The Loney (19 page)

‘It was on the windowledge, you say?’ said Mr Belderboss.

‘Yes,’ said Farther. ‘Stuck between the bars.’

‘Oh, put it down, Reg, it’s absolutely hideous,’ said Mrs Belderboss. ‘No one wants to see that at the breakfast table.’

He looked around at the others and then went back to studying the face on the jar.

‘I don’t see anyone complaining, Mary.’

Mrs Belderboss made a noise of exasperation that Father Bernard caught as he came in through the door.

‘My, my, Mrs Belderboss,’ he said. ‘That sounded like a soul in distress.’

‘Oh, you tell him, Father,’ she said. ‘He won’t listen to me.’

‘About what?’

She gestured to the bottle Mr Belderboss was looking at.

‘He’s obsessing again.’

‘It was in the quarantine room, Father,’ said Mr Belderboss. ‘Between the bars on the window. There’s definitely something inside it.’

He shook the jar and handed it to Father Bernard.

‘Sounds like liquid of some sort. What do you think?’

Father Bernard put it close to his ear and listened as he moved it from side to side.

‘Aye,’ he said. ‘There’s definitely something in there.’

‘Ugly thing, isn’t it?’ said Mr Belderboss.

‘Aye, it is that.’

‘What do you think it is?’ asked Farther.

Father Bernard passed it back to Mr Belderboss and laughed and shook his head.

‘I’m afraid I’ve no idea.’

‘Father Wilfred would have known,’ said Mrs Belderboss. ‘Wouldn’t he, Esther?’

Mummer handed Father Bernard a plate but didn’t look at him.

‘I’m sure he would,’ she said.

‘He’d a doctorate from Oxford,’ said Mrs Belderboss, leaning towards Father Bernard, as he began buttering a slice of toast.

‘Cambridge,’ said Mr Belderboss, without taking his eyes off the jar that he was now turning round and round in his hands.

‘One of those places, anyway,’ said Mrs Belderboss. ‘He was a very clever man.’

‘And so well travelled,’ said Mr Belderboss, shaking the jar gently next to his ear.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Mrs Belderboss. ‘I’d have given my eye-teeth to have gone to some of the places he did. You were very lucky, Joan.’

Father Bernard looked confused. Mrs Belderboss leaned towards him again and smiled at Miss Bunce across the table as she explained.

‘Miss Bunce was lucky enough to accompany Father Wilfred on his trip to the Holy Land last summer. As his personal secretary no less.’

‘Really?’ said Father Bernard, looking at Miss Bunce. ‘Well, well.’

Miss Bunce flushed slightly and scraped off a clod of butter from the block in the middle of the table.

‘Mrs Belderboss makes it sound grander than it was, Father, but it was a wonderful experience,’ she said.

Mummer suddenly remembered there was something she had to do and went out of the room.

It was still a bone of contention with her that Miss Bunce had been picked to go to Jerusalem with Father Wilfred. It wasn’t because she hadn’t been asked herself—she could hardly have accepted anyway, what with the shop to run—but because it was Miss Bunce who
had
.

She put on a front but had soon become utterly sick of the endless talk about the trip and had sat sour-faced through the slide show that had done the rounds of people’s houses during the autumn of 1975: Father Wilfred coming out of the tomb of Lazarus. Father Wilfred standing outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Father Wilfred walking along the Via Dolorosa. Father Wilfred in Al Bustan, waist deep in a crowd of poor, grinning Palestinian children wanting sweets as he tried to find the garden where King David set down the Psalms.

After a while, she came back in with a tray of tea cups and during the silence as she set them out on the table, there was a knock at the front door. Everyone looked up. Father Bernard wiped his mouth and went to see who it was. We heard him speaking to someone in a tone of surprise and then the door to the dining room opened and Clement’s mother appeared, dressed in a long coat—the hem of which met the tops of her wellingtons—and carrying a sack of firewood. Everyone watched as she moved backwards across the room, dragging the sack towards the nook beside the fireplace.

‘Don’t you want some help, Mrs Parry?’ said Mr Belderboss, looking towards Father Bernard, who shrugged in a way that suggested he had already asked her and she had declined.

‘Nay,’ she said and looked up at us. She wasn’t wearing her glasses anymore and her eyes were a bright blue.

‘Where’s Clement?’ asked Mrs Belderboss.

