The Living and the Dead in Winsford (34 page)

I ask my mother why she behaved in that strange way. I’m only thirteen years old, but I’ve been in secondary school for a year and begun to have my eyes opened to the way the world works. I want answers to most things.

But I don’t get an answer to this question, my mother merely gives me a look that says it’s not possible to explain everything to a thirteen-year-old. I remember feeling annoyed with her for several days. When I take up the matter with my father, he looks worried but simply says: ‘That’s the way it is, Maria. Somebody always has to stay at home, and the one who does so knows that in a way that you and I simply can’t understand.’

If we hadn’t found Gunsan, my mother would have taken leave of her senses: that is the fact of the matter that both he and I try to avoid spelling out.

When it eventually happens for real, it’s as if my mother has had time to prepare herself. Gunsan stays alive for quite a few more years.

I follow my mother’s example two days before Christmas forty-two years later. I stay inside the house, or only just outside it, for the whole day. Go no further than the yard and the garden. It’s a cold day, and there is even a light snowfall in the early afternoon. I investigate the little stable building, something I haven’t done before – all I’ve done is fetch firewood from the bunker at the gable end. But there really isn’t much to investigate and certainly no trace of a dog. Just junk, and more junk – it must be very many years since a horse last stood in here. The only thing I might find useful is a lantern; I think it is designed to burn some kind of oil, and despite the fact that it’s filthy and rusty I take it into the house to examine it more closely.

How I could possibly be interested in something like that, now that darkness has fallen again, is way beyond my comprehension. I have a headache that is getting worse, and realize that it is due to the fact that I haven’t eaten or drunk anything all day. Perhaps all the wine I drank yesterday is also making its presence felt. I take out the remains of the soup, but the mere sight of it makes me feel sick and I put the jar back in the fridge. I drink a glass of apple juice and eat a few dry biscuits instead – it’s simply not possible to force anything else down. Apart from two headache pills and another mouthful of juice. By seven o’clock Castor has been away for twenty hours . . . I remember letting him out just after making my attempt at finding the passwords last night.

Twenty hours on a moor. The temperature has been round about zero all the time. How long is it possible for . . . ?

Nevertheless I shout and I shout. And shout and shout.

Why shouldn’t I shout?

About an hour later I am possessed by some sort of urge to act logically. I sit there with paper and pencil and try to put things into perspective. I write down the following facts and try to find a thread linking them together – it seems to me that there must be one:

The dead pheasants

The silver-coloured rental car

The man calling himself G

Samos

Taza

Professor Soblewski’s e-mail

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.