The Loney

Chapter Four

Hanny came home from Pinelands at the start of the Easter holidays, bristling with excitement.

Even before Farther had turned off the car engine, he was running down the drive to show me the new watch Mummer had given him. I had seen it in the window of the shop where she worked. A heavy, golden-coloured thing with a picture of Golgotha on the face and an inscription from Matthew on the back:

Therefore, be aware. Because you do not know the day or the hour.

‘That’s nice, Hanny,’ I said and gave it back to him.

He snatched it off me and slipped it on his wrist before handing over a term’s worth of drawings and paintings. They were all for me. They always were. Never for Mummer or Farther.

‘He’s very glad to be home, aren’t you, Andrew?’ said Mummer, holding the door open for Farther to bundle Hanny’s suitcase through the porch.

She tidied Hanny’s hair with her fingers and held him by the shoulders.

‘We’ve told him that we’re going back to Moorings,’ she said. ‘He’s looking forward to it already. Aren’t you?’

But Hanny was more interested in measuring me. He put his palm on the top of my head and slid his hand back towards his Adam’s apple. He had grown again.

Satisfied that he was still the bigger of the two of us, he went up the stairs as noisily as he always did, the banister creaking as he hauled himself from step to step.

I went into the kitchen to make him a cup of tea in his London bus mug and when I found him in his room he still had on the old raincoat of Farther’s that he had taken a shine to years before and insisted on wearing whatever the weather. He was standing by the window with his back to me looking at the houses on the other side of the street and the traffic going by.

‘Are you alright, Hanny?’

He didn’t move.

‘Give me your coat,’ I said. ‘I’ll hang it up for you.’

He turned and looked at me.

‘Your coat, Hanny,’ I said, shaking his sleeve.

He watched me as I undid the buttons for him and hung it on the peg on the back of the door. It weighed a ton with all the things he kept in the pockets to communicate with me. A rabbit’s tooth meant he was hungry. A jar of nails was one of his headaches. He apologised with a plastic dinosaur and put on a rubber gorilla mask when he was frightened. He used combinations of these things sometimes and although Mummer and Farther pretended they knew what it all meant, only I really understood him. We had our world and Mummer and Farther had theirs. It wasn’t their fault. Nor was it ours. That’s just the way it was. And still is. We’re closer than people can imagine. No one, not even Doctor Baxter, really understands that.

Hanny patted the bed and I sat down while he went through his paintings of animals and flowers and houses. His teachers. Other residents.

The last painting was different, though. It was of two stick figures standing on a beach littered with starfish and shells. The sea behind them was a bright blue wall that rose like a tsunami. To the left were yellow mountains topped with mohicans of green grass.

‘This is The Loney, isn’t it?’ I said, surprised that he remembered it at all. It had been years since we’d been there and Hanny rarely drew anything that he couldn’t see right in front of him.

He touched the water and then moved his finger to the camel hump dunes, over which hung a great flock of birds. Hanny loved the birds. I taught him all about them. How you could tell if a gull was in its first, second or third winter by the mottle of its plumage and the differences between the calls of the hawks and terns and warblers. How, if you were very still, you could sit by the water and the knots would move around you in a swarm so close that you could feel the breeze from their wings on your skin.

I’d copy the cries of the curlews and the redshanks and the herring gulls for him, and we’d lie on our backs and watch the geese high up in a chevron and wonder what it would be like to part the air a mile above the earth with a beak as hard as bone.

Hanny smiled and tapped the figures on the painting.

‘That’s you,’ I said. ‘That’s Hanny.’

Hanny nodded and touched himself on the chest.

‘That’s me?’ I said, pointing to the smaller of the two and Hanny gripped my shoulder.

‘I’m glad you’re home,’ I said, and I meant it.

Pinelands didn’t do him much good. They didn’t know him. They didn’t care for him like I did. They never asked him what he needed. He was just the big lad in the tv lounge with his paints and crayons.

