Ferney (12 page)

Books were a boon. Learning to read and the mushroom growth of the paperback were two of the greatest blessings of the twentieth century as far as he was concerned. They ranked right up there
with central heating and compact disc recordings of J. S. Bach and far above the motorcar for someone who had so much to lose by leaving home. It was history books almost always for him, history
books and travel books. Novels mostly skated over the top of life, though he’d dip in and out of them, looking for signs that they might repay his interest. Just sometimes one would hit the
mark, showing a wider understanding.

On rarer occasions, when a novel really made him think, he would get excited by what he found, detecting a degree of special wisdom in the writer. Once or twice a book had even made him wonder
if the author could really have gained such insight in just one lifetime or if perhaps there were other people out there going through the same cycle as himself. Such writers were indeed worth
reading, but you wasted so much time on the dross trying to find them. Not that history books were that much more reliable, but at least they helped fill in the gaps and string things out in the
right order.

He found what he wanted and began to read. It was the seventeenth century seen through twentieth-century eyes so it wasn’t quite right, but then how could it be? He’d seen this
before in modern historians, so used to the telephone, the radio and rapid travel that the isolated, meandering mistakes of a peasant army trudging through rain and mud to total defeat in the wrong
place at the wrong time seemed specially tragic, as if it could have been so easily avoided. It couldn’t, of course. That was the way life had been for almost all of history, blundering in a
limited compass inside an opaque outer ring where time and distance were so much less adjustable. He read quietly for an hour, then put the book down and began to think.

Ferney’s memories, because there were so many, came in different bands of quality. At the lowest end, there were the fleeting shreds that would come back to him as little more than the gut
feeling that something he knew was right. His dreams were full of bits and pieces like that and often he would lie in bed on waking trying to hang on to some tiny, slippery, wriggling end of an
image so that he could drag it into the daylight.

If he succeeded that might take him to the second level, where he could use the visual tricks, go to the right spot and see what happened when he tuned the landscape.

Next up were the familiar big events, the ones he’d been over a thousand times, and they were like a painting to him, but a painting that was covered in layer after layer of old varnish,
so that he had to take great care that what he could still see was the original and not the retouching of memory because every time he took them out to look he added another layer.

Right at the heart of him were the clear, core delights and catastrophes and they were more like flies in amber, every detail preserved by the power of emotion vested in them. The thread of his
long love story ran through them and it was one of these that he had chosen for the day’s work. He feared what was to come, but he knew it had to be done and hoped that she would, in the end,
forgive him for it.

Mike really hadn’t been at all happy at the idea of leaving Gally for another two nights in the caravan by herself.

‘Why don’t you come to London?’ he’d asked before they got up. ‘We might as well both use the flat if we’re going to keep it on.’

It was in his mind that she seemed a little better, but he didn’t trust the reasons. He was sure that the only long-term answer was for her to continue to confront the horrors of her
childhood with the help of caring experts. Finding solace in a house, a place and an old man’s disquieting ways could be a dangerously wrong turning. Whatever route she took, he wanted them
to take it together.

‘London?’ she’d said incredulously. ‘When I can be down here?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said unhappily. ‘The door doesn’t even lock properly and it’s in the middle of nowhere.’

‘No, no, it’s really not. It’s right in the middle of . . . somewhere.’

It had sounded funny at the time and he had laughed, giving up the argument until later, but she’d meant it. Even waking once, by herself in the night as a pair of owls shrieked at each
other, there were no imagined horrors lurking in the dark trees beyond the window. In her childhood, and often since then, she had been to places that seemed to reject her – where, when dark
fell, she had to keep her mind free of imaginings in case the shreds of them should catch and cling together and start to form into something frightful. Here at the house she knew there would be no
such fears, though down on the road and out along the ridge she knew there were less comfortable places. The house and its surroundings gave her a complex sense of security, a guard dog that had
once been fierce before it knew her.

