We moved carefully along the ridge and at the end where it sloped down to the road, we pressed ourselves into the sand. Parting the grass with the muzzle I could see the front passenger more clearly now. Mummer would have thought her common the way she was applying lipstick in the mirror of the sun visor, rolling her lips in and out. She was the kind of woman Mummer would have pointed out to Farther. The kind of woman she would have commented on.
Lifting her chin and turning her head, she began clearing up some imperfection in the corner of her open mouth with a folded arrowhead of tissue and then ran the tip of her little finger down her philtrum, giving it a flick at the end.
The driver distracted her for a moment and she turned to face him. There was evidently some kind of disagreement and the woman went back to her preening, impatiently dabbing powder across her cheeks and nose and pausing to shout something half way through the process.
Inching to the right, I could see the girl sitting in the back. She leant forward and tried to intervene, but the adults in the front ignored her and she stared out of the window instead.
She looked straight at me, but didn’t see me. I was careful to stay well hidden. I always was. When I played my games in London, I could be as silent as the dead in the Jewish cemetery. Deader than the dead.
Watching the girl, I didn’t even hear my own breath, only sensed its warmth coming and going on my trigger finger.
Hanny was shaking my arm.
‘What’s the matter?’
He showed me his empty wrist, marked red from his watch strap.
‘Did you drop it?’ I said.
Hanny looked at his wrist again.
The driver finally got out and stood with the door open. He adjusted his tweed trilby, looked up at the seagulls and at the marshes through which they had just driven, his face saying god-forsaken. I heard the clank of a lighter opening; a moment later the wind blew copperblue smoke towards me, bringing the sweet dung smell of the man’s cigar and the woman’s voice.
‘Leonard,’ she said to the man and he ducked down to speak to her.
I caught her name as he lifted his head again and tacked it contemptuously onto the end of his sentence. Laura.
Hanny was scuffling about in the sand looking for his watch. I nudged him to be quiet. Leonard slammed the car door, sending little birds flapping away, and stepped down off the road onto the sand. He walked away and stood watching the injured gull with an amused curiosity. He took off his hat, brushed it with the back of his hand and put it back on.
In his toffee coloured jacket and his expensive shoes, he looked as out of place here as his Daimler. He was a lounge lizard, a spiv, a bent bookie with fingers full of sovereign rings and his blue shirt open two buttons at the collar. A smell of aftershave drifted up from him—a coniferous sap stirred with a fumigant like the stuff Farther sprayed over his roses to kill off the aphids.
Laura got out and fiddled with the boot of the car, eventually unlocking it and calling to Leonard. He sloped back up onto the tarmac and went over to her. They had a conversation that I couldn’t hear properly, then Laura went to open the girl’s door. Leonard grappled with something in the boot, heaved, twisted and finally dragged out a wheelchair that by pressing some lever with his foot sprang open.
Laura held the door and Leonard parked the chair with its seat facing the girl. She inched slowly out, puffing and wincing as she held onto her belly. She was as pregnant as it was possible to be.
Leonard held her hand as she shuffled towards the open door and when she was close enough half fell into the chair, making it creak with her weight. She ran her fingers through her coppery hair and tucked it behind her ears and grimaced again. She was younger than me; thirteen or fourteen, I guessed. One of those girls that every school had. Even the Catholic comps. Girls that Mummer and the other ladies at Saint Jude’s pretended they didn’t like to talk about. They had probably brought her here to have the baby in this deserted place out of shame.
Leonard wheeled her to the edge of the road and carefully down onto the beach, where he headed towards the pillbox, leaving thin tyre tracks and scattering gulls from a pile of weed fizzing with flies. In her heels, Laura followed more slowly, coming to a standstill now and then as she decided how best to negotiate the swathes of wrack and litter.
She was dressed out of her time, somehow, like I imagined fashionable women might have dressed in the 1930s—a bottle green coat with a stole made from an entire fox, a short haircut parted at the side.
