The Living and the Dead in Winsford Read online

  Mark Britton

  Jeremy Britton

  Death

  Castor’s disappearance

  I eventually cross out several of them. All that remains is the pheasants, the rented car and Castor. And Death, although I would prefer to cross that out as well. I decide that the rest are irrelevant, at least in the current situation. After a while I add two questions:

  Is Martin really dead?

  In which case how do I know that?

  And after having sat perfectly still for several minutes, staring at my piece of paper, I manage to revert to a thought I recall having had several days ago, before I read that last e-mail from Soblewski:

  An accomplice?

  Might it be that . . . ?

  Would it be possible that . . . ?

  It takes quite some time to make these trains of thought comprehensible, and that has no doubt to do with my state of mind. Castor has gone missing and I’m on the edge of a nervous breakdown: there’s no point in my pretending otherwise, and I don’t do so.

  But if I do go back to that question about a possible accomplice that I raised some time ago – the only possible way for Martin to keep himself incognito if he did manage to get out of that rat-filled bunker – what exactly do I think? Well, I think that realistically there is only one possible accomplice.

  Professor Soblewski.

  Isn’t that the case? I ask myself. What other scenarios would be possible? In what other way could Martin have reacted without it being known that . . . that his wife left him to die in an old bunker from the Second World War? Who would he have trusted to be his confidant if he decided to take the matter into his own hands and get his own back? As he walked along that beach, shuddering and filled with hatred. Because that surely has to be when he decided to solve the problem.

  Soblewski, of course. The professor’s house is not far away – certainly no more than a three-hour walk. He and Martin had sat talking and making plans for half the night, so even if Martin wasn’t actually looking for a comrade-in-arms, Soblewski’s must have been the first name to occur to him, and his first move after getting out must have been to return to Soblewski’s house.

  What would the implications of that be? What exactly are the implications of this way of thinking?

  Despite my predicament it’s not all that difficult to answer that question. It would quite simply mean that Martin and Soblewski are fully acquainted with all the e-mail correspondence that has taken place since I came to Exmoor.

  Furthermore: that Soblewski’s own messages to Martin are fictitious, invented with the aim of not making me suspect anything. In particular I am not supposed to suspect anything when Soblewski, almost in passing, mentions that a dead body has been found not far from his home.

  Surely this must be a possible set-up?

  Yes indeed, I’m forced to concede that it is indeed a possible set-up.

  And it also produces a link – a series of threads – between the various facts I scribbled down on that sheet of paper.

  How many people in the world would Castor voluntarily go off with if they shouted for him?

  I crunch up that sheet of paper and throw it into the fire. There is thunder inside my head. Are there any more false e-mails in addition to those from Soblewski? What’s the situation with those more or less aggressive messages from G, which have dried up over the last few days? Might they also have been written by my husband and his accomplice?

  It dawns on me that I haven’t been out to shout for Castor for quite a while, and – to demonstrate to myself that there is a credible and possible alternative to the conclusions I’m close to drawing – I get dressed and go out to shout for him for at least half an hour.

  In various directions, but without leaving the garden.

  In my mind’s eye I can see how he has sunk down so deep into a quagmire out on the moor that only his head is still above ground. He’s trying to turn it so that he can see from which direction his missus is coming to rescue him: but in the end he accepts that any such solution simply isn’t going to happen. It’s better to just close your eyes and give up your miserable dog’s life. It’s better to abandon any such vain hope.

  Or else . . . Or else he’s lying and licking his chops on a bed in a guest house somewhere not far away. Dunster or Minehead or Lynmouth, why not? Lying there and watching his master, the man sitting over there in the armchair with a glass of beer and a newspaper, who has just materialized out of nowhere . . .

  In neither case is there much point in his missus standing out there in the dark shouting for him in a voice that increasingly resembles that faint scraping of a knife on the bottom of a saucepan.

  But you go on shouting even so. You do that. As long as you have something to do, no matter how useless it is, you carry on doing it: because that’s how you stop yourself from going out of your mind.

  You shout and shout.

  And when I’ve finished shouting I fall asleep on the sofa yet again.

  42

  There’s a knocking on the door that wakes me up.

  I pull the blanket off me and sit up. Check that I am dressed, and run my hands through my hair. Confused images are helter-skeltering through my mind, hammer blows are pounding away behind my eyes. I probably look like a witch, and am not sure if I should go and answer the door or not.

  Then I recall the situation and decide that it doesn’t matter if I look like a witch. Nothing matters any more – most probably nothing has mattered for a long time now, but it is time for me to face up to that fact. To take it seriously.

  More knocking. I stand up and go to open the door.

  It’s Lindsey, the new waiter at The Royal Oak: several seconds pass before I manage to identify him. It’s been snowing during the night, just a thin layer that is no doubt starting to melt away already: but the landscape is still white, and that comes as a surprise.

  As does Lindsey, of course. Nobody has never knocked on the door of Darne Lodge while I’ve been living here. He is stamping in the snow rather nervously with his low shoes, and apologizes.

  ‘Tom asked me to drive up here. I have to return straight away – we’ll be opening for lunch shortly and we’re expecting a biggish group . . .’

