The Loney Read online

***

  It’s odd, but when I was a child there were certain things that were so clear to me and their outcomes so inevitable that I thought I had a kind of sixth sense. A gift of foresight, like that of Elijah or Ezekiel, who had predicted drought and destruction with such unsettling accuracy.

  I remember Hanny once swinging over a pond on The Heath and knowing, knowing, that the rope would break, which it did; like I knew that the stray cat he brought back from the park would end up minced on the tube line, and that he would drop the bowl of goldfish he’d won at the fair on the kitchen floor as soon as we got home.

  In the same way, I knew after that conversation around the dinner table that Billy was going to die soon. The thought came to me as an established fact; as though it had already come to pass. No one could live like that for long. Being that filthy took so much effort that I was sure that the same merciful God who sent a whale to save Jonah and gave Noah a nod about the weather, would put him out of his misery.

  Chapter Three

  That Easter was the last time we went to the Loney for several years.

  After the evening when he’d set us straight about Billy Tapper over supper, Father Wilfred changed in a way that no one could quite explain or understand. They put it down to him getting too old for the whole thing—after all it was a long journey up from London and the pressure of being shepherd to his flock during such an intense week of prayer and reflection was enough to wear out a man half his age. He was tired. That was all.

  But as I had the uncanny knack of sensing the truth about things, I knew that it was something far more than that. There was something very wrong.

  After the conversation about Billy had petered out and everyone had settled in the living room, he’d walked down to the beach and come back a different man. Distracted. Rattled by something. He complained rather unconvincingly of a stomach upset and went to lie down, locking his door with an emphatic swipe of the bolt. A little while later I heard noises coming from his room, and I realised he was crying. I’d never heard a man cry before, only one of the mentally disadvantaged lot that came to do crafts at the parish hall once a fortnight with Mummer and some of the other ladies. It was a noise of fear and despair.

  The next morning when he finally rose, dishevelled and still agitated, he muttered something about the sea and went out with his camera before anyone could ask him what was wrong. It wasn’t like him to be so offhand. Nor for him to sleep in so late. He wasn’t himself at all.

  Everyone watched him walking down the lane and decided it was best to leave as soon as possible, convinced that once he was back at Saint Jude’s he would quickly recover.

  But when we returned home, his mood of fretfulness barely altered. In his sermons he seemed more worked up than ever about the ubiquitous evils of the world and any mention of the pilgrimage cast a shadow over his face and sent him into a kind of anxious daydream. After a while no one talked about going there anymore. It was just something that we used to do.

  Life pulled us along and we forgot about The Loney until 1976 when Father Wilfred died suddenly in the new year and Father Bernard McGill was relocated from some violent parish in New Cross to take on Saint Jude’s in his stead.

  After his inaugural mass, at which the bishop presented him to the congregation, we had tea and cakes on the presbytery lawn so that Father Bernard could meet his parishioners in a less formal setting.

  He ingratiated himself straight away and seemed at ease with everyone. He had that way about him. An easy charm that made the old boys laugh and the women subconsciously preen themselves.

  As he went from group to group, the bishop wandered over to Mummer and me, trying to eat a large piece of Dundee cake in as dignified a manner as possible. He had taken off his robes and his surplice but kept on his plum-coloured cassock, so that he stood out amongst the browns and greys of the civilians as a man of importance.

  ‘He seems nice, your grace,’ said Mummer.

  ‘Indeed,’ the bishop replied in his Midlothian accent that for some reason always made me think of wet moss.

  He watched Father Bernard send Mr Belderboss into fits of laughter.

  ‘He performed wonders to behold in his last parish.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ said Mummer.

  ‘Very good at encouraging the young folk to attend,’ the bishop said, looking at me with the specious grin of a teacher who wishes to punish and befriend in equal measure and ends up doing neither.

  ‘Oh my lad’s an altar boy, your grace,’ Mummer replied.

  ‘Is he?’ said the bishop. ‘Well good show. Father Bernard’s quite at home with the teens as well as the more mature members of the congregation.’

  ‘Well if he comes on your recommendation, your grace, I’m sure he’ll do well,’ said Mummer.

