The Loney

Chapter Ten

Early on Good Friday, just before the clock chimed for Saint Matthew, Mummer came into our room and drew back the curtains. Hanny rolled over and snuffled into his pillow.

‘Ten minutes,’ she said. ‘Don’t keep us waiting.’

I watched her go and then got out of bed. Outside the sky was obscured by a low swirling cloud of moisture that was somewhere between fog and drizzle. Down in the front garden where the fruit trees dripped and bent in the wind, I saw Father Bernard setting a wooden crucifix against the gate — the last of the fourteen Mummer would have had him distributing round the outside of the house since the first washes of dawn.

Once this was done, he put his hands on the dry stone wall and let his head tip forward before coming back inside. He was as tired as I was.

I rolled back the rug, took up the floorboard and checked the rifle. It was still there, of course. I touched the cold metal of the trigger, flicked the little safety catch on and off and tried to imagine what it would be like to fire it. To feel it punch my shoulder. The noise it would make.

The small hand of the clock found Matthew the tax collector and rang five times in soft dabs that seemed to come from deep inside the mechanisms. I put the rifle back and then shook Hanny until he was awake.

He immediately touched his wrist and looked at me expectantly.

‘Yes, Hanny,’ I said. ‘I know. We’ll get your watch back today.’

***

When we got downstairs, everyone was already sitting around the kitchen table in their coats.

‘’Morning lads,’ said Father Bernard. He had his hand inside a shoe and was scuffing off the dirt in quick movements. ‘Sleep well?’

‘Yes, Father.’

‘Thank you for asking,’ Mummer said, looking at me and then to Father Bernard.

‘Thank you for asking, Father,’ I said and he slowed his brushing for a moment, glancing up at Mummer and then me.

Hanny went over to one of the cupboards and started looking for cereal. Mummer snapped at him and then, remembering herself, she smiled at him instead and touched him gently on the arm.

‘No, Andrew,’ she said. ‘We don’t eat until it goes dark. And when we do, it will be fish, not cornflakes.’

Hanny didn’t understand. Mummer took the box off him and put it back in the cupboard.

Farther came in coughing and sat down, laying a single key on the table.

‘I’ve got that door open,’ he said. ‘The one in the study.’

Mummer rolled her eyes, but Mr Belderboss leant forward.

‘What was inside?’ he said.

‘A bed,’ Farther replied.

Mr Belderboss frowned.

‘And some toys,’ said Farther.

‘Was it a playroom, do you think?’ Mr Belderboss said.

‘No,’ said Farther, barking into his fist again. ‘I’ve a feeling it was a quarantine.’

‘For the children with TB?’

Farther nodded. ‘There’s a little barred window that’s been bricked up from the outside. That’s probably why we’ve never noticed it before.’

He launched into a rasping cough.

‘Oh, will you stop,’ said Mummer. ‘What is the matter with you?’

‘I think it’s that room,’ said Farther. ‘Full of dust.’

‘Funny place to keep the children, right next to the study,’ said Mr Belderboss.

‘Perhaps it wasn’t a study then,’ said Farther. ‘Or perhaps it was so Gregson could keep an eye on them while he worked. I don’t know.’

‘It’s a constant surprise this place,’ said Mr Belderboss. ‘I shall look forward to seeing it.’

‘Not now, Reg,’ said Mrs Belderboss. ‘Father’s waiting to begin.’

Father Bernard was standing by the back door in his coat and shoes.

‘Only if everyone’s ready,’ he said.

***

The rain came down harder as soon as we went outside and the back yard became a delta of little streams gushing through the cobbles. Father Bernard walked across to the middle and stopped.

‘Here?’ he said to Mummer.

‘That’s where Father Wilfred started, yes,’ said Mummer.

Father Bernard nodded and then began.

‘In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.’

Everyone responded and then went to their knees, apart from Mr and Mrs Belderboss who wouldn’t have got up again if they had. Hanny was looking around, more interested in the way the rain was pattering out of the broken gutter, until I pulled him down next to me.

Father Bernard closed his eyes and lifted up his hands.

