The Loney

by Andrew Michael Hurley

‘Well, if there are rumours, I’m sure they’re out there by now,’ said Farther. ‘You can’t stop people talking. And anyway rumours come and go. They’ll be talking about something else next week. You know what people are like.’

  ‘I’m not sure you’ve quite grasped how serious this is,’ said Mummer. ‘People might very well lose interest in gossip and move on, but it’s left in their minds as fact. If people have it in their heads that Father Wilfred—you know—then it would turn everything he ever said into a lie. And what would that do to people’s faith?’

  ‘Faith’s not an exact science, Esther,’ said Farther.

  ‘Yes it is,’ said Mummer. ‘You either have it or you don’t. It’s quite simple.’

  ‘Esther’s right,’ said Mr Belderboss.

  Mrs Belderboss nodded in agreement.

  ‘Listen,’ said Farther. ‘I think that if we have even the slightest suspicion that Wilfred took his own life then we ought to report it to the police.’

  ‘And what good would that do?’ said Mummer.

  ‘It would be the right thing to do.’

  ‘If we can’t prove it, how would they?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think it matters if they do prove it. Wouldn’t it at least take the burden off Reg a little?’

  ‘Well, we can’t say anything to the contrary now, can we?’ said Mummer. ‘How would that look three months down the line?’

  ‘Like we had something to hide,’ Mr Belderboss said.

  ‘It sounds like we do,’ said Farther.

  The apostle clock chimed for midnight. Everyone waited for it to stop.

  ‘Well, Reg and I are a little tired,’ said Mrs Belderboss once the last ring had ended.

  ‘It is quite late, I suppose,’ said Mr Belderboss. ‘We’ll see you all in the morning.’

  Farther helped Mrs Belderboss to her feet and she held his arm as he led her to the door. Mr Belderboss used his stick to get himself out of the chair. Farther opened the door for them and they said goodnight and went off to their room along the corridor.

  Once they were gone, Mummer said, ‘Aren’t you going too?’

  Farther sighed briefly and came and sat on the bed.

  ‘I think you’re the one who needs some rest,’ he said, taking her hand. ‘It’s not doing you any good getting so worked up about everything. So things haven’t gone all that smoothly, so what? Father Bernard likes a drink now and then, so what? It’s really not the end of the world. Don’t get so upset about everything.’

  ‘I’m not upset,’ she said. ‘In fact, in a funny way, I’m glad that I’ve seen Father Bernard for the inept he is. At least this trip’s illustrated that much.’

  ‘Come on, love,’ said Farther softly and smiling at Hanny who was still by the window with the hare. ‘Leave Andrew be. Let him get some sleep. Come to bed.’

  ‘I haven’t finished praying for him.’

  He took Mummer’s hands in his.

  ‘Esther,’ he said. ‘I think it’s time that we accepted that he is the way he is, and that’s how it’s always going to be.’

  ‘I can’t do that.’

  ‘We’re going home tomorrow,’ he said. ‘And I think that’s where we ought to stay. We shouldn’t come here again. It’s not a good place.’

  ‘What are you on about, not a good place? We’ve been coming here for years.’

  ‘I mean, I don’t think Andrew’s ever going to get better here.’

  ‘Why not?’

  He looked at me and then down at his hands. ‘In that room next to the study …’ he began and Mummer sighed. ‘No hear me out, Esther. It’s important.’

  Mummer set her face and waited for him to go on.

  ‘Before we went to the shrine, I went to lock it up and I found a name scratched into the plaster by the bed.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Well I think it was the name of the girl they put in there.’

  ‘It probably was.’

  ‘The thing is,’ he said. ‘I moved the bed away from the wall to get a better look and there were four other names there as well.’

  ‘So they were all ill,’ said Mummer. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

  ‘They all died, Esther.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Mummer.

  ‘It’s true,’ said Farther. ‘Each name had a line scraped through it, and …’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘I know I’ve not said anything,’ he said. ‘And I wasn’t going to. But I found some letters.’

  ‘Letters?’

