The Living and the Dead in Winsford Read online

  And her birthday was so close to Christmas: I recall being a bit sorry for her on that account.

  I get out of bed and wonder why she has suddenly come into my head. And then I remember that she always does on this day, every year. Just for half a minute or even less. I usually wonder what became of her, and I do today as well.

  Is this what old age is like? I wonder as I check the thermometer and observe the sky through the window. People crop up then disappear, crop up and disappear. In a never-ending stream and with no apparent order or reason. Not just on their birthdays, I assume. The older we get the more vulnerable we become to our memories.

  I feel listless today again. Come to that, I have done so every morning since that evening and night with Mark Britton. I can’t make up my mind if it’s because I miss him, or if there is some other reason – even if it’s the opposite of missing him. But why should that be so? I note down that it’s only four degrees, and looks wet and windy. It’s not exactly foggy, but it’s as if a thick but quite translucent cloud were drifting over the moor. Three ponies are chewing away just on the other side of the wall, with two more not far behind them. The sky is dark.

  It strikes me that everything is going awry.

  I start crying.

  Then stop crying after a few minutes and light a fire instead. Castor comes sauntering in from the bedroom. I don’t think I’d be setting foot outside the house today if it weren’t for him.

  I can’t even decide what is worst about sitting in prison like this. You leave no impression on the world. You are outside time. If you somehow managed to cease existing for a day it wouldn’t make any difference. Nobody would notice anything at all. Is that why some people become pyromaniacs? Or break into schools with their gun and shoot children? In order to make the impression that is so terribly important?

  Is this a peculiar question? I don’t know; but the reason why I am here – isn’t it precisely so that I can avoid making any impression? And why am I suddenly enquiring about a reason?

  We go for a morning walk instead. The same rough heather, the same grass and moss and thorn bushes. Bracken, pheasants and mud. After ten minutes there is a hailstorm: we turn back and hurry home.

  *

  Halfway through breakfast I realize that I fell asleep before eleven last night, and that I haven’t yet used today’s words. I read through my list and decide to have one more go with literary figures. The last two days I’ve tried Russians and Americans, so if I spread myself out a bit in Europe today, I can try three Swedes tomorrow.

  Fagin. Quixote. Faust.

  No luck, I note as usual, but I thought I detected a little bit of hesitation on the part of the computer when I tried Quixote. There was a slightly longer pause than usual before it stated that I had provided an invalid password. Could that be because some of the letters were correct?

  Or is it just that I’m losing my grip and imagining things?

  I start playing patience instead, but only eight games. I’ll save the rest until this evening.

  I go to the centre after a long, difficult walk up to Dunkery Beacon, the highest point on the whole moor. We started from Wheddon Cross, in accordance with instructions in the guidebook, and almost all the time we had our destination in view, apart from when it was partially obscured by mist and clouds. But after having struggled up through soaking wet pasture land, difficult to negotiate, for what seemed like many hours, and forcing our way past aggressive herds of very fat cows – they were worryingly reminiscent of surly uniformed officials at border crossings into totalitarian countries – we came to the narrow road that encircles the summit in an irregular circle, and decided that we would attempt the final five hundred metres some other day. The wind was blowing straight at us, and there was good reason to think that the view would be restricted on a day like this one. We hadn’t seen a single person on the whole way up, and in fact the only real plus was a group of stags some way away from the path.

  So we turned back, and walked down along a sheltered path through a valley – wet and muddy, but protected from the wind – and were back at the car park outside The Rest and Be Thankful Inn after two-and-a-half hours in all. This was the very pub I had called in at when I first arrived on the moor fifty days earlier: I remembered the big-bosomed blonde barmaid, the crossword-solving woman and the peripatetic plumber, and thought that it seemed as if had happened a year ago.

  But I didn’t consider even for a moment popping in again. Instead we got into the car and began driving along the now familiar A396 back to Winsford. And as we were doing so, I decided it was high time to check the e-mails again.