‘He’s out,’ she said, dusting off her hands.

‘Oh,’ said Mrs Belderboss. ‘Well how did you get here?’

She lifted her wellingtons in turn. ‘Shanks’ Pony,’ she said.

‘On your own?’

‘Aye,’ she said.

‘Oh.’

Clement’s mother put her hands in the pockets of her coat and looked at the wood she had brought in.

‘That should be enough for now,’ she said. ‘As long as it dunt get any colder.’

She went to the door and Father Bernard opened it for her.

‘It’s alright,’ she said. ‘I’ll see me sen out.’

Father Bernard watched her as she went down the hallway and out through the front door.

‘I thought she was blind,’ Mrs Belderboss said quietly to her husband.

‘Well, perhaps she had an operation,’ he replied. ‘They can sort out cataracts nowadays can’t they?’

‘Is that what you think it was? Cataracts?’

‘I don’t know. Probably.’

‘That’s astonishing,’ said Mrs Belderboss. ‘It was so quick. We only saw her the other day.’

‘You see what I mean about this place,’ said Mr Belderboss looking around the table. ‘A constant surprise.’

***

After breakfast, I went upstairs and fetched the envelope of money from under the mattress. Mummer was still annoyed about Mrs Belderboss bringing up the Jerusalem trip and was so distracted by all the preparations she needed to make for the visit to the shrine that she agreed we could go out for a few hours.

Hanny wanted to take the tandem. I told him it was broken and pinched the tyres until my fingers met, but he still didn’t understand.

‘Father Bernard said he would mend them,’ I said.

Hanny grasped the handlebars and rocked the bike back and forth, looking at me expectantly.

‘No, Hanny. We can’t ride it yet.’

As a compromise, I let him push it from the kitchen out into the yard, but he was soon distracted by a hare running off down the lane and he left the bike against a stone wall and chased after it. I went into the outbuilding and took a box of bullets out of the drawer. The box was too big, so I took out one of the clips and pushed it deep down into an inside pocket. I would stow it away in the pillbox when I got a chance. And then I could fire the rifle. Send a bullet out over the sea. Practice my aim in case Parkinson and Collier came.

The mist had thinned a little and looking over the fields there was something different that I couldn’t quite place until I got further down the lane.

Hanny had stopped running and held onto the wall, breathing hard and looking across the field at the hare. I stood next to him and watched as it cut a furrow through swathes of fresh green grass that seemed to have appeared overnight.

***

Down at the beach and over the sea, the fog had lingered in the cold air and was so thick that we couldn’t see more than a few yards. We waited and tried to listen for the sound of the sea to gauge whether the tide was in or out. Hanny went and sat on a rock and picked off the dried seaweed. I moved a little further toward the water but was reluctant to go too far in case I lost Hanny in the mist. I looked over at him and he stared back and kissed his fingers.

‘I know, Hanny, I know,’ I said and picked up a stone and pitched it into the fog. It landed with a single thud, and walking a little further I could see that there was only a thin wash of water. The tide was receding. The weed on the rocks was still wet.

‘Come on, Hanny,’ I said. ‘We need to go now.’

Hanny walked off quickly and I had to jog at times to keep up with him. When I finally called to him to wait, he stopped in the mist up ahead.

‘Hold my hand tight,’ I said.

We had come to the last of the timber posts and there was half a mile of open sand that couldn’t be crossed as quickly. The tide had scrubbed away any tracks Leonard’s car might have made and even if I could have roughly remembered the route they had marked, a safe path yesterday could be quite the opposite now.

‘Hold my hand,’ I said again, but Hanny was too distracted and so I took hold of his arm and led him around the standing water.

‘You mustn’t let her kiss you again,’ I said. ‘The man will be cross with you.’

He smiled.

‘I’ll be cross with you too.’

He touched his lips again.

‘No, Hanny.’

He stuck out his tongue and turned away.

‘Listen,’ I said, holding him by the shoulders and nudging his chin with my knuckle so that he faced me. ‘There are men who don’t want us to be here. Men who might hurt you. So we’ve got to be careful about what we do. We just need to give the money back and leave them alone.’

He looked down at his feet.

‘Hanny, I’m serious,’ I said, hitting him a little harder this time. ‘I won’t be able to stop them if they want to hurt you.’

