The Man in the Moss (62 page)

           
'Well, I didn't go down,' said Lottie. 'That's for sure.'
           
'Perhaps somebody wanted to
frighten you, Mrs Castle.'

           
She said, 'When you got Matt's coffin out, did you ... ?'

           
'No,' Ashton said. 'We had no reason and no right to
disturb your husband.'

           
She said, 'Do you mind if we go outside?'

           
'After you,' Ashton said. He pulled the wooden door into
place behind them, quite thankful to be out of there himself. Place was like a
mausoleum without a tomb.

           
Lottie Castle sniffed and one side of her mouth twitched
in latent self-contempt. 'You know what it's like when you're alone - Or maybe
you don't.'

           
'Yes,' he said, 'I do.'

           
'Things that would otherwise seem totally crazy go
through your head.'
           
'True.'

           
'And with you lot digging up his grave, I thought...
Well, it was as if he was ...'

           
Lottie Castle thrust open the kitchen door. Ashton
followed her in, quietly shut the door behind them and stood with his back to
it.

           
'I didn't catch that,' he said. 'As if he was what?'

           
'As if you'd let him out,' Lottie Castle said in a
parched monotone, looking down at the flags. 'And he'd come back. For his
pipes.'

           
She turned her back on Gary Ashton and walked over to the
stove.

           
'Listen,' Ashton said, wondering if he was cracking up.
This piping. Was it, like - I'm sorry - any particular tune?'

           
'No,' she said. 'No particular tune.' She was silent a
moment, then she said, 'When Matt used to get the pipes out, he'd flex the bag
a bit, get the air circulating, make all these puffing, wheezing noises and
then a few trills up and down the scale. Warming up, you know? Getting
started.'

           
Lottie placed both palms on the hot-plate covers. 'Matt
Castle getting warmed up,' she said. 'That was what I thought heard.'

Hans moistened his lips
with his tongue. Cathy got up. 'I'll fetch you a cup of tea.'

           
'No ...' Her father moved in his chair, winced. 'No, it's
all right. I ...' He looked quietly down at his knees for a while. Then he
said, 'They were talking about a plastic one. Back at the hospital, you know. I
said to leave it a while. I said I was seeing a very experienced private
therapist.'

           
Cathy smiled. 'Wasn't working though, was it?'

           
'No.' Hans sighed. 'She was talking, the last time I saw
her, about something getting in and sapping her powers. Perhaps it was
intimations of mortality. That was her way of expressing it - that she was
corning to the end of her useful life. And maybe she could see the end, as
well, of over a thousand years of tradition. And I'm wondering, too, if this is
going to be the end of it.'
           
Cathy said nothing.

           
Hans said, 'Bit of a rag bag, the Mothers, aren't they?
Now? Nobody to really take over. Nobody with Ma's authority. Milly Gill? I
don't think so, do you? Nice woman, but too soft
- in the nicest way, of course. And the rest of the village - well, modern
times, modern attitudes. General loss of spirituality. I blame the eighties,
Mrs Thatcher, all that greed, all that materialism. Some of it had to find its
way across the Moss sooner or later.'

           
'It's still a good place, Pop, in essence.'

           
'Yes ... as long as that essence remains. I'm very much
afraid the essence has gone.'

           
Cathy thought they'd never come as close as this to
discussing it. He'd always been too busy organising things, fudging the issue.
The issue being that the parish priest in Bridelow must become partially blind
and partially deaf. This also was a tradition.

In the old days - which, in
this instance, meant as recently as last year - it wasn't possible to get to
Bridelow Brewery without passing the Hall.

           
The Hall was built on a slight incline, with heathery
rock gardens. Ernie Dawber could remember when the old horse-drawn beer drays
used to follow the semi-circular route which took them under the drawing-room
window for the children admire. The Horridges were always proud of their shire
horses; the stable block had been a very fine building indeed, with a Victorian
pagoda roof.

           
Now it was decaying amid twisted trees grown from hedges
long untrimmed. No horses any more; it was heavy trucks and different
entrances, no obvious link between the brewery and the Hall. Liz Horridge,
Ernie thought, must be feeling a bit bereft. He shouldn't have left it so long.
There was no excuse.

           
The Hall itself, to be honest, wasn't looking too good
either. Big holes in the rendering, gardens a mess. Arthur Horridge would have
a fit. Ernie was merely saddened at another symptom of the Change.
           
Gettin' a bit whimsy, Ernie
?
           
Leave me alone, Ma. Give me a
break, eh?
           
Fifty yards below the house,
the drive went into a fork, the other road leading to the brewery.

           
'By 'eck,' Ernie Dawber said, stopping to look.

           
For suddenly the brewery was more impressive than the
Hall.

           
In the past it had always been discreet, concealed by big
old trees. But now some of the biggest had been felled to give the Victorian
industrial tower block more prominence.

           
Gannons's doing? Had they made out a case for the brewery
as an historic building and got a Government grant to tart it up?

           
Bloody ironic, eh? They sack half the workforce, talk
about shifting the operation to Matlock, but if there's any money going for
restoration they'll have it. Happen turn it into a museum.

           
They'd even finished off repairing the old pulley system
for the malt store, briefly abandoned last ... May, was it? How soon we forget
... when a rope had snapped and Andy Hodgson had fallen to his death.
Accidental death - official coroner's verdict. No blame attached.