  ‘In a little box under the bed. From Gregson to the children’s governess, asking her if the children were better, if they might be able to come home soon.’

  Mummer rubbed her eyes. ‘Why are you telling me all this?’

  ‘Esther, it wasn’t just that one room that was a quarantine,’ he said. ‘It was the whole house. Gregson didn’t build it as a home, but a hospice.’

  ‘Of course it was a home,’ said Mummer.

  Farther shook his head.

  ‘Gregson never lived here himself; he only built it so the governess could take the children to the shrine.’

  Mummer looked at him irritably.

  ‘I still don’t see what this has to do with us,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t you see?’ said Farther. ‘He kept on insisting that she take them even when it was obvious there was no hope of them getting any better.’

  ‘He had faith,’ said Mummer. ‘That’s all that’s obvious to me.’

  ‘It’s not about faith,’ said Farther. ‘It’s about knowing when to admit defeat.’

  ‘Defeat?’

  ‘Before someone gets hurt.’

  ‘I’m not giving up on Andrew now. Where would that leave us?’

  ‘Esther, it drove that poor man out of his mind in the end that he couldn’t change anything.’

  ‘I know I can’t change anything,’ Mummer snapped. ‘I’m not saying that I can do anything. I’m asking God.’

  Farther sighed and Mummer pushed his hands away.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ she said.

  ‘Esther.’

  ‘Leave me alone with my son.’

  ‘Don’t do this to him anymore. Don’t do it to yourself. Let’s go home as soon as we can tomorrow. It’s not Bernard’s fault that everything’s gone wrong this week. It’s this place. It’s sick. It’s not good for us.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Mummer, grabbing Farther’s wrist suddenly. ‘Your faith might have crumbled along with Wilfred’s but don’t try and ruin mine as well.’

  Farther tried to prise off her fingers, but she gripped even tighter.

  ‘Do you know what?’ she said, smiling a little. ‘I think you’re scared.’

  Farther stopped struggling.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not me.’ And he nodded to the corner of the room, where a gorilla sat under the shelves of pebbles and driftwood with his arms wrapped around his knees.

  ***

  Hanny has changed beyond all recognition since then, but if I do see anything of the old him it is always through the eyes. There is an honesty of feeling there that betrays everyone, I suppose. And there in that room at Moorings, behind his silly mask, there was a fear that I was to see many years later when I was arrested that night outside his house. A fear that I was going to be taken away and I wouldn’t be able to protect him. He has Caroline, of course, and the boys, but he still needs me. It’s obvious. Not that Baxter agrees. He seems to think I was having some sort of breakdown.

  ‘We’re definitely getting somewhere, though,’ he said the last time I saw him.

  It was a wet, blustery day at the beginning of November, a few days before they found the child at Coldbarrow. The horse chestnut outside his office window was lumbering to and fro, sending its great yellow hands down onto the tennis courts below. They were closed for the winter now. The nets removed and the white lines buried under leaves and seeds. Baxter is a member there, as you might expect. It’s that sort of
place. Doctors, dentists, academics. He told me that his mixed doubles partner was doing a post-grad in ancient Hebrew. Lovely girl. Very athletic. Yes, I could imagine Baxter eyeing up her swaying rump as they waited for the serve.

  He was standing by the window with a cup of Darjeeling, watching the tree moving in the rain. A clock ticked on the mantelpiece above the fire, which was feeding noisily on a stack of beechwood. He took a sip and set the cup back on the saucer.

  ‘Do you feel the same?’ he said.

  ‘I suppose so.’

  He looked back outside and smiled to himself.

  ‘Is that a polite no?’

  ‘It’s a polite you tell me.’

  He laughed gently and sat down on the leather chair that was facing me.

  ‘You don’t have to agree, old boy,’ he said. ‘Your brother’s not paying me to make you jump through hoops. I just rather thought you’d turned a corner lately.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I think,’ he said, draining his cup and putting it down on his desk. ‘That you’re beginning to genuinely understand your brother’s concerns about you.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Mm,’ said Baxter. ‘I think you are. I think that if I asked you, you could explain them very eloquently now.’

