Andrew Hurley - The Loney

‘He had faith,’ said Mummer. ‘That’s all that’s obvious to me.’

‘It’s not about faith,’ said Farther. ‘It’s about knowing when to admit defeat.’

‘Defeat?’

‘Before someone gets hurt.’

‘I’m not giving up on Andrew now. Where would that leave us?’

‘Esther, it drove that poor man out of his mind in the end that he couldn’t change anything.’

‘I know I can’t change anything,’ Mummer snapped. ‘I’m not saying that I can do anything. I’m asking God.’

Farther sighed and Mummer pushed his hands away.

‘Leave me alone,’ she said.

‘Esther.’

‘Leave me alone with my son.’

‘Don’t do this to him anymore. Don’t do it to yourself. Let’s go home as soon as we can tomorrow. It’s not Bernard’s fault that everything’s gone wrong this week. It’s this place. It’s sick. It’s not good for us.’

‘Listen,’ said Mummer, grabbing Farther’s wrist suddenly. ‘Your faith might have crumbled along with Wilfred’s but don’t try and ruin mine as well.’

Farther tried to prise off her fingers, but she gripped even tighter.

‘Do you know what?’ she said, smiling a little. ‘I think you’re scared.’

Farther stopped struggling.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not me.’ And he nodded to the corner of the room, where a gorilla sat under the shelves of pebbles and driftwood with his arms wrapped around his knees.

***

Hanny has changed beyond all recognition since then, but if I do see anything of the old him it is always through the eyes. There is an honesty of feeling there that betrays everyone, I suppose. And there in that room at Moorings, behind his silly mask, there was a fear that I was to see many years later when I was arrested that night outside his house. A fear that I was going to be taken away and I wouldn’t be able to protect him. He has Caroline, of course, and the boys, but he still needs me. It’s obvious. Not that Baxter agrees. He seems to think I was having some sort of breakdown.

‘We’re definitely getting somewhere, though,’ he said the last time I saw him.

It was a wet, blustery day at the beginning of November, a few days before they found the child at Coldbarrow. The horse chestnut outside his office window was lumbering to and fro, sending its great yellow hands down onto the tennis courts below. They were closed for the winter now. The nets removed and the white lines buried under leaves and seeds. Baxter is a member there, as you might expect. It’s that sort of place. Doctors, dentists, academics. He told me that his mixed doubles partner was doing a post-grad in ancient Hebrew. Lovely girl. Very athletic. Yes, I could imagine Baxter eyeing up her swaying rump as they waited for the serve.

He was standing by the window with a cup of Darjeeling, watching the tree moving in the rain. A clock ticked on the mantelpiece above the fire, which was feeding noisily on a stack of beechwood. He took a sip and set the cup back on the saucer.

‘Do you feel the same?’ he said.

‘I suppose so.’

He looked back outside and smiled to himself.

‘Is that a polite no ?’

‘It’s a polite you tell me .’

He laughed gently and sat down on the leather chair that was facing me.

‘You don’t have to agree, old boy,’ he said. ‘Your brother’s not paying me to make you jump through hoops. I just rather thought you’d turned a corner lately.’

‘In what way?’

‘I think,’ he said, draining his cup and putting it down on his desk. ‘That you’re beginning to genuinely understand your brother’s concerns about you.’

‘Am I?’

‘Mm,’ said Baxter. ‘I think you are. I think that if I asked you, you could explain them very eloquently now.’

‘ Are you asking me?’

He interlaced his fingers and then opened his hands by way of prompting me to speak.

I told him what he wanted to hear and he dutifully jotted it down in his notebook. I told him that I understood Hanny and Caroline were worried about me. That sitting outside their house at all hours was unnecessary. That I shouldn’t blame the neighbour who called the police. Hanny didn’t need me to be his watchman. And the fact that I couldn’t identify the particular threats I felt were ranged against him meant that they were unlikely to exist at all. I had invented them so that that I still felt essential to Hanny, even though he was married and had a family of his own to look after him.

We’d never discussed that last point before but I added it in anyway, knowing that Baxter would be impressed with my self-perception. And I would be a step closer to making him think I was cured.

‘Very good,’ he said, looking up briefly from his notebook. ‘You see, a corner turned. You’re a different man to the one that came to me back in March.’

‘Is that right?’

‘Indeed. I mean there’s a way to go yet before you’re …’

‘Normal?’

‘Happier, I was going to say. But it’s all about little steps, Mr Smith. There’s no point in trying to run and all that.’

‘I suppose not.’

‘And it’s not about pressing you into some sort of societal mould either,’ he said. ‘It’s about getting you to a level of understanding that will allow you interact with others in a more fulfilling, less stressful way.’

He looked down at his fingers and laughed quietly.

‘I don’t often admit this, Mr Smith, but I actually find myself envying my patients from time to time.’

‘How so?’

‘It’s the opportunity that a crisis can bring, I suppose,’ he said. ‘To really look to one’s place in the grand scheme of things. To identify the things that really matter. It’s so easy to bungle through life only experiencing a slender set of emotions and never thinking about why one does what one does. Who was it said, “An unexamined life is not worth living,” Aristotle?’

‘Socrates.’

‘Ah, yes, of course. Well, it’s a sound philosophy whoever came up with it. And one that I’m afraid I cannot live by as well as you, Mr Smith. You are living life. You’re engaging with the struggle. Not like me.’

‘Perhaps you ought to be telling Hanny all this. Then he might understand me.’

Baxter smiled. ‘He will in time,’ he said. ‘You might feel like your relationship is broken, but we humans have an inbuilt urge to fix things. You’ll work it out. Your brother is stronger than you think.’

Hanny slipped away sometime in the night. His bed was empty and his boots and coat were gone. I always slept lightly at Moorings — even more so since Parkinson’s visit — and I wondered how he had managed to leave without waking me. But as I got out of bed I realised that he’d laid towels down on the floorboards so that I didn’t hear him go.

I felt his mattress. It was stone cold. Even the smell of him had vanished. I couldn’t believe he had been so devious and dissembling. It wasn’t like him at all.

In the middle of the room, the pink rug had been turned back and the loose floorboard lifted out. I felt around inside the cavity. The rifle was missing and he had taken the bullets from my coat pocket.

I knew where he had gone, of course. He had gone to Coldbarrow to see Else and his baby.

Downstairs in the kitchen, Monro lifted his head and pined when I came in. I stroked his neck to quieten him down and saw that the floor was littered with the treats Father Bernard had brought for him. Clever Hanny.

Monro sneezed and lay down and went back to chewing the bone shaped biscuits that he discovered one by one in the folds of his blanket.

Outside, a light drizzle, briny and ripe, spread across the fields and its moisture grew on me like fur. The tandem was leaning against the wall, the tyres repaired. That was why Father Bernard had come in so late. He hadn’t been at The Bell and Anchor as Mummer said, but out in the yard in the rain fixing the bike.