comb.'
'Yes, Mammy, I know that.' She'd always call her Mammy deliberately in a vain effort to demystify the woman. 'I'm doing my best to avoid it. That's why…'
'The comb has not forgiven you,' the Duchess said severely. 'You have some damage to repair.'
'Aye, I know.' Moira said. 'I know that too.' She'd returned from the phone floating like a ghost through a battlefield, blood and bandages everywhere – well, maybe not so much blood, maybe not any. Maybe the blood was in her head.
'You all right, Miss Cairns? You weren't hit?'
'I'm fine. Your… I'm fine'
'You're very pale. Have a brandy.
'No. No, thank you.'
All this solicitousness. Scared stiff some of his Celtic brethren would sue the piss out of him. She was impatient with him. Him and his precious guests and his precious trophies and his reputation. What did it matter? Nobody was dying.
Yes, Moira. Yes, he is. I'm sorry… No, not long. I'll know more in the morning. Perhaps you could call back then.
She had to get out of this house, didn't want to see wounds bathed and glass and antlers swept away. Didn't want to see what had happened to the pale man.
Outside, Mungo Macbeth, of the Manhattan Macbeths, still sat with his legs dangling over the edge of the terrace.
Moira joined him, feeling chilly now in her black dress, stiff down by the waist where it had soaked up spilled Guinness from the carpet.
And, because he was there and because he was no threat any more, she began to talk to Macbeth. Talked about many things – not including Matt Castle.
In fact she was so determined not to talk about Matt – and, therefore, not to break down – that she blocked him out, and his dying, with something as powerful and as pertinent to the night: she found she was telling Mungo Macbeth about the Comb Song.
'Everybody thinks it's metaphor, you know?'
'It exists?'
'Aye. Sure.'
Then she thought. Only person I ever told before was M…
She said quickly, 'Your family make regular donations to the IRA?'
'… what?'
His eyebrows went up like they'd been pulled on wires and she stared good and hard into his eyes. They were candid and they were innocent.
'Sorry,' she said. 'I forgot. You aren't even Irish.'
'Moira, let's be factual here. I'm not even Scottish.'
She found herself smiling. Then she stopped. She said, 'Every year these gypsies would camp on the edge of the town, derelict land since before the War. Only this year it was to be redeveloped, and so the gypsies had to go. My daddy was the young guy the council sent to get rid of them. He was scared half to death of what they might do to him, the gypsy men, who would naturally all be carrying knives.'
Some night creature ran across the tiered lawn below them, edge to edge.
'My gran told me this. My daddy never speaks of it. Not ever. But it wasn't the gypsy men he had cause to fear, so much as the women. They had the poor wee man seduced.'
Macbeth raised an eyebrow, but not much.
'Like, how could he resist her? This quiet Presbyterian boy with the horn-rimmed spectacles and his first briefcase. How could he resist this, this…' Moira swung her legs and clicked her heels on the terrace wall.
'I can sympathize,' Macbeth said.
'She was a vision,' Moira said. 'Still is. He'd have laid down his beloved council job for her after the first week, but that wasn't what they wanted – they wanted the camp site until the autumn, for reasons of their own, whatever that was all about.
And they got it. My daddy managed to keep stalling the council, his employers, for reasons of his own. And then it all got complicated because she wasn't supposed to get herself pregnant. Certainly not by him.'
She'd glossed over the rest, her daddy's ludicrous threats to join the gypsies, her gran's battle for custody of the child, the decision by the gypsy hierarchy that, under the circumstances, it might be politic to let the baby go rather than be saddled with its father and pursued by his mother.
And then her own genteel, suburban, Presbyterian upbringing.
'And the rest is the song. Which you know.'
The American, sitting on the wall, shook his head, incredulous. 'This is prime-time TV, you know that? This is a goddamn mini-series.'
'Don't you even think about it, Mr Macbeth,' Moira said, 'or Birnam Wood'll be corning to Dunsinane faster than you can blink.'
'Yeah, uh, the wood. I was gonna ask you. The scene in the wood where you get the comb…?'
'Poetic licence. What happened was, the gypsies were in town, right, just passing through. Two of them – I was twelve – these two gypsies were waiting for me outside the school. I'm thinking, you know… run like hell. But, aw… it was… intriguing. And they seemed OK, you know? And the camp was very public. So I went with them. Well… she'd be about thirty then and already very revered, you could tell. Even I could see she was my mother.'
'Holy shit,' said Macbeth.
'We didn't talk much. Nobody was gonna try and kidnap me or anything. Nobody offered me anything. Except the comb. She gave me that.'
'And is it a magic comb?'
'It's just a comb,' Moira said, more sharply than she intended. 'He's close to you,' the Duchess said.
'Who?'
'The departed one.'
'Still?'
'We'll have some tea,' the Duchess said in a slightly raised voice, and a young woman at once emerged from the kitchen with a large silver tray full of glistening white china. 'One of my nieces,' the Duchess said, 'Zelda…' There would always be nieces and nephews to fetch and carry for the Duchess.
She lifted the lid of the pot and sniffed. 'Earl Grey. Never mind. You should take a rest, Moira. Unravel yourself.'
'Maybe I'd rather not see what's inside of me.'
The Duchess stirred the tea in the pot, making it stronger, making the Earl Grey's rich perfume waft out. 'Maybe you should get away, and when you get back your problems will be in perspective. Go somewhere bland. St Moritz, Barbados…'
'Jesus, Mammy, how much money you think I'm making?'
'Well, England then. Tunbridge Wells or somewhere.'
'Tunbridge Wells?'
'You know what I mean.'
'Yeah. You're telling me it's something I'm not gonna get away from no matter where I go.'
'Am I?'
'You said there was damage to repair. You think I damaged Matt Castle?'
'Do you?'
'I don't kn… No! No, I don't see how I could have.'
'That's all right, then,' said the Duchess. She smiled.
Moira felt profoundly uneasy. 'Mammy, how was he when he died? Can you tell me that?'
'Moira, you're a grown woman. You know this man's essence has not returned to the source. I can say no more than that.'
Moira felt the weight of her bag on her knees, the bag with the comb in it. The bag felt twice as heavy as
