'So what about Dic?' Lottie said.
'Will Dic want to do it?'
Lottie said grimly, 'He'll do it. Is he good enough?'
'Oh, aye,' Willie said without much difficulty. 'I reckon he is. With a bit of practice, like. But really, like, what we could do with is…He beat his knees harder to help him get it out. '… Moira.'
'She rang me,' Lottie said. 'Last night.'
Willie's eyes lit up, expectant. Dear God, Lottie thought, they're all in love with her.
'Actually, it was early this morning. I mean very early. Gone midnight. The kind of time people don't ring up unless it's an emergency.'
'Oh,' Willie said, and his hands were suddenly still.
'She asked me about Matt. She said, was he ill? I told her yes he was very ill. I told her it was close to the end. I told her…' Lottie stood up and put her hands on the warm metal covers over the hot-plates of the kitchen stove, pressing down with both hands, hard. 'I didn't need to tell her.'
Willie was quiet.
'We didn't say much. She started to explain why she'd put him off when he wrote to her. I stopped her. I said we'd discuss it some other time.'
There was a new kind of silence in the room.
'I put the phone down,' Lottie said. 'It was about twenty-five past twelve. I waited for a minute or two, in case Dic had heard the phone, but he was fast asleep. I thought, I'll make some cocoa, take it up with me. But I didn't move. I knew. I mean, why should she suddenly ring after all these years at that time of night? And sure enough, not five minutes had passed and the phone rang again, and it was Sister Murtry at the hospital. And I just said, He's gone, hasn't he?'
There was more silence, then Lottie said, 'I've not slept since. I've just sent Dic to bed for a few hours. I'm not tired, Willie. I'm not using up any energy – not thinking, you know?'
Lottie sat down again. 'I shan't be staying here. Only until it's done. His bloody project. I think coming back here, buying the pub, the whole bit, that was all part of it. The project. All I want is to draw a line under it, do you see? I mean, I hope somebody'll buy the pub, somebody sympathetic, but if not…' She shrugged. 'Well, I've got to get away, regardless.'
Willie nodded. Fingers starting up very slowly. 'Um… what about Moira?'
'I'm not inviting her to the funeral, that's for sure.' Lottie folded her arms, making a barrier. 'If she wants to help complete these songs, that'd be… I'll not be begging. No more of that. And another thing, Willie – tell whoever needs to be told, tell them I'm not having anything to do with these stupid… traditions. You know what I'm saying? Matt might've accepted it, I don't. All right?'
'Aye, all right,' Willie said, not sounding too happy. But that was his problem, Lottie thought. 'Yeh,' he said. 'I'll tell her.'
When Willie had gone, Lottie pushed her hands on to the hot-plate covers again, seeking an intensity of heat, needing to feel something. Something beyond this anaesthetized numbness.
Wanting pain – simple pain. Loss. Sorrow.
Not any of this confusion over the gratitude that he was gone and the wanting him back… but back as he used to be, before all this. Before his project. A blinding sun through leafless trees ricocheted from the windscreens of cars on the forecourt. A perky breeze ruffled the flags projecting from the motel's awning and lifted tufts of Chrissie's auburn hair. She thought she probably looked quite good, all things considered.
That, she told herself, was what a good night's sleep could do for you.
Ha!
Roger Hall paused, gripping the door-handle of his Volvo Estate. Don't say it, Chrissie thought. Just don't give me that, I still can't understand it, this has never happened to me before…
He didn't. He merely put on an upside-down, pathetic grin.
'Can we try again sometime?' Eyes crinkled appealingly, full of silly morning optimism, and she felt herself falling for it – even if she knew he still wasn't telling the half of it.
'Why not,' she said, daft bitch. She squeezed his arm. 'How long will you be gone?'
'Oh, only until Tuesday. That is, I'll be back late tonight so I'll see you tomorrow morning. Have lunch together, shall we? Would that be…?'
'Of course,' she said. She would have wangled the day off and gone to London with him. They'd been too close to the Field Centre last night, that was probably the problem. Too close to him.
'I'm really only going down there,' Roger said, 'to make sure we get all the stomach returned. Don't want them trying to pinch him back, bit by bit.'
Shut up! Just shut up about that fucking thing!
'Don't worry about it, Roger. Just drive carefully.'
As the Volvo slid away past the Exit Southbound sign, two commercial traveller types came out to their twin Cavaliers and gave her the once-over. Chrissie found herself smiling almost warmly at the younger one. It would be two years in January since her divorce.
She got into her Golf. She looked at her face in the driving-mirror and decided it could probably take a couple more years of this sort of thing before she ought to start looking for something… well, perhaps semi- permanent.
Sadly, Roger's marriage was now in no danger whatsoever. Not from her, anyway.
All the trouble he'd gone to to deceive his wife. Was that for her? Was that really all for her? And then he couldn't do it. Because of 'tension'.
She imagined him driving like the clappers to London, where he was supposed to have spent the night, and then driving determinedly back with the bogman's peaty giblets in a metal samples case.
There was his real love. And there was more to it
Alter the way he'd been talking last night, she'd half expected to wake up in the early hours to find him all wet and clammy and moaning in his sleep about lumps of the stuff in the bed.
But that hadn't happened either. Indeed, the only thing to remind her of soft, clammy peat was the consistency of Roger's dick.
Chrissie got out of the motel compound by the service entrance and drove to work.
Not to worry. Later that morning, little Willie Wagstaff went to see his mother in her end-of-terrace cottage across from the post office.
'Need to find a job now, then,' the old girl said sternly before he'd even managed to clear himself a space on the settee. Ma was practical; no time for sentiment. Dead was dead. Matt Castle was dead; no living for Willie playing the drums on his own.
'Can't do owt yet,' Willie said. 'Sides, there's no work about.'
'Always work,' said Ma, 'for them as has a mind to find it.'
Willie grinned. Rather than see him relax for a while, Ma would have him commuting to Huddersfield or Chorlton-cum- Hardy to clean lavatories or sweep the streets.
'Devil makes work for idle hands,' she said. Her as ought to know – half the village reckoned she'd been in league with the bugger for years.
'Aye, well, I've been over to see Lottie this morning.'
'Oh aye? Relieved, was she? Looking better?'
'Ma!'
'Grief's one thing, our Willie, hypocrisy's summat else. She's done her grieving, that one.'
'I've to tell you…' Willie's fingers were off… dum, dum de-dum, side of his knees.
Ma's eyes narrowed. Her hair was tied up in a bun with half a knitting-needle shoved up it.
'Er…' Dum, dum, dum-di-di, dum-di-di…
'Gerrit out!' Ma squawked.
'No messing about,' Willie mumbled quickly. 'Lottie says, none of that.'
'What's that mean?' Making him say it.
'Well, like… well, naturally he'll be buried in t'churchyard. First one. First one since…' His fingers finding a different, more complicated rhythm. 'What I'm saying, Ma, is, do we have to…? Does it have to be Matt?'
Ma scowled. She had a face like an over-ripe quince. She wore an old brown knee-length cardigan over a blue