  ‘Oh, I don’t doubt it,’ the bishop replied, brushing crumbs off his stomach with the back of his hand. ‘He’ll be able to steer you all through safe waters, make good around the capes, as it were.’

  ‘In fact my sailing analogy is quite apt,’ he said, looking into the middle distance and awarding himself a smile. ‘You see, I’m rather keen on Father Bernard taking the congregation out into the wider world. I don’t know about you but I’m of the opinion that if one is cosseted by the familiar, faith becomes stagnant.’

  ‘Well, if you think so, your grace,’ said Mummer.

  The bishop turned to Mummer and smiled in that self-satisfied way again.

  ‘Do I detect that there may be some resistance to the idea, Mrs …?’

  ‘Smith,’ she said, then, seeing that the bishop was waiting for her to answer, she went on. ‘Perhaps there might be, your grace, among the older members. They’re not keen on things changing.’

  ‘Nor should they be, Mrs Smith. Nor should they be,’ he said. ‘Rest assured, I rather like to think of the appointment of a new incumbent as an organic process; a new shoot off the old vine, if you like; a continuum rather than a revolution. And in any case I wasn’t suggesting that you went off to the far flung corners of the earth. I was thinking of Father Bernard taking a group away on a retreat at Easter time. It was a tradition that I know was very dear to Wilfred’s heart, and one that I always thought worthwhile myself.

  ‘It’d be a nice way to remember him,’ he added. ‘And a chance to look forward to the future. A continuum, Mrs Smith, as I say.’

  The sound of someone knocking a knife against a glass started to rise over the babble in the garden.

  ‘Ah, you’ll have to excuse me, I’m afraid,’ said the bishop, dabbing crumbs from his lips. ‘Duty calls.’

  He went off towards the trestle table that had been set up by the rose bushes, his cassock flapping around his ankles and getting wet.

  When he had gone, Mrs Belderboss appeared at Mummer’s side.

  ‘You were having a long chat with his grace,’ she said, nudging Mummer playfully in the arm. ‘What were you talking about?’

  Mummer smiled. ‘I have some wonderful news,’ she said.

  ***

  A few weeks later, Mummer organised a meeting of interested parties so as to get the ball rolling before the bishop could change his mind, as he was wont to do. She suggested that everyone come to our house to discuss where they might go, although Mummer had only one place in mind.

  On the night she had set aside, they came in out of the rain, smelling of the damp and their dinners: Mr and Mrs Belderboss, and Miss Bunce, the presbytery housekeeper, and her fiancé, David Hobbs. They hung up their coats in the little porch with its cracked tiles and its intractable odour of feet and gathered in our front room anxiously watching the clock on the mantelpiece, with the tea things all set out, unable to relax until Father Bernard arrived.

  Eventually, the bell went and everyone got to their feet as Mummer opened the door. Father Bernard stood there with his shoulders hunched in the rain.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ said Mummer.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Smith.’

  ‘Are you well,
Father?’ she said. ‘You’re not too wet I hope.’

  ‘No, no, Mrs Smith,’ said Father Bernard, his feet squelching inside his shoes. ‘I like the rain.’

  Unsure if he was being sarcastic, Mummer’s smile wavered a little. It wasn’t a trait she knew in priests. Father Wilfred had never been anything other than deadly serious.

  ‘Good for the flowers,’ was all she could offer.

  ‘Aye,’ said Father Bernard.

  He looked back at his car.

  ‘I wonder, Mrs Smith, how you’d feel about me bringing in Monro. He doesn’t like being on his own and the rain on the roof sends him a wee bit crackers, you know.’

  ‘Monro?’ said Mummer, peering past him.

  ‘After Matt.’

  ‘Matt?’

  ‘Matt Monro,’ said Father Bernard. ‘My one and only vice, Mrs Smith, I can assure you. I’ve had long consultations with the Lord about it, but I think he’s given me up as a lost cause.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Mummer. ‘Who are you talking about?’

  ‘The daft feller mooning at the window there.’

  ‘Your dog?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mummer. ‘Well, I suppose that’ll be alright. He won’t, you know, will he?’

