The Loney (3 page)

‘Ah no, Mrs Smith, he’s well house trained. He’ll just doze off.’

‘It’ll be fine, Esther,’ said Farther and Father Bernard went out to the car and came back with a black Labrador that sneezed on the doormat and shivered and stretched out in front of the fire as if he had always lived at our house.

Mummer offered Father Bernard the single armchair next to the television, a threadbare thing somewhere between olive and beige that Mummer had tried to pretty up with a lace-edged antimacassar, aligned using Farther’s spirit level when she thought no one was looking.

He thanked her and wiped his brow with a handkerchief and sat down. Only when he was settled did everyone else do the same. Mummer clicked her fingers and shot me a look that was the equivalent of a kick up the backside. As with all social occasions at our house, it was my job to distribute the opening round of tea and biscuits, and so I knelt by the table and poured Father Bernard a cup, setting it down on top of the television which had been covered with a starched cloth—the way all the crucifixes and statues were at church now that it was Lent.

‘Thank you, Tonto,’ Father Bernard said, smiling at me conspiratorially.

It was the nickname he’d given to me when he arrived at Saint Jude’s. He was the Lone Ranger and I was Tonto. It was childish, I know, but I suppose I liked the idea of the two of us fighting side by side, like the pals in the
Commando
stories did. Though fighting what, I wasn’t sure. The Devil, maybe. Heathens. Gluttons. Prodigals. The kinds of people Father Wilfred had trained us to despise.

Listening to the armchair groaning under him as he tried to make himself comfortable, I was struck once again by how enormous Father Bernard was. A farmer’s son from Antrim, he was no more than thirty or so, though he looked middle-aged from years of hard graft. He had a solid, heavy face, with a nose that had been bashed flat and a roll of flesh that bulged over the back of his collar. His hair was always well groomed and oiled back over his head to form a solid helmet. But it was his hands that seemed so out of place with the chalice and the pyx. They were large and red and toughened to leather from an adolescence spent building dry stone walls and pinning down bullocks to have their ears notched. If not for the dog collar and his wool-soft voice, he could easily have passed for a doorman or a bank robber.

But, as I say, everyone at Saint Jude’s liked him straightaway. He was that sort of person. Uncomplicated, honest, easy to be with. A man to other men, fatherly to women twice his age. But I could tell that Mummer was reserving judgment. She respected him because he was a priest, of course, but only as far as he more or less replicated Father Wilfred. When he slipped up, Mummer would smile sweetly and touch him lightly on the arm.

‘Father Wilfred would normally have led the Creed in Latin, Father, but it doesn’t matter,’ she said after his first solo mass at Saint Jude’s. And, ‘Father Wilfred would normally have said grace himself,’ when he offered the slot to me over a Sunday lunch that it seemed Mummer had arranged merely to test him on such details.

We altar boys thought Father Bernard was fun—the way he gave us all nicknames and would invite us to the presbytery after Mass. We had, of course, never been asked there by Father Wilfred, and even to most of the adults in the parish it was a place of mystery almost as sacrosanct as the tabernacle. But Father Bernard seemed glad of the company, and once the silverware had been cleaned and put away and our vestments hung in the closet, he would take us across to his home and sit us around the dining table for tea and biscuits and we’d swap stories and jokes to the sound of Matt Monro. Well, I didn’t. I let the other boys do that. I preferred to listen. Or pretend to listen at least and let my eyes wander around the room and try to imagine Father Bernard’s life, what he did when no one else was around, when no one was expecting him to be a priest. I didn’t know if priests could ever knock off. I mean, Farther didn’t spend his free time checking the mortar on the chimney stack or setting up a theodolite in the back garden, so it seemed unfair that a priest should have to be holy all the time. But perhaps it didn’t work like that. Perhaps being a priest was like being a fish. Immersion for life.

***

Now that Father Bernard had been served, everyone else could have their tea. I poured out a cup for each person—finishing one pot and starting on the next—until there was one mug left. Hanny’s mug. The one with a London bus on the side. He always got a cup, even when he was away at Pinelands.

‘How is Andrew?’ Father Bernard asked, as he watched me.

‘Fine, Father,’ Mummer said.

Father Bernard nodded and pulled his face into a smile that acknowledged what she was really saying, beneath the words.