  ‘What’s it all about?’

  ‘Your dog, madam,’ he says. ‘We have your dog at the inn. He was sitting outside the door when Rosie came downstairs. So we let him in and have given him something to eat – I assume he ran off from here earlier this morning, did he?’

  I stare at him but can’t produce a word. He shuffles uncomfortably and throws out his arms as if he still wants to apologize for something.

  ‘I must be getting back. But you can come down and fetch him whenever it suits you. Rosie and Tom asked me to tell you that.’

  ‘Thank you, Lindsey,’ I manage to say at last. ‘Thank you so much for coming here to tell me. He’s been missing ever since yesterday evening, in fact. It’s so worrying . . .’

  I don’t know why I reduce the length of his absence by a whole day.

  ‘Anyway, that was all I have to tell you . . .He’s a lovely dog, madam.’

  ‘Yes, he is lovely. Tell Rosie and Tom I’ll be there in an hour.’

  ‘Thank you very much, I’ll do that,’ says Lindsey and returns to his Land Rover that is chugging away on the road.

  I get undressed, stand in the shower and reel off the whole of the Twenty-third Psalm. This time without being interrupted.

  *

  He comes to meet me as I walk in through the door. I sink down onto my knees and throw my arms around him – I had been determined to retain my dignity and not do any such thing, but there was no chance of that. He licks my ears, both my right one and my left. He smells a bit, not absolutely clean but not the way you would stink after spending two nights and a day out on a muddy moor.

  ‘The prodigal son has returned, I see.’

  It’s Robert, sitting in his usual place with a pint of Exmoor Ale in front of him.

/>   ‘Dogs,’ says Rosie from behind the bar. ‘They’re nearly as bad as men.’

  ‘I don’t follow you,’ says Robert.

  Rosie snorts at him. ‘If you can’t find them at home, you’ll find them at the pub. But it’s great when they come to the right place. He’s had a bite to eat and he’s slept for an hour in front of the fire. Lindsey says he’s been missing since yesterday evening.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I say, standing up. ‘I don’t know what got into him. I let him out to do his business, and he was off before you could say Jack Robinson.’

  ‘No doubt he picked up the scent of something that took his fancy,’ says Tom, who appears next to his wife behind the bar.

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m saying,’ says Rosie. ‘Just like a man.’

  ‘Haven’t I stood by your side for thirty years?’ sighs Tom, winking at me. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. A Merry Christmas, by the way! It looks as if it might be a white one – but you’re used to that, I suppose?’

  ‘I certainly am,’ I say. ‘But I don’t suppose this will stay.’

  ‘The main thing is that you do,’ says Rosie.

  I don’t understand what she means, and they can tell that by looking at me.

  ‘To eat lunch here, that’s what I mean. We have a carvery today. There’ll be a big crowd coming in about half an hour, but you’ll be able to take the best bits if you sit down now.’

  ‘You promised me the best bits, have you forgotten that already?’ protests Robert, raising his glass.

  Life goes on as usual, despite everything, I think, and sit down at the table nearest the fire. Castor lies down at my feet.

  It really does. Life. It goes on as usual. And Castor and I will continue to wander around together as before.

  I sit wallowing in that grandiose but perceptive thought as we drive to Dulverton after our lunchtime gluttony at The Royal Oak. As a tribute to this eternal truth and practical process we are going to buy some Christmas food. If we can find any: it’s the twenty-third today, and high time . . . The road is rather bumpy and slippery after the snow, but even so Castor sits in the front passenger seat without a safety belt, so that I can keep stroking him.

  Where have you been? I think. Over and over again. Where have you been? Where have you been?

  But I don’t really care just now. Perhaps I don’t really want to know, and the main thing is that he’s back. I’ll never let him go out again on his own in the darkness. Not as long as we’re both alive.

  I manage to keep such speculation at arm’s length – presumably the season of the year helps in that respect. Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day. We don’t go anywhere, we stay in Darne Lodge and go for long walks over the moor, one in the morning and one in the afternoon: down towards the village, but only halfway – it’s too muddy to go all the way; uphill towards Wambarrows with long detours in the direction of Tarr Steps. Tarr Steps from the good side, not the Devil’s road.

  And I don’t let Castor out of my sight for a single second.

  I read about John Ridd and Lorna Doone, almost to the end. I called in at the second-hand bookshop and collected Bessie Hyatt’s two novels when we were doing our Christmas shopping, but they can stand next to Dickens and wait for a while. I cook and keep the fire going. We eat, we cuddle on the sofa and exchange our thoughts. We’ve nothing to complain about. Nothing at all.

  The weather is so-so. The temperature is close to freezing, but there’s no more snow: what did fall has melted away. Even so, Castor wears a dog jacket when we are out walking. We don’t meet a soul out on the moor, not a single one for three days. The ponies don’t seem to be celebrating the birth of Jesus: we come across groups of them here and there as usual. It looks as if they move around during the night, and you never know where they’re going to appear the next morning. But not a day passes without our seeing them somewhere or other. It seems to me that they regard Darne Lodge as a sort of hub, a central point that they can keep an eye on and keep within range.

