The Loney (13 page)

There were no stairs, only doors either side and one at the end, next to which there was an upturned plant pot for a telephone to sit on.

The rain came down hard outside and the hallway darkened. I had been right to think of the place as a tomb. The plaster had been left unpainted, the woodwork without varnish, as though it had been built and immediately abandoned. Its walls had never contained a family. No one had ever laughed there. It had a kind of airlessness, a heavy silence, that made it immediately unsettling. I’ve never felt it anywhere else since, but there was definitely something that I picked up with a different sense. Not a ghost or anything ridiculous like that, but something nevertheless.

‘Wait here,’ Laura said and went along the hallway to the door at the end where she paused to sort through the bunch of keys. She unlocked the door, there was a brief glimpse of a bare kitchen, and then she closed it behind her, locking it from the inside.

‘What’s his name?’ Else said to me.

‘Andrew,’ I said.

‘That’s a nice name,’ she said and smiled at Hanny.

Hanny smiled back and touched her hair.

‘Don’t do that,’ I said.

‘No, it’s alright,’ said Else, rearranging it back behind her ears.

She shifted in her chair and winced a little and breathed out.

‘The baby’s moving,’ she said to Hanny. ‘Do you want to feel it?’

She took Hanny’s hand and placed it on her belly. He hesitated but Else put her hands over his and a grin spread across his face as he felt the baby kicking against his palm.

Laura came back out of the kitchen and then went to a different door, moving the keys around the ring until she came to the one she needed. She was about to go into the room when the telephone rang.

‘Let them in here,’ said Laura.

Else looked at her.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘This room is alright for them to be in.’ And she went to pick up the phone.

Like the hallway, the room was bare and cold. There were no curtains, only yellow nets covering windows that were thick with cold condensation. The fireplace was boarded up and there were footprints in the dust where someone had walked in and out of the room carrying the boxes that were stacked against the wall. A porcelain doll in a bonnet and pinafore sat on top of one of the boxes staring at us. Hanny went over and picked it up. He smiled and showed me how its eyes closed and opened when he tipped it back and forth.

‘He might have put it there,’ said Else pointing to the battered desk in the alcove of the chimney breast. ‘That’s where he keeps the things he finds.’

I went over and looked through the various shells and bits of glass and bone. There was a sheep’s skull resting as a paperweight on a pile of brown envelopes and next to it was an old toothbrush in a mug. Leonard had evidently got halfway through cleaning off the green mould stuck between the sutures. I picked up the skull and looked into one of the eye sockets. The white worm of the optic nerve was still attached, though the eye and brain had long since been eaten or rotted away.

Hanny was sitting on a chair with the doll on his knee. The box next to him was open and he reached inside and took out an old encyclopaedia. I told him to leave it alone.

‘It’s alright,’ said Else.

Hanny flipped through the pages, stopping now and then to show Else a picture that he liked. A matador. A mandarin duck. A magician.

The albino cat wandered in and jumped up onto Hanny’s lap. He stroked it gently and then picked it up and pressed it to his cheek. The cat licked his face and then hopped down to Else.

‘Thank you for bringing her back,’ she said. ‘She goes off for days sometimes, don’t you?’

She scolded the cat and then kissed Hanny, leaving a smudged half moon of red on his lips.

It took me more by surprise than it did Hanny. He smiled and looked back at the book.

‘Do you want to keep it?’ she said to him.

‘No, he doesn’t,’ I said.

‘It’s alright,’ said Else. ‘They’re just old books. He’s got hundreds of them. He never looks at them, but he won’t throw them out.’

‘Do you want the book?’ I said to Hanny.

He looked at me and I went over and put it in his satchel.

‘Take some more, if you like,’ said Else.

‘One’s enough.’

‘Please, she said. I want him to have them.’

‘He’d rather just have his watch back.’

‘Well, it’ll be here somewhere, if you’re sure Leonard picked it up.’

‘He did.’

She frowned and cocked her head to one side.

‘Are you really here on holiday?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I replied.

‘Why?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean why come here? What is there to do?’

‘There’s the beach,’ I said.

‘Is that it?’

I shrugged.

‘It didn’t look much fun to me,’ she said.

‘Well it is.’

‘What do you do there, apart from hide in the grass?’

