The man with two Dobermans prowling the inside of the wire mesh perimeter fence was clearly too old to be a security guard. His appallingly stained trousers were held up by a dressing-gown cord with dirty gold tassels; a thinner golden cord was draped around the crown of his tattered trilby.
However, the dogs looked menacing enough, and when the man flung open the metal gate, they sprang.
For just a few seconds, the dun-coloured sky disappeared as the Dobermans rose massively and simultaneously into the air. And then they were on her, both heads into her exposed face, hot breath pumping and the great, savage teeth.
'Oh, my God!' Moira shrieked as the rough tongues sliced through her make-up. 'Do you guys know what this bloody stuff cost?'
She threw an arm around each of the dogs, trapping the four big front paws to her tweed jacket, and they all staggered together through the gate and on to the site, knocking over an empty, grey plastic dustbin.
The elderly man in the black trilby caught the bin as it fell. 'Moira!,' he yelled. 'Hey!'
'Donald,' Moira said, arms full of black and gold paws. 'You all right?'
'Well, damn.' He pulled his hat off. 'We wisny expecting ye today, hen, the Duchess didny say…'
'That's because she doesn't know,' Moira said. 'I hope she's not away from her van… Down, now…'
The dogs obediently sat at her feet. 'Ye've still got the way, all right,' Donald said admiringly.
'They've grown. Again. I swear I've never seen Dobermans this big. What d'you feed them on?
Donald didn't smile. 'Public health officials.'
'My daddy,' she reminded him gently, "was a public health official.'
'Aye, I know. But your daddy wisny like the hard-faced bastards they send 'round these days.' Donald turned his head and shouted at a woman pegging baby-clothes to a washing line outside a lilac-coloured caravan.
'Hey, Siobhan, the Duchess, she in now?'
'Oh… sure' The woman stumbled and dropped a nappy in a puddle. She picked it up, wrung out the brown water and hung it on the line. 'Leastways, I haven't seen no red carpet goin' down today.'
'Tinkers,' Donald said disparagingly. 'They're all bloody tinkers here now, 'cept for the few of us.'
Moira followed him and the dogs through the site, with its forty-odd vans on concrete hard-standings and its unexpectedly spectacular views of the Ayrshire coast. It might have been a holiday caravan site but for the washing lines full of fluttering clothes and the piles of scrap and all the kids and dogs.
They passed just one perfect old Romany caravan, bright red and silver, originally designed for horses but with a tow-bar now. A man with a beard and an earring sat out on the step whittling chunks out of a hunk of dark wood. He wore a moleskin waistcoat trimmed with silver. Moira stared at him, amazed. 'Who the hell's that?'
Donald turned his head and spat. One of the Dobermans growled. 'Oh,' Moira said. 'I see.'
'Bloody hippies. Call 'emselves New Age gypsies. Wis a time this wis a select site. All kindsa garbage we're gettin' now, hen.'
He stopped at the bottom of six concrete steps leading to the apex of the site, a flat-topped artificial mound with the sides ranked into flowerbeds.
Nothing changes, Moira thought. Wherever she's living it's always the same.
Evergreen shrubs, mainly laurel, sprouted around the base of the shining silver metal palace which crowned the mound like the Mother Ship from Close Encounters. The old man mounted the bottom step. 'Hey, Duchess!'
It wasn't what you'd call a traditional Romany caravan. Few like it had been seen before on a statutory local authority gypsy site. Only movie stars on location lived quite like this.
Donald stayed on the bottom step, the Dobermans silent on either side of him. There were antique carriage lamps each side of the door, a heavy door of stained and polished Douglas fir, which slid open with barely a sigh.
She came out and stood frailly in the doorway, a soft woollen evening stole about her bony shoulders. The day was calm for the time of year, no breeze from the sea.
Donald said, 'Will you look who's here. Duchess.' From the edges of the stole, the Duchess's hair tumbled like a cataract of white water almost to her waist. She looked down at Moira and her face was grave.
Moira said, 'Hullo, Mammy.' 'You OK?'
He'd looked anxious, his tuxedo creased, the thistle lolling from his buttonhole.
Well, actually, it was more than anxious; the guy had been as scared as any of them in the room full of splintered bone – twisted antlers across the tables on beds of broken glass, and one pair still hanging menacingly among the glittering shards of a chandelier.
Moira had said, 'You ever see bomb damage in Belfast?'
'Huh?'
She was up on her knees now, examining the guitar for fractures.
'Bomb damage,' she said, not looking at him.