‘He’ll be back at Easter, won’t he?’ said Father Bernard.

‘Yes,’ said Mummer.

‘You’ll be glad to have him home, I’m sure.’

‘Yes,’ said Mummer. ‘Very glad.’

There was an awkward pause. Father Bernard realised that he had strayed into private territory and changed the subject by raising his cup.

‘That’s a lovely brew, Mrs Smith,’ he said and Mummer smiled.

It wasn’t that Mummer didn’t want Hanny at home—she loved him with an intensity that made Farther and I seem like we were merely her acquaintances sometimes—but he reminded her of the test that she still hadn’t passed. And while she delighted in any little advancement Hanny seemed to have made—he might be able to write the first letter of his name, or tie a bootlace, say—they were such small progressions that it still pained her to think of the long road ahead.

‘And it will be a long road,’ Father Wilfred had once told her. ‘It will be full of disappointments and obstacles. But you should rejoice that God has chosen you to walk along it, that He has sent you Andrew as both a test and guide of your soul. He will remind you of your own muteness before God. And when at last he is able to speak, you will be able to speak, and ask of the Lord what you will. Not everyone receives such a chance, Mrs Smith. Be mindful of that.’

The cup of tea that we poured for Hanny that went cold and grew a wrinkled skin of milk was proof that she hadn’t forgotten. It was, strangely, a kind of prayer.

‘So,’ Father Bernard said, putting down his half empty tea cup and declining Mummer’s offer of more. ‘Does anyone have any suggestions about where we ought to go at Easter?’

‘Well,’ said Miss Bunce quickly, glancing at David who nodded encouragement. ‘There’s a place called Glasfynydd.’

‘Where?’ said Mummer, giving the others a sceptical look that Mr and Mrs Belderboss returned with a grin. They had never heard of the place either. It was just Miss Bunce trying to be different. She was young. It wasn’t her fault.

‘Glasfynydd. It’s a retreat on the edge of the Brecon Beacons,’ she said. ‘It’s beautiful. I’ve been lots of times. They have an outdoor church in the wood. Everyone sits on logs.’

No one responded apart from David, who said, ‘That sounds nice,’ and sipped his tea.

‘Alright,’ said Father Bernard after a moment. ‘That’s one idea. Any others?’

‘Well, it’s obvious,’ said Mummer. ‘We should go back to Moorings and visit the shrine.’ And buoyed on by Mr and Mrs Belderboss’s murmurs of excitement in remembering the place, she added, ‘We know how to get there and where everything is and it’s quiet. We can go at Holy Week and take Andrew to the shrine and stay on until Rogationtide to watch the beating of the bounds, like we used to do. It’ll be lovely. The old gang back together.’

‘
I’ve
never been before,’ said Miss Bunce. ‘And neither has David.’

‘Well, you know what I mean,’ said Mummer.

Father Bernard looked round the room.

‘Any other suggestions?’ he said, and while he waited for a response he picked up a custard cream and bit it in half.

No one said anything.

‘In that case,’ he said. ‘I think we ought to be democratic about it. All those who want to go to South Wales …’

Miss Bunce and David raised their hands.

‘All those who want to go back to Moorings …’

Everyone else responded with much more vigour.

‘That’s that then,’ said Father Bernard. ‘Moorings it is.’

‘But you didn’t vote, Father,’ said Miss Bunce.

Father Bernard smiled. ‘I’ve given myself the right to abstain this time, Miss Bunce. I’m happy to go wherever I’m led.’

He grinned again and ate the remainder of his biscuit.

Miss Bunce looked disappointed and shot glances at David, wanting his sympathy. But he shrugged and went over to the table for another cup of tea, which Mummer poured with a flourish, as she relished the prospect of going back to The Loney.

Mr and Mrs Belderboss were already describing the place in minute detail to Father Bernard who nodded and picked another biscuit from his plate.

‘And the shrine, Father,’ said Mrs Belderboss. ‘It’s just beautiful, isn’t it, Reg?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Mr Belderboss. ‘Quite a little paradise.’

‘So many flowers.’ Mrs Belderboss chipped in.

‘And the water’s so clean,’ said Mr Belderboss. ‘Isn’t it, Esther?’

‘Like crystal,’ said Mummer, as she passed the sofa.

