The Loney Part 39

A waft of warm air met me. It's always warm in the bas.e.m.e.nt. A dry heat to stop the damp getting to the books. It can be a bit oppressive in the summer but that morning I was more than thankful for it.

I switched on the strip lights and they pinked and flickered and lit up the long rows of bookshelves and cabinets. The homes of many old friends. Ones I've got to know intimately over the last two decades.

When I have a moment, which is becoming rarer these days, I like to visit Vertot's History of the Knights of Malta or Barrett's Theorike and Practike of Moderne Warres. There's no better way to spend an hour or two once the museum has closed than reading these volumes as they were written-in quiet reflection and study. Any other way is worthless. Having them spread open in a display case upstairs for people to glace in pa.s.sing is an insult if you ask me.

I generally work at the far end of the bas.e.m.e.nt where there's a computer I use for research and a wide desk where I can keep all the bookbinding equipment and still have plenty of elbow room.

I don't know why I felt the urge to do it, and it makes me feel like someone out of a d.i.c.kens novel, one of Scrooge's clerks perhaps, but a while ago I moved the desk under one of those gla.s.s grids they have at street level where I could look up and watch the shadows of feet going past. I suppose there was something comforting about it. I was down there warm and dry and they were out in the rain with people and places to hurry to and be late for.

But today the gla.s.s was opaque with snow, making the bas.e.m.e.nt even gloomier. The strip lights don't do much apart from create shadows, if I'm honest, and so I switched on the angle poise lamp and sat down.

For the past few weeks, I had been working on a set of Victorian wildlife books that had been donated from the sale of some laird's estate up in Scotland. Encyclopaedias of flora and fauna. Manuals of veterinary science. Copious volumes about badgers and foxes and eagles and other reprehensible predators. Their habits and breeding patterns and the many ways to cull them. They were in a reasonable condition, given that they had been languishing in a gillie's hut for years, but the leather covers would have to be replaced and the pages re-sewn if anyone was ever going to read them again. Someone would. There was always someone who would find such things fascinating. Academics might take pains to go through all the details, but what was of interest to the museum, the bit of social history they could sell to the public, was the handwritten marginalia. The little insights of the anonymous gamekeeper who had stalked the moors of the estate and kept his master's animals safe for nigh on fifty years.

Notes about the weather and nesting sites were strewn around the sketches he had made of the things he had had to kill in order to protect the deer and the grouse. A fox caught in a snare. An osprey spread-eagled by shotgun pellets. They seemed at first glance, gruesome, boastful things, no better than hanging trophy heads along a hallway, or rats along a fence, but the detail of feathers and fur and eyes that he had taken time to render with his fine pencil made it clear that he loved them dearly.

It was, to him, no different to pruning a garden, I suppose. The gillie hadn't hated these animals for following their instincts of survival anymore than a gardener hates his plants for growing. It was a necessary mastery that he exercised over the estate. Without him, there would have been nothing but chaos, and I suspect that it's reverted back to wilderness now that there's no one looking after it anymore.

I worked for an hour or more until I heard the doors at the other end of the bas.e.m.e.nt opening. I put my gla.s.ses down on the desk (I have become short-sighted in recent years) and looked around the shelves. Helen appeared, her coat over her arm.

'Are you there?' she called, making a visor with her mittened hand and peering through the shadows.

I got up from the desk.

'Yes? What is it?'

'Good news. We can go home,' she said.

'Home?'

'They're going to close the museum because of the snow.'

'I've got work to finish off.'

'You don't have to do it,' said Helen. 'Everyone else is leaving.'

'All the same. I'd like to get it done.'

'It's really coming down out there,' she said. 'I'd get going if I were you. Otherwise you might be stuck here all night. If you need a lift, I can take you as far as Paddington.'

She had come further towards me now and stood at the end of the 990s: history of New Zealand to extraterrestrial worlds.

'I don't mind,' she said.

'It's out of your way,' I replied.

'It doesn't have to be.'

I looked back at the book on the desk.

'I've too much to do to go home,' I said. 'Haven't you?'

She looked at me, gave me that frown smile again and zipped up her coat.

'I'll see you on Monday,' she said and went back towards the door and the bas.e.m.e.nt became silent again apart from the steady tick of the central heating.

I returned to the book and gently removed the st.i.tching from the spine of McKay's Prevention of Galliforme Diseases with a pair of tweezers before dropping the brittle strands of thread into the bin. No, it was better that I stayed here. It wasn't fair to ask Helen to drive a mile out of her way in this weather. And they would only start gossiping again if they saw us together in her car.

I didn't stop working until hours later. It was three in the afternoon. I hadn't eaten any lunch, but I wasn't hungry, and I often lose track of time down there in the bas.e.m.e.nt anyway, separated as I am from the world of scurrying feet above. A day could sometimes easily pa.s.s without me once looking up from what I was doing.

