Phil Rickman - The man in the moss

'And you'll come to the point, Mr Macbeth. Life is short.' He blinked. 'OK.' Swallowed. Couldn't believe he'd come here, was doing this. 'Uh… fact of the matter is… I spent some time with your daughter, couple nights ago.'

'Really,' the Duchess said dryly.

'No, hey, nothing like… See, I…' This was his first meeting with Moira all over again. Couldn't string the words together. 'Can't get her off of my mind,' he said and couldn't say any more.

'You poor man.' The merest shade of a smile in the crease down one check. 'How can I help?'

Acutely aware how embarrassingly novelettish all this was sounding, how like some plastic character in one of his own crummy TV films, he said solemnly, 'See, this never happened to me before.'

The Duchess had a very long neck. Very slowly she bent it towards him, like a curious swan. 'Are you a wealthy man, Mr Macbeth?'

'One day, maybe,' he said. 'So they tell me.' Thinking, if she asks me to cross her fucking palm with silver, I'm out of here.

'The feeling I'm getting from you…' Those ancient, ancient eyes connecting with his, '… is that, despite your name, you've always been very much an American.'

'That's that the truth,' Macbeth confirmed with a sigh. 'All we've got to do now is convince my mom.'

The Duchess smiled at last. 'I think I like you, Mr Macbeth,' she said. 'We'll have some tea.' Later she picked up on the theme. 'You're really not what you appear, are you?'

'No?'

The Duchess shook her head. Tiny gold balls revolved in her earrings.

'This worries you. You feel you've been living a lie. You feel that all your life you've tried to be what people expect you to be. But different people want different things, and you feel obliged, perhaps, to live up to their expectation of you. You feel…' The Duchess scrutinized him, with renewed interest, over her gold-rimmed bone china teacup. 'You feel you are in your present fortunate position because of who you are rather than what you can do.'

Macbeth said nothing. He hadn't come here for this. Had he?

'Sorry to be so blunt,' the Duchess said.

'No problem,' Macbeth said hollowly.

'This is your job perhaps. People think you can open doors?'

'Do they just,' said Macbeth.

'Now you've woken up, and you're thinking, am I to spend my life… serving up the, er, goods…? As a form of restitution? Paying back, even though I might be paying back to people who never gave me anything, or do I go out on my own, chance my arm…?'

There were subtle alterations in her voice. Macbeth felt goose-bumps forming.

The Duchess said, 'is there something more out there than piling up money? Even if that money's not all for me, even if it's helping the economy and therefore other people who might need the money more than me? Are there… more things in heaven and earth than you get to read about in the New York Times?'

Christ. He was listening to himself. By the time she sat back to sip more tea, he'd swear the Duchess had developed a significantly deeper voice and an accent not unlike his own.

Ah, this is just a sophisticated act. This is a classy stage routine.

'No it isn't,' the Duchess said crisply.

He almost dropped his cup. 'What…?' His hand shook.

'No, it isn't… going to rain,' the Duchess said sweetly. 'Although it was forecast. But then forecasts are seldom reliable, I've found.' He guessed she'd never been to college. He guessed she hadn't always talked so refined. He guessed her life-story would make more than one mini-series.

Then he guessed he'd better start keeping a tighter hold on his thoughts until he was someplace else.

'I'm not a fortune-teller, you know,' she said, like some women would say, what do you think I am, a hooker?

'I, uh… Moira never said you were,' Macbeth said uncomfortably.

'I appear to be able to do it. Sometimes. But I don't make a practice of it.' She poured herself more tea. 'So why did I let you in here?'

Macbeth didn't know.

'Because I'm worried about the child,' she said. 'That's why.'

He said, 'I can understand that.'

'Can you?'

'I'm, uh, a Celt,' he said, and she started to laugh, a sound like the little teaspoon tinkling on the bone china.

'To be Celtic,' she said, 'is more an attitude than a racial thing. Like to be a gypsy is a way of life.'

'What about to be a psychic?'

Her face clouded. 'That,' she said, 'is a cross to bear. She'll tell you that herself. It's to accept there's a huge part of your life that will never be your own. It's to realise there are always going to be obligations to fulfil, directions you have to go in, even though you can't always see the sense of it.'

'That's what she's doing right now?'

The Duchess nodded. 'She has things to work out. Oh, I don't know what she's doing and I wouldn't dream of interfering, she's a mature person. But I am her mother, and mothers are always inclined to worry, so I'm told. I was only thinking – coincidence – just before you arrived, I wish she had someone who cared for her. But she's a loner. We all are, I fear. We learn our lesson. We don't like other people to get hurt.'

'You're saying you think Moira needs someone with her?'

The Duchess shrugged her elegant shoulders. 'Someone looking out for her, maybe. When Donald told me there was a man at the gate asking after Moira, I wondered if perhaps…'

Then she gave him the kind of smile that was like a consolatory pat on the arm. 'I don't really feel you're the one, Mr Macbeth.'

Sometimes, when he interviewed would-be film-directors, there was one nice, bright-eyed kid he could tell was never going to make it. And trying to let the kid down easy he'd always start out, 'I don't really feel…'

'Look, Duchess…' Macbeth felt like he was about to cry. This was absurd. He started to tell her about the night at the Earl's Castle, about Moira singing 'The Comb Song', and how it ended.

'Yes,' the Duchess said impatiently, 'I know about that.'

'So am I right in thinking Moira caused all that, the deer heads and stuff to come crashing down?'

The Duchess looked cross. 'The question is… pouff! Irrelevant! How can anyone ever really say, I did this, I caused this to happen? Perhaps you are a factor in its happening, perhaps not. I'll tell you something, Mr Macbeth… nobody who's merely human can ever be entirely sure of the ability to make anything happen. Say, if you're a great healer, sometimes it works… you're lucky, or you're so good and saintly that you get helped a lot. And sometimes it doesn't work at all. I once knew a woman called Jean Wendle… but that's another story…'

She lay back on the chaise and half-closed her eyes, looking at the wall behind him. 'Or, let us say, if you're a bad or a vengeful person, and you want to hurt somebody, you want to curse them… in the movies, it goes… zap, like one of those, what d'you call them… ray guns, lasers.'

He heard a small noise behind him, turned in time to see a plate, one of a row of five with pictures on them, sliding very slowly from the wall.

The plate fell to the floor and smashed. Macbeth nearly passed out.

From a long way away, he heard the Duchess saying, 'Doing damage, harming people is much easier but that's unpredictable too. Sometimes people dabble and create a big black cloud…' Throwing up her arms theatrically,'… and they can't control where it goes.'

Numbly, Macbeth bent to pick up the pieces of the plate. Maybe he'd dislodged it with the back of his head. The ones still on the wall had pictures of Balmoral Castle, where the Queen spent time, and Glamis Castle, Blair Atholl Castle and the Queen Mother's Castle of Mey.

He held two pieces of the broken plate together and saw, in one of those shattering, timeless moments, that they made up a rough watercolour sketch of the familiar Victorian Gothic facade of the Earl's place.