He held me close to his chest and stroked my hair. He was getting stronger. Every time I saw him he looked different. The puppy fat that had been there at Christmas had slipped from his face and he had no need to fake a moustache with a piece of burnt cork anymore like we used to do as children. It seemed unimaginable, but Hanny was becoming an adult.

I think he sensed the strangeness of it too, albeit dimly. The way one might feel there was something different about a room but not be able to say what. Was there a missing picture, say, or a book shelved in a different place?

Sometimes I caught him looking at the span of his hands, the nest of black hairs on his breastbone, his hard oval biceps, as though he couldn’t quite understand what he was doing inside this man’s body.

***

As we had always done in the past, we left for Moorings at first light on the Tuesday of Holy Week.

Once everyone had gathered at Saint Jude’s and stowed their bags on the minibus, Father Bernard went to get into the driver’s seat. But before he could start the engine, Mummer touched him on the arm.

‘Father Wilfred usually led us in prayer before we left,’ she said.

‘Yes, of course,’ said Father Bernard and he got down and started on the sign of the cross.

‘We tended to go around the corner, Father,’ said Mummer. ‘And pray with Our Lady.’

‘Oh, right,’ said Father Bernard. ‘Yes, of course.’

We gathered at the foot of the little Alpine rockery on which the Virgin stood and bowed our heads as Father Bernard made an impromptu prayer of intercession, asking her for a safe journey and a successful pilgrimage. After the Amen, we took it in turns to go to the railings, lean forward and kiss Mary’s feet.

Father Bernard made way for Mrs Belderboss, who lowered herself slowly to her knees and had Mr Belderboss hold her by the shoulders as she leant over. Once she had kissed the Holy Mother’s toes, she closed her eyes and began a whispered prayer that went on so long Father Bernard began to look at his watch.

I was to be the last to go up, but Father Bernard said, ‘Leave it, Tonto. Otherwise we’ll be sitting on the North Circular all day.’

He looked up at Mary with her expression of vacancy and grief. ‘I’m sure she won’t mind.’

‘If you say so, Father.’

‘I do,’ he said and jogged back to the minibus, making everyone laugh with a quip that I didn’t catch as he climbed up the steps to the driver’s seat.

I hadn’t seen them all so happy for months. I knew what they were thinking. That this time it would be different. That Hanny would be cured. That they were on the cusp of a wonderful victory.

***

We drove out of London, heading north through the East Midlands and across Yorkshire to Lancashire. I sat in the back with Monro wedged under my seat and slept on and off as a dozen counties went by. Every so often I woke up with the feeling that I was repeating parts of the journey. But then England is much the same all over, I suppose. A duplication of old farms, new estates, church spires, cooling towers, sewage works, railway lines, bridges, canals, and towns that are identical but for a few small differences in architecture and stone.

The sunlight that, as we left, had begun to creep over the London suburbs, disappeared the further north we went, returning only momentarily on the shoulder of a yellow hill miles away or picking out a distant reservoir in a second or two of magnesium brilliance.

The temperature dropped and the clouds darkened. The road steamed in driving rain. Shreds of mist hung over the cold lakes and woods. Moorland turned the colour of mould and becks coursed in spate down the peaty slopes, white and solid-looking from a distance, like seams of quartz.

No one had mentioned it — hoping presumably that it would go away of its own accord — but for the last few miles the minibus had been making an awful racket, as though something was loose in the engine. Every time Father Bernard changed gear there was a loud shuddering and grinding and eventually it refused to shift at all and he pulled in to the side of the road.

‘What is it, Father?’ said Mr Belderboss.

‘The clutch, I think,’ Father Bernard replied.

‘Oh, it’ll be the damp, it gets into everything up here,’ said Mr Belderboss and sat back satisfied with his assessment.

‘Can you fix it, Father?’ Mrs Belderboss said.

‘I certainly hope so, Mrs Belderboss.’ Father Bernard replied. ‘I get the impression that you have to rely on our own ingenuity out here.’