  Both Alfred Biggs and Margaret Allen are on duty for once. And there are two young girls and two young boys, sitting in different corners and lost in a world of their own of which I have no conception. I think in passing of Jeremy Britton, and exclude him from my thoughts just as quickly.

  ‘Welcome again,’ says Margaret Allen.

  ‘Ah, it’s our lady writer,’ says Alfred Biggs.

  I apologize for the fact that Castor and I are so dirty, and explain that we have just been climbing up towards Dunkery Beacon.

  ‘On a day like this?’ exclaims Alfred.

  ‘That was brave of you,’ says Margaret. ‘I’ll put a cup of tea on for you. You can have your usual computer.’

  I take my own e-mails first this time. Answer three Christmas greetings from colleagues at the Monkeyhouse, one from my brother and finally one from Christa. She says nothing about me appearing in her dreams or that she is worried, and I’m grateful for that. Violetta di Parma writes and says that she has forwarded our post in accordance with my instructions, and that she must now rush off so as not to miss the performance of Handel’s Messiah. I write a brief thank-you, and hope she enjoyed the concert.

  Then Martin’s inbox. As always, I open it with a degree of dread. Offer up a silent prayer that at least there won’t be anything from G.

  And my prayer is answered on that point. I read through the six messages that might require an answer: the first five can safely be ignored, the sixth and last is from Professor Soblewski:

  My Dear Friend,

  A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to both of you.

  That was in Swedish, but then he goes over to English and writes about an anthology of short stories that he and Martin evidently intend publishing – in Sweden and Poland simultaneously, half of them by Swedes and the other half by Poles. Young and promising writers, no old, established authors: they aim to promote the avant-garde. Soblewski suggests that they should replace one called Majstowski by somebody called Słupka, and promises to send the story in question as soon as he receives the translation. Then he wonders if young Anderson, whose story Carnivores he has just read in translation, is really all that outstanding. He would like Martin’s views on both these points. And to conclude he writes:

  By the way, a curious and slightly macabre thing has occurred just a few miles from here. The police have found a dead body, they suspect foul play but are apparently unable to identify it. We live in a dangerous world, dear friends. Take good care of each other.

  Sob

  A sound rings out in my right ear, and I suddenly have difficulty in breathing.

  A dead body. A few miles from here. The police are not able to identify it.

  I notice that the room I’m sitting in, and which Margaret Allen has just left, waving goodbye from the doorway, has started swaying. I feel sick, and for a brief moment I think I’m going to throw up over the computer.

  Or faint. Or both.

  I cling tightly onto the table with both hands as the feeling slowly passes over. I close my eyes for a while, and hope Alfred Biggs hasn’t noticed the state I’m in. The sound is still there, but is not quite so loud now and has moved over into my left ear, for some reason. I open my eyes and read the text again.

  Not the part about the anthology. Only the section about the dead body. Three times.

  Foul play? Take goo
d care of each other?

  It’s almost dark when we leave the computer centre, despite the fact that it’s only five o’clock. This is the evening when Mark Britton will be at The Royal Oak with his friendly IT colleague. Until now I haven’t been able to make up my mind whether or not to go there and join them. But Soblewski’s e-mail has made the decision for me.

  Castor and I will spend the evening alone at Darne Lodge.

  We might not even play patience. We might simply lock the door and sit there with our thoughts and assess the remainder of our lives.

  38

  Julie. Wrong.

  Markurell. Wrong.

  Berling. Wrong.

  We go to bed. Lie there in the darkness, listening to the rain and the wind – or at least, I do. I don’t know how much of all that Castor is aware of as he lies by my feet under the duvet. Or how much he cares. I have said missus to him several times: at first he cocked his head in order to hear better, but then he lost interest.