Leonard set the wheelchair so that it faced the sea. Laura stayed with the girl and Leonard went off to investigate the pillbox. I put him in the sights and tracked him as he crossed the beach slowly and awkwardly with a gait that suggested a gammy knee. He came to the pillbox, looked at it, removed his shoes and took his hands out of his pockets so that he could swing his arms and get up the drift of sand. Rather satisfyingly, he slipped a few times on his bad leg before he managed to put his fingers into one of the gunslits and pull himself up.
Making a visor with his hands, he peered inside and then suddenly jerked backwards, losing his footing and sliding ridiculously, one leg outstretched and the other crooked in such a way that it rolled him slowly but unavoidably onto his back. His shoes came out of his hand and tumbled away.
He got up, looked to see if anyone had witnessed his fall, and twisted to wipe the sand off his backside, before limping along the foot of the dunes in search of his brogues. He found one nestled in a pile of bladderwrack and stopped right underneath us to put it back on.
Having heard his involuntary cry, Laura made her way towards him.
‘Are you alright?’ she asked.
‘Full of bloody rats,’ Leonard nodded to the pillbox.
Laura smiled to herself and took out a packet of cigarettes.
‘Well you will come to these sorts of places,’ she said, lighting up.
Leonard gave her a look. She walked away and picked up his other shoe, tipped it over, let a stream of sand come out and gave it back. Leonard slipped it on and then bent down to pick up something else—it was Hanny’s watch. He thumbed away the sand, shook it, put it to his ear and then stuck it in his pocket.
I turned to tell Hanny, but he was staring past me over to where the girl was sitting in the wheelchair. The injured gull had stopped shrieking and was hopping tentatively over to her outstretched hand. When it was close to her, it angled its head and nipped at the weed she was holding, its damaged wing held out like a fan. It came again for another feed and stayed this time. The girl stroked its neck and touched its feathers. The bird regarded her for a moment and then lifted off silently, rising, joining the others turning in a wheel under the clouds.
Chapter Nine
Spring drowned The Loney.
Day after day, the rain swept in off the sea in huge, vaporous curtains that licked Coldbarrow from view and then moved inland to drench the cattle fields. The beach turned to brown sludge and the dunes ruptured and sometimes crumbled altogether, so that the sea and the marsh water united in vast lakes, undulating with the carcasses of uprooted trees and bright red carrageen ripped from the sea bed.
Those were the worst days; the days of mist and driving rain, when Moorings dripped and leaked and the air was permanently damp. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do but wait for the weather to change. And sitting by the bay window of the front room watching the water flowing down the fields and the lanes, listening to the rooks barking in the cold woods, filled me with a sense of futility that I can remember even now.
I’ve not said anything to Doctor Baxter about Moorings or The Loney but he says he can tell that I’m harbouring a lot of negativity from the past—his words—and that I ought to try and let it go.
I told him that with me working in a museum the past was something of an occupational hazard and he laughed and wrote something down on his notepad. I can’t seem to do or say anything without him making a note of it. I feel like a damn specimen.
*
**
With everyone stuck indoors, Moorings began to feel more and more cramped, and as we waited for a break in the weather people drifted away from the sitting room to find their own space. Mummer and Mr and Mrs Belderboss split off to different parts of the house to see if they could root out some decent cutlery to use instead of the huge, tarnished implements we’d made do with so far. Farther went to look at the rosemaling on the old furniture in the study. Miss Bunce and David sat at opposite ends of an Ottoman reading. Hanny was upstairs drawing pictures of the girl he had seen at The Loney. The girl and the gull with the broken wing.
Only Father Bernard ventured out, taking Monro on a long walk that brought him back late in the afternoon.
I was in the kitchen, making Hanny some tea, when he came through the door saturated and dripping. He took off his cap and wrung it out on the doorstep. Monro sat beside him, blinking away rainwater and panting.
‘And there’s me thinking that the good Lord promised not to flood the world again,’ he said, hanging his coat on the back of the door. ‘I hope you’ve started work on the ark, Tonto.’