He was silent. He crouched down next to her, the two of them by the dais, all the others, the multi-national Celts, brushing each other down, sheltering in groups in the corners of the Great Hall.
The pale man had been helped away by the Earl and some servants He'd looked just once at Moira with his damaged eye.
There were no cracks in the body of the guitar, although its face was scratched and it looked to be very deeply offended.
'What's your name?' Moira turned to the American.
'Huh?'
'What are you called?'
'I, uh…' He grimaced, the suaveness gone, black curls sweated to his forehead. He looked as limp as the thistle he wore. 'I don't believe this has happened. Some kind of earthquake? Or what? Uh… Macbeth.'
'That's your name? My God. Here, hold this a second.' She passed him the guitar while she untangled her hair.
He held the instrument up by the neck, gripping it hard.
'You have earthquakes in these parts?'
'What?' She'd started to laugh.
'Earthquakes. Tremors.'
She said 'Macbeth. I thought you were going to be Irish despite the thistle. New York Irish '
'Just New York. Born and raised. Mungo Macbeth. Of the Manhattan Macbeths. My mother said I should wear the kilt.' He straightened the thistle. 'We compromised,'
'That's a compromise?'
He said, 'You really are OK now?'
'Oh, I'm fine. Just fine.' Feeling like she'd come through a war – a whole war in just a few minutes.
Mungo Macbeth had been looking around at all the wreckage, where the stags' heads had fallen. Then up at the ceiling.
'There isn't one of them left hanging,' he'd said, awed. Not a goddamn one.'
He was right.
What have I done?
'I mean, is that weird?' Mungo Macbeth said. 'Or is that weird?' 'And what was it that made you think,' the Duchess said contemptuously, 'that it was you?'
She didn't sound at all like Moira. Her voice was like the refined tink you made when you tapped with your fingernail on crystal glass of the very highest quality. A most cultured lady who had never been to school.
'Not me on my own,' Moira said. 'Someone… something was… you know, like an invasion? I felt threatened. This guy… Also, I didn't like the setup anyway, generations of stalkers' trophies, and all these elitist folk, like "we are the Celtic aristocracy, we're the chosen ones…" '
The Duchess lifted her chin imperiously. 'What nonsense you talk. Do you seriously think that if you began to suddenly resent me or something, you could come in here and break everything on my walls?'
Virtually all the wall space in the luxurious caravan had been decorated with fine china.
'Your walls, no,' Moira said.
'I should think not indeed.'
'But this place, I felt very threatened.'
She kept seeing, like on some kind of videotape loop, the man unfastening her guitar case. But it was all so dreamlike, part of the hallucination summoned by the song and the strangeness of the night. She couldn't talk about it.
'I'm mixed up, Mammy.'
'Don't whine,' the Duchess said mildly.
'I'm sorry.' And the smoky form in the fireplace? The sensation of Matt – and yet not Matt?
And the knowing. Confirmed by the call.
Lottie? Lottie, listen, I know it's late, I'm sorry… Only it's Matt. I've been thinking about Matt all night…
The Duchess said, 'Have you the comb with you?'
'Surely.' Moira pulled her bag on to her knee.
'Show me.' The Earl had said he couldn't explain it; the heads had been accumulating on the walls for four or more generations, and had ever been dislodged before. Some sort of chain-reaction perhaps, the domino effect. He had suggested everyone go through to the larger drawing room, and the servants had been dispatched for extra chairs and doctors to tend the injuries, none of them apparently major.
Uninjured, Moira and the American called Macbeth had gone outside into the grounds.
'Clear my head,' he said.
The house behind them was floodlit, looked like a wedding cake. A narrow terrace followed the perimeter of the house, and they walked along it, Moira carrying the guitar in its case.
'Why are you here?' she said, drifting. 'What do you do? Or are you just rich?'
'TV,' Macbeth said. 'I make lousy TV shows. But, also we're rich, the Macbeths. Which is why they let me make my lousy TV shows, and also why I'm here. That is, my mother… she was invited. She owns the company.'
'Uh huh.' Moira nodded, as if she was interested. White flakes of bone were still silently spattering her vision, like static.
'They sent me," Macbeth said, 'on account of, A I'm about the most expendable member of the family, and B – they figured it was time I reconnected with my, uh, roots.'
Roots sometimes need to stay buried,' Moira said. 'You dig up the roots, you kill the tree.'
'I never thought about it like that '
'It's probably just a clever thing to say. You found your roots? Have you been to where Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane?'