  ‘Are you asking me?’

  He interlaced his fingers and then opened his hands by way of prompting me to speak.

  I told him what he wanted to hear and he dutifully jotted it down in his notebook. I told him that I understood Hanny and Caroline were worried about me. That sitting outside their house at all hours was unnecessary. That I shouldn’t blame the neighbour who called the police. Hanny didn’t need me to be his watchman. And the fact that I couldn’t identify the particular threats I felt were ranged against him meant that they were unlikely to exist at all. I had invented them so that that I still felt essential to Hanny, even though he was married and had a family of his own to look after him.

  We’d never discussed that last point before but I added it in anyway, knowing that Baxter would be impressed with my self-perception. And I would be a step closer to making him think I was cured.

  ‘Very good,’ he said, looking up briefly from his notebook. ‘You see, a corner turned. You’re a different man to the one that came to me back in March.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Indeed. I mean there’s a way to go yet before you’re …’

  ‘Normal?’

  ‘Happier, I was going to say. But it’s all about little steps, Mr Smith. There’s no point in trying to run and all that.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘And it’s not about pressing you into some sort of societal mould either,’ he said. ‘It’s about getting you to a level of understanding that will allow you interact with others in a more fulfilling, less stressful way.’

  He looked down at his fingers and laughed quietly.

  ‘I don’t often admit this, Mr Smith, but I actually find myself envying my patients from time to time.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘It’s the opportunity that a crisis can bring, I suppose,’ he said. ‘To really look to one’s place in the grand scheme of things. To identify the things that really matter. It’s so easy to bungle through life only experiencing a slender set of emotions and never thinking about why one does what one does. Who was it said, “An unexamined life is not worth living,” Aristotle?’

  ‘Socrates.’

  ‘Ah, yes, of course. Well, it’s a sound philosophy whoever came up with it. And one that I’m afraid I cannot live by as well as you, Mr Smith. You are living life. You’re engaging with the struggle. Not like me.’

  ‘Perhaps you ought to be telling Hanny all this. Then he might understand me.’

  Baxter smiled. ‘He will in time,’ he said. ‘You might feel like your relationship is broken, but we humans have an inbuilt urge to fix things. You’ll work it out. Your brother is stronger than you think.’

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Hanny slipped away sometime in the night. His bed was empty and his boots and coat were gone. I always slept lightly at Moorings—even more so since Parkinson’s visit—and I wondered how he had managed to leave without waking me. But as I got out of bed I realised that he’d laid towels down on the floorboards so that I didn’t hear him go.

  I felt his mattress. It was stone cold. Even the smell of him had vanished. I couldn’t believe he had been so devious and dissembling. It wasn’t like him at all.

  In the middle of the room, the pink rug had been turned back and the loose floorboard lifted out. I felt around inside the cavity. The rifle was missing and he had taken the bullets from my coat pocket.

  I knew where he had gone, of course. He had gone to Coldbarrow to see Else and his baby.

  Downstairs in the kitchen, Monro lifted his head and pined when I came in. I stroked his neck to quieten him down and saw that the floor was littered with the treats Father Bernard had brought for him. Clever Hanny.

  Monro sneezed and lay down and went back to chewing the bone shaped biscuits that he discovered one by one in the folds of his blanket.

  Outside, a light drizzle, briny and ripe, spread across the fields and its moisture grew on me like fur. The tandem was leaning against the wall, the tyres repaired. That was why Father Bernard had come in so late. He hadn’t been at The Bell and Anchor as Mummer said, but out in the yard in the rain fixing the bike.

  I pushed the tandem away from the house, manoeuvring it around the puddles and lifting it over the cattle grid so as not to wake anyone. Once I was around the front of the house, I set off down the lane, met the coast road, split the deep puddles that were standing there, and was soon passing through the marshes.

  After days of rain they could become six or seven feet deep with no discernible bottom, only a jelly of mud and dead vegetation. I called Hanny’s name, strangely hoping that he had stumbled into one of the pools. Better to go that way than whatever Parkinson had in mind.

