found life endlessly confusing. Ernie Dawber sympathized. He'd always reckoned that the day he retired he'd be able to sit back, job well enough done, and start to understand a few basics. But everything had just got hazier.
With them all looking at him, giggling and nudging each other, Benjamin seemed to get even smaller. Mr Dawber had a little deliberation about this while the class was settling down.
'Now then…' he said thoughtfully. 'Who can tell me when we find acorns?'
'Autumn!' four or five of the cleverer ones chorused scornfully.
'That's right. So, what I'm going to do – and don't forget to remind me when the times comes, lad – I'm going to put Benjamin, because he knows all about acorns… in charge of making the Autumn Cross.'
The clever ones looked aghast, unable to find any justice in this, and Ernie Dawber smiled to see it. Corning in just a few hours a week, to teach the children about nature, at least gave him more time to consider the psychology of the job.
'Now then.' He clapped his hands to change the mood.
'What else do we need for the Spring Cross? Tom.'
'Birds' eggs.'
Mr Dawber's voice dropped an octave.
'We most certainly do not take birds' eggs to put into the Spring Cross, or for any other reason, Thomas Garside. And if it comes to my notice that any of you nave disturbed any nests there's going to be Trouble.'
There was silence.
'And don't anybody think I won't find out about it,' said Mr Dawber.
And they knew he would, because, one way or another, Mr Dawber found out about everything. And if it was important enough he put it in The Book of Bridelow. The foreman tells the JCB driver to switch his engine off. His voice is shaking.
'Come down a minute, Jason. Come and take a look at this.' The driver, a younger man, swings, loose-limbed, to the ground. His boots shudder on the surface of the Moss. 'What you got?'
'I'm not sure.' The foreman seems reluctant to go back in the trench.
The driver grinning, shambling over to the pit and balancing expertly on the rim. Can't make it out at first. Looks like a giant bar of dark chocolate.
Then, while the foreman is attempting to light a cigarette and nervously scattering matches over the peat, the driver suddenly realises what he's staring at, and, when the thought lurches into his head, it's eerily echoed by the foreman's fractured croak.
'Looks like a dead 'un to me, Jason.'
The driver falls over backwards trying not to topple into the trench. Just Eliza Horridge and Shaw now, and the drawing room at The Hall was too big.
He was taller but slighter than his father, who used to stand, legs apart, in front of the fireplace, lighting his pipe, belching dragon's breath and making it seem as if the room had been built around him. When Arthur Horridge spoke, the walls had closed in, as if the very fabric of the building was paying attention.
'The w-w-w-worst thing about all this…' Shaw's thin voice no more emphatic than the tinkling of the chandelier when a window was open, '… is that when der-der-Dad wanted to expand ter-ten years ago, the bank wouldn't back him, and now…'
'We'll ride it,' Liz Horridge told him firmly. 'We always have. We've got twenty-three people depending on us for an income.'
'Ter-ter-too many,' said Shaw. 'Fer-far…'
'No!' The first time ever that she hadn't waited politely for him to finish a sentence. 'That's not something your father would have said.'
She turned away from him, glaring out of the deep Georgian-style window at the brewery's grey tower through the bare brown tree trunks. Its stonework badly needed repointing, one more job they couldn't afford.
'When sales were sagging,' Liz said, as she'd said to him several times before, 'Arthur always blamed himself, and it was our belt – the family's – that was tightened. I remember when he sold the Jag to-'
'It was der-different then!' Shaw almost shrieked, making her look at him. 'There was no competition to ser- speak of. Wh-what did they need to know about mer-mer-market forces in those days?'
'And it's all changed so quickly, has it, in the six months since your father's death?'
'It was cher-changing… yer-years before. He just couldn't see it. He didn't w-want to ser-see it.'-
'He knew what his duty was,' Liz snapped, and her son began to wring his hands in frustration.
The sun shone through the long window, a cruel light on Shaw, the top of his forehead winking like a feeble flashlight.
If baldness was hereditary, people doubtless asked, why had Arthur managed to keep most of his hair until the end, while Shaw's had begun to fall out before he turned twenty?
Behind the anger, Liz felt the usual sadness for him, while acknowledging that sympathy was a poor substitute for maternal pride.
'Mother,' Shaw said determinedly, 'listen to me. We've ger-got to do it. Ser-soon. We've got to trim the workforce. Ser-ser-some of them have ger-got to go. Or else…'
'Never,' said Liz Horridge. But she knew that such certainty was not her prerogative. Shaw was the owner of the Bridelow Brewery now. He glared mutinously at her, thin lips pressed tight together, only too aware of how much authority he lost whenever he opened them.
'Or else what?' Liz demanded. 'What happens if we don't trim the workforce?'
She looked down at herself, at the baggy jeans she wore, for which she was rather too old and a little too shapeless these days. Realising why she was wearing the jeans. Spring cleaning.
An operation which she would, for the first time, be undertaking alone, because, when Josie had gone into hospital, she hadn't taken on another cleaner for economic reasons. Thus trimming her own workforce of one.
The ber-ber-brewery's not a charity, Mother,' Shaw said pleadingly. 'Jim Ford says we could be out of ber- business inside a year.'
'Or else what?' Liz persisted.
'Or else we sell it,' Shaw said simply.
Liz laughed. 'To whom?'
'Ter-ter-to an outside… one of the big firms.'
'That's not an option,' Liz said flatly. 'You know that. Beer's been brewed in Bridelow since time immemorial. It's part of the local heritage.'
'And still cer-could be! Sell it as a going concern. Why not?'
'And you could live with that, could you?'
He didn't answer. Liz Horridge was shaking with astonishment. She faced him like an angry mother cat, narrowing her eyes, penetrating. 'Who's responsible for this? Who's been putting these thoughts in your head?'
'Ner-nobody.' But he couldn't hold her gaze. He was wearing a well-cut beige suit over a button-down shirt and a strange leather tie. He was going out again. He'd been going out a lot lately. He had no interest in the brewery, and he wasn't even trying to hide this any longer.
'And what about the pub? Is this fancy buyer going to take that on as well?'
'Ser-somebody will.' Shaw shrugged uselessly, backing towards the door. 'Anyway, we'll talk about it later, I've got to…'
'Where are you going?'
'I… I'm…' He went red and began to splutter. Pulled out a handkerchief and blew his nose, wiped his lips. For years she'd worried because he didn't go out enough, because he hadn't got a girlfriend (although this had hardly been surprising). Now at last, at the age of thirty-one, he was feebly groping for control of his own destiny… and floundering about, unbalancing everything.
Liz Horridge turned away from him and walked to the other window, the one with the view of Bridelow, which summer would soon obscure. She could see the humped but still sprightly figure of Mrs Wagstaff in the distance, lugging a shopping basket across the cobbles to Gus Bibby's General Stores.
Her breast heaved and she felt tears pumping behind her eyes.
Arthur… it's not my fault.
Mrs Wagstaff stopped in the middle of the street and – although it was too far away for Liz to be certain –
