mankind.'

           
'They'll all be coming in soon,' Milly said despondently.
'Look at all them strangers at the brewery. Three of ours sacked, one of theirs
brought in. Rationalization, they call it. We don't see it till it's happened.
Sometimes I think all we see is ...'