‘You wouldn’t understand.’

‘Wouldn’t I?’

‘No.’

‘Boys’ stuff is it?’

I said nothing. Her smile suddenly faded again and she gave a sudden sharp intake of breath and put her hands on her stomach. Exhaling slowly, she caught the expression of concern on Hanny’s face.

‘Oh, don’t worry, Andrew,’ she said, holding his hand. ‘It’s nothing. I’ve done this before. It gets easier the more you have.’

Hanny smiled and she touched his face and kissed him again. I reached into the box and took out a pile of other books and gave them to Hanny. He put them in his bag and went over to the desk to look at the sheep’s skull.

I heard Laura put down the phone and then she came into the room.

‘Well?’ she said.

‘It’s not here.’

‘Then I’m afraid you’ve had a bit of a wasted journey.’

‘Is there nowhere else it might be?’

Laura lit another cigarette and shook her head. ‘If it’s not in here, I wouldn’t like to say.’

‘But it’s my brother’s. He wants it back.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and then holding the cigarette in her lips, she dipped into her pocket and brought out a purse. She thumbed open the catches and took out a five pound note.

‘Here. Buy him a new one,’ she said, holding the note out to me.

‘He doesn’t want a new one,’ I said.

Laura looked at me and then took out another note.

‘Buy one for yourself as well,’ she said, folding the two notes together and pressing them into my hand. ‘Alright?’

I held the notes back to her.

‘Isn’t your husband in?’

‘No.’

‘When will he be back?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know.’

‘Will he be here tomorrow?’

‘Possibly. It’s hard to say. He’s very busy.’

‘We’ll come back tomorrow.’

‘I wouldn’t want you to waste your time again.’

‘It won’t be a waste if Hanny gets his watch.’

‘It’s alright,’ said Else pulling aside the net curtains. ‘He’s here.’

***

The rain was coming down in needles now and battering the roof of Leonard’s Daimler. Water washed under its tyres and seeped away into the bracken. He looked at us standing on the porch.

Laura flapped open an umbrella and went down the steps to the car. Leonard got out and said something to her that I couldn’t hear for the rain. She spoke back to him and then they both looked at us. Leonard hitched up the collar of his jacket and came stiffly up the steps to the house while Laura took a wicker basket from the back seat.

‘I’m told you’ve lost a watch,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘And that you think I’ve got it.’

‘You found it at the beach yesterday.’

‘Did I now?’

He lit up a stump of a cigar in his cupped hands.

‘What did it look like, this watch?’ he said blowing smoke out of the side of his mouth.

‘Just give it back, Leonard,’ Laura said quietly as she passed him. ‘Before the tide comes in,’ she added.

He clamped the cigar in his teeth and withdrew a handkerchief from his breast pocket. He looked at us as he shook it loose and then refolded it into a square pad. Another long suck on the cigar and then he tossed it away and held the hankie to Hanny’s face. Hanny drew back, but Leonard held him firmly by the shoulder.

‘She’s right, boys,’ he said wiping the lipstick off Hanny’s mouth. ‘The thing you have to remember about the tides here, is that no one can say they know them. Not really.’

He took hold of Hanny’s chin and moved his head left and right, inspecting it for any more traces of make-up.

‘I mean,’ he said, spitting on the hankie and moving over to Else, ‘Someone could tell you to set off now and before you know it you might be swimming home, or not swimming home, if you know what I mean.’

Leonard dabbed at Else’s lips, taking off the redness there, and then shoved the hankie into his pocket.

‘They say it’s the biggest graveyard in the north of England,’ he said, looking behind him at the sea and the sludge.

He took out a paper bag of mints and ate one. He noticed Hanny staring at them, and he smiled to himself and put them away. Laura banged on the window at him and after waving her away, Leonard looked at Hanny and me in turn and then pulled up his sleeve.

‘Is this it?’ he said, showing us the watch he was wearing.

‘Yes.’

He looked at us again and undid the buckle and handed it to me.

‘I should stay well away from here if I were you,’ he said. ‘Dangerous place. It’s very easy to misjudge things. You could get well out of your depth and end up in all sorts of trouble.’

Hanny put the watch back on his wrist.

‘Listen,’ said Leonard. ‘Hear that?’

