Ferney (10 page)

‘I hope you don’t mind,’ she said. ‘I took you literally. Tell me if you want me to go away.’

‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘never. Come and sit down by me. I’m sorry, I’m not feeling too good today. You found your way all right?’

‘A woman I met had to tell me where you were.’ She found herself admitting, ‘I went to the wrong place. I can’t think why, but I was quite sure you lived somewhere
else.’

‘Where?’

‘An old cottage down at the end of the road with a big box hedge.’

He stared intently at her. ‘Lamberts Lea?’

She thought back to the name on the gate. ‘Yes, that’s the one. I must have been dreaming. For some reason I thought you lived there.’

His eyes seemed to be watering. ‘You remembered,’ he said.

‘Remembered?’

‘I did live there. With my wife. Not lately, though.’

‘Oh, I see. I don’t think I knew,’ she replied uncertainly. ‘Unless you told . . .’

He coughed once, then twice, then uncontrollably, his body heaving as he scrabbled for a tissue from the box next to him. Gally darted forward, found one and put it in his hand, then crouched by
him until it stopped.

‘Have you seen a doctor?’ she asked.

‘I don’t need one,’ he wheezed. ‘I know what’s wrong. How’s it going at your place?’

‘The water’s almost gone. The cellar’s going to need quite a lot of work to put it right, but it’s drying out really fast. I’m so grateful. The builders are coming
to start fixing the end wall. The stream’s running really well.’

‘And you?’ he said. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ In her own ears her voice sounded defensive.

‘I just wondered. It’s a bit of a strain, moving.’

‘No, it’s . . . easier being here,’ she said.

He looked into her face for the space of three heartbeats and she was seized by his eyes. They had no trace of age in them. ‘And what about the stone?’

‘Oh . . . Well, you know . . .’

‘No, I don’t,’ he said firmly. ‘You tell me.’

‘Well, Mike thinks it’s silly. He says it would be a bit twee.’

‘What does he mean by that?’ Ferney sounded younger, stronger, irritated.

‘He means it’s a bit self-conscious to put it up again. He says nobody even knows how it was exactly, so he thinks we should just let it lie there.’

Ferney sat back and digested this in silence then he came to a decision. ‘You tell him I know exactly how it was. I told you. There’s a picture.’

‘Yes, you said. Is it a photo?’

‘Course it’s not. That stone fell down long before photos came along. There’s a painting.’

‘Can I see it?’

‘Oh yes, of course you can. That’s what I said.’

‘Where is it?’

He started to get out of his chair.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Stay there. Tell me and I’ll find it.’

‘The room right at the back. Go and see.’

She went out into the hall. The bungalow was L-shaped and beyond the kitchen two doors opened off a short passage. She tried the nearest. It took her into what had probably been intended as a
garage, but it was full of shelves from floor to ceiling, some with their contents hidden under dustsheets, some crammed with boxes and objects of all sorts. She looked round for a painting but
only had time to take in what looked like a row of clocks shrouded in clear plastic bags when his voice came from the front room.

‘The door at the end. Not the other one!’

She closed the door quietly and opened the other. It was a study or perhaps a tiny library, one wall lined with full bookshelves, the other dominated by a great painting about four feet wide.
The frame was battered, intricate gilt and the picture itself was opaque dark brown, parts of it nearly black. It looked heavy and indecipherable at first glance. She put the light on and it made
little difference. She peered closely at the surface, but that only made it harder to see the tiny variations in darkness that gave away the shape. Standing back again, she could make out the
outline of a house surrounded by trees. A lighter, oblique patch indicated something tall and grey poking through the vegetation. She felt a thrill of recognition. Their house, undoubtedly. Their
stone, the Bag Stone as it had once been. When? Oh, to see through the years of encrusted grime, but after looking for a while, letting her eyes stray where they would, she began to feel it was
starting to reveal itself. Putting together her image of the house now with the faint, dark suggestions of the picture, she could make sense of the outlines, give it proportion, place the stone
properly. Mike had to see this. Could he? Would she be able to bring him into Ferney’s house? It puzzled her that such a problem could exist.

