Andrew Hurley - The Loney

Gregson had christened it Sunny Vale; then it was Rose Cottage, Softsands, Sea Breezes, and lastly Moorings by the taxidermist.

‘It must have been lovely, though, in its heyday,’ said Mrs Belderboss, pushing aside the curtains a little more. ‘What with that view and everything.’

‘Clever landscapers, the Victorians,’ said Farther.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Mr Belderboss. ‘The view was all part of the prophylactic, wasn’t it?’

‘There’s something timeless about it,’ said Mrs Belderboss, looking out at the sea. ‘Don’t you think?’

‘Well, it’s a very old part of the country,’ said Mr Belderboss.

Mrs Belderboss rolled her eyes. ‘It must be the same age as everywhere else, you fool.’

‘Oh, you know what I mean,’ he replied. ‘Untrodden, then. Some of the yew trees up in the woods must have been ancient in the time of Bede. And they do say there are places around here that haven’t been set foot in since the Vikings came.’

Mrs Belderboss scoffed again.

‘It’s true,’ Mr Belderboss replied. ‘A century in this place is nothing. I mean, it’s quite easy to imagine that that book,’ he said, nodding to Miss Bunce’s hands, ‘could have been read by some poor little consumptive only yesterday.’

Miss Bunce put the book down and wiped her hands on her duffle coat, as Mr Belderboss went over to the other side of the room, enthusing over the seascapes of tiny ships under colossal stormclouds that the taxidermist had spent his last years painting. His brushes were still there in a jam jar. His palette had a dry crust of dark oils. And under the dust a rag, a chewed pencil, some loose, pre-decimal change all contributed to the uneasy feeling I always had when I stayed at Moorings, that the taxidermist had merely stepped out to smoke one of his expensive cigars and that he might return at any moment and pop through a door like one of the three bears in the old book, to find a Goldilocks sleeping in every room.

The room Hanny and I shared was at the top of the house where the rooks scrabbled across the slates for the insects in the moss. Every so often, one of the more daring would come to the window-ledge, quite unperturbed that we were watching it, and rake its pencil-sharp beak down the glass with a horrible squeal to nibble out the things living in the decaying woodwork of the frame.

Only when I banged on the window did it finally disappear, flapping away in a peal of grating laughter and sailing in a smooth scoop back up to the others in the woods. Hanny was sad to see it go, but I couldn’t let it stay there. Mummer didn’t care much for those kinds of birds. Crows, ravens, jackdaws and the like. She would even shoo the jays and magpies out of the back garden in London. There was an old saying in her village that they prevented the sick from getting better, and that when they gathered in numbers a death was imminent.

‘Sorry, Hanny,’ I said. ‘We can go and look at them later if you like.’

He took his face away from the window, leaving a little oval of condensation.

‘We ought to unpack,’ I said and nodded to the duffle-bag at his feet. He bent down and handed it to me, looking over my shoulder, his face suddenly brightening at the abundance of interesting junk in the room.

I suppose it was like looking at it anew for him, but to my eyes nothing much had changed. Only the water stains on the ceiling had grown. The dark patches had assumed the shapes of foreign countries, and a succession of tide lines showed how the empire of dampness had expanded year on year since we’d last been.

I put Hanny’s clothes away for him, hung up his coat on the back of the door and set his Lives of the Saints book down on the bedside table. At Pinelands they encouraged them to do these sorts of things for themselves, but Hanny was too excited by what was in the room to care about anything else and took the various objects down one by one to look at them: all the colourful stones and shells, the splints of driftwood, the bottles, cuttlebone, hornwrack, dried twists of coral, mermaids’ purses. There was a whole shelf of scrimshaw: whale teeth polished to the delicacy of bone china and engraved with intricately detailed pictures of schooners and battleships. Against one wall was a chest of drawers that contained specimens of birds’ eggs, each one labelled with common and Latin name and the date it had been found. Some were decades old.

On the floor and on top of the long wardrobes were Victorian curios under dusty glass domes that had always frightened me to death when I was a child. Exotic butterflies, horribly bright, impaled to a stump of silver birch, two squirrels playing cricket in caps and pads, a spider monkey wearing a fez and smoking a pipe.

There were music boxes and broken wind-up toys, grinning marionettes and tin humming tops, and between our beds sat a clock on which the hours were indicated by little paintings of the apostles. Mummer thought it wonderful, of course, and when we were children she told us the story of each of them: how Andrew had elected to be crucified on a saltire; how James was chosen to be with Jesus during the transfiguration and how he was beheaded by Herod Agrippa on his return to Judea; how Matthias had replaced the treacherous Judas and converted the cannibals of Ethiopia.

They had all suffered and toiled so that we could do the same. For God’s work should never be easy.

I touched Hanny lightly on the shoulder and he turned around.

‘Mummer says I’ve to give you a bath,’ I said.

I mimed washing under my armpits and Hanny smiled and went over to a shelf where there was a stuffed mallard.

‘You can’t take that in the bath,’ I said.

He frowned and held onto it tightly.

‘You’ll ruin it, Hanny.’

I fetched some towels and he followed me down the landing to the bathroom. He insisted on bringing the duck with him and sat it on the rim of the bath while he lay there in the foam listening to the wind playing in the pipework and the drains. He nodded and listened and then nodded again.

‘It’s just the wind, Hanny,’ I said. ‘It’s not talking to you.’

He smiled at me and slipped under the water, sending a mushroom of bubbles to the surface. He stayed there for a moment longer than I was comfortable with, and then, just as I was about to reach in and pull him out, he resurfaced open-mouthed and blinking, his mop slapped down over his ears.

I got him out after half an hour. The water was cold and the suds had all dissolved. I dried him slowly in a ritual drummed into me by Mummer. One of the many she insisted Hanny and I follow for the sake of our health, like cleaning our teeth with hot water and cutting our fingernails every other day.

Once he was completely dry, I helped him on with his pyjamas. But he had stopped smiling. His whole body was stiff and uncooperative, making it difficult to get his arms down the sleeves and the buttons done up. I noticed that he was staring past me at the darkening sky outside and then I understood what was wrong. He had realised that we were staying here and he didn’t like it. He wanted to go home.

I settled him into bed and let him pet a stuffed hare that he’d taken a fancy to, hoping it might send him off to sleep. He held it close to him and stroked its ears as I went and sat by the window and tried to look beyond my reflection to the sea, which was rapidly fading in the dusk.

The room went suddenly silent. The rooks had stopped croaking. A stillness settled around the house and over the fields, and everything seemed watchful and timorous.

The night crept in at The Loney, in a way that I’ve never known anywhere else. At home in London, it kept its distance from us, skulking behind the streetlights and the office blocks and could be easily knocked aside in a second by the rush of light and metal from the Metropolitan Line trains that flashed past the end of our garden. But here it was different. There was nothing to keep it away. The moon was cold and distant and the stars were as feeble as the tiny specks of light from the fishing boats way out at sea.