He smiled and got out. He was right, of course. In every direction there was nothing but deserted, muddy fields where seabirds were blown like old rags.

The rain battered onto the windscreen and ran down in waves as Father Bernard lifted the bonnet and propped it open.

‘Go and help him,’ Mummer said to Farther.

‘What do I know about cars?’ he replied, glancing up from the map he was studying.

‘You could still give him a hand.’

‘He knows what he’s doing, Esther. Too many cooks and all that.’

‘Well, I hope he does manage to get us going again,’ said Mummer, looking out of the window. ‘It’s only going to get colder.’

‘I’m sure we’ll survive,’ said Farther.

‘I was thinking of Mr and Mrs Belderboss,’ Mummer replied.

‘Oh, don’t worry about us,’ said Mr Belderboss. ‘We’ve known cold, haven’t we, Mary?’

‘I should say so.’

They started to harp on about the war and having heard it all before I turned to Hanny who had been tugging at my sleeve for the last five minutes, desperate for me to share his View Master.

Hanny grinned and handed me the red binoculars that he’d had stuck to his face for most of the journey, clicking through the various reels he took out of his school satchel. It had been Mountains of the World until we stopped at Kettering for a toilet break, then Strange Creatures of the Ocean, and Space Exploration until Mummer had finally persuaded him onto Scenes from The Old Testament, which he now urged me to look through again. Eve with her private parts delicately blotted with foliage, Abraham’s knife poised over Isaac’s heart, Pharaoh’s charioteers tumbling in the Red Sea.

When I had finished I noticed that he had his hands jammed between his legs.

‘Do you need to go?’ I said.

Hanny rocked back and forth, kicking the side of his boot against the door.

‘Come on then.’

While Father Bernard was poking about in the engine, I took him outside and walked down the lane a little so no one else would see. He went over to a dry stone wall and unzipped his jeans while I waited in the rain and listened to it tapping on the hood of the parka Mummer had insisted I bring.

I looked back at the minibus and thought I could hear raised voices. Mummer. Farther. They had tried their best to hold onto the cheerfulness that had been there when we left Saint Jude’s, but it had been difficult not to feel despondent once the rain began pounding the roads and everything had been obscured by mist.

A stiff wind blew in across the fields bringing the smell of brine and rot as strong as an onion. It seemed that all our past pilgrimages were contained in that smell and I felt a tension start to grow in my stomach. We had been coming here for as long as I could remember, yet I’d never felt completely comfortable in this place. It was rather like my grandfather’s house. Glum, lifeless, mildly threatening. Not somewhere you wanted to linger for very long. I was always glad to see the back of it once our Easter pilgrimage was over and I’d breathed a private sigh of relief when Father Wilfred died and we stopped going altogether.

The rest of them kept up their spirits with hymns and prayers but at times it seemed as though they were, without knowing it perhaps, warding things off, rather than inviting God in.

Hanny finished and waved me over to where he was standing.

‘What is it?’ I said.

He pointed at the fence in front of him. A hare had been shot and skinned and its hide splayed on the barbed wire, along with several dozen rats. Trophies or deterrents, I suppose they were both.

‘Leave it alone, Hanny,’ I said. ‘Don’t touch it.’

He looked at me pleadingly.

‘We can’t save it now,’ I said.

He went to stroke it but withdrew his hand when I shook my head. The hare stared at us through a glassy brown eye.

We were starting to cross the road back to the minibus when I heard the sound of a car approaching. I grabbed Hanny’s sleeve and held him tightly as an expensive-looking Daimler went past us, throwing water into the ditches on either side. There was a young girl asleep in the back, her face against the window. The driver slowed at the corner where we were standing and turned his head briefly to look at me before he rounded the bend and was gone. I had never seen a car like that here before. There was little in the way of traffic at all around The Loney. Mostly hay-trucks and farm wagons and not always motorised either.

When Hanny and I got back to the minibus Father Bernard still had his hands deep in amongst the pipes and wires.

