Andrew Hurley - The Loney

But today the glass was opaque with snow, making the basement even gloomier. The strip lights don’t do much apart from create shadows, if I’m honest, and so I switched on the angle poise lamp and sat down.

For the past few weeks, I had been working on a set of Victorian wildlife books that had been donated from the sale of some laird’s estate up in Scotland. Encyclopaedias of flora and fauna. Manuals of veterinary science. Copious volumes about badgers and foxes and eagles and other reprehensible predators. Their habits and breeding patterns and the many ways to cull them. They were in a reasonable condition, given that they had been languishing in a gillie’s hut for years, but the leather covers would have to be replaced and the pages re-sewn if anyone was ever going to read them again. Someone would. There was always someone who would find such things fascinating. Academics might take pains to go through all the details, but what was of interest to the museum, the bit of social history they could sell to the public, was the handwritten marginalia. The little insights of the anonymous gamekeeper who had stalked the moors of the estate and kept his master’s animals safe for nigh on fifty years.

Notes about the weather and nesting sites were strewn around the sketches he had made of the things he had had to kill in order to protect the deer and the grouse. A fox caught in a snare. An osprey spread-eagled by shotgun pellets. They seemed at first glance, gruesome, boastful things, no better than hanging trophy heads along a hallway, or rats along a fence, but the detail of feathers and fur and eyes that he had taken time to render with his fine pencil made it clear that he loved them dearly.

It was, to him, no different to pruning a garden, I suppose. The gillie hadn’t hated these animals for following their instincts of survival anymore than a gardener hates his plants for growing. It was a necessary mastery that he exercised over the estate. Without him, there would have been nothing but chaos, and I suspect that it’s reverted back to wilderness now that there’s no one looking after it anymore.

I worked for an hour or more until I heard the doors at the other end of the basement opening. I put my glasses down on the desk (I have become short-sighted in recent years) and looked around the shelves. Helen appeared, her coat over her arm.

‘Are you there?’ she called, making a visor with her mittened hand and peering through the shadows.

I got up from the desk.

‘Yes? What is it?’

‘Good news. We can go home,’ she said.

‘Home?’

‘They’re going to close the museum because of the snow.’

‘I’ve got work to finish off.’

‘You don’t have to do it,’ said Helen. ‘Everyone else is leaving.’

‘All the same. I’d like to get it done.’

‘It’s really coming down out there,’ she said. ‘I’d get going if I were you. Otherwise you might be stuck here all night. If you need a lift, I can take you as far as Paddington.’

She had come further towards me now and stood at the end of the 990s: history of New Zealand to extraterrestrial worlds .

‘I don’t mind,’ she said.

‘It’s out of your way,’ I replied.

‘It doesn’t have to be.’

I looked back at the book on the desk.

‘I’ve too much to do to go home,’ I said. ‘Haven’t you?’

She looked at me, gave me that frown smile again and zipped up her coat.

‘I’ll see you on Monday,’ she said and went back towards the door and the basement became silent again apart from the steady tick of the central heating.

I returned to the book and gently removed the stitching from the spine of McKay’s Prevention of Galliforme Diseases with a pair of tweezers before dropping the brittle strands of thread into the bin. No, it was better that I stayed here. It wasn’t fair to ask Helen to drive a mile out of her way in this weather. And they would only start gossiping again if they saw us together in her car.

***

I didn’t stop working until hours later. It was three in the afternoon. I hadn’t eaten any lunch, but I wasn’t hungry, and I often lose track of time down there in the basement anyway, separated as I am from the world of scurrying feet above. A day could sometimes easily pass without me once looking up from what I was doing.

I switched on the kettle to make tea and as it boiled I looked up at the glass panel. It glowed with a buttery light and I wondered if it had stopped snowing at last and the sun had come out. Whatever, it would be going dark before long.

I sat back down at the desk but hadn’t taken a sip before there was someone knocking at the door. It wasn’t Helen come back to rescue me, I knew that. She had keys. Most likely it was Jim, the caretaker, who I’d fought tooth and nail to keep out of the basement with his anti-bacterial sprays and his polish and his propensity for throwing things away. He’d always been a little abrupt with me since I’d had his key off him and rattled the ones he had left in a plaintive way, it seemed, as though without the full set he felt somehow emasculated.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t dislike him. I’d just rather it was me who kept the place clean and tidy. Jim doesn’t really get the idea of an archive, keeping things. I quite admire him in many ways and had half expected him to have stuck around that afternoon. He’s a stubborn old sod like me and wouldn’t have gone home just because it was snowing.

I put the cup down and went to open the door. Jim stood there — brown overcoat and navy tattoos — his mace-head of keys hanging from his belt.

‘Yes?’

‘Visitor for you,’ he said, stepping aside.

‘Hanny?’ I tried to sound surprised, but I knew with all this business at Coldbarrow that he would come to see me sooner or later.

‘Hello, brother,’ he said as he sidled past Jim and shook my hand.

‘I’m locking up at four,’ said Jim pointedly and wandered off up the stairs, jangling his keys.

‘What are you doing here?’ I said and gestured for Hanny to go down to my desk as I closed the door. He was damp with snow and his scarf was caked in ice.

‘I rang the flat, but there was no answer,’ he said. ‘I must admit I thought you’d be at home today.’

‘I’ve too much to do,’ I replied.

‘You work too hard.’

‘Pot. Kettle.’

‘Well, you do.’

‘Is there any other way to work?’

He laughed. ‘No, I suppose not, brother.’

‘Tea?’

‘If you’re having one.’

I made Hanny a cup as he draped his wet things over the radiator.

‘Don’t you get lonely down here, brother,’ he said, looking up at the glass panel.

‘Not at all.’

‘But you do work alone?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘You said that with some conviction.’

‘Well, there was someone else once.’

‘What happened to them?’

‘She wasn’t quite suited.’

‘To what?’

‘To detail.’

‘I see.’

‘It’s important, Hanny.’

‘It must be.’

‘It’s not easy staying focused all day,’ I said. ‘It takes a particular type of mind.’

‘Like yours.’

‘Evidently.’

Hanny took the cup of tea off me and pressed the back of his thighs against the radiator. He looked up at me, went to say something, but stopped short and changed tack.

‘How are things going with Doctor Baxter?’ he asked.

‘Baxter? Alright I suppose.’

‘He said you were making progress last time I spoke to him.’

‘I thought our sessions were meant to be confidential.’

‘They are, you fool,’ said Hanny dismissively. ‘He didn’t give me any details. He just said you’d turned a corner.’