He rubbed his chin and felt around in his coat pockets until he found the plastic dinosaur and handed it to me.

‘You don’t need to say sorry,’ I said. ‘Just don’t do anything stupid.’

He held my hand and we carried on. Not for the first time I wished that I’d brought the rifle. The mist had turned the sands an ashen colour and was so thick that all sense of space was lost. Oystercatchers and gulls would sound far off one moment and then suddenly loud as they flew by. And from time to time there was a steady rumble that I thought at first was thunder or an aeroplane but realised that it was the sea churning its way over the sands, drawing out to its limit, like a bowstring.

***

Leonard’s car was parked outside Thessaly when we got there. The place was Sabbath quiet. I knocked on the door, waited, and then when no one had come after a minute, I knocked again.

Hanny had wandered away to look at the bell tower.

I called him back, but he ignored me. I shouted a little louder, but he was too intent on opening the door and so I went over to try and lead him back to the house.

It was impossible to tell from the mainland, and even from Thessaly one could miss it, but it seemed that there had once been another building there—a chapel, perhaps, by the fragments of stone archways half hidden in the bracken. What had happened to it, I didn’t know. I’d never heard of any place of worship on Coldbarrow. Perhaps they had got it wrong, or the old stories had succumbed to Chinese whispers as old stories do. Perhaps the Devil hadn’t built the tower at all but knocked down the church around it. Perhaps he had built Thessaly from the remains. They were of the same stone after all.

Before I could stop him, Hanny put his shoulder to the door and it grated open enough for us to look inside. Water dripped and something fluttered up to the belfry where the wind murmured around the wooden scaffold that held the bell in place. I wondered if, long ago, they had crept in here to satisfy themselves that Alice Percy was really dead and had stood as quietly as we did now, looking up, watching her turning on the end of the rope, her bare soles curled in rigor mortis.

A stronger gust came in off the sea and swung the bell into a soft tolling. Hanny looked suddenly frightened and started to back away, almost running into Leonard, who had come out of the house and was standing in the door watching us.

‘I didn’t expect to see you two here again so soon,’ he said.

He was dressed down from the last time we’d been here. No jacket or aftershave, just shirt sleeves and corduroys. The kind of thing Farther put on when he was creosoting the fence or touching up the gloss work on the skirting boards.

But Leonard's arms were spattered with dried blood.

He saw me looking and rolled down his sleeves.

‘What do you want?’ he said.

I opened my coat and took out the envelope.

‘I’ve brought this back,’ I said.

Leonard took it from me and frowned.

‘Where did you get this?’ he said, opening the envelope and looking inside.

‘It was in the book your daughter gave Hanny to keep. I don’t think she knew it was in there.’

It was the lie that I thought the least damaging.

‘Daughter?’

‘Else.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘No, I dare say she didn’t know.’

‘It’s all there,’ I said.

‘How do you know that?’ Leonard smiled and looked inside the envelope. ‘Had a quick count of it, did you?’

Hanny was tugging at my sleeve and stroking his stomach.

‘What’s the matter with him?’ said Leonard.

‘He wants to see Else.’

‘Does he now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I’m afraid that isn’t possible.’

From somewhere inside Thessaly there came the sound of a baby crying. Hanny stopped what he was doing and looked at the window at the far end of the house. He smiled. Leonard followed Hanny’s gaze and then looked at me, considered something, and took out several notes from the envelope. He came closer to me, hobbling on his bad leg, and slipped them into the breast pocket of my parka. I went to remove the money but Leonard kept his hand on my chest.

‘Please, it’s the least I can do,’ he said. ‘Since you came all this way to bring it back.’

‘But I don’t want it.’

‘That’s us settled,’ he said. ‘I don’t expect there’s anything else you’ll need to come back for now, is there?’

‘No.’

‘Good lad,’ he said. ‘And those names on that list.’

‘What about them?’

‘Can you remember any of them?’

‘No.’

‘That’s the way,’ he said.

The baby cried again and Leonard nodded towards the lane.

‘On you go then.’

I pulled Hanny away and Leonard watched us go before he went back inside the house. Hanny insisted on walking backwards so that he could keep looking for Else. He kept on stumbling and fell over more than once, on the last occasion refusing point blank to get up. I went to pull him to his feet, but he wrestled out of my grip and kept his eyes fixed on the house.