He ruffled his hair with his fingertips and sent Monro off to the corner where there was an old blanket on the floor.
‘Your mother’s been hard at work, I see,’ he said, dusting his hands and going over to the stove where Mummer had something simmering. He lifted the lid and his face was swathed in vapours.
‘God preserve us,’ he said. ‘It’s a good job I have a will of iron. Otherwise I’d have a spoon in this before you could say jack rabbit.’
Mummer appeared and closed the door behind her. Father Bernard put the lid back on the pot and smiled.
‘God bless you, Mrs Smith,’ he said. ‘My old teacher in seminary always said that there was no better way to praise the Lord than feeding a priest. Mind you, I’m not sure whose side you’re on, tempting me like this.’
Mummer folded her arms.
‘We were wondering, Father, if you knew about the arrangements for wet days,’ she said.
Father Bernard’s smile wavered a little. ‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘When it was too wet to go out anywhere,’ said Mummer. ‘Father Wilfred liked to gather everyone together for prayers at ten, noon and four. To give a structure to the day. Otherwise it’s all too easy for people to get distracted. Hunger can do funny things to the mind. Pledges get broken. Father Wilfred always made sure that we stayed focused on our sacrifice so that we would remember the greater one.’
‘I see,’ said Father Bernard.
Mummer looked at her watch.
‘It’s almost four, Father,’ she said. ‘There’s still time. As long as it won’t keep you from whatever else you need to do.’
He looked at her. ‘No, that’s quite alright,’ he said and he went off to dry himself and to change his trousers, while Mummer gathered everyone in the sitting room to wait for him.
‘Give him time,’ Mrs Belderboss was saying as I came in. ‘He’s doing his best.’
‘I’m sure he didn’t need to be out for quite so long,’ Mummer retorted.
‘They need a lot of exercise those sorts of dogs,’ said Mrs Belderboss.
‘Well, perhaps he ought not to have brought his dog with him,’ said Mummer.
‘He couldn’t very well have left it behind now could he? And anyway, I’m sure the boys are enjoying having a dog around, aren’t you?’
She looked at me and smiled.
‘Father Wilfred would never have kept a dog,’ said Mummer.
‘Everyone’s different, Esther.’
‘That’s as may be,’ she replied. ‘But it’s not the dog I’m concerned about.’
‘Oh?’
‘I’m sure I smelled drink on him when he came in just now.’
‘On Father Bernard?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘My father was a drunk, Mary,’ said Mummer. ‘I think I know the stench of ale well enough.’
‘But even so.’
‘I know what I smelled.’
‘Alright, Esther,’ said Mrs Belderboss. ‘Don’t get upset.’
Mummer turned on me and frowned.
‘Instead of earwigging,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you make yourself useful and see to the fire.’
I got up and looked in the wicker basket for a chunk of wood that might last the rest of the afternoon. Mummer sat with her legs crossed, red-faced, her eyes fixed on the door the same way she had watched the road the day we’d met Billy Tapper in the bus shelter. Father Bernard couldn’t come back quickly enough.
I’d learnt by now that my grandfather was a disgrace Mummer liked to keep under the carpet along with my uncle Ian who lived with another man in Hastings and a second cousin who had been twice divorced.
I’d asked her about him a number of times in the past, of course —as all boys are interested in their grandfathers—but I still knew little about him other that he was an alcoholic and a layabout and had spent his short adult life carting his withering liver from one public house to the next until he died one Saturday afternoon in the tap room of The Red Lion, his head on a table of empties.
Eventually, Father Bernard came in, his face red from scrubbing and his hair slicked back over his head. He had his thumb stuck inside his Bible, marking a particular passage that he perhaps thought might redeem him.
‘You must be freezing, Father,’ said Mrs Belderboss, getting up. ‘You have my chair.’
‘No no, Mrs Belderboss, don’t worry about me, I’m like rhubarb.’
