The Man in the Moss (30 page)

           
'She should leave. She's no connections here.'

           
'Why won't she leave?'

           
'I don't know,' Shaw said, but he did. His mother
couldn't bear to be supplanted by Therese. His mother did not like Therese.
This was understandable. Sometimes he wasn't
sure that the word 'like' precisely conveyed his own feelings.

           
Her dark hair, swept back today, was mostly inside the
collar of the fur coat. She wore a deep purple lipstick.

           
Nor, he thought, was 'love' appropriate. So why ...

           
Therese nodded back towards the village. Shaw looked his
watch: three minutes to four, and the light was weakening.

           
... why ...

           
Therese said, 'It's coming.' Meaning the funeral procession.
           
Shaw shuddered again, with a
cold pleasure that made him afraid of her and of himself.

           
'You know,' Therese said, 'I think it's time you met
father. Properly.'

           
'Is he dead?' Shaw asked fearfully.

CHAPTER
V

Everything that happened,
the dreadful inevitability of it all, Ernie Dawber would remember in horribly
exquisite detail. Like a series of grim cameos. Or the meticulously etched
illustrations in the pre-war picture-book from which he used to tell stories to
the youngest children on Friday afternoons, enjoying the measured resonance of
his own headmasterly tones and then holding up the book to what was left of the
light so they could all see the pictures.

           
Cosy, back then. Friday afternoons in mid-autumn, with Mr
Dawber and The Brothers Grimm. Home to buttered toast for tea.

           
Now it was another Friday afternoon. But this time the
text was being read to Ernie and he could see all the pictures, the pages
turning over in a terrible, considered rhythm, until he wanted to leap up from
his seat in the back row, crying out,
Stop
... stop!

           
He didn't leap up much any more. Sometimes, lately, he
felt unsteady and disconnected in his head. But when he went to the doc's for
some pills for it, the doc had made him have tests. Sorry he'd gone now.

           
No leaping up, anyroad. Nowt he could do except to
witness it, for this was all he was now: the observer. The local historian, dry
and factual. Not for him to comment or to judge. Nothing that happened on this
day would ever be recorded, anyway, in The Book of Bridelow.
          
And so was best forgotten.

           
As if ever he could.

Cosy, too (the first
picture) in the bar at The Man before the funeral, having a whisky for the
cold, with his half of Black, his mind charting the changes from that warm
evening when Matt Castle had brought them hope.

           
Although, unknown to him at the time, the Change must
have begun on the bright March morning when the roadmen found the bog body.

           
Hand clenching on his glass of Black, now condemned as
gnat's piss by them as knows. The only light in the bar is greenish-blue, from
the old gas-mantle Matt Castle reinstated, childishly happy when he found it
could still be made to work.
           
Such small things seemed to
delight Matt, painstakingly patching up frail memories of his childhood.

           
Unaware that he, too, was part of the Change.
           
Behind the bar, Stan Burrows
in a black waistcoat, says passively, 'Tough about Gus Bibby, eh?'
           
'Why? What's up?'

           
'You not heard, Ernie? He's closing up the Stores.'
           
'No!'

           
'I could see it coming, me. Just not up to it no more.
Bent double half the time. I went in for a bucket last week, had to climb up
and get it meself. 'Sides which, he's selling nowt. What can you buy in Gus's
you can't get in Macclesfield twenty per cent cheaper?'

           
'It's a matter of principle, Stan. We're glad enough to
shop at Gus Bibby's when there's snow or floods and you can't get across the
Moss. Anyway, what about his son?'

           
'How many days a year can't you get across t'Moss since
they've built that road up? Nay, it's price of progress, int it?'

           
'
Progress
?
Ernie nearly choking on his so-so half of Black.
           
Stan saying, 'Nay, Bibby's'll
shut and it'll stay shut. Who's going t'buy that place?'
           
'What about his son?'
           
'He'll not come back, will he?
Got a good job wi' Gas Board in Stockport. Would you come back?'
           
'Aye,' said Ernie. 'I would.'

           
'How many's like you, though, Ernie? Any more. Be honest.
How many?'

Second picture.

           
Halfway up the street, church behind him, looking down
towards The Man. From up here, the pub looks as if it's built on the Moss
itself.

           
A bitter wind has blown through Bridelow, snatching the
leaves from the trees and bleaching the colour from the faces inside the front
porches. The faces hovering, ghostly in the shadows, the bodies invisible in
black.

           
The villagers start to step from their doorways; the
coffin's coming.

           
A fair turn-out, thanks to Matt's folk-music friends from
the Manchester circuit and outsiders with an interest in Bridelow like Dr Roger
Hall. And the former brewery workers who failed to find employment in Buxton,
Macclesfield, Glossop, or even Manchester and Sheffield; they're all here,
except for the ones hunched over their fires with their Beecham's Powders and a
bad case of Taiwanese flu, the like of which would never have got Across the
Moss in the old days.

           
Ernie fancies he can hear wretched coughing from behind
the drawn curtains, as if the virus has spread to the stones themselves.

Turn the page, lad.