She smiled at Father Bernard and went to offer Miss Bunce a biscuit, which she took with a
thankyou
that could have drawn blood. Mummer nodded and moved on. At Moorings, she knew she could beat Miss Bunce and her Glasfynydd hands down, being on home turf as it were.

She had grown up on the north-west coast, within spitting distance of The Loney and the place still buttered the edges of her accent even though she had long since left and had lived in London for twenty years or more. She still called sparrows spaddies, starlings sheppies, and when we were young she would sing us rhymes that no one outside her village had ever heard.

She made us eat hot pot and tripe salads and longed to find the same curd tarts she had eaten as a girl; artery-clogging fancies made from the first milk a cow gave after calving.

It seemed that where she grew up almost every other day had been the feast of some saint or other. And even though hardly any of them were upheld any more, even by the most ardent at Saint Jude’s, Mummer remembered every one and all the various accompanying rituals, which she insisted on performing at home.

On Saint John’s day a metal cross was passed through a candle flame three times to symbolise the holy protection John had received when he went back into his burning house to rescue the lepers and the cripples staying there.

In October, on the feast of Saint Francis of Assisi, we would go to the park and collect autumn leaves and twigs and fashion them into crosses for the altar at Saint Jude’s.

And on the first Sunday in May—as the people of Mummer’s village had done since time immemorial—we would go out into the garden before Mass and wash our faces in the dew.

There was something special about The Loney. To Mummer, Saint Anne’s shrine was second only to Lourdes; the two mile walk across the fields from Moorings was her Camino de Santiago. She was convinced that there and only there would Hanny stand any chance of being cured.

H
anny came home from Pinelands at the start of the Easter holidays, bristling with excitement.

Even before Farther had turned off the car engine, he was running down the drive to show me the new watch Mummer had given him. I had seen it in the window of the shop where she worked. A heavy, golden-coloured thing with a picture of Golgotha on the face and an inscription from Matthew on the back:

Therefore, be aware. Because you do not know the day or the hour.

‘That’s nice, Hanny,’ I said and gave it back to him.

He snatched it off me and slipped it on his wrist before handing over a term’s worth of drawings and paintings. They were all for me. They always were. Never for Mummer or Farther.

‘He’s very glad to be home, aren’t you, Andrew?’ said Mummer, holding the door open for Farther to bundle Hanny’s suitcase through the porch.

She tidied Hanny’s hair with her fingers and held him by the shoulders.

‘We’ve told him that we’re going back to Moorings,’ she said. ‘He’s looking forward to it already. Aren’t you?’

But Hanny was more interested in measuring me. He put his palm on the top of my head and slid his hand back towards his Adam’s apple. He had grown again.

Satisfied that he was still the bigger of the two of us, he went up the stairs as noisily as he always did, the banister creaking as he hauled himself from step to step.

I went into the kitchen to make him a cup of tea in his London bus mug and when I found him in his room he still had on the old raincoat of Farther’s that he had taken a shine to years before and insisted on wearing whatever the weather. He was standing by the window with his back to me looking at the houses on the other side of the street and the traffic going by.

‘Are you alright, Hanny?’

He didn’t move.

‘Give me your coat,’ I said. ‘I’ll hang it up for you.’

He turned and looked at me.

‘Your coat, Hanny,’ I said, shaking his sleeve.

He watched me as I undid the buttons for him and hung it on the peg on the back of the door. It weighed a ton with all the things he kept in the pockets to communicate with me. A rabbit’s tooth meant he was hungry. A jar of nails was one of his headaches. He apologised with a plastic dinosaur and put on a rubber gorilla mask when he was frightened. He used combinations of these things sometimes and although Mummer and Farther pretended they knew what it all meant, only I really understood him. We had our world and Mummer and Farther had theirs. It wasn’t their fault. Nor was it ours. That’s just the way it was. And still is. We’re closer than people can imagine. No one, not even Doctor Baxter, really understands that.

Hanny patted the bed and I sat down while he went through his paintings of animals and flowers and houses. His teachers. Other residents.

The last painting was different, though. It was of two stick figures standing on a beach littered with starfish and shells. The sea behind them was a bright blue wall that rose like a tsunami. To the left were yellow mountains topped with mohicans of green grass.