I switched on the kettle to make tea and as it boiled I looked up at the gla.s.s panel. It glowed with a b.u.t.tery light and I wondered if it had stopped snowing at last and the sun had come out. Whatever, it would be going dark before long.

I sat back down at the desk but hadn't taken a sip before there was someone knocking at the door. It wasn't Helen come back to rescue me, I knew that. She had keys. Most likely it was Jim, the caretaker, who I'd fought tooth and nail to keep out of the bas.e.m.e.nt with his anti-bacterial sprays and his polish and his propensity for throwing things away. He'd always been a little abrupt with me since I'd had his key off him and rattled the ones he had left in a plaintive way, it seemed, as though without the full set he felt somehow emasculated.

Don't get me wrong. I don't dislike him. I'd just rather it was me who kept the place clean and tidy. Jim doesn't really get the idea of an archive, keeping things. I quite admire him in many ways and had half expected him to have stuck around that afternoon. He's a stubborn old sod like me and wouldn't have gone home just because it was snowing.

I put the cup down and went to open the door. Jim stood there-brown overcoat and navy tattoos-his mace-head of keys hanging from his belt.

'Yes?'

'Visitor for you,' he said, stepping aside.

'Hanny?' I tried to sound surprised, but I knew with all this business at Coldbarrow that he would come to see me sooner or later.

'h.e.l.lo, brother,' he said as he sidled past Jim and shook my hand.

'I'm locking up at four,' said Jim pointedly and wandered off up the stairs, jangling his keys.

'What are you doing here?' I said and gestured for Hanny to go down to my desk as I closed the door. He was damp with snow and his scarf was caked in ice.

'I rang the flat, but there was no answer,' he said. 'I must admit I thought you'd be at home today.'

'I've too much to do,' I replied.

'You work too hard.'

'Pot. Kettle.'

'Well, you do.'

'Is there any other way to work?'

He laughed. 'No, I suppose not, brother.'

'Tea?'

'If you're having one.'

I made Hanny a cup as he draped his wet things over the radiator.

'Don't you get lonely down here, brother,' he said, looking up at the gla.s.s panel.

'Not at all.'

'But you do work alone?'

'Oh yes.'

'You said that with some conviction.'

'Well, there was someone else once.'

'What happened to them?'

'She wasn't quite suited.'

'To what?'

'To detail.'

'I see.'

'It's important, Hanny.'

'It must be.'

'It's not easy staying focused all day,' I said. 'It takes a particular type of mind.'

'Like yours.'

'Evidently.'

Hanny took the cup of tea off me and pressed the back of his thighs against the radiator. He looked up at me, went to say something, but stopped short and changed tack.

'How are things going with Doctor Baxter?' he asked.

'Baxter? Alright I suppose.'

'He said you were making progress last time I spoke to him.'

'I thought our sessions were meant to be confidential.'

'They are, you fool,' said Hanny dismissively. 'He didn't give me any details. He just said you'd turned a corner.'

'That's what he seems to think.'

'And have you?'

'I don't know.'

'You seem happier.'

'Do I?'

'Less anxious.'

'You can tell that about me in just a few minutes?'

'I do know you, brother. I can see it, even if you can't.'

'Am I that transparent?'

'I didn't mean that. I meant that it's hard to perceive things about yourself sometimes.'

'Such as?'

'Well, I can see that Baxter's making a difference. And that our prayers are too.'

'Oh yes, how are things at the church?' I said.

'Couldn't be better,' he replied.

'Still packing them in every Sunday?'

'Sunday, Monday, Tuesday ... We've been very blessed, brother. We light a candle for you every day.'

'That's good of you.'

Hanny laughed quietly. 'G.o.d loves you, brother,' he said. 'Even if you don't believe in Him, He believes in you. It will end. This sickness will leave you. He will take it away.'

Perhaps it was the light down there, but he looked old suddenly. His black hair was still thick enough to have been tousled into a nest by his woollen hat, but his eyes were starting to sink into the soft cushions of the sockets and there were liver spots on the backs of his hands. My brother was slowly slipping towards pension age and I was following like his shadow.

He embraced me and I felt his hand on my back. We sat down at the desk and finished the tea in silence.

Having circled around what concerned him and run dry of small talk, he looked troubled now, frightened even.

'What is it, Hanny?' I said. 'I'm sure you didn't come all this way to ask me about Doctor Baxter.'

He breathed out slowly and ran his hand over his face.

'No, brother, I didn't.'

'What then?'

'You've heard the news about Coldbarrow, I take it?' he said.

'I could hardly have missed it, could I?'