‘Come again?’
‘I don’t mind the cold,’ he said.
‘Well, if you’re sure you’re alright,’ Mrs Belderboss said and sat back down.
Mr Belderboss stared out of the window.
‘Will you look at the weather,’ he said.
The rain blustered about the yard and the fields, where mist lingered in stretches over the grass.
‘Do you think we might be able to get out tomorrow, Father?’ said Miss Bunce.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘Perhaps we could listen to the forecast later.’
Mr Belderboss chuckled as he looked at the ancient radio sitting on the sideboard—the sort of dark, wooden thing that would still be broadcasting Churchill’s speeches if we were to turn it on.
‘Oh, you’ll not get a station here, Father,’ he said. ‘It’s the hill you see. Blocks the signal.’
‘Well,’ said Father Bernard. ‘We’ll just have to take it as the Lord gives it. Is that everyone here?’
‘No,’ said Mummer. ‘My husband seems to be dragging his heels somewhere.’ She looked at me and gestured at the door. ‘Go and see where he is.’
I went to get up when Farther appeared, sorting through the huge bunch of keys Clement had left us.
‘Oh, there you are,’ said Mummer. ‘We were about to send out the search party.’
‘Mm?’ Farther said, distracted by a small brass key he had twisted off the ring.
‘Where have you been?’ said Mummer.
‘In the study,’ he replied.
‘All this time? What have you been doing?’
‘I’ve found another room,’ he said.
‘What are you talking about?’ said Mummer.
‘At the back of the study,’ Farther said. ‘There’s a little room. I’ve never seen it before.’
‘Are you sure?’ Mr Belderboss said.
‘You know the old tapestry?’ said Farther. ‘Between the paintings?’
‘Yes?’ replied Mr Belderboss.
‘I knocked it aside by accident and there was a door behind it.’
‘Good Lord,’ said Mr Belderboss.
‘I thought if I could find a key for it, we might be able to get inside and have a look.’
‘Well, it’ll have to wait,’ said Mummer, gaining Farther’s attention for the first time and indicating with her eyes that Father Bernard was poised to lead the prayers.
‘Oh,
sorry, Father,’ he said and sat down.
‘We’re still missing someone,’ said Mrs Belderboss. ‘Where’s Andrew?’
‘He’s upstairs resting,’ I said.
‘Well go and fetch him,’ said Mummer.
‘Oh leave him,’ said Mrs Belderboss.
‘Leave him?’ said Mummer. ‘He ought to be here if we’re praying for him.’
‘He’s tired,’ I said.
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ said Mummer. ‘We’re all tired.’
‘I know,’ said Mrs Belderboss. ‘But with all that noise last night, I should think he slept less than any of us. If he’s settled, it’s probably best to leave him where he is.’
‘I agree with Mary,’ said Mr Belderboss.
Father Bernard cleared his throat. ‘Perhaps we should make a start, Mrs Smith?’
‘Esther?’ said Farther.
‘Yes, alright,’ said Mummer sharply and she leant forward to light the candles set out on the table.
Mrs Belderboss sighed and looked out of the window.
‘I do hope it improves for when we go to the shrine on Monday,’ she said. ‘It won’t be the same if it’s raining, will it Reg?’
‘No,’ said Mr Belderboss. ‘Not like last time, do you remember?’
Mrs Belderboss turned to Father Bernard. ‘It was a glorious day,’ she said. ‘The sun came out just as we arrived. And the flowers were just beautiful. All the magnolias and the azaleas.’
Father Bernard smiled.
‘Everyone was so happy, weren’t they, Reg?’ she went on. ‘Wilfred, especially.’
‘It must be nice to have that memory of your brother, Mr Belderboss,’ said Father Bernard.
Mr Belderboss nodded. ‘I suppose so. They do say that you ought to remember people at their happiest don’t they?’
‘Aye,’ said Father Bernard. ‘I can’t see that there’s much to be gained by doing anything else.’
The Loney Page 8