  I feel disorientated. Not so much by my surroundings, for they have been constant for several weeks now, but inside me. I have difficulty in remembering thoughts, or linking one thought with another: this might be something I’ve been experiencing for quite a while, but it feels especially intense this evening. I suspect it must be Soblewski’s e-mail that has brought it on – acted as the amplifier or catalyst. The police have found a dead body. Perhaps I would emerge unscathed from a mental examination, perhaps not: I have personal experience of the concept of Angst, no doubt about that – mainly during the time when I was suffering from depression, and it really doesn’t have anything to do with potatoes. But what I am feeling now has nothing to do with Angst: it’s more a question of total rootlessness, or connectionlessness, if such a word exists. I don’t know. The process of cause and effect has vanished, or at least I no longer understand it. I can’t pin it down.

  I hope it is due to the fact that the year is coming to an end. The day after tomorrow is the year’s shortest day – I notice that I keep coming back to that fact with the stubbornness of a lunatic: but then all of a sudden everything changes. Light arrives. When the new year has established itself I shall be able to think ahead, not merely to outlive my dog but also to make decisions that imply . . . that imply that I shall be able to live a sort of real life. Connections will emerge and then fade away. I think I can see this ahead of me: all I need to do is to allow a few days to pass, a Christmas to come and go; to wait for Mark Britton to come back from Scarborough perhaps, to enter a new, untried year and somehow to progress . . . Like a book you have on the bedside table but haven’t yet had the strength to start reading. But you can imagine how interesting it is going to be. And what you can imagine exists, it really does – in a certain way and to a certain extent it really does.

  I lift up the duvet and ask Castor if he understands my way of thinking, because I have actually been speaking aloud about all this. He doesn’t move a muscle. I suddenly hear that metallic sound out there on the moor again. It’s coming in waves, rising and falling. I wrap my pillow around my head and do my best to fall asleep. I think I’m ready to cope with most things, but I’d rather not dream about Martin. I start mumbling the only quotation from the Bible that I know off by heart, the Twenty-third Psalm:

  The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

  He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:

  he leadeth me beside the still waters.

  He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.

  Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . .

  Before I get to the end I’ve started to dream about rats. No, I realize that I’m still awake, so it’s not a dream. In which case I don’t know what it is: just a notion, perhaps, or a mirage. But this evening it is something that risks complete collapse.

  . . . apparently unable to identify it.

  Huh, I suddenly thought. What had I expected? What other message could have been more desirable?Which?

  Well, then . . .

  The twentieth of December. Thursday, eight degrees and a clear blue sky. Virtually no wind at all. From the overgrown cairn where Roman legionaries must once have stood and gazed out over the countryside after having killed Caratacus, it is possible to see for miles in all directions on a day like this.

  Dunkery Beacon, for instance, that we tried to reach yesterday but didn’t quite manage it: if you were an eagle or a falcon you would easily be able to fly there in five minutes in today’s clear weather. Everything is extremely beautiful: charming and undulating moorland, with the blossom on the gorse bushes striving up longingly towards the sun. It’s allowed for a boy to make love to his girlfriend – almost obligatory, in fact.

  After a late breakfast we set off for Porlock Common. High above Exford we park in a tiny lay-by and then walk over the open countryside for several hours without a map. We see stags again some distance away, and maintain the high spirits of the morning until dusk begins to fall. By the time we get back to Darne Lodge it is half past four, and we arrive at our simple cottage at almost exactly the same moment as Mark Britton. We haven’t even entered the house, and we stand outside in the yard, talking. He hands over a bouquet of roses and a bottle of champagne.

  ‘Just a little Christmas Box,’ he says, and his smile is slightly unsure. ‘I intended to give it to you last night at the pub, but you never came.’

  ‘Something else cropped up, I’m afraid,’ I say, and he is civilized enough not to ask what.

  ‘Jeremy and I will be setting off early tomorrow morning,’ he says. ‘To Scarborough, that is. So I thought I’d wish you a Merry Christmas slightly in advance. If you . . .’

  ‘If I what?’