‘We ask our Lord Jesus Christ to forgive us our sins. And we pray especially for Andrew that he be filled with the Holy Spirit and find peace this Eastertide. Hail Mary, full of grace …’

Hanny watched as we all spoke the words together.

Once the prayer was over, everyone stood up and moved across the yard to the first station. There we got to our knees again and Father Bernard said, ‘We adore thee, O Christ, and we praise thee.’

Everyone replied: ‘Because by Thy holy cross, Thou hast redeemed the world.’

Father Bernard opened a small prayer book, shielding it from the rain with his hand.

Pilate condemned Jesus to death and he took up the cross that was given to him. He fell. His mother came to wipe away the blood and Simon picked him and his crucifix up off the floor. He fell again. And again.

And so it went on, until we had circled Moorings and Jesus was dead.

***

Once it was over, I was allowed to take Hanny out for a few hours before the Tenebrae service at Little Hagby.

We went down to the beach, chancing that the crossing to Coldbarrow would be clear and we could get his watch back. I didn’t want to go at all. I’d have quite happily let Leonard keep the damn thing — Hanny would have forgotten about it in a day — but Mummer would notice it was missing and make me pay for a new one. It would be my fault that he had lost it.

We had no idea of the tides anymore. We hadn’t been here for so long that that kind of knowledge had been lost. But when we got there the sea was well out — a line of foam at the edge of the mud flats. A huge stillness had settled now that waters had retreated but the clouds on the horizon had the look of something building to attack. Darkening and darkening, turning the silent gulls that swooped before them an unnatural white.

Had it been like this for the farmers that had once grazed their cattle here? Had they always looked out to sea, wondering when it would come sweeping in again and with what ferocity? I suppose they must have done.

At some point in the past, there had been a shingle causeway from the beach to Coldbarrow for farmers to get to the saltmarshes further out in the bay, and though, like everything else, it had been washed away, there remained a line of black timber posts at the edge of the old road. They petered out half way across, but it was better than nothing and the fact that they had barely shifted in a hundred years or more meant that they marked the only solid pathway one was likely to find at low tide.

For half a mile, we followed the stumps and then, when they gave out, the wandering tracks the Daimler had left in the sand were the only thing to guide us around the patches of sinking mud and the deep cuttings still eroding from the withdrawal of the tide. It was out here in the maw of the bay that one felt most exposed. The flatness of the sands made everything seem a long way away. There was nothing but the wind and the coming and going of light; and the gulls were bigger and unafraid. This was their territory, and we were nothing.

When we finally came to Coldbarrow itself there was a cobbled slipway leading onto a dirt road that ran around the perimeter. Rutted and claggy with sludge and sand it looked impassable, yet there were footprints and tyre grooves criss-crossing the lane all the way towards Thessaly, which sat away on the edge of the cliffs at the north end. Nevertheless, it was better to cut across the heather moor and save our boots. Mummer would only start asking questions if we came back up to our knees in mud.

I held open a barbed wire fence for Hanny to climb through and then showed him where to hold it so that I could do the same. The land rose a little and then we were on the peat moor where the heather had been ravaged to stubble by the wind.

It was easy to see why no one ever came here. What was there to come for? No livestock could survive for long on the stony ground and anything one tried to build would be knocked flat by the first storm to come barrelling across the Irish Sea. For there was nothing beyond Coldbarrow, only a yawning openness of grey water until one hit the coast of County Louth a hundred and fifty miles away.

Perhaps that was what made me stop and look across the sands at our footprints. To know that there was a place we could go back to.

The mainland was a thin strand of grey, the pillbox barely distinguishable in the range of dunes. Only Moorings stood out, white against the trees of Brownslack Wood that moved in the wind like the pelt of a huge, dozing animal.

Seeing it like that, so thickly heaped over the fell, I reckoned Mr Belderboss was right. Maybe no one had set foot in there for centuries. There must still be places like that, even in England, I imagined. Wild woods left to themselves.

Hanny tugged at my hand and we carried on through the heather. As we walked, I became aware of a faint ringing sound, like someone running a finger around the rim of a wine glass.

‘Can you hear that?’

He stopped and I touched my ear.

