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.’
Chapter Twenty-four
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.
I pushed the tandem away from the house, manoeuvring it around the puddles and lifting it over the cattle grid so as not to wake anyone. Once I was around the front of the house, I set off down the lane, met the coast road, split the deep puddles that were standing there, and was soon passing through the marshes.
After days of rain they could become six or seven feet deep with no discernible bottom, only a jelly of mud and dead vegetation. I called Hanny’s name, strangely hoping that he had stumbled into one of the pools. Better to go that way than whatever Parkinson had in mind.
But there was nothing. Only the hiss of the reeds and the slop of the ink-black water as the wind came across the marshes bringing a flurry of white flakes.
For a moment I thought it was snowing — it wouldn’t have been unheard of there, even in the late spring — but then as I got closer to the hawthorn tree I could see that it had burst into life well before it ought to have done, like the apple trees and the fresh green grass up at Moorings. Each gnarled limb held a garland of petals, the way Father Wilfred held the white roses as he lay in his coffin.
At the dunes, I had to heave the tandem through the col as the wind had piled sand a foot thick over the road. Hanny’s footprints were there, mixed with the impressions of car tyres. Leonard had passed this way and recently.
I called for Hanny again, thinking that he might be hiding in the marram somewhere. I waited and looked up at the grass bending in the wind, the grey clouds scudding overhead.
The tide was starting to come in. The sandflats were slowly sinking under the water, and way out, almost at Coldbarrow was a figure leaning into the wind, his white shirt fluttering. It was Hanny. He had the rifle over his shoulder.
I made a cup with my hands and shouted, but he couldn’t hear me, of course. And in the event I was glad. The last thing I wanted him to do was start to come back now that the tide was racing in. It was better that he went on and waited.
I left the tandem against the pillbox and began to run across the sand, following the posts as far as I could. In places there was no water at all, but further out in the full blast of the wind, the sand had collapsed into deep gutters, the edges of which fell apart alarmingly as I jumped over each that I came to.
The roar was all about me as the sea thrust itself towards the shore, breaking into foaming crowns when it smashed down into some hidden declivity. Driftwood and weed sped past, rising and falling on the grey swell, turning, breaking, and then sucked under by the currents.
To my right I could make out one of those temporary pathways the water and wind would conjure up at The Loney now and then; long backbones of sand that only became apparent when the high tide left them exposed above the water. I waded over and climbed up to the highest point and saw that it wound in a long, meandering ribbon towards Coldbarrow.
Yet, even that pathway ran out well before I got there. The ground broke and slipped away, and I was pitched forward into the sea, my legs suddenly kicking into nothingness.
The cold of it took my breath out like a punch and squeezed my scrotum into a walnut. I reached down, swiping my hands through the heavy, grey water, trying to hold on to something, anything, whatever unidentifiable thing of plastic or wood I could grasp — but the tide whipped everything away and there was nothing else to do but swim as hard as I could towards the shoreline of Coldbarrow.
I was a decent swimmer in those days. Quite hardy to the chill of open water and unafraid of the deeps. There weren’t many brooks and pools around the Heath that I hadn’t explored. But breast-stroking Highgate Ponds was one thing, The Loney was something else. The swell came at me from all sides and seemed determined to pull me under. There was a movement in the water that flowed and gripped and sucked at the same time. I swallowed mouthfuls of salt water and choked it out in bouts of desperate coughing, my throat and my nose burning.
I seemed to be getting no closer and after striking again and again towards land, it occurred to me that I was in the early stages of drowning; in that period of fighting, sinking, re-surfacing. And a panic took hold of me. I could barely feel my body. My hands were locked into claws. I would soon get too tired to move. Then what? An ache in the lungs. Silence. Nothing.