The Loney Part 11

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 d.a.m.n 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 impa.s.sable, 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 gla.s.s.

'Can you hear that?'

He stopped and I touched my ear.

'That sound,' I said.

He shook his head.

The gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s 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.'