In Chapter Thirty-Nine: Soft Interview, the village lies quiet under a hard Peak frost and the Y2K calamity that hadn’t happened has left a low-grade civic embarrassment, as though the place had been caught believing in something. The pub is filling. Pauline is anchored, as she is most evenings. Declan Marsden walks in to pay her.
The technique is methodical and without warmth. He catches Mick’s eye, taps two fingers against the bar — gin and tonics — and drifts to the stool beside her. He places the glass on her coaster. The ice cracks, a sharp gunshot in the ambient murmur. He says Ay up, Pauline, at the volume of a man who knows she will hear it under the room’s low hum and lean in. She flinches, recognises him, calls him by the name she keeps for him in her own head — the cipher — and the conversation begins. Three patrol cars at the mill last night. The new lot at Number 42 not putting the bin out. Mick still watering the gin? Pauline snorts. Always.
What Declan is there to extract is the conversation Pauline has already had with the man in the suit, asking about the village architecture, asking about the Knights. He said he was a surveyor, she whispers. Telecoms. She tells Declan she did not really tell him much, just generalities — whether the Knights were home, whether the boy was about. She had not seen the boy in months. She had not thought to be alarmed. As Declan lets the silence sit a beat too long for innocence and not long enough for guilt, the realisation crosses her face in stages. She has been worked. By somebody she did not recognise as a worker.
What she does not realise is that she is being worked again, on the same stool, on the same evening, by a man she does recognise. Declan hands her a counter-story to carry: Ben is away on warehouse work, the boy has bad migraines, the light is agony for him. It’s nothing sinister, Pauline. Just a poorly lad and two uncles trying to keep going. The fiction is delivered with the viscosity of mercury. Pauline takes it. She receives it as a confidence; she will transmit it as gospel. The narrative is a disappointment to her appetite for scandal. It lacks malice. It lacks the jagged edges. Which means she will pass it on exactly as received, to prove her proximity. Declan finishes his gin. Goodnight, Pauline.
Pauline lives in a stone-fronted terrace four doors down from the church, in the house she grew up in. Her mother died there in 1986 and her father in 1992. Pauline did not move out and did not consider it. The wallpaper in the back room is the wallpaper her mother chose in 1978. The shelves in the front room hold her father’s collection of horse brasses and her own collection of small porcelain figurines. The cat is called Sandra. The cat is, on the available evidence, the only inhabitant of the house Pauline does not consider it her business to know everything about. Sandra has been allowed her privacy.
She worked the counter at the village post office from 1972 until it closed in 1996, which is the most relevant single fact about her. Twenty-four years of being the person every household in the village had to walk through to send a parcel, collect a pension, post a Christmas card, query a stamp. The job placed her in the geographical and social centre of Hope’s End for two and a half decades, with full visibility of who paid what bill on which day, who collected which benefit, whose handwriting was on whose envelope. The pension book of every elderly resident in the village passed through her hands monthly. The Christmas-card distribution patterns of the entire village passed under her eye every December. By the time the post office closed, she had built an interior model of the village so detailed that none of her subsequent gossip required investigation. It only required updating.
The post office is now a charity shop and Pauline thinks of this, when she thinks of it at all, as a small civic tragedy. The closure left her with a state pension, the small savings of a lifetime of unmarried prudence, and an enormous reservoir of unmonetised village knowledge with nowhere obvious to put it. The Rail & Reservoir solved the problem. She walked in one evening in 1997 with the air of a woman finding her replacement office and has been there most evenings since.
She was widowed before she was widowed, in the technical sense: she was engaged once, in 1971, to a man called Brian who broke it off six weeks before the wedding and emigrated to Australia. She has not been involved with anyone since. She does not consider this a tragedy. She considers it information. Brian wrote to her twice in the late seventies and the letters are in a drawer upstairs. She has not opened them in fifteen years. She remembers their contents perfectly.
The thing she thinks about, on the rare nights when she is not in the pub and the cat is on her lap and the television is on and she allows herself to think honestly about the day, is that Declan Marsden has been buying her gin for years and she has been telling him things for years and she does not, on reflection, know what he does with the information. The not-knowing is, she has decided, none of her business. The decision is not entirely comfortable. She has made it anyway.