           
Don't want to put a
damper on things, Ernest, but summat's not right.

           
Go away, Ma.

           
He had to stop this. Snatches of Ma Wagstaff had been
bobbing up and down in his brain ever since he'd awakened, like an old tune that'd
come from nowhere but you couldn't get rid of it. Reminding him of his
commitment.
Get him back.
           
And if I don't? If I fail?
What then?

           
He could only think of one answer to that. One he'd
thought of before, and it had made him laugh, and now it didn't.

           
Well. Nagged from beyond the grave. You wouldn't credit
it. Ernie straightened his hat, girded up his gaberdine, turned his back on the
brewery, which suddenly offended him, and hurried up to the Hall.

           
He pressed the bell-push and heard the chimes echo, as if
from room to room within the house.

           
Even as he pressed again, he knew there was nobody
inside.

           
So she doesn't come down to the village any more ...
Well, she's always been a bit aloof. Not a local woman. Only to be expected
with this bad feeling about the brewery. She supposed to subject herself to
that when it wasn't her fault?

           
But you, Ernest...
Nowt to stop you going to see her.

           
Ma ...

           
... She were in a shocking state,
banging her fists on Ma's door - 'please, please', like this ...

           
'Please, Liz.' Ernie, sheltering under the overhanging
porch as the rain came harder. 'Answer the door, eh?'

           
He remembered attending her wedding back in ... 1957,
would it be? This high-born, high-breasted Cheshire beauty, niece of Lord
Benfold, on the arm of a grinning Arthur Horridge, boisterous with pride - free
ale all round that night in The Man. 'Sturdy lass,' Ma Wagstaff had observed
(they were already calling her Ma back in the 'fifties). 'Never pegged her own
washing out, I'll bet.'

           
Ma talking then as if Eliza Horridge were nowt to do with
her. As if there was no secret between them.

           
It was years before Ernie had put two and two together.

           
... put me hand on
her shoulder and she nearly had hysterics, I want Ma, I want Ma ...'

           
Oh, Lord, Liz. Answer the bloody door. Please.

Hans said, 'I realised a
long time ago where the essence was. That' a real centre of spirituality was
what was important - that what
kind
of spirituality it was was, to a large extent, irrelevant.'

           
'You say you realised ...' Cathy said slowly. 'Did that
come in a blinding flash, or were you ... tutored, perhaps?'

           
'Both. They started work on your mother to begin with,
through the well-dressing. She was always interested in flowers.' Hans laughed
painfully. 'Can you imagine? Doing it through something as utterly innocuous as
flower arranging
? Millicent Gill it
was taught her - only a kid at the time, but she'd been born into it. Flowers.
Petal pictures. Pretty.'

           
'Yes,' Cathy said.

           
'Then flowers in the church. Nothing strange about that.
But in this kind of quantity? Used to look like Kew Gardens in August.'

           
'I remember.'

           
'And the candles. Coloured candles. And the statues. I
remembered commenting to the bishop - old Tom Warrender in those days, canny
old devil - about the unexpected Anglo- Catholic flavour. "But they still
turn up in force on a Sunday, don't they, Hans?" he said. And then he
patted me on the shoulder, as if to say, don't knock it when you're winning. Of
course, even then I knew we weren't talking about Anglo-Catholicism - not in
the normal sense, anyway. And then, when we'd been here a few years, your
mother went into hospital to have you and Barney …'

           
'Which reminds me, Pop, Barney called from Brussels -
he'll be over to see you before the end of the week.'

           
'No need. Tell him ...'

           
'There's no telling him anything, you know that. Go on.
When Mum was in hospital ...'

           
'I was approached by Alf Beckett, Frank Manifold and
Willie Wagstaff. They said the house was no place to bring families into, far
too dismal and shabby. Give them a couple of
hours and they and a few of the other lads would redecorate the place top to
bottom. Be a nice surprise for your mother - welcome-home present from the
village.'

           
'I didn't know about that.'

           
'Of course you didn't. Anyway, I said it was very good of
them and everything, but the mess ... Don't you worry about that, Vicar, they
said. You won't even have to see it until it's done. We've arranged
accommodation for you.'

           
'Ah,' said Cathy.

           
'They'd installed a bed in the little cellar under the
church,' said Hans. 'The place had been aired. Chemical toilet in the passage.
Washbowl, kettle, all mod cons. Of course, I knew I was being set up, but what
could I do?'

           
Hans paused, 'I spent... two nights down there.'

           
'And?' Cathy discovered she was leaning forward, gripping
the leatherette arms of her chair.

           
'And what? Don't expect me to tell you what happened. I
came out, to put it mildly, a rather more thoughtful sort of chap than when I
went in. Can't explain it. I think it was a test. I think I passed. I hope I
passed.'

           
'But you didn't want Joel sleeping down there?'

           
'God, no. The difference being that I'd been there a few
years by then - I was halfway to accepting certain aspects of Bridelow. They
knew that. Somebody took a decision. That the vicar should be ... presented. To
Her. I think ... I think if I hadn't been ready, if I hadn't been considered
sufficiently ... what? Tolerant, I suppose. Open-minded ... then probably
nothing would have happened. Probably nothing would have happened with Joel.
But I didn't want him down there. I don't want to sound superior or anything,
but that boy could spend fifty years in Bridelow and still not be ready.'