‘What’s wrong with it, Father?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know, Tonto,’ he said and wiped the rain out of his eyes with his sleeve. ‘It might be the fly wheel, but I’d have to take the whole thing apart to be sure.’

He closed the bonnet with some reluctance and followed me back on board.

‘Any luck?’ said Mr Belderboss.

‘Not so far,’ Father Bernard replied, smoothing his sopping hair back over his head. ‘I think it’ll be a garage job to be honest.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Mrs Belderboss. ‘What a start.’

‘Well at least it got us this far,’ said Farther.

‘Aye, there’s that,’ said Father Bernard.

Monro was whining. Father Bernard shushed him and he shrank into a white eyed nervousness.

‘I think the best thing to do,’ he said, ‘will be for me to walk on to the village and see if there’s anyone there who can help us.’

‘In this weather, Father?’ said Mrs Belderboss. ‘You’ll catch your death.’

‘To be honest, the walk will do me good, Mrs Belderboss,’ he said. ‘I don’t do well sitting for so long.’

‘It’s a fair way, Father,’ said Mr Belderboss. ‘It must be a good three or four miles.’

Father Bernard smiled dismissively and started to wind his scarf around his neck.

‘You’ll go with him, won’t you?’ Mummer said to me.

‘Ah, don’t worry yourself, Mrs Smith,’ said Father Bernard. ‘There’s no sense in two of us getting soaked.’

‘It’s no trouble, is it?’ Mummer nudged me.

‘No,’ I said.

The wind buffed around the minibus. Monro piped up again and Father Bernard leant down and scrubbed his neck to comfort him.

‘What’s the matter with him, Father?’ said Mr Belderboss.

‘I don’t know,’ said Father Bernard. ‘Maybe it was that car going past.’

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ said Mr Belderboss. ‘He was going at a fair gallop. I didn’t think he was going to slow down for the bend.’

‘The girl was a pretty little thing, though wasn’t she?’ said Mrs Belderboss.

Mr Belderboss frowned. ‘What girl?’

‘The girl in the back.’

‘I didn’t see a girl.’

‘Well then you missed out, Reg.’

‘Oh come on now, Mary,’ he said. ‘You know I only have eyes for you.’

Mrs Belderboss leant over to Miss Bunce.

‘Make the most of David’s sincerity while it lasts,’ she said, but Miss Bunce was looking past her at Monro, who had crawled back under my seat and was shaking.

‘Come on, old feller,’ said Father Bernard. ‘You’re showing me up. What’s the matter?’

***

Three men were coming across the field towards us. They were dressed in filthy green wax jackets and rubber boots. None of them wore hats or had umbrellas. They were local men, either hardened to the weather or possessed of the knowledge that it would pass over in a few moments.

One of them carried a shotgun over his arm. Another had a white terrier on a chain. One of those ones with a long face and wide-set eyes. A dog drawn by a child. The third man was older than the other two and walked several yards behind, coughing into his fist. They stopped and looked at us for a few moments before carrying on towards the road.

‘Should we ask them for some help, Father?’ said Mr Belderboss.

‘I’d rather we didn’t,’ said Miss Bunce, looking at David, who reassured her by taking her hand.

‘Well, it’s either that or we spend the rest of the week sitting here,’ said Mummer.

Father Bernard got out and looked along the road before crossing. The men climbed over the stile and waited when Father Bernard called to them. The tallest of them, who was bald and had the build of a Charolais bull, held his shotgun over the crook of his arm and looked at Father Bernard while he explained about the clutch. The one with the dog held its snout tightly closed and alternated his interest between what Father Bernard was saying and the strangers on the minibus. His left arm seemed to hang more loosely and on that hand he wore a black mitten tied at the wrist with some string. The elder man coughed again and sat down on a broken bit of wall. He was a strange colour. The colour of nicotine or dried daffodils. The same colour my grandfather went when his liver packed in.

‘Oh dear,’ said Mrs Belderboss. ‘He doesn’t look at all well, does he, Reg?’