‘That sound,’ I said.

He shook his head.

The grass rustled and then a flash of white fur made us both turn at the same time. A slender, staring cat emerged and mewed with a tiny voice. Hanny put out his hand and it came to him. It had no collar and no name tag, but it wasn’t feral. The fur had been well looked after.

It was an albino, with eyes that looked as if they had been marinated in blood. It mewed again and sprayed its musk onto a rock, its tail erect and shivering. Again came that faint, high pitched smoothing of the air. It seemed to be calling the cat. It licked its paw and then sprang off through the grass towards Thessaly.

***

Hanny got there before me and was standing at the end of a cutting that led to the house through the black stems of heather and the ferns that had yet to unfurl their little crosiers.

The ringing sound was stronger here and I realised that I had been hearing the wind moving the bell in the small brick tower that they said the Devil had built for Alice Percy to entice poor foreign sailors onto the rocks.

The wind wasn’t strong enough to swing it against the clapper and it shimmered over its surface instead, producing a delicate, liquid sound that floated on the damp air.

The girl we had seen at The Loney was sitting under the lopsided portico of the house in her wheelchair. After a moment she held up her hand and Hanny started to walk towards the house, following the albino cat.

Standing close to it for the first time, Thessaly was an ugly place. Built low and long to withstand the weather, it seemed to have emerged from the earth like a stunted fungus. Every window was black and stains ran from the sills down the grimy plasterwork as though the place was permanently weeping. The portico was an attempt at elegance that had failed in the most spectacular way and reminded me of the gateways to the vaults in the graveyard at Saint Jude’s with their life-sized angels and broken gates.

Hanny stopped a few feet from the girl and was staring at her as she smoothed her hands over her swollen stomach. Perhaps it was the dry, russet hair and its attendant dribble of freckles across the bridge of her nose; perhaps it was pregnancy that had given her a fleshiness about the face, but she seemed even younger than I’d first thought. The prettiness that Mrs Belderboss had noticed came and went too quickly for it to be a constant quality and it disappeared altogether when she grimaced as the baby moved.

The door behind her was open and Laura’s voice came from inside the house.

‘Is that him back?’ she said, and then looked disappointed as she came out and saw me and Hanny standing there.

She was smoking a cigarette and was dressed in a matching liver-coloured skirt and jacket. She had pearls around her neck and, like her husband, smelled strongly of fragrance.

‘Can I help you?’ she said, touching the edges of her painted mouth with her little finger.

I told her that we’d come for the watch.

‘Watch?’ she said.

‘Your husband found a watch yesterday at The Loney. It belongs to us.’

‘The where?’

‘The beach,’ I said. ‘He found it in the sand.’

‘I don’t recall seeing you there,’ she said.

‘Well, we were.’

Laura took another drag and tapped the ash from the end with her forefinger.

‘What’s the matter with him?’ she asked, gesturing towards Hanny.

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘Why is he staring at me? Is he a bit slow?’

I nudged Hanny to stop and he looked at his feet instead.

‘Do you live around here?’ Laura said.

‘No.’

‘On holiday?’

‘Yes.’

‘Poor you,’ she said, as the rain started again.

She looked at us both and then turned back into the house.

‘Come in,’ she said. ‘I’ll see if he’s left it lying around. Give Else a hand over the step.’

The girl smiled at Hanny again, hoping that he would do the honours.

‘He doesn’t understand,’ I said.

But Hanny took hold of the handles and wheeled her backwards through the doorway and into a long corridor lined with empty coat hooks on which a smell of old, damp gabardine hung. There was room for little else other than a pair of wellingtons and an umbrella.

There were no stairs, only doors either side and one at the end, next to which there was an upturned plant pot for a telephone to sit on.

The rain came down hard outside and the hallway darkened. I had been right to think of the place as a tomb. The plaster had been left unpainted, the woodwork without varnish, as though it had been built and immediately abandoned. Its walls had never contained a family. No one had ever laughed there. It had a kind of airlessness, a heavy silence, that made it immediately unsettling. I’ve never felt it anywhere else since, but there was definitely something that I picked up with a different sense. Not a ghost or anything ridiculous like that, but something nevertheless.