'No,' he said. 'But I think I just found one of the three witches.'
'Really?' Moira said coldly.
'Only these days they come more beautiful.' Macbeth stopped suddenly and threw up both hands. 'Ah, shit, I apologise. I don't mean to be patronizing, or sexist or anything. It was, uh… The hair… your wonderful, long, black hair…'
Oh, please…
'With that lonely grey strand,' Macbeth said. 'Like a vein of onyx. Or something. I recognized it soon as you came into the room tonight. See, I don't know much about Celtic history, but rock music and folk… I mean, I really do have those albums.'
'Would that you didn't,' Moira said quietly. Then she shook her hair. 'Sorry. Stupid. Forget it.'
Standing on the edge of the terrace overlooking a floodlit lawn, he cupped both palms around his face. 'I am such an asshole.'
No way she could disagree.
Macbeth hung his head. 'See, I… Aw, Jesus, I'm in this party of seriously intellectual Celtic people, and, like… what do I know? What's my contribution gonna be? What do I know? – I know a song. So I go – showing off my atom of knowledge – I go, how about you play The Comb Song? Just came out. Dumb, huh?'
She looked hard into his dark blue eyes. 'So it was you asked for the song.'
'Yeah, it just came to me to ask for that song. Then someone else took it up. It was confusing. I coulda bit off my tongue when it came clear you didn't want to do that number. I'm sorry.' He sat down on the paved area, legs hanging over the side of the terrace. He rubbed his eyes. 'All those stag heads. Like it was orchestrated.'
'You think it was somehow down to the song? Hence I'm a witch? You connect that with me?'
'Uh…' Macbeth looked very confused. 'I'm sorry. Whole thing scared the shit out of me. You feel the atmosphere in there? Before it happened?'
Headlight beams sliced through the trees along the drive. The ambulance probably. Maybe two. Maybe a whole fleet, seeing this was the Earl's place.
'Cold,' Macbeth said. 'Bone-freezing cold. I mean… shit… it isn't even cold out here… now.'
Moira had said, 'Can you excuse me? I need to make a phone call.' She didn't know how old the comb was. Maybe a few hundred years old, maybe over a thousand. She'd never wanted to take it to an expert, a valuer; its value was not that kind.
The comb was of some heavy, greyish metal. It was not very ornate and half its teeth were missing, but when she ran it through her hair it was like something was excavating deep furrows in her soul.
The Duchess weighed the comb in fingers that sprayed red and green and blue fire from the stones in her rings, eleven of them.
'My,' the Duchess said, 'you really are in a quandary, aren't you?'
'Else why would I have come.'
'And someone… You've not told me everything… I can sense a death.'
'Yes,' Moira whispered, feeling, as usual, not so much an acolyte at the feet of a guru, more like a sin-soaked Catholic at confession.
'Whose?'
'Matt Castle.'
'Who is he?'
'You know… He was the guy whose band I joined when I left the university in Manchester. Must be… a long time… seventeen years ago.'
'This was before…?'
'Yes.'
The Duchess passed the comb from one hand to the other and back again. 'There's guilt here. Remorse.'
'Well, I…I've always felt bad about leaving the band when I did. And also… three, four months ago, he wrote to me. He wanted me to do some songs with him. He was back living in his old village, which is that same place they found the ancient body in the peat. Maybe you heard about that.'
'A little.' The Duchess's forefinger stroking the rim of the comb.
'Matt was seriously hung up on this thing,' Moira said, 'the whole idea of it. This was the first time… I mean, when we split, his attitude was, like, OK, that's it, nice while it lasted but it's the end of an era. So, although we've spoken several times on the phone, it's fifteen years last January since I saw him. Um… last year it came out he'd been to the hospital, for tests, but when I called him a week or so later he said it was OK, all negative, no problem. So… Goes quiet, we exchange Christmas cards and things, as usual. Then, suddenly – this'd be three, four, months ago – he writes, wanting to get me involved in this song-cycle he's working on, maybe an album. To be called The Man in the Moss.'
'And you would have nothing to do with it?'
'I… Yeh, I don't like to bugger about with this stuff any more. I get scared… scared what effect I'm gonna have, you know? I'm pretty timid these days.'
'So you told him no.'
'So I… No, I couldn't turn it down flat. This is the guy got me started. I owe him. So I just wrote back, said I was really sorry but I was tied up, had commitments till the autumn. Said I was honoured, all this crap, and I'd be in touch. Hoping, obviously, that he'd find somebody else.'
