“You really have nothing to be embarrassed about,” said Shadow, reflecting that the English found embarrassment wherever they looked for it.
“Well. All a bit silly, one way or another. And I really am feeling much perkier.”
Shadow nodded. “If you’re feeling better, I guess I should start heading south.”
“No hurry,” said Oliver. “It’s always nice to have company. Moira and I don’t really get out as much as we’d like. It’s mostly just a walk up to the pub. Not much excitement here, I’m afraid.”
Moira came in from the garden. “Anyone seen the secateurs? I know I had them. Forget my own head next.”
Shadow shook his head, uncertain what secateurs were. He thought of telling the couple about the cats on the hill, and how they had behaved, but could not think of a way to describe it that would explain how odd it was. So, instead, without thinking, he said, “I ran into Cassie Burglass on Wod’s Hill. She pointed out the Gateway to Hell.”
They were staring at him. The kitchen had become awkwardly quiet. He said, “She was drawing it.”
Oliver looked at him and said, “I don’t understand.”
“I’ve run into her a couple of times since I got here,” said Shadow.
“What?” Moira’s face was flushed. “What are you saying?” And then, “Who the, who the fuck are you to come in here and say things like that?”
“I’m, I’m nobody,” said Shadow. “She just started talking to me. She said that you and she used to be together.”
Moira looked as if she were going to hit him. Then she just said, “She moved away after we broke up. It wasn’t a good breakup. She was very hurt. She behaved appallingly. Then she just up and left the village in the night. Never came back.”
“I don’t want to talk about that woman,” said Oliver, quietly. “Not now. Not ever.”
“Look. She was in the pub with us,” pointed out Shadow. “That first night. You guys didn’t seem to have a problem with her then.”
Moira just stared at him and did not respond, as if he had said something in a tongue she did not speak. Oliver rubbed his forehead with his hand. “I didn’t see her,” was all he said.
“Well, she said to say hi when I saw her today,” said Shadow. “She said she’d be waiting, if either of you had anything you wanted to say to her.”
“We have nothing to say to her. Nothing at all.” Moira’s eyes were wet, but she was not crying. “I can’t believe that, that fucking woman has come back into our lives, after all she put us through.” Moira swore like someone who was not very good at it.
Oliver put down his book. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t feel very well.” He walked out, back to the bedroom, and closed the door behind him.
Moira picked up Oliver’s mug, almost automatically, and took it over to the sink, emptied it out and began to wash it.
“I hope you’re pleased with yourself,” she said, rubbing the mug with a white plastic scrubbing brush as if she were trying to scrub the picture of Beatrix Potter’s cottage from the china. “He was coming back to himself again.”
“I didn’t know it would upset him like that,” said Shadow. He felt guilty as he said it. He had known there was history between Cassie and his hosts. He could have said nothing, after all. Silence was always safer.
Moira dried the mug with a green and white tea towel. The white patches of the towel were comical sheep, the green were grass. She bit her lower lip, and the tears that had been brimming in her eyes now ran down her cheeks. Then, “Did she say anything about me?”
“Just that you two used to be an item.”
Moira nodded, and wiped the tears from her young-old face with the comical tea towel. “She couldn’t bear it when Ollie and I got together. After I moved out, she just hung up her paintbrushes and locked the flat and went to London.” She blew her nose vigorously. “Still. Mustn’t grumble. We make our own beds. And Ollie’s a good man. There’s just a black dog in his mind. My mother had depression. It’s hard.”
Shadow said, “I’ve made everything worse. I should go.”
“Don’t leave until tomorrow. I’m not throwing you out, dear. It’s not your fault you ran into that woman, is it?” Her shoulders were slumped. “There they are. On top of the fridge.” She picked up something that looked like a very small pair of garden shears. “Secateurs,” she explained. “For the rosebushes, mostly.”
“Are you going to talk to him?”
“No,” she said. “Conversations with Ollie about Cassie never end well. And in this state, it could plunge him even further back into a bad place. I’ll just let him get over it.”
Shadow ate alone in the pub that night, while the cat in the glass case glowered at him. He saw no one he knew. He had a brief conversation with the landlord about how he was enjoying his time in the village. He walked back to Moira’s house after the pub, past the old sycamore, the gibbet tree, down Shuck’s Lane. He saw nothing moving in the fields in the moonlight: no dog, no donkey.
All the lights in the house were out. He went to his bedroom as quietly as he could, packed the last of his possessions into his backpack before he went to sleep. He would leave early, he knew.
He lay in bed, watching the moonlight in the box room. He remembered standing in the pub and Cassie Burglass standing beside him. He thought about his conversation with the landlord, and the conversation that first night, and the cat in the glass box, and, as he
