The Moor is Dark Beneath the Moon. David Watmough

      By the time he turned off the A-39 and entered the slower pace and elm-tree cool of the winding lanes, he experienced the sudden rusticity as a needed benison that would prevent his skull from cracking. When he eventually reached the final hill outside and overlooking the village of Pentudy, he felt finally cleansed of the highway dreck, and his spirits rose in response to the abrupt change of weather so Cornish in its capriciousness. And he welcomed a sun-shot sky with the coastal wind now given way to a gentle breeze that carried the burnt scents of autumn and the murmur of bees. Then his sight concentrated on the starkly familiar edifice of Aunt Hannah’s Lanoe House with its lime wash differentiating it from its whitewashed neighbours. Parked immediately in front of it was the Verrans’ Morris. He smiled, bemused by the fact that even the ridiculously battered and muddied old minivan was a relief after the hourlong preview of contemporary Cornwall in its festoon of high wires, untidy car cemeteries, and blatant roadside advertising—a place obeisant to tourism and its ugly adjuncts in which he was already convinced he had no proper place.

      But if Davey was now the interloper—certainly in the eyes of the Verrans and most likely in the minds of the villagers of Pentudy who “knew not Joseph,” as his biblically versed grandmother would have surely quoted—he felt another conviction perversely but determinedly growing in him. He wasn’t just there to bury an old and unhappy woman who had lived for decades at odds with her neighbours, not even to safeguard her meagre chattels from these Tintagel interlopers, but now in new and startling resolve not to leave until fully possessed of that life in Pentudy that had become progressively beleaguered after the early death of her husband, also a Joseph, the beloved younger brother of Davey’s patriarchal farmer father, Wesley.

      He drove by the granite Norman church whose presence dominated the western entrance to the village, past the smithy, whose bellows and anvil could be seen from the open road, past the ugly house that now belonged to only him and Alyson—whatever the Verrans believed—and at which site, until short minutes ago, he had contemplated pulling up and joining them for the fictitious search for the will, and parked instead in the courtyard of the Cornish Arms, the only hostelry in the remote moorland village.

      Switching off the ignition, he raced through a “Hail Mary,” subconsciously invoking a dusty religious past and perhaps preparing himself to enter a territory and a time in which the darker things pertaining to his aunt in that isolated life would become intelligibly clear and which he could one day explain to his Cousin Alyson and the two doubters under her roof. And hopefully, as postscript, he could deal with the Tintagel pygmies who seemed bent on feeding off the detritus of her death.

      An earlier phone call on arrival in Tintagel before the funeral service had secured his reservation, and in the meantime the current if temporary inhabitants of Lanoe were the immediate challenge. He decided to check into his booked room, after the encounter with them at Lanoe.

      In spite of himself, as he crossed the threshold of Aunt Hannah’s domain, the memories gusted. Nearing the steep, plum-carpeted stairs that faced the front door, he again knew the claustrophobia in their narrow steepness between bare distempered walls that formed grotesque maps of dried damp: an immediate reminder for a small boy of threatening goblins and nasty gnomes as he had pushed bare knees in a frantic effort to climb them as fast as his thin legs would allow to reach the cold little room his two aunts called “his” whenever he stayed there and they decreed it was time for bed.

      The cold had been one thing, the darkness another. “You’re far too old for a hot-water bottle,” sallow Aunt Nora, with her distinct moustache, had told him dismissively in answer to one piped question, followed swiftly by “Who needs a nightlight when you’ve Jesus nailed above you on the wall, you faithless boy!” And when he persisted in sharing the thought with her that in the unholy dark Jesus would be no good to him, followed by the observation that he knew where you could buy phosphorescent crucifixes that would glow Christ’s goodness and keep the demons away, she slapped his bare arm and accused him of blasphemy.

      Scared of her, yet still propelled to ask her for heat and light in his weekend bedroom at Lanoe House, she would invariably threaten to leave him behind when she attended the seven o’clock Mass on Sunday mornings. That was something he couldn’t bear to contemplate. He never wanted to be left alone with silent Uncle Joseph who rarely left his study except to rant at anyone’s God as all deities had been absent from the mud of Flanders when and where he’d most needed them or, even worse, with moist-lipped Aunt Hannah who was always wanting to smother him with kisses and tell him that he was the little boy she’d always wanted to have.

      He could never decide which was worse—all that luvvy stuff or tall Aunt Nora, who not only hated warmth and light but was always silent on the way to church, while yanking painfully at his arm to make him keep up with the enormous strides of her hairy legs (he’d glimpsed her one Saturday afternoon in the bath). They were the only two occupants to flee the numbing cold of Lanoe on a Sabbath dawn, though obviously that wasn’t something she had in mind. Perhaps she was trying to make up for naughty Uncle Joseph who, she said, had become a pagan because of his dreadful experiences before coming home from the Great War. Listening to Aunt Nora as a child, Davey got the impression that her beloved brother’s loss of faith was far worse than all the wheezing and coughing he did even before taking out his leather tobacco pouch and rolling and smoking his own cigarettes.

      With Aunt Hannah it was different. Her sister-in-law told him the reason she wasn’t at early Mass was because she was a lazy Methodist and everyone knew they only got up early when there was a chance to make money.

      After Davey and his aunt got inside St. Brychan’s, the name of the patron saint of Pentudy Church—the two of them were always early—they would be subsequently joined by a scattering of worshippers: ghosts among the deep shadows beyond the array of flickering candles on the votive stand at the entrance to the Lady Chapel where the early Masses were always said.

      When she wasn’t complaining to him about his filthy boyish habits, Aunt Nora seemed to enjoy shocking him. Standing there at the foot of the stairs, some sixty years later, he still recalled her saying to him, “Of course, I prefer the First Mass of the day. There are no damn people you have to talk to before or after. And they don’t want to have some stupid chat with you, which is even better!”

      As he heard the Verrans skittering toward him from the direction of the kitchen at the back of the house, he conceded, in spite of himself, just how much they belonged. It was because they blended so congruously into that remote ancestral world he kept recalling: of a sadly dehydrated marriage between his uncle and aunt, of the ever-present animosity between childless Aunt Hannah and her stubborn spinster of a sister-in-law, and of their mutual dislike that, even in his child eyes, had seemed to embrace them like the contracting convulsions of a hungry python. That strangling serpent that had entwined them only increased its pressure with the departure of their umpire—the sole man of the house—who finally succumbed in his fiftieth year to the mustard gas that had lurked in his lungs since he encountered it, unsuspectingly, on the battlefields of France.