Dong.
This was the dong. The hollow chime. Not the link, not the ping.
Aw, hey, no, please ...
The phone turned out to be in the room where she'd left her guitar, where it would be safe - the black case lying in state, like a coffin, across two Jacobean chairs. Safe here, she'd thought, surely. This is a castle. But she'd take it with her when she'd made her call.
She stood in front of the phone, picked it up and put it back a couple of times. She didn't know who to ring.
Malcolm. If in doubt, call Malcolm. She was planning, anyway, to strangle the bastard for tonight. 'You'll enjoy it,' he'd insisted. 'You'll find it absolutely fascinating. Rory's mortified.'
She rang him at home in Dumbarton. 'Malcolm,' she said, 'I may never convince myself to forgive you for this. I may even cast about in the shark-infested waters you inhabit for a new agent.
He didn't say a word. Had he heard all this before from her? More than once? Was she becoming querulous? Creeping middle age? She felt tired, woozy. She shook herself, straightened her back, raised her voice.
'Listen, there are so-called Celts here not only from Ireland and Wales and Brittany, but from Switzerland and Italy - with Mafia connections, no doubt - and America and some wee place nudging up to Turkey. And they are, to a man, Malcolm - they are a bunch of pretentious, elitist, possibly racist wankers.'
'Racism?' Malcolm said. 'I thought it was about money. EC grants. Cultural exchanges. More EC grants ...'
'Aye, well ...'
'Is it not a good fee for you?'
'Is it the same fee as Rory's fee would have been?'
'Oh, Moira, come now ...'
'Forget it. Listen, the real reason I disturbed you on the sabbath ...'
'Not my sabbath, as it happens.'
' ... is my answering machine is on the blink and I suspect someone's trying to get hold of me, and it's no' my daddy because I called him.'
'Nothing urgent that I'm aware of, Moira, don't you worry your head."
'No messages?'
'None at all.' He paused. 'You aren't feeling unwell again, you?'
'I'm fine.' Her left hand found the guitar case, clutched at it. She had that feeling again, of being touched. She shivered. She felt cold and isolated but also crowded in, under detailed examination. Too many impressions: the hollow chime, the eyes, the touch - impersonal, like a doctor's. Too much, too close. She had to get out of here.
'It's none of my business, of course,' said Malcolm, who believed in the Agent's Right to Know, 'but what was it exactly that made you think someone wanted to contact you?'
'Just a feeling.'
'Just a feeling?'
'Aye,' she said wearily. There was nothing touching her now. The room was static and heavy, no atmosphere. The furniture lumpen, without style. A museum. Nothing here.
Nothing ... right?
He said, 'You are a strange, witchy woman, Moira.'
'Malcolm,' Moira said. 'Go fuck yourself, huh?'
From Dawber's Book of Bridelow:
RELIGION (i)
Bridelow is dominated by the ancient church dedicated to Saint Bride and built upon a small rise, thought to be the remains of the 'low' or burial mound from which the village gets the other half of its name.
The tower is largely Norman, with later medieval embellishments, although there was considerable reconstruction work to this and to the main body of the church in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The clock was added to the tower following a donation by the Bridelow Brewery in 1889 and was subsequently illuminated, enhancing the role of the tower as a 'beacon' for travellers lost on Bridelow Moss.
The churchyard offers a spectacular view over the Moss and the surrounding countryside, which, to the rear, gives way to a large tract of moorland, uninhabited since prehistoric days.
CHAPTER IV
During evensong, though he still didn't know quite what had happened with Matt, the Rector said a short prayer for the dying landlord of The Man I'th Moss.
Holding on to the lectern, eyes raised to the bent and woven branches of the Autumn Cross, he said carefully, 'Grant him strength, O Lord, and ... a peaceful heart.'
Not quite sure what he meant, but he felt it was the right thing to say; you learned to trust your instincts in Bridelow. Sure enough, several members of the congregation looked up at him, conveying tacit approval. Briefly, he felt the warmth of the place again, the warmth he'd always remember, a quite unexpected warmth the first time he'd experienced it.
Unexpected because, from the outside, the church had such a forbidding, fortress-like appearance, especially from a distance, viewed from the road which traversed the Moss. He remembered his first sight of the building, close on thirty years ago. Not inspiring, in those days, for a novice minister: hard and grey-black with too many spiky bits and growling gargoyles. And Our Sheila perpetually playing with herself over the porch.
This was the 1960s, when what the young clergyman dreamed of was a bright, modern church with a flat roof and abstract stained glass (after ten years it would look like a lavatory block, but in the sixties one imagined things could only get better and better.)
'Amen,' the congregation said as one. The old schoolmaster, Ernest Dawber, glanced up at the Rector and gave him a quick, sad smile.
The warmth.
Sometimes it had seemed as if the church walls themselves were heating up under the pale amber of the lights - they were old gas-mantles converted to electricity, like the scattered streetlamps outside. And at Christmas and other festivals, it felt as though the great squat pillars either side of the nave had become giant radiator pipes.
But the warmth was rarely as apparent now. The Rector wondered if it would even be noticeable any more to a newcomer. Perhaps not. He'd gone to the expense of ordering more oil for the boiler and increasing the heat level. Knowing, all the same, as he went through the motions, that it couldn't be that simple.
There'd been a draught in the pulpit today; he certainly hadn't known that here before. The draught was needle-thin but it wasn't his imagination because, every so often, the Autumn Cross would sway a little over his head, rustling.
It rustled now, as he read out the parish notices, and something touched his hair, startling him. When he reached out, his flingers found a dead leaf. It crackled slightly, reminding him of the furious flurry of leaves blasted against his study window at dusk, like an admonishment: you must not watch us ... you must turn your face away.