‘Wait here,’ Laura said and went along the hallway to the door at the end where she paused to sort through the bunch of keys. She unlocked the door, there was a brief glimpse of a bare kitchen, and then she closed it behind her, locking it from the inside.

‘What’s his name?’ Else said to me.

‘Andrew,’ I said.

‘That’s a nice name,’ she said and smiled at Hanny.

Hanny smiled back and touched her hair.

‘Don’t do that,’ I said.

‘No, it’s alright,’ said Else, rearranging it back behind her ears.

She shifted in her chair and winced a little and breathed out.

‘The baby’s moving,’ she said to Hanny. ‘Do you want to feel it?’

She took Hanny’s hand and placed it on her belly. He hesitated but Else put her hands over his and a grin spread across his face as he felt the baby kicking against his palm.

Laura came back out of the kitchen and then went to a different door, moving the keys around the ring until she came to the one she needed. She was about to go into the room when the telephone rang.

‘Let them in here,’ said Laura.

Else looked at her.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘This room is alright for them to be in.’ And she went to pick up the phone.

Like the hallway, the room was bare and cold. There were no curtains, only yellow nets covering windows that were thick with cold condensation. The fireplace was boarded up and there were footprints in the dust where someone had walked in and out of the room carrying the boxes that were stacked against the wall. A porcelain doll in a bonnet and pinafore sat on top of one of the boxes staring at us. Hanny went over and picked it up. He smiled and showed me how its eyes closed and opened when he tipped it back and forth.

‘He might have put it there,’ said Else pointing to the battered desk in the alcove of the chimney breast. ‘That’s where he keeps the things he finds.’

I went over and looked through the various shells and bits of glass and bone. There was a sheep’s skull resting as a paperweight on a pile of brown envelopes and next to it was an old toothbrush in a mug. Leonard had evidently got halfway through cleaning off the green mould stuck between the sutures. I picked up the skull and looked into one of the eye sockets. The white worm of the optic nerve was still attached, though the eye and brain had long since been eaten or rotted away.

Hanny was sitting on a chair with the doll on his knee. The box next to him was open and he reached inside and took out an old encyclopaedia. I told him to leave it alone.

‘It’s alright,’ said Else.

Hanny flipped through the pages, stopping now and then to show Else a picture that he liked. A matador. A mandarin duck. A magician.

The albino cat wandered in and jumped up onto Hanny’s lap. He stroked it gently and then picked it up and pressed it to his cheek. The cat licked his face and then hopped down to Else.

‘Thank you for bringing her back,’ she said. ‘She goes off for days sometimes, don’t you?’

She scolded the cat and then kissed Hanny, leaving a smudged half moon of red on his lips.

It took me more by surprise than it did Hanny. He smiled and looked back at the book.

‘Do you want to keep it?’ she said to him.

‘No, he doesn’t,’ I said.

‘It’s alright,’ said Else. ‘They’re just old books. He’s got hundreds of them. He never looks at them, but he won’t throw them out.’

‘Do you want the book?’ I said to Hanny.

He looked at me and I went over and put it in his satchel.

‘Take some more, if you like,’ said Else.

‘One’s enough.’

‘Please, she said. I want him to have them.’

‘He’d rather just have his watch back.’

‘Well, it’ll be here somewhere, if you’re sure Leonard picked it up.’

‘He did.’

She frowned and cocked her head to one side.

‘Are you really here on holiday?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I replied.

‘Why?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean why come here? What is there to do?’

‘There’s the beach,’ I said.

‘Is that it?’

I shrugged.

‘It didn’t look much fun to me,’ she said.

‘Well it is.’

‘What do you do there, apart from hide in the grass?’

‘You wouldn’t understand.’

‘Wouldn’t I?’

‘No.’

‘Boys’ stuff is it?’

I said nothing. Her smile suddenly faded again and she gave a sudden sharp intake of breath and put her hands on her stomach. Exhaling slowly, she caught the expression of concern on Hanny’s face.