  Just like Castor and I do, of course. This two-hundred-year-old stone dwelling on the moor is our home, for better or worse. It’s not yet time to start thinking about roads leading away from it. For now it’s somewhere to stay and make the most of.

  To stick to routines.

  Menelaus. Wrong.

  Agamemnon. Wrong.

  Achilles. Wrong.

  43

  During the thirty or more years we have spent together we have socialized with lots of people – of course we have.

  But we don’t have many lasting friends. I don’t feel especially worried or frustrated about writing that, it’s just a statement of fact. When we have attended private dinner parties or sessions in pubs, it has nearly always been a case of meeting colleagues and their associates. My colleagues or Martin’s colleagues. Mainly the latter. Indeed, I think I can say that I’ve been introduced to about three times as many academics as he has been to television folk of one kind or another, colleagues who in response to my smiling introduction have felt obliged to shake hands with my husband, the literature professor Martin Holinek.

  But of course colleagues can also be friends, and there was one couple who were quite close to us. Whom I didn’t hesitate to confide in during the whole of the eighties and into the nineties. They were called Sune and Louise. Sune and Martin had become acquainted at grammar school, and had begun studying literary history at the same time at the same university. Incidentally, Sune is that lecturer who maintains he saw Jacqueline Kennedy drinking coffee at a cafe in Uppsala.

  Louise entered Sune’s life at about the same time as I became intimate with Martin, and they moved into a shared flat in Åsögatan in the Söder district of Stockholm about six months after Gunvald was born. Louise was working at a bank in those days, and as far as I know she still does – or at least still works in the bank world.

  Sune had a very poverty-stricken childhood. He grew up as the only child of a single mother who managed to just about make a living as a cleaner in a little village in Värmland. Thanks to a woman teacher who realized how gifted he was, he had a decent education: she supported both Sune and his mother financially while he was at grammar school as a boarder, and continued to finance his advanced academic studies. Sune always referred to this teacher, whose name was Ingegerd Fintling and had been dead for about a year when we first met, as an angel in human guise. In the seventies both Sune and Martin were naturally very left-wing, and I think that Sune was a sort of political alibi for Martin. Martin himself came from the upper middle-class, but it would be hard to imagine anything more lower-class than the son of a cleaner. For several years Martin was almost jealous of his friend.

  But as time passed, needless to say the red paint faded away from Martin, even though he liked to insist for many years that he was a social democrat. In any case, we socialized with Sune and Louise quite a lot during those decades: after all, we lived only a few blocks away from them in the early eighties; and they had their first and only child, Halldor, about halfway between our two.

  I remember being very fond of Louise without really understanding why. She was an unusually quiet and friendly person – perhaps that was why. She didn’t seem to expect much from life, and was always satisfied with herself and her circumstances. Whenever we met she was happy to allow Sune and Martin to make the elaborate gestures, lay down the political manifesto and go on about politics – but not in a submissive sort of way. She often laughed at them, and we sometimes did so in partnership; but there was never any trace of malice or irony in Louise, just a sort of mild and amused tolerance. Boys will be boys, after all.

  It was several years before I realized that she was religious. Deeply and privately so, without any fuss. When the penny dropped I asked her why she hadn’t told me, and she said it was because I had never asked.

  And she added that she felt no need to advertise her beliefs. Nor to discuss them. She didn’t go to church, and she didn’t believe in organized r
eligion. She and God had a relationship of their own, it didn’t need any augmentation.

  I wanted to know how she had achieved that relationship, if it was something she had experienced ever since she was a child: she explained that she had a revelation when she was fifteen, and it just went on from there.

  I wondered how she reconciled her faith with all the left-wing chatter, and pointed at our living room where Martin and Sune were absorbed by an analysis of some radical political subtlety or other. Louise and I were standing in the kitchen, preparing the dessert as the gentlemen had been responsible for the main course. We were both stone-cold sober as I was pregnant with Synn and Louise was breast-feeding. Halldor and Gunvald must have been fast asleep in our warm bedroom.

  ‘It’s not a problem,’ said Louise. ‘I have no desire to sit there debating Our Lord and socialism with Martin, but inside my head everything is straightforward. God comes first, if you understand what I mean.’

  ‘And what about Sune?’ I asked of course. ‘Opium for the masses, or whatever it is they say?’

  ‘Sune is number three,’ explained Louise, and giggled – she really could giggle like a thirteen-year-old. ‘Halldor is number two. Sune knows the ranking order, and accepts it.’

  For some reason I never mentioned Louise’s religious beliefs to Martin, and long afterwards, when we no longer met, I sometimes wondered why. It wasn’t as if it were a secret she had trusted me with. Louise and I didn’t talk about it between ourselves either, not even when she was holding my hand during the difficult period after Synn’s birth. I guessed of course that she was sitting there praying for me in her own quiet way, but I never asked nor commented on it.

  Perhaps I kept it to myself simply because I had no wish to hear Martin’s exposition and analysis of the circumstances: yes, that was probably the top and bottom of it.