'Go home, Frank, you've had too many.'
'Too many what? Listen, fart-face, you're not my fucking foreman no more. Not your pub, neither. What's your name, mate?'
Macbeth had had too many bad experiences of telling his name to guys in bars. 'Kansas,' he said. 'Jim Kansas.'
'... kind of fucking name's that?'
'Frank, if you don't go home …'
'Aye? Go on. Finish sentence, Stan. What you goin' do if I don't go?'
'I shall pick up that big bottle of Long John,' said Mrs Lottie Castle, appearing in the doorway, 'and I'll use it to bash out all of your front teeth, Frank Manifold. That's for starters.
Out!'
'It's raining,' Young Frank said.
And he giggled. But he went.
Macbeth started to breathe again.
'Sorry,' the barman Stan said to him. 'Everybody seems to be on edge tonight.' The other guys in the bar were draining their glasses, coming to their feet. 'We'll leave you to it, Lottie, I think. Shut the place, I would. You'll get no more custom tonight. Not in this.'
Now Stan looked meaningfully at Macbeth. Lottie said, 'He's staying.' Stan nodded dubiously and didn't move. 'He's an old friend of Matt's,' Lottie said. 'Couldn't make it for the funeral.'
'Right.' Stan accepted this and shrugged into his overcoat. 'Night then, Lottie. Good night, Mr Kansas.'
Macbeth was curious. This woman didn't know him from Bill Clinton and here she was letting her regular customers and the help go and him stay the night. Normal way of things, the woman being a widow, this would've been no big surprise, he had to admit. But she was a very recent widow. Also, she didn't seem to have even noticed what he looked like.
She looked tired. Drained. Eyes swollen. She dragged out a weary smile.
'Mr ... Mungo. I've located Willie Wagstaff. He doesn't know where Moira is, but he says he doesn't mind talking to you if you don't keep him too long. He's at his girlfriend's - that's the Post Office. About a hundred yards up the street, same side.'
'Right. Uh, what did you ... ?'
'I told him I thought you were all right. I hope you are.'
Macbeth said, 'Mrs Castle, what's going on here? Just why is everybody on edge? Who're all these people at the Rectory?'
'Ask Willie,' she said. 'And just so you know, he used to play the drums in Matt's band, so he's known Moira a long time. Do you want to borrow an umbrella?'
'Thanks, I have a slicker in back of the car. What if I'm late?'
'I'll still be up,' Lottie Castle said. 'Whatever time it is. Just hammer on the door.'
Lottie bolted the door behind him, top and bottom. Then she went through to the back door and secured that too.
She put on some coffee, partly to combat the rain noise with the warm pop-pop-pop of the percolator.
Earlier she'd pulled through a three-seater sofa from the living room that never got lived in. There was a duvet rolled up on the sofa.
Tonight's bed. Would have been, if she'd been alone in the pub. She'd put the American in Bedroom Three, the one Dic used when he was here. Soon as he'd left yesterday she'd changed the bedding, aired the room. It was just across the passage from her own.
Were bad dreams somehow stopped at source when you were no longer alone in the building?
That, of course, would depend on whether they were dreams.
On the refectory table was a local paper with the phone numbers of two estate agents ringed, the ones that specialised in commercial properties. Give that a try first, see if anyone was interested in a loss-making pub, before resorting to the domestic market.
Former village inn. Full of character. Dramatic rural location. Reduced for quick sale.
Well, did she have a choice? Was there any kind of alternative?
Lottie poured coffee, strong but with a little cream which she left unstirred, thin, white circles on the dark surface, because black coffee was apt to make her think of the Moss.
She left the cup steaming on the table, stood in the centre of the room for a moment with her sleeves pushed up and her hands on her hips.
'Matt,' she said, 'you know I didn't want to come, but I didn't complain. I supported you. I gave up my lovely home.'
Strange, but all the time he was dying he never once allowed a discussion to develop about her future. But then, they never actually talked about him dying; just, occasionally, about him being ill. And he obviously wasn't afraid; he was just - amazing when you thought about it - too preoccupied.
'You were always a selfish bastard, Matt,' she said.
Standing on the flags, hands on hips, giving him a lecture.
Don't see why I should feel ashamed, do you?'
Feeling not so unhappy, because there was someone to wait up for.
She left on a wall-lamp in the kitchen, went through to the bar, leaving the door ajar. Switched the lights off one by one at the panel beside the mirror, leaving until last the disused brass gas-mantle which Matt had electrified.
The porch-light would stay on all night, gilding the rippling rain on the window. Lottie moved out into the darkened, stone-walled bar, collecting the ashtrays for emptying.
Wondering what Willie would make of the American with the silly name who'd driven down from Glasgow on the wettest Sunday of the year to find Moira Cairns.
Matt would have done that. Matt would have killed for Moira, and there was a time when she would have killed Moira because of it, but it didn't seem to matter any more.
When the gaslight came back on behind the bar, Lottie dropped all the ashtrays with a clatter of tin.
The gas mantle was fitted with on electric bulb under the little gauzy knob thing and it looked fairly realistic. Or so she'd thought because she'd never seen the original gas.
Until now.
Oh, yes. This was gas, being softer, more diffused; she almost felt she could hear a hiss. Did they hiss? Or was that Matt?
Matt, whose face shone from the mirror behind the bar, enshrouded in gaslight.
Lottie stood with her back to the far stone wall. Her hands found her hips. Against which, untypically, they trembled.
She said, very quietly, 'Oh, no.'
Ernie Dawber knew that if he allowed himself to think about this, he would at once realise the fundamental insanity of the whole business.
He would see 'sense'.
But Bridelow folk had traditionally answered to laws unperceived elsewhere. Therefore it was not insane, and it required another kind of sense which could never be called 'common'.