‘Toxoplasmosis, most likely,’ said Mr Belderboss.

‘Toxo what?’

‘They get it from cats,’ he said. ‘It’s very common with farmers. Their cats pick up all sorts of things.’

‘What are you on about?’

‘I read it in the paper,’ he said. ‘You have a look at their hands. They don’t wash them properly. All they have to do is swallow a bit of cat’s doings and that’s that. I’m right, aren’t I?’

‘I think so,’ said Farther.

Mrs Belderboss shook her head.

‘I’m telling you, it’s toxoplasmosis,’ said Mr Belderboss. ‘Look at him. Poor bugger.’

Outside, Father Bernard patted the bull man on the shoulder and brought him over to the minibus. The bull man handed the shotgun to his friend with the dog and leant over the engine when Father Bernard lifted the bonnet.

I could hear them talking, or rather Father Bernard talking and the other man listening or giving the occasional aye. After a few moments the man with the dog came over and put in his two penn’orth, and eventually, Father Bernard dropped the bonnet and got back into the driver’s seat.

‘I think Mr Parkinson may well have saved the day,’ he said, responding to the bull man’s gesture that he should start the engine.

‘Mr who?’ said Miss Bunce.

‘Parkinson,’ said Father Bernard. ‘And the feller with the dog is called Collier.’

‘How do you know that?’ said Miss Bunce.

‘I asked them,’ he replied. ‘It’s a wee habit I picked up in the Ardoyne. Ask a feller’s name and shake his hand and more often than not he’ll help you out whoever he is.’

‘I thought you’d come from New Cross,’ said Farther.

‘Aye I did, but I was two years in the Ardoyne after I left seminary.’

‘No one told us that,’ said Mummer.

‘Ah, you see, Mrs Smith, there’s more to me than meets the eye.’

The minibus slid smoothly into gear and Father Bernard gave a thumbs up which Parkinson returned with a slight nod of the head. We edged forward, the wheels spinning momentarily in the sludge by the side of the road and set off towards Moorings.

The men stood and watched us all the way down the lane, the dog straining on its leash, desperate to tear something to pieces.

***

A while later, familiar landmarks appeared — a pub with an unusual name, a monument on a very green hill, a crown of standing stones in a field. It only remained for the road to bore through a thickness of overhanging oak trees and then the coastline of The Loney was suddenly flung out to our left.

I remember how my eye used to leap instinctively to the horizon, how looking suddenly across that immense distance of uniform grey seemed to produce the same feeling as looking down from the spire of Saint Jude’s or the top floor of Farther’s office block. A kind of vertigo.

‘Lovely view, isn’t it, Joan?’ said Mrs Belderboss.

Miss Bunce looked past me at the grim plain of the sea and the gulls turning on the wind, frowned uncertainly and went back to the half sleep she’d been in since we’d set off again after the breakdown.

‘Lovely view,’ Mrs Belderboss said again, verifying it to herself this time as fact.

Over the water, the cloud thinned and fingers of sunlight touched the bare bulge of Coldbarrow, lighting up its brown tundra and catching the windows of Thessaly, the old house sitting at its northern tip. They flared and then faded again, as if the place had been woken for a moment out of a long sleep.

I’d never liked the look of Thessaly and even though in the past we had always been under strict instructions never to cross the sands to Coldbarrow, we wouldn’t have gone there anyway.

There were stories, naturally, of it being haunted. A witch had once lived there, they said; a beautiful woman called Alice Percy who lured sailors onto the rocks, and who remained there in some form or other even though they’d hanged her in the old belltower next to the house. In fact, all around The Loney people still clung to old superstitions out of conviction, it seemed, rather than nostalgia, and it wasn’t unusual to come across farms where the occupants hadn’t quite the courage to take down the horseshoes nailed to barn doors to keep boggarts from spoiling the hay, or for people to leave an acorn in their window to turn lightning away from the house.