A steady hiss was coming as the sea began to wash up against the rocks at the bottom of the cliff behind the house.

‘I should get a move on if I were you,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t want you to be stuck here all night.’

He looked at us again and went behind Else, turned her chair around and pushed her into the house.

W
e left Coldbarrow at the right time.

Looking back once we reached the pillbox, the sea was pounding the rocks by Thessaly, sending up spikes of foam that hung in the air before disintegrating back into the swell. The sands were gone.

Hanny was pleased to have his watch back and kept on showing it to me, wanting me to tell him the time.

‘We’re late, Hanny,’ I said. ‘That’s all that matters.’

When we got back to Moorings, Father Bernard was standing at the top of the lane, looking out for us.

‘Come on, you two,’ he said as we passed him. ‘You’d better get a move on before your mother has an aneurysm.’

Everyone was waiting on the bus with firm-set faces. Mummer pulled up her sleeve to reveal her watch and looked at me. That was all she needed to say.

I sat next to Hanny and he smiled at me and put his fingers on his lips where Else had kissed him. I took hold of his hand and moved it away.

‘Leave it, Hanny,’ I said and gave him a look that made him lower his head. I didn’t mean to scold him like that. It wasn’t his fault after all. It was just that I didn’t want Mummer to see.

That was what I told myself anyway. There was another feeling that I didn’t want to recognise at the time but seems rather obvious now. I was jealous. But only in the way I was jealous of the boys at school whose sexual exploits had elevated them above the playground proles.

It wasn’t that I particularly wanted their experiences—my God, I would have been terrified—only to be in their club, where membership guaranteed that you didn’t have your gym shoes rammed down a toilet pan full of muck and urine or your ribs blackened by discerning elbows in the corridors. The sex stuff didn’t really matter. I didn’t care about that.

I suppose I was jealous because that kiss had been wasted on Hanny. It didn’t matter to him or to his peers at Pinelands. What I could have done with that experience back at school. To have had the ears of the changing room as I described it all in lurid detail, to have been thought of in another way, if only for the final term, might have made all the difference. I don’t know.

Hanny touched his face again. There were still faint traces of lipstick on his chin that Leonard hadn’t managed to get rid of. I wondered if Mummer might notice, as she noticed every small difference in Hanny’s appearance, but she had her back to me and was watching silently out of the window like everyone else.

No one spoke at all, in fact, until a few miles further on when Mrs Belderboss patted the back of Father Bernard’s seat.

‘Stop, Father,’ she said and he pulled into the side of the road. ‘Look.’

Everyone peered out of the windows as a swarm of bright red butterflies spun over the field in a flexuous shape, twisting and spiraling as one entity.

‘Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?’ said Mrs Belderboss.

‘What are they doing out? It’s too early in the year for them,’ said Mr Belderboss. ‘They’ll die before the day’s done.’

‘’Tis God’s world, Mr Belderboss,’ said Father Bernard, smiling. ‘I’m sure He knows what He’s doing.’

‘I think it’s a sign,’ said Mrs Belderboss to Mummer and put her hand on hers. ‘That God will be with us when we go to the shrine.’

‘Yes,’ said Mummer. ‘Perhaps it is.’

‘I’m sure of it,’ Mrs Belderboss replied.

After all, signs and wonders were everywhere.

Father Wilfred had told us time and time again that it was our duty as Christians to see what our faith had taught us to see. And consequently Mummer used to come home from the shop with all kinds of stories about how God had seen fit to reward the good and justly punish the wicked.

The lady who worked at the bookmakers had developed warts on her fingers from handling dirty money all day long. The Wilkinson girl, who had visited the clinic on the Finchley Road that the women at Saint Jude’s talked about in hushed tones, had been knocked down by a car not a week later and had her pelvis snapped beyond repair. Conversely, an elderly lady who came into the shop every week for prayer cards and had spent much of the previous decade raising money for Cafod, won a trip to Fatima.

Mummer would tell us these tales over the dinner table without a flicker of doubt that God’s hand was at work in the world, as it had been in the time of the saints and martyrs, the violent deaths of whom were regularly inflicted upon us as exempla of not only the unconditional oath we had to make to the service of the Lord but of the necessity of suffering.