  But there was nothing. Only the hiss of the reeds and the slop of the ink-black water as the wind came across the marshes bringing a flurry of white flakes.

  For a moment I thought it was snowing—it wouldn’t have been unheard of there, even in the late spring—but then as I got closer to the hawthorn tree I could see that it had burst into life well before it ought to have done, like the apple trees and the fresh green grass up at Moorings. Each gnarled limb held a garland of petals, the way Father Wilfred held the white roses as he lay in his coffin.

  At the dunes, I had to heave the tandem through the col as the wind had piled sand a foot thick over the road. Hanny’s footprints were there, mixed with the impressions of car tyres. Leonard had passed this way and recently.

  I called for Hanny again, thinking that he might be hiding in the marram somewhere. I waited and looked up at the grass bending in the wind, the grey clouds scudding overhead.

  The tide was starting to come in. The sandflats were slowly sinking under the water, and way out, almost at Coldbarrow was a figure leaning into the wind, his white shirt fluttering. It was Hanny. He had the rifle over his shoulder.

  I made a cup with my hands and shouted, but he couldn’t hear me, of course. And in the event I was glad. The last thing I wanted him to do was start to come back now that the tide was racing in. It was better that he went on and waited.

  I left the tandem against the pillbox and began to run across the sand, following the posts as far as I could. In places there was no water at all, but further out in the full blast of the wind, the sand had collapsed into deep gutters, the edges of which fell apart alarmingly as I jumped over each that I came to.

  The roar was all about me as the sea thrust itself towards the shore, breaking into foaming crowns when it smashed down into some hidden declivity. Driftwood and weed sped past, rising and falling on the grey swell, turning, breaking, and then sucked under by the currents.

  To my right I could make out one of those temporary pathways the
water and wind would conjure up at The Loney now and then; long backbones of sand that only became apparent when the high tide left them exposed above the water. I waded over and climbed up to the highest point and saw that it wound in a long, meandering ribbon towards Coldbarrow.

  Yet, even that pathway ran out well before I got there. The ground broke and slipped away, and I was pitched forward into the sea, my legs suddenly kicking into nothingness.

  The cold of it took my breath out like a punch and squeezed my scrotum into a walnut. I reached down, swiping my hands through the heavy, grey water, trying to hold on to something, anything, whatever unidentifiable thing of plastic or wood I could grasp—but the tide whipped everything away and there was nothing else to do but swim as hard as I could towards the shoreline of Coldbarrow.

  I was a decent swimmer in those days. Quite hardy to the chill of open water and unafraid of the deeps. There weren’t many brooks and pools around the Heath that I hadn’t explored. But breast-stroking Highgate Ponds was one thing, The Loney was something else. The swell came at me from all sides and seemed determined to pull me under. There was a movement in the water that flowed and gripped and sucked at the same time. I swallowed mouthfuls of salt water and choked it out in bouts of desperate coughing, my throat and my nose burning.

  I seemed to be getting no closer and after striking again and again towards land, it occurred to me that I was in the early stages of drowning; in that period of fighting, sinking, re-surfacing. And a panic took hold of me. I could barely feel my body. My hands were locked into claws. I would soon get too tired to move. Then what? An ache in the lungs. Silence. Nothing.

  Through a burst of blind splashing, the sky, Coldbarrow, the churning horizon were turned vertical first one way and then the other, but through the swing of the world I was aware of a blurred figure on the shoreline. Then, slipping down into the muffled darkness under the water and out again, they were suddenly closer. Something was being thrust out for me to hold. I made a grab for it and felt my fingers close on a frayed leather strap. I felt a pull that countered that of the tide, felt my thighs and knees eventually scraping against the cobbles of the slipway and then the clutch of the sea was gone and Hanny was standing over me. I let go of the rifle strap and he knelt down and touched my face. I could hardly breathe. Words came out juddering. Hanny cupped his hand to his ear, wanting me to repeat what I said, but I pushed him away and he went over to a rock and sat down with the rifle across his knees.