Andrew Hurley - The Loney

‘But she’s wearing glasses,’ said Miss Bunce.

Mrs Belderboss laughed. ‘I know. She’s a funny old bird.’

Clement watched us as we pulled up in front of the house. Father Bernard waved to him, but he just stared like his mother.

There were unkind whispers about him, as there always are in such places about quiet, lonely men, but the general consensus was that he was harmless. And although the pig farm he kept with his mother was a desolate and ramshackle place thrown way out on the windswept fields south of Moorings, I got the impression that it was not out of neglect that it was in such poor repair. His mother took as much looking after as the swine by all accounts. Poor Clement. I always thought of him as something akin to a shire horse; in build and temperament. Clumping. Plodding. Head down in deference. Dependable to a fault.

The taxidermist’s son could hardly have checked up on him all the way from Kowloon but he paid him to look after Moorings all the same, safe in the knowledge that Clement didn’t have the brains to rip him off.

Everyone got out of the minibus and stretched. Miss Bunce buttoned up her coat and wrapped her arms around herself, pacing back and forth to keep warm, while David fetched her bags. Mr Belderboss struggled down the metal step with Farther taking his weight and Mrs Belderboss fussing around him like a moth.

Father Bernard put on his jacket, zipped it up to the neck and went over to Clement, bidding us to follow him.

As we got closer, Clement started to look confused.

‘Where’s t’other feller?’ he said.

‘Sorry?’

‘The priest.’

‘Father Wilfred? Didn’t anyone tell you? He passed away.’

‘Died did he?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘How?’

Father Bernard looked at us and then said, ‘I’m Father McGill, if that’s any good.’

‘You’re a priest an all?’ said Clement.

‘For my sins, aye,’ Father Bernard smiled and Clement shook his hand with relief.

Father Bernard paused and looked at Clement’s mother, waiting to be introduced.

‘Mother,’ said Clement, and the old lady jerked into life and held out her hand.

Father Bernard took it and said, ‘Good to meet you.’

The old lady said nothing.

‘Go and wait in the van,’ said Clement.

She remained expressionless.

‘I said wait in the van.’ Clement nudged her and she set off with her stick, driving a wedge through the crowd of us standing there.

As she went past, she lifted up her glasses and looked at me with her grey milky eyes that were slick and glossy like the underside of a slug.

‘Do you want to come inside?’ said Clement.

‘Aye, ’tis a bit raw,’ said Father Bernard.

‘Rooks say we’ll have a good summer, though.’

‘How’s that?’

Clement pointed past the house to the woods where several dozen of the birds were going in and out of their nests.

‘Building them right high up this year,’ he said.

‘That’s good,’ said Father Bernard.

‘Aye, but it’s not normal,’ Clement mumbled.

He turned up the path to the front door along the miniature boulevard of apple trees that were still winter-naked, their branches speckled with blight like the putrefying windfallen fruit that lay underneath them. There was always something rather sad about those trees, I thought. The way they dutifully grew their produce every summer only for it to blacken and fall off uncollected.

Every movement of Clement’s was slow and heavy and it took an age for him to find the right key. Once the house was open, Mummer muscled her way through to the front and led everyone along the hall that, as it had always done in the past, smelled of cigars and spent matches and the air had a hard, porcelain coldness to it.

‘Sitting room, drawing room, lavatory,’ she said as she turned the handle of each door.

Mr and Mrs Belderboss followed her down the hall and back, delighted at finding things in exactly the same place as they had always been and having new people to show around, although Miss Bunce seemed reluctant to go much further than the dead grandfather clock by the front door. She looked up anxiously as the bare bulb that illuminated the hallway faded and then came back on, brighter than it had been before.

‘It’s only the wind,’ said Mummer.

‘It catches on the wires,’ said Clement who was still lingering at the threshold.

I noticed for the first time that he was wearing a wooden crucifix around his neck. One he had made himself by the look of it. Two chunks of split wood bound with string.

‘There you are,’ said Mummer. ‘It catches on the wires.’

Clement adjusted his cap and turned to go.

‘I’ll bring thee some more firewood in a day or two,’ he said, nodding to the bags lined up in the hallway.

‘Are you sure you need to, Clement? It looks like there’s enough there for a month,’ said Father Bernard.

Clement frowned and looked very serious. ‘Quite sure, Father. When the wind gets down the chimney it draws the heart out of the fire in no time,’ he said.

‘Is there bad weather on the way?’ asked Father Bernard.

‘There usually is,’ Clement replied.

Miss Bunce smiled thinly as he looked at us all one last time and closed the door.

‘Now, come on Joan,’ said Mr Belderboss, once Clement had left. ‘There’s nothing to worry about.’

And he took her arm and led her past the peeling wallpaper and the oil paintings of wild seascapes into the sitting room to show her the amount of expensive objects that had been left by the taxidermist. Something that charmed him and bewildered him in equal measure.

At his bidding, everyone else followed and listened as he pointed out the delicate knick-knacks worth hundreds apiece.

‘Ah, now then,’ he said, plucking out a small clay pipe from a wooden box lying on the windowledge. ‘This is interesting. You can still see the teeth marks on the stem. Look.’

He offered it to Mummer but she frowned and he put it back where he found it, making a beeline for Miss Bunce whose attention had been taken by the books on the rosewood Davenport by the window.

Among them was a first edition of The Island of Doctor Moreau , one bound in leather that looked to have been signed by Longfellow, and a children’s pop-up book of Goldilocks and the Three Bears , that Miss Bunce began to read, turning the fragile pages slowly. Late Victorian, Mr Belderboss reckoned, about the same time Moorings was finished.

‘Chap called Gregson built it,’ said Mr Belderboss. ‘Cotton mill owner. That’s what they were round here, wasn’t it, Esther? Cotton men?’

‘Yes,’ said Mummer. ‘Cotton or linen.’

‘There’s a photograph of him and his missus somewhere,’ said Mr Belderboss looking around the room. ‘Was it seven children they had, Mary? It might have been more. I don’t think many of them saw their fifth birthday, mind you. TB and all that. That’s why they built these sorts of places. To keep their little ’uns alive. They thought the sea air would do them good.’

‘They built them to last, as well,’ said Farther, smoothing his hand over the plaster. ‘They must be a yard thick these walls.’

Miss Bunce looked around her and then out of the window, unconvinced, it seemed, that anyone who stayed here would leave the place healthier than when they came in.

It came as no surprise to her when Mr Belderboss explained how the house had changed hands many times since it had been built and carefully renamed by each successive occupant in an attempt to make it deliver what it seemed to promise sometimes, sitting there quietly under the gentle ruffling of the wood and the flour soft clouds.