  ‘Ah no, Mrs Smith, he’s well house trained. He’ll just doze off.’

  ‘It’ll be fine, Esther,’ said Farther and Father Bernard went out to the car and came back with a black Labrador that sneezed on the doormat and shivered and stretched out in front of the fire as if he had always lived at our house.

  Mummer offered Father Bernard the single armchair next to the television, a threadbare thing somewhere between olive and beige that Mummer had tried to pretty up with a lace-edged antimacassar, aligned using Farther’s spirit level when she thought no one was looking.

  He thanked her and wiped his brow with a handkerchief and sat down. Only when he was settled did everyone else do the same. Mummer clicked her fingers and shot me a look that was the equivalent of a kick up the backside. As with all social occasions at our house, it was my job to distribute the opening round of tea and biscuits, and so I knelt by the table and poured Father Bernard a cup, setting it down on top of the television which had been covered with a starched cloth—the way all the crucifixes and statues were at church now that it was Lent.

  ‘Thank you, Tonto,’ Father Bernard said, smiling at me conspiratorially.

  It was the nickname he’d given to me when he arrived at Saint Jude’s. He was the Lone Ranger and I was Tonto. It was childish, I know, but I suppose I liked the idea of the two of us fighting side by side, like the pals in the Commando stories did. Though fighting what, I wasn’t sure. The Devil, maybe. Heathens. Gluttons. Prodigals. The kinds of people Father Wilfred had trained us to despise.

  Listening to the armchair groaning under him as he tried to make himself comfortable, I was struck once again by how enormous Father Bernard was. A farmer’s son from Antrim, he was no more than thirty or so, though he looked middle-aged from years of hard graft. He had a solid, heavy face, with a nose that had been bashed flat and a roll of flesh that bulged over the back of his collar. His hair was always well groomed and oiled back over his head to form a solid helmet. But it was his hands that seemed so out of place with the chalice and the pyx. They were large and red and toughened to leather from an adolescence spent building dry stone walls and pinning down bullocks to have their ears notched. If not for the dog collar and his wool-soft voice, he could easily have passed for a doorman or a bank robber.

  But, as I say, everyone at Saint Jude’s liked him straightaway. He was that sort of person. Uncomplicated, honest, easy to be with. A man to other men, fatherly to women twice his age. But I could tell that Mummer was reserving judgment. She respected him because he was a priest, of course, but only as far as he more or less replicated Father Wilfred. When he slipped up, Mummer would smile sweetly and touch him lightly on the arm.

  ‘Father Wilfred would normally have led the Creed in Latin, Father, but it doesn’t matter,’ she said after his first solo mass at Saint Jude’s. And, ‘Father Wilfred would normally have said grace himself,’ when he offered the slot to me over a Sunday lunch that it seemed Mummer had arranged merely to test him on such details.

  We altar boys thought Father Bernard was fun—the way he gave us all nicknames and would invite us to the presbytery after Mass. We had, of course, never been asked there by Father Wilfred, and even to most of the adults in the parish it was a place of mystery almost as sacrosanct as the tabernacle. But Father Bernard seemed glad of the company, and once the silverware had been cleaned and put away and our vestments hung in the closet, he would take us across to his home and sit us around the dining table for tea and biscuits and we’d swap stories and jokes to the sound of Matt Monro. Well, I didn’t. I let the other boys do that. I preferred to listen. Or pretend to listen at least and let my eyes wander around the room and try to imagine Father Bernard’s life, what he did when no one else was around, when no one was expecting him to be a priest. I didn’t know if priests could ever knock off. I mean, Farther didn’t spend his free time checking the mortar on the chimney stack or setting up a theodolite in the back garden, so it seemed unfair that a priest should have to be holy all the time. But perhaps it didn’t work like that. Perhaps being a priest was like being a fish. Immersion for life.

  ***

  Now that Father Bernard had been served, everyone else could have their tea. I poured out a cup for each person—finishing one pot and starting on the next—until there was one mug left. Hanny’s mug. The one with a London bus on the side. He always got a cup, even when he was away at Pinelands.