The morning was luxurious. She drank her coffee slowly, sitting on the doorstep in the sun. By the time the builders arrived to start underpinning the gable end, she had everything ready for
them, an area – already desecrated by the digger – marked off for their mixers and their supplies. She had cut back those plants which might be in the way and lifted some of the smaller
ones wholesale, bedding them carefully in out of harm’s reach and hoping they would survive.

Don Cotton’s young foreman, Rick, was quite unlike his pugnacious boss, cheerful, straightforward and prepared to listen to her precise requirements about what should be touched and what
should not.

Soon she had nothing to do but watch and think – and Ferney’s painting was all she could think about. She wanted to see it again and talk to him some more. It was easier without Mike
there and she wished there wasn’t that unnecessary tension when the two men were together. Ferney seemed, in some way she couldn’t yet pin down, completely integral with the house and
Mike somehow wasn’t. She suppressed the thought. Since finding the house there seemed an increasing number of thoughts she had to suppress.

In the middle of the afternoon there was nothing to do but watch the builders at work and she had already done enough of that. She wanted exercise and the hill beyond the road beckoned, exciting
uplands from which to fix the surroundings in her head. She walked along the lane to the field gate, swinging the garland ring in her hand, looking for fresh flowers in the hedgerow to bring it to
life again. The field had been grazed and she climbed the slope easily, turning from time to time to look back over her shoulder at the diminishing house. Shielded by a conspiracy of contours, it
disappeared into the dip before she could get a really good view, but beyond it the flat land to the south was opening up in compensation. As she neared the top of the hill she could see the squat,
straight-edged shape of an Ordnance Survey trig point. She came nearer. Just beyond it was a flat stone, a natural bench, and sitting on the stone, looking round at her with an intent expression on
his face, was Ferney.

The only surprise was that there was no surprise. She had the sense for a moment of the man as a magnet, his field spreading down the hill to show some part of her where he was and perhaps draw
her to his presence.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘You must be feeling better.’

‘I’ll last the year out,’ he said. ‘I was coming down to see you, but I should have known you’d come up here.’

‘It’s the first time I’ve been,’ she said, then, ‘Why do you laugh?’

‘I’ve got a few things to tell you,’ he said. ‘Have you the time?’

‘Mike’s away. All the time in the world. There’s some things I want to ask you, too.’

‘Go on then, sit down. You first.’

Gally’s way was the direct way. ‘You don’t like Mike, do you? Why? I don’t want you to dislike him. It makes things . . . harder.’

Ferney seemed to withdraw a little into himself, looking away then back at her.

‘I don’t mind him. Just haven’t got the time for folk, I suppose.’

How could he explain it? Ordinary people could come and go but they only ever brushed past his life. It took a profoundly unusual character to pierce the barriers that time and experience had
set around him.

‘All folk or just him? You’ve got time for me.’

‘Most people you meet when you’re . . . my age, you’ve heard it all before. There’s nothing new in them. You’re not like that.’

‘You hardly know me, Ferney.’

‘I hardly know you? Do you feel that?’

‘Well no, I don’t really,’ she said, groping for words, ‘but it sounds silly to say so.’

‘You
are
married to him, are you?’

‘Yes, of course. Why do you ask?’

‘You don’t wear a ring.’

‘Oh. I don’t like rings.’

He nodded. ‘Do you know why?’

‘No . . . well, they make me feel funny.’

‘What sort of funny?’

‘Claustrophobia of the finger, Mike calls it. A bit panicky, I suppose. Why do you ask?’

‘I know you,’ he said. ‘I know more about you than you think.’

That nettled her a little and she looked at him defiantly.

‘I know you’re expecting,’ he said.

Time stopped. She stared. No one knew. Mike didn’t know. She barely knew herself. It was just an odd little certainty scarcely two days old.

‘That’s more than I do,’ she said, but the words hung in the air, transparently false, and she wished she could take them back. She couldn’t catch the sob that came.

‘What is it?’ he said, concerned.