It’s easy to scoff, I suppose, but there was so little of the modern world there that it was difficult not to think of the place being at a sort of standstill and — how shall I put it? — primed in some way.

A sudden mist, a mumble of thunder over the sea, the wind scurrying along the beach with its crop of old bones and litter, was sometimes all it took to make you feel as though something was about to happen. Though quite what, I didn’t know.

I often thought there was too much time there. That the place was sick with it. Haunted by it. Time didn’t leak away as it should. There was nowhere for it to go and no modernity to hurry it along. It collected as the black water did on the marshes and remained and stagnated in the same way.

***

Father Bernard drove at a snail’s pace, hunched over the steering wheel, looking through the gaps he had rubbed out of the condensation with his sleeve. The track was strewn with pot holes and everyone hung on as the minibus bounced in and out of the ruts.

It went on this way for half a mile or more, the suspension groaning, until we rounded a sharp bend at the top of the lane.

‘Look,’ said Mummer suddenly, pointing up the hillside to our right. ‘There it is.’

Moorings stood alone in a field of iron coloured weeds and limestone boulders on the gentle rise of land that began at the seashore a mile away and continued to the foot of the steeper hills behind the house, where a spread of ashes, yews and oaks called Brownslack Wood marched over the top of the hill and down into the moorland of the next valley.

With its bowed roof, the house looked like a ship that had been washed far inland on a storm tide. A huge wisteria vine was its rigging. A crumbling chimney its crow’s nest.

It had been the home of a taxidermist who retired there with his third wife in the late 1950s. She died within a year of them moving in and he didn’t stick around for much longer than that himself, leaving the property to his son, a banker who lived in Hong Kong. Unable to sell the place, the son rented it out, and as far as I knew we were the only people who ever stayed there.

***

Going up the lane, I turned Hanny’s face towards the large limestone boulder over to the left. We’d christened it the Panzer. Or at least I had. And when Mummer hadn’t been watching us we’d thrown pebble grenades at it. Launched stick rockets at its tracks. Crawled on our bellies through the grass to do in the scar-faced Kapitän like the Tommies did in Commando.

I wondered if Hanny remembered any of that. He had remembered the beach, after all, and we were always very good at picking up our games where we left off, no matter how long it had been since we’d played them. Perhaps he would want to play soldiers again when we got to the beach. He never seemed to tire of it. Though what it meant to him, I don’t know. I mean, he can’t have had any conception of war or of the bravery and sacrifice we pretended to experience. It was the excitement of it all, I suppose. Charging down the dunes with driftwood machine guns and winning, always winning.

As we approached Moorings, there was a Land Rover parked up on a grass verge. It was dented and filthy and had crude white crosses painted on the doors like something that might have ferried men out of the Somme.

‘Oh, there he is,’ said Mrs Belderboss, pointing out of the window. ‘Still the same as ever.’

‘Who?’ said Miss Bunce, craning around her seat to see.

‘Clement,’ said Mrs Belderboss.

Miss Bunce peered at the large man standing by the front door with a woman half his size. Mrs Belderboss caught the look of concern on her face.

‘Oh, he’ll not bother you,’ she said. ‘He’s just a bit, you know. Smile at him. That seems to do the trick.’

‘Who’s the lady?’

Mrs Belderboss turned to her. ‘That’s his mother,’ she said. ‘She’s blind as a bat, poor thing.’

‘But she’s wearing glasses,’ said Miss Bunce.

Mrs Belderboss laughed. ‘I know. She’s a funny old bird.’

Clement watched us as we pulled up in front of the house. Father Bernard waved to him, but he just stared like his mother.

There were unkind whispers about him, as there always are in such places about quiet, lonely men, but the general consensus was that he was harmless. And although the pig farm he kept with his mother was a desolate and ramshackle place thrown way out on the windswept fields south of Moorings, I got the impression that it was not out of neglect that it was in such poor repair. His mother took as much looking after as the swine by all accounts. Poor Clement. I always thought of him as something akin to a shire horse; in build and temperament. Clumping. Plodding. Head down in deference. Dependable to a fault.