  ‘If you save the bubbly maybe we can share it on New Year’s Eve?’

  I promise to think about that, and give him a hug. ‘But I hope I can look at the roses before then? When will you be back?’

  ‘That depends. In good time before New Year in any case. Do you have a mobile so that I can get in touch with you?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘I must say you keep yourself pretty isolated. Can I call in on you when I get back?’

  I promise that he will be welcome, and then we say goodbye. Wish each other the compliments of the season again. I remain standing there, watching as he negotiates the twists and turns of Halse Lane. I think it’s odd that we actually made love only a week ago.

  But then, the world’s an odd place.

  Then we are on our own.

  I manage to read another chapter of Lorna Doone, and note that people were much more courageous in the old days.

  Sixteen games of patience, four go out.

  Dylan. Wrong.

  Cohen. Wrong.

  Coltrane. Wrong.

  I look closely at the roses. They are not quite red. I drink two tumblers of wine before bed, and that helps to some extent.

  39

  The shortest day.

  At The Stag’s Head in Dunster, where we have a simple lunch – a ploughman’s and fizzy water – we get into conversation with a local fudge maker. I’m grateful for every form of human contact, and it seems the fudge maker is as well. He tells me that his ex-wife runs a little delicatessen shop in the town, and although it’s fifteen years since they divorced he is still responsible for making the fudge. Selling it is still the cornerstone of the whole business, he stresses: people come from as far away as Taunton and Barnstaple to buy Mrs Miller’s Home-Made Fudge. Occasionally they even get customers from as far away as Bristol, and during the weeks leading up to Christmas she sells as much as during the rest of the year put together.

  I promise to call in and buy a few lumps.

  ‘Vanilla,’ he says. ‘Take the classic stuff. Or possibly coffee, but don’t go for any of the newfangled fancy tastes. Fudge ought to taste like fudge, for God’s sake.’

  Then he asks where I come from. I tell him I’m a Swedish writer but I’m spending the
winter on Exmoor and writing a novel. He asks where I’m living, and I tell him I’m renting a house just above Winsford.

  ‘Winsford!’ he exclaims, and his expression becomes distinctly dreamy. ‘I had a girlfriend there once. I should have married her instead of Britney. She runs the pub there, by the way – perhaps you’ve seen her?’

  ‘Rosie?’

  ‘Rosie, yes! She’s a fine-looking woman, isn’t she? Not as attractive as you, of course, but pretty good by my standards.’

  I make a non-committal response and we chat for a while about Exmoor and the way that life makes up its own mind about how it’s going to proceed. When we say goodbye I can’t avoid thinking what a small world it is, here on Exmoor. The fact that a fudge maker in Dunster was once sweet on a pub landlady in Winsford is nothing remarkable. I also remember clearly Mark Britton’s estimate of the number of marriageable women on the moor. Rather less than zero.

  And that makes me think about something else as I sit chewing fudge in the car on the way back to Darne Lodge: how many people actually know that there is a mad Swedish woman author sitting writing in that old house, the scene of several suicides?

  One or two, presumably.

  The evenings are the worst. Unless I think about going to The Royal Oak Inn, and I’ve decided not to do so today. Better to save it up for a day or two. Once before Christmas Eve, once afterwards, and then Mark Britton will be back and as the new year dawns I shall be in a fit state to make plans. To create a future for myself.

  I try to convince myself of this as I wander around the house, as I make a fire, as I put stuff into the refrigerator and sip at a glass of port. It’s five o’clock and already pitch dark, impossible to move around outdoors. I recall that the moon was shining the evening I came here, briefly at least, but I don’t think I’ve experienced a moonlit evening since then. Ten metres away from the house is the overgrown stone wall, I know that, but there’s no chance of seeing it from my window. Tonight it’s foggy as well: it’s usually possible to detect the borderline between heaven and earth, where the rounded hill with a handful of trees on the summit can be seen to the south; but not the way things are this evening.