‘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 h
ouse, 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.’
A
nd 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.
The Loney Page 4
