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?'