           
Up by the arched lych-gate now, watching people stepping
down to the cobbles to join the ragged tail of the procession.

           
The blinds are down at the Post Office, soon to be the
only shop remaining in Bridelow. Ernie hardly recognizes black-clad Milly Gill,
who normally looks like a walking botanical garden. Is she in mourning just for
Matt Castle, or for Bridelow itself?

           
The coffin's at a funny angle because of the respective
heights of the men carrying it, from little Willie to gangling Frank. Are
Willie and Milly Gill back together? Ernie hopes so; they need each other, time
like this.

           
Lottie Castle follows immediately behind and, by 'eck,
mourning becomes her, she's never looked as fine, the red hair swept back under
a neat, black pillbox hat with a little veil, generous mouth set hard. With
her, half a pace behind, is the lad, Dic, a leather case under his arm.

Go on, turn over, you've
got to look ...

           
The coffin on a wooden bier beneath the Autumn Cross, the
Rector hunched stiffly before it, his strong hair slumped over his forehead,
not quite hiding pearls of sweat, and the lines in his face like an engraving.

           
Behind the Rector bobs the new curate, curly-haired lad,
built like a brick privy. Bit of a firebrand, by all accounts.
           
He'll be all right. He'll
settle down. Won't he?
           
At the side, by the choir
stalls, is Hans's lass, Catherine, who seems all of a sudden to have lost her
youth. Anxiety on her firm, plain face; worried about her dad, and with good
reason. Needs a long rest, that lad.

           
Two youngsters with guitars who Ernie doesn't recognize
sing a wistful but forgettable ballad, stop and look around afterwards before
realising congregations aren't supposed to

applaud, especially at a
funeral.

           
Then the Rector gets down to it.

           
'Lord, we're here to thank you for the life of Matthew
Castle, and to pray that his soul might...'

           
Ernie, in the centre of the rearmost pew, locates Ma
Wagstaff without much difficulty - that's quite a hat Ma's got on, with those
big black balls on it. Anyway, it's through Ma that he spots ...
the mystery woman
. Otherwise he never
would have noticed her, all in black like that and in the shadow of the pillar.

           
Ma turns around just once, with that famous penetrating
stare. Thought at first the old girl was looking at him. And then he sees the
black, hooded figure to his left, on the little seat wedged up against the
stone pillar.

           
By 'eck. They're not usually as public as this about it,
these women.

Pretty place, this church.
Norman, was it, those huge archways? And candles here and there, like in a
Catholic church.
           
Warm stained glass with Garden
of Eden-type pictures full of flowers and fruit.

           
And the cross that hung above the carved wooden screen
dividing the nave from whatever the altar area was called.

           
The cross was of green wood. Or at least wood that had
been green last summer. Woven boughs, some with shrivelled, dead leaves still
hanging from them. A cross from the woods and the hedgerows. Yeah, nice. And
strange. One of several strange things in here - like the German Shepherd dog
sitting stoically on a pew next to a small boy.
           
Well, why not?
           
But still just a wee bit
weird.

           
Jesus, she'd be feeling at home here next. But she still
kept the cloak about her; it was pretty damn cold in here and going to be a
good deal colder outside, when the darkness came down.

           
Underneath the cloak, the jeans and jumper she'd
travelled down in. No place to change. Wouldn't worry Matt how she looked, but
jeans might not be viewed as entirely respectful at a funeral in these parts;
keep them covered.

           
Also ...I don't
want this place to know me. Don't want to be identified by Lottie or Willie or
Dic or anybody who ever bought a Castle Band album.

           
Not yet, OK? .

           
Locking the car, she'd glanced up into the thickening
sky, and thought, Before this burial's over, it's going to be fully dark. Matt
Castle going out of the dark and into the last black hole, and the peaty soil
heaped upon him under cover of the night.

           
But no bad thing, the dark.

           
I can't face anybody, she'd thought, standing alone in
the muddy parking area behind the church, pulling up the deep hood until her
face was lost,
traitorous cow
, I'll
stay at the back, out of sight, I'll pay my respects in my own way. And then
I'll get the hell out, and nobody'll be the wiser.

           
And yet ...

           
She'd stared up at the church, at its dour, crenellated
walls, at its Gothic stained-glass windows showing their dark sides to the sky,
taking the light and giving out nothing. At all the pop-eyed stone gargoyles
grinning foolishly down on her.

           
... somehow ...

           
Followed the walls to the tower and the edge of the
churchyard where the moor began in ochre tufts and gorse bushes, and in the
distance there was a clump of rocks like a toad, and if you blinked the toad
would be quivering, having leapt and landed five yards closer.

           
... there's
something here that knows me already.
           
No people around at that time,
only the sensation of them behind the drawn curtains. Not peering through the
cracks at the stranger and the stranger's dusty BMW, nothing so obvious.

           
'This is a
knowing
place,' she'd found herself saying aloud.

           
Then, all too damn conscious of looking very like an
extremely witchy woman, she'd passed through a wooden wicket gate under a
steep, stone archway, to walk a while among Bridelow's dead.