There was a gate at the front of the house and another lighter patch above it. She leaned closer then stood back, squinted, looked closely again, moving her eyes around to make sense of the
dirty blurs of lighter paint. There was a figure standing by the gate. Something else. Two figures.

The pleasure of her company was intense, but in a perverse way he could enjoy it more in his memory now that she’d gone and the strain of possibly making a mistake had
eased. Ferney could see the marks of the pain in her and he had to walk such a careful tightrope, watching the way her mind was working, telling her just enough and no more. That meant there was
constant tension as well as enormous joy in having her there. Now that she’d gone he could relax and let the pleasure and the rest of it take over.

She’d wanted to know all about the picture. It came as a shock to find she couldn’t see it quite the way he could. He knew its vivid colours well enough to see through the masking
dirt of the years. She wanted to know how he had got it. He was vague. He’d had it for years was all he would say, but yes, it was the cottage and yes, it did show the stone standing –
well, leaning anyway. Not all that accurately, there had been a lot of artist’s licence taken with that picture, but the man who’d painted it had insisted on his right to take liberties
with the landscape. Who were the figures? He just smiled. People that lived there long ago.

When was it painted, she’d asked, and he’d almost told her the date. Not just the year but the month as well, before he saw that would open up far too many questions. He could have
told her 1823, that was the year, but all he’d said was, ‘Early last century some time, I expect.’

If he’d been well he would have gone out when he was alone again and the house was quiet. He would have climbed the hill, revisited the very spot, sat in the grassy hollow for a while,
refreshing the memories he wanted to keep, flushing out the rest, discarding the dross to make space. The tight pain in his chest wouldn’t let him go, so instead he dragged his armchair round
to the other big window in the end wall and sat back to gaze up the hill beyond the garden where the field had barely changed.

He blanked out the present and almost immediately heard the mental echo of a roar of exhaust, saw the ghost of a blue Fordson tractor, tearing diagonally down the hill, much too fast, felt his
ghost feet running as it slowly, inevitably tipped outwards and tumbled. Horrible, vivid, recent. He pushed that one fiercely away, keeping his mind blank, scanning the ages.

A musical note came back to him across two hundred years, a note, then a bar, then a refrain. ‘Fill up my loving cup, then you and me shall . . .’ No, not quite. ‘. . . so thou
and I shall sup. When the summer’s come again . . .’ then what?

To be dependent on the random dice-throw of the genes, that was the wild card, the delight and the horror of his lives. Once you’ve had the luck of a voice that could stop fights, silence
politicians and make old ladies fall in love, it was hard to be saddled with a raven’s croak next time round.

The last decade of the eighteenth century, just two and a half old men’s lives ago – everyone scared by the bloodbath going on across the Channel, hearing the tales brought by the
escapees, afraid that the anarchy might soon lap British shores. There was a burst of new songs to cloak the fearful French with derisive humour and the singers who lapped them up and spread them
were the centres of attention. That one would have been a lonely life indeed but for his voice. It was a life that started in poignant sadness – a life that threw him against his will across
the seas, pining for the comfort he couldn’t have. Only his voice rescued him, gave him the solace of instant acceptance, instant friendship as soon as he had started to sing. Then he would
be welcomed everywhere he went, loved momentarily by all who heard him, in the narrow circles permitted to him by that family. He was asked to sing whenever he stood still for long enough, smiled
at, embraced, toasted and encored every time.

His voice made living easier in a hard time for living, but won him no deep friendships. What was important was the feeling he had inside him as he sang and that made up for everything. It could
transport him up a pathway of soaring, perfect notes to a state of bliss, to a level of enhanced experience which others might have called religious ecstasy. Religion was a closed book to him, a
path he saw others take. Song and only song made this life thrilling and it didn’t matter what the songs were so long as they climbed into the clear upper registers where his voice could
unfold its wings and fly.