The taxidermist’s son could hardly have checked up on him all the way from Kowloon but he paid him to look after Moorings all the same, safe in the knowledge that Clement didn’t have the brains to rip him off.

Everyone got out of the minibus and stretched. Miss Bunce buttoned up her coat and wrapped her arms around herself, pacing back and forth to keep warm, while David fetched her bags. Mr Belderboss struggled down the metal step with Farther taking his weight and Mrs Belderboss fussing around him like a moth.

Father Bernard put on his jacket, zipped it up to the neck and went over to Clement, bidding us to follow him.

As we got closer, Clement started to look confused.

‘Where’s t’other feller?’ he said.

‘Sorry?’

‘The priest.’

‘Father Wilfred? Didn’t anyone tell you? He passed away.’

‘Died did he?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘How?’

Father Bernard looked at us and then said, ‘I’m Father McGill, if that’s any good.’

‘You’re a priest an all?’ said Clement.

‘For my sins, aye,’ Father Bernard smiled and Clement shook his hand with relief.

Father Bernard paused and looked at Clement’s mother, waiting to be introduced.

‘Mother,’ said Clement, and the old lady jerked into life and held out her hand.

Father Bernard took it and said, ‘Good to meet you.’

The old lady said nothing.

‘Go and wait in the van,’ said Clement.

She remained expressionless.

‘I said wait in the van.’ Clement nudged her and she set off with her stick, driving a wedge through the crowd of us standing there.

As she went past, she lifted up her glasses and looked at me with her grey milky eyes that were slick and glossy like the underside of a slug.

‘Do you want to come inside?’ said Clement.

‘Aye, ’tis a bit raw,’ said Father Bernard.

‘Rooks say we’ll have a good summer, though.’

‘How’s that?’

Clement pointed past the house to the woods where several dozen of the birds were going in and out of their nests.

‘Building them right high up this year,’ he said.

‘That’s good,’ said Father Bernard.

‘Aye, but it’s not normal,’ Clement mumbled.

He turned up the path to the front door along the miniature boulevard of apple trees that were still winter-naked, their branches speckled with blight like the putrefying windfallen fruit that lay underneath them. There was always something rather sad about those trees, I thought. The way they dutifully grew their produce every summer only for it to blacken and fall off uncollected.

Every movement of Clement’s was slow and heavy and it took an age for him to find the right key. Once the house was open, Mummer muscled her way through to the front and led everyone along the hall that, as it had always done in the past, smelled of cigars and spent matches and the air had a hard, porcelain coldness to it.

‘Sitting room, drawing room, lavatory,’ she said as she turned the handle of each door.

Mr and Mrs Belderboss followed her down the hall and back, delighted at finding things in exactly the same place as they had always been and having new people to show around, although Miss Bunce seemed reluctant to go much further than the dead grandfather clock by the front door. She looked up anxiously as the bare bulb that illuminated the hallway faded and then came back on, brighter than it had been before.

‘It’s only the wind,’ said Mummer.

‘It catches on the wires,’ said Clement who was still lingering at the threshold.

I noticed for the first time that he was wearing a wooden crucifix around his neck. One he had made himself by the look of it. Two chunks of split wood bound with string.

‘There you are,’ said Mummer. ‘It catches on the wires.’

Clement adjusted his cap and turned to go.

‘I’ll bring thee some more firewood in a day or two,’ he said, nodding to the bags lined up in the hallway.

‘Are you sure you need to, Clement? It looks like there’s enough there for a month,’ said Father Bernard.

Clement frowned and looked very serious. ‘Quite sure, Father. When the wind gets down the chimney it draws the heart out of the fire in no time,’ he said.

‘Is there bad weather on the way?’ asked Father Bernard.

‘There usually is,’ Clement replied.

Miss Bunce smiled thinly as he looked at us all one last time and closed the door.