‘Oh, don’t worry, Andrew,’ she said, holding his hand. ‘It’s nothing. I’ve done this before. It gets easier the more you have.’

Hanny smiled and she touched his face and kissed him again. I reached into the box and took out a pile of other books and gave them to Hanny. He put them in his bag and went over to the desk to look at the sheep’s skull.

I heard Laura put down the phone and then she came into the room.

‘Well?’ she said.

‘It’s not here.’

‘Then I’m afraid you’ve had a bit of a wasted journey.’

‘Is there nowhere else it might be?’

Laura lit another cigarette and shook her head. ‘If it’s not in here, I wouldn’t like to say.’

‘But it’s my brother’s. He wants it back.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and then holding the cigarette in her lips, she dipped into her pocket and brought out a purse. She thumbed open the catches and took out a five pound note.

‘Here. Buy him a new one,’ she said, holding the note out to me.

‘He doesn’t want a new one,’ I said.

Laura looked at me and then took out another note.

‘Buy one for yourself as well,’ she said, folding the two notes together and pressing them into my hand. ‘Alright?’

I held the notes back to her.

‘Isn’t your husband in?’

‘No.’

‘When will he be back?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know.’

‘Will he be here tomorrow?’

‘Possibly. It’s hard to say. He’s very busy.’

‘We’ll come back tomorrow.’

‘I wouldn’t want you to waste your time again.’

‘It won’t be a waste if Hanny gets his watch.’

‘It’s alright,’ said Else pulling aside the net curtains. ‘He’s here.’

***

The rain was coming down in needles now and battering the roof of Leonard’s Daimler. Water washed under its tyres and seeped away into the bracken. He looked at us standing on the porch.

Laura flapped open an umbrella and went down the steps to the car. Leonard got out and said something to her that I couldn’t hear for the rain. She spoke back to him and then they both looked at us. Leonard hitched up the collar of his jacket and came stiffly up the steps to the house while Laura took a wicker basket from the back seat.

‘I’m told you’ve lost a watch,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘And that you think I’ve got it.’

‘You found it at the beach yesterday.’

‘Did I now?’

He lit up a stump of a cigar in his cupped hands.

‘What did it look like, this watch?’ he said blowing smoke out of the side of his mouth.

‘Just give it back, Leonard,’ Laura said quietly as she passed him. ‘Before the tide comes in,’ she added.

He clamped the cigar in his teeth and withdrew a handkerchief from his breast pocket. He looked at us as he shook it loose and then refolded it into a square pad. Another long suck on the cigar and then he tossed it away and held the hankie to Hanny’s face. Hanny drew back, but Leonard held him firmly by the shoulder.

‘She’s right, boys,’ he said wiping the lipstick off Hanny’s mouth. ‘The thing you have to remember about the tides here, is that no one can say they know them. Not really.’

He took hold of Hanny’s chin and moved his head left and right, inspecting it for any more traces of make-up.

‘I mean,’ he said, spitting on the hankie and moving over to Else, ‘Someone could tell you to set off now and before you know it you might be swimming home, or not swimming home, if you know what I mean.’

Leonard dabbed at Else’s lips, taking off the redness there, and then shoved the hankie into his pocket.

‘They say it’s the biggest graveyard in the north of England,’ he said, looking behind him at the sea and the sludge.

He took out a paper bag of mints and ate one. He noticed Hanny staring at them, and he smiled to himself and put them away. Laura banged on the window at him and after waving her away, Leonard looked at Hanny and me in turn and then pulled up his sleeve.

‘Is this it?’ he said, showing us the watch he was wearing.

‘Yes.’

He looked at us again and undid the buckle and handed it to me.

‘I should stay well away from here if I were you,’ he said. ‘Dangerous place. It’s very easy to misjudge things. You could get well out of your depth and end up in all sorts of trouble.’

Hanny put the watch back on his wrist.

‘Listen,’ said Leonard. ‘Hear that?’

A steady hiss was coming as the sea began to wash up against the rocks at the bottom of the cliff behind the house.

‘I should get a move on if I were you,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t want you to be stuck here all night.’

He looked at us again and went behind Else, turned her chair around and pushed her into the house.