She paused. Her voice dropped. 'He died last night. About the same time all this…'
The Duchess passed the comb back to Moira. 'I don't like the feel of it. It's cold.'
The comb is icy, brittle, oh…
Her mother was glaring at her, making her wish she hadn't come. There was always a period of this before the tea and the biscuits and the Duchess saying, How is your father? Does he ever speak of me? And she'd smile and shake her head, for her daddy still didn't know, after all these years, that she'd even met this woman.
The Duchess said, 'That trouble you got into, with the rock and roll group. You dabbled. I said to you never to dabble. I said when you were ready to follow a spiritual path you should come to me. It was why I gave you the 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 before, like a sack of stolen bullion.
She said in a rush, 'Mammy, somebody was after the comb. I had to fight for it.'
'Yes. That happens. The comb represents a commitment. Sometimes you have to decide whether or not you want to renew it.'
'So it was this struggle which caused… See, I'm confused. I feel exhausted, but I feel I made it through to a new level, a new plateau. But that usually means something heavy's on the way. Well, doesn't it?'
The Duchess blinked. 'How is your father?' she said brightly. 'Docs he speak of me often?' She said goodbye to Donald at the gate and patted the Dobermans. Her old BMW was parked about fifty yards away near a derelict petrol station. Parked behind it was a car which had not been there before, a grey Metro with a hire-firm sticker on the rear window.
Leaning against the Metro was a man wearing a dinner jacket over a black t-shirt. On the t-shirt it said in red, I ¦ Govan. The remains of a thistle hung out of one lapel of the jacket.
His face fumbled a grin.
'Uh, hi,' he said.
Moira was furious.
'You followed me! You fucking followed me!'
'Listen… Moira… See, this has been… Like, this was the most bizarre, dramatic, momentous night of my life, you know?'
'So? You've had a sheltered life. Is that supposed…?'
'I can't walk away from this. Am I supposed to like, push it aside, maybe introduce it as an anecdote over dinner with my associates?'
Moira stood with her key in the door of the BMW. She wanted to say, OK, while you're here maybe you can tell me something about a tall, pale man with white hair.
Instead, she said, 'Macbeth, you shouldn't believe everything a woman tells you when she's in shock.'
'I… Goddammit, I saw. And I tried to sleep on it and I couldn't, so this morning…' Mungo Macbeth looked sheepish and spread his hands…
She gave him a cursory glance intended to wither, fade him out.
'I figured maybe you could use some help,' he said.
OK,' she said. 'You see those gates? Behind those gates is a guy with two huge and ferocious dogs. The dogs'll do anything the guy says… And the guy – he'll do anything I say. You got the message?'
'Couldn't we go someplace? Get a bite to eat?'
'No, we could not.' Moira opened the driver's door of the BMW and got in, wound down the window. 'You think I need a strong male shoulder to lean on, that it? Or maybe a bedpost?'
Macbeth said helplessly, 'I just think… I just think you're an amazing person.'
'Macbeth…" She sighed. 'Just go away, huh?'
He nodded, expressionless, turned back to his hire car. He looked like he might cry.
This was ridiculous.
'Hey, Macbeth.. Moira leaned back out of the window, nodded at his T-shirt. 'You ever actually been to Govan?'
'Aw, hell…' Macbeth shrugged. 'I cruised most of those Western Isles. Just don't recall which is which.'
Moira found a grin, or the grin found her. Hurriedly, she put the car into gear, drove away, and when she looked back there was only a bus, a long way behind.
From Dawber's Book of Bridelow.
THE BREWERY
Fine beers have been brewed in the Bridelow area since time immemorial, the most famous being the almost-black Bridelow Bitter.
This, or something similar, was first produced commercially, on an relatively small scale, by Elsie Berry and her sons in the late seventeenth century, using a species of aromatic bog-myrtle as a preservative. The Berry family began by providing ale for the Bridelow pub. The Man I'th Moss, but demand grew swiftly in communities up to fifteen miles away.
The Bridelow Brewery as we know it today was founded in the early nineteenth century by Thomas Horridge, a businessman from Chesterfield who bought out the Berry Family and whose enterprise was to provide employment for many generations of Bridelow folk. He at once began work on the construction of the first proper road across the Moss to facilitate the movement of his brewery wagons.
Descendants of Thomas Horridge continued to develop the industry, and the family became Bridelow's greatest benefactors, building the village hall, enabling major repairs to be carried out to the ancient church and continuing to facilitate new housing as recently as the 1950s.
However…