‘Now, come on Joan,’ said Mr Belderboss, once Clement had left. ‘There’s nothing to worry about.’

And he took her arm and led her past the peeling wallpaper and the oil paintings of wild seascapes into the sitting room to show her the amount of expensive objects that had been left by the taxidermist. Something that charmed him and bewildered him in equal measure.

At his bidding, everyone else followed and listened as he pointed out the delicate knick-knacks worth hundreds apiece.

‘Ah, now then,’ he said, plucking out a small clay pipe from a wooden box lying on the windowledge. ‘This is interesting. You can still see the teeth marks on the stem. Look.’

He offered it to Mummer but she frowned and he put it back where he found it, making a beeline for Miss Bunce whose attention had been taken by the books on the rosewood Davenport by the window.

Among them was a first edition of The Island of Doctor Moreau, one bound in leather that looked to have been signed by Longfellow, and a children’s pop-up book of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, that Miss Bunce began to read, turning the fragile pages slowly. Late Victorian, Mr Belderboss reckoned, about the same time Moorings was finished.

‘Chap called Gregson built it,’ said Mr Belderboss. ‘Cotton mill owner. That’s what they were round here, wasn’t it, Esther? Cotton men?’

‘Yes,’ said Mummer. ‘Cotton or linen.’

‘There’s a photograph of him and his missus somewhere,’ said Mr Belderboss looking around the room. ‘Was it seven children they had, Mary? It might have been more. I don’t think many of them saw their fifth birthday, mind you. TB and all that. That’s why they built these sorts of places. To keep their little ’uns alive. They thought the sea air would do them good.’

‘They built them to last, as well,’ said Farther, smoothing his hand over the plaster. ‘They must be a yard thick these walls.’

Miss Bunce looked around her and then out of the window, unconvinced, it seemed, that anyone who stayed here would leave the place healthier than when they came in.

It came as no surprise to her when Mr Belderboss explained how the house had changed hands many times since it had been built and carefully renamed by each successive occupant in an attempt to make it deliver what it seemed to promise sometimes, sitting there quietly under the gentle ruffling of the wood and the flour soft clouds.

Gregson had christened it Sunny Vale; then it was Rose Cottage, Softsands, Sea Breezes, and lastly Moorings by the taxidermist.

‘It must have been lovely, though, in its heyday,’ said Mrs Belderboss, pushing aside the curtains a little more. ‘What with that view and everything.’

‘Clever landscapers, the Victorians,’ said Farther.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Mr Belderboss. ‘The view was all part of the prophylactic, wasn’t it?’

‘There’s something timeless about it,’ said Mrs Belderboss, looking out at the sea. ‘Don’t you think?’

‘Well, it’s a very old part of the country,’ said Mr Belderboss.

Mrs Belderboss rolled her eyes. ‘It must be the same age as everywhere else, you fool.’

‘Oh, you know what I mean,’ he replied. ‘Untrodden, then. Some of the yew trees up in the woods must have been ancient in the time of Bede. And they do say there are places around here that haven’t been set foot in since the Vikings came.’

Mrs Belderboss scoffed again.

‘It’s true,’ Mr Belderboss replied. ‘A century in this place is nothing. I mean, it’s quite easy to imagine that that book,’ he said, nodding to Miss Bunce’s hands, ‘could have been read by some poor little consumptive only yesterday.’

Miss Bunce put the book down and wiped her hands on her duffle coat, as Mr Belderboss went over to the other side of the room, enthusing over the seascapes of tiny ships under colossal stormclouds that the taxidermist had spent his last years painting. His brushes were still there in a jam jar. His palette had a dry crust of dark oils. And under the dust a rag, a chewed pencil, some loose, pre-decimal change all contributed to the uneasy feeling I always had when I stayed at Moorings, that the taxidermist had merely stepped out to smoke one of his expensive cigars and that he might return at any moment and pop through a door like one of the three bears in the old book, to find a Goldilocks sleeping in every room.