His unsympathetic father forced his enlistment in the voracious navy so that death got him at the height of his powers and what a death – what a dreadful, confusing struggle back he faced
in his next boyhood, born in the wrong place, cut off from all the familiar things that would have grounded him, led him gently to awareness. It was too much to expect anyone to go through that
without madness twisting their path. He knew about nightmares. He knew the full horror that dislocation could bring and the overwhelming relief of finding the way back.

The first powerful memory that had crossed the bridge from dead man to live boy was the pure delight of soaring song which filled his head from the earliest conscious moment of that next time.
But cruelly, it was only a memory.

That next time round he was a toddler as the nineteenth century dawned, adrift in a foreign land, adrift in mind as well as in body. He gurgled and ululated every second of the day but nature
had failed to hand out the same rare bounty twice. There was nothing tuneful in this Ferney. From the start, his voice was harsh and wavered unreliably as he tried to hold his notes, but the power
of all that glorious, pressing, recent memory kept him trying, hoping right through the travails of his boyhood that he might all at once remember how, as if it was a question of the force of the
will, not the physical form of the throat, hoping he would suddenly break through to recapture that lost rapture now only present in his inadequate recollections.

He’d come back to Penselwood from far away in a suspicious time, come back alone to sanity with no story to tell except that of a wanderer. The girl saved him from despair, as he stepped
from nowhere back into their life one day in his teens. She was barely fifteen, short and plain but beautiful to him from the second he saw her by Castle Orchard, and neither needing to know
anything much of the other to be sure of what they’d found again. That straightened out the twists in him, but still from time to time he would open his throat and howl a semblance of a song,
always to be disappointed. She would forgive him anything but that, so when he felt the need to give voice, he’d go alone up the hill.

It had been on such an occasion that he’d met the painter, a clear bright day with Napoleon two years safely buried at last and George the Fourth’s poor Queen Caroline dying just
three months later. Not surprising, the way George had treated her too. In the countryside they’d talked about it for years afterwards. Nothing new, he thought, in royalty doing its best to
drive a coach and horses through the sanctity of marriage.

He looked again out through the window and past the bushes, up the slope. It wasn’t the same as being up there in person, but he could try to do it from here. Up by the skyline, right at
the furthest point of his vision, was the hollow and the hedge. He relaxed, focusing on the song, trying to pull the rest out of it. ‘Fill up my loving cup . . .’ There wasn’t
quite enough. He saw an easel but he couldn’t get it right. He tried too hard and the outline kept wriggling around. Easels came to him in a long parade of shapes and sizes, but none that
went with the hollow on the hill. He tried for a face, but that was more elusive still, then he sighed and let his head drop on to his chest in defeat. Immediately, as soon as he stopped trying, an
unexpected, unbidden image arrived in full force and he half-laughed, half-gasped at the shock of it. He was on to it like a terrier before it could slip away.

Two legs, waving in the air – well-dressed gentleman’s legs, with shiny black buckled shoes and yellow hose, somewhat darned and now grass-stained. He’d stopped singing,
hadn’t he? Yes. He’d been standing there talking to a horse. Horse-calming had always earned Ferney money when he needed it. There were many times, when he was by himself, when he
preferred the company of horses to men. Men followed stupid fashions, blocking off their chances to know the world better. Horses didn’t change. They might not be very bright, but they had
one abiding driving force, whether pony, Arab or shire horse, and that was a monstrous, all-consuming curiosity.

All you had to do, however tricky the horse, was attract that curiosity and insist on playing the game your way. Stand there just talking quietly to yourself and gradually drop your voice as the
animal came nearer. You could snare almost any horse that way, keep it inching towards you, and however often it would shy away it would come back because it just had to know, just had to get its
head closer to hear what it was you were going on about. In the end, when you could barely hear yourself it would be right there next to you, bending its ears to pick up the faint whisper, standing
there on your terms, so close it fooled itself into trusting you in its desperation to be in on the secret. Then you’d won. When it had been there, that close, that still, it forgot all about
mistrust. Once you were there you had a firm base to build on so the worst of horses could be made useful again. For a man who had the knack, there was good money to be had from winning the trust
of bad horses.