  ‘How is Andrew?’ Father Bernard asked, as he watched me.

  ‘Fine, Father,’ Mummer said.

  Father Bernard nodded and pulled his face into a smile that acknowledged what she was really saying, beneath the words.

  ‘He’ll be back at Easter, won’t he?’ said Father Bernard.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mummer.

  ‘You’ll be glad to have him home, I’m sure.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mummer. ‘Very glad.’

  There was an awkward pause. Father Bernard realised that he had strayed into private territory and changed the subject by raising his cup.

  ‘That’s a lovely brew, Mrs Smith,’ he said and Mummer smiled.

  It wasn’t that Mummer didn’t want Hanny at home—she loved him with an intensity that made Farther and I seem like we were merely her acquaintances sometimes—but he reminded her of the test that she still hadn’t passed. And while she delighted in any little advancement Hanny seemed to have made—he might be able to write the first letter of his name, or tie a bootlace, say—they were such small progressions that it still pained her to think of the long road ahead.

  ‘And it will be a long road,’ Father Wilfred had once told her. ‘It will be full of disappointments and obstacles. But you should rejoice that God has chosen you to walk along it, that He has sent you Andrew as both a test and guide of your soul. He will remind you of your own muteness before God. And when at last he is able to speak, you will be able to speak, and ask of the Lord what you will. Not everyone receives such a chance, Mrs Smith. Be mindful of that.’

  The cup of tea that we poured for Hanny that went cold and grew a wrinkled skin of milk was proof that she hadn’t forgotten. It was, strangely, a kind of prayer.

  ‘So,’ Father Bernard said, putting down his half empty tea cup and declining Mummer’s offer of more. ‘Does anyone have any suggestions about where we ought to go at Easter?’

  ‘Well,’ said Miss Bunce quickly, glancing at David who nodded encouragement. ‘There’s a place called Glasfynydd.’

  ‘Where?’ said Mummer, giving the others a sceptical look that Mr and Mrs Belderboss returned with a grin. They had never heard of the place either. It was just Miss Bunce trying to be different. She was young. It wasn’t her fault.

  ‘Glasfynydd. It’s a retre
at on the edge of the Brecon Beacons,’ she said. ‘It’s beautiful. I’ve been lots of times. They have an outdoor church in the wood. Everyone sits on logs.’

  No one responded apart from David, who said, ‘That sounds nice,’ and sipped his tea.

  ‘Alright,’ said Father Bernard after a moment. ‘That’s one idea. Any others?’

  ‘Well, it’s obvious,’ said Mummer. ‘We should go back to Moorings and visit the shrine.’ And buoyed on by Mr and Mrs Belderboss’s murmurs of excitement in remembering the place, she added, ‘We know how to get there and where everything is and it’s quiet. We can go at Holy Week and take Andrew to the shrine and stay on until Rogationtide to watch the beating of the bounds, like we used to do. It’ll be lovely. The old gang back together.’

  ‘I’ve never been before,’ said Miss Bunce. ‘And neither has David.’

  ‘Well, you know what I mean,’ said Mummer.

  Father Bernard looked round the room.

  ‘Any other suggestions?’ he said, and while he waited for a response he picked up a custard cream and bit it in half.

  No one said anything.

  ‘In that case,’ he said. ‘I think we ought to be democratic about it. All those who want to go to South Wales …’

  Miss Bunce and David raised their hands.

  ‘All those who want to go back to Moorings …’

  Everyone else responded with much more vigour.

  ‘That’s that then,’ said Father Bernard. ‘Moorings it is.’

  ‘But you didn’t vote, Father,’ said Miss Bunce.

  Father Bernard smiled. ‘I’ve given myself the right to abstain this time, Miss Bunce. I’m happy to go wherever I’m led.’

  He grinned again and ate the remainder of his biscuit.

  Miss Bunce looked disappointed and shot glances at David, wanting his sympathy. But he shrugged and went over to the table for another cup of tea, which Mummer poured with a flourish, as she relished the prospect of going back to The Loney.

  Mr and Mrs Belderboss were already describing the place in minute detail to Father Bernard who nodded and picked another biscuit from his plate.