‘Nothing. I had a . . .’

He waited a long time, but she was staring into the ground, unable to find the words.

‘You lost a baby?’ he suggested gently.

She just nodded.

‘You’ll be all right this time,’ he said, and she looked at him as if he were mad but her eyes slowly dried.

He papered it over for them. ‘Do you like your house?’ he said.

‘I love it.’

‘Just as it is?’

‘Just as it is. More or less.’

‘There’s nothing fixed about old houses. Bits and pieces change.’

‘We’ve got to fix it one way or another. I think I’d like to fix it just the way it was in your picture. I wish I could see that a bit more clearly.’

‘The picture. Well, it was never quite like that. He changed it around a bit, you know. It was all right when he first did it, but that was just a rough sketch, he said. When it came back
from his studio there were a lot of little fancies added in.’

I couldn’t see it that clearly, she thought. ‘What sort of fancies?’

‘That little trickle of a stream was ten times the size for a start and he’d made the roof all tiled over and he didn’t like the hill. Said it spoilt his composition, so
he’d made it all flat. I ask you. This place. Flat.’

‘But for all that, it’s the house.’

‘First picture of it. Still, that’s just one moment in amongst a lot of others.’

‘Do you know how old the house is?’

‘There’s no real way of saying how old something like that is. You start with a hut, maybe, and if it’s in a good spot people go on wanting to live there, so they build it a
bit stronger when it falls down, first wood, then perhaps a stone wall or two. They might build more on it here or there. Who’s to say what makes it that house? But your house has been around
a good long time one way and another. The right-hand end, the cellar and the kitchen and the room above, that’s new. Built the year Queen Victoria was crowned.’

New, she thought? That was 1837.

‘They put a new front door in then,’ he said. ‘Can’t think why they did it, but I never got round to putting it right.’

‘You lived there?’

‘Of course I did.’ Disappointment crossed his face. He paused and considered. ‘Well, on and off, you might say.’ Then he looked at her so that she had to meet his gaze.
‘You’ve got a feel for history, haven’t you?’

‘I love reading it,’ she said. ‘It’s what I like most, I think. Mike’s always very good for me, tells me the bits I don’t know.’

‘I could tell you a story about that house.’

‘I want to know everything there is to know about it.’

‘All right, but you have to help me.’

‘What do you mean?’

This was it, he thought. Would she do it?

‘You’ve got to try imagining it going on, the way I tell it to you. Try and get the pictures in your head, then maybe you can fill in the bits I can’t tell too well. Can you do
that?’

She smiled uncertainly. ‘I’m not sure I know quite what you mean, but I’ll try.’

‘All right then,’ he said. ‘This happened three hundred years ago. You’ll have heard of Jamie Scott?’

She shook her head.

‘That’s what people in these parts called him. The Duke of Monmouth, he was. Bastard son of King Charles.’

‘The Monmouth rebellion?’

‘That’s it,’ he nodded approvingly. ‘Good man, the Duke. He could be a bit of a twit, but he was good at heart. A lot of people backed him round here. Thought he had more
right to the throne than the other one. James the Second. What do you know about him?’

She thought. ‘He landed at Lyme Regis, didn’t he? Marched up towards Bristol and got beaten at Sedgemoor.’

‘Took a lot of men from these parts with him. Cloth-making was a big thing round here in those days and the weavers, they were Protestants, you know, almost to a man. It went with the
trade. King James, now, he was trying to put the Catholics back on top. Cruel too, the way he was going about it, so all those weavers went off to join Monmouth as soon as the word spread that
he’d arrived. Barely a weapon between them, so they took axes and scythes lashed on to long poles.’

‘Brave people.’

He snorted. ‘It was pathetic. They were doing what they thought was right, sure enough, but really – Protestant, Catholic, what difference does it make? It’s all
mumbo-jumbo.’

She wanted to find out why he’d said that, but she didn’t want to stop the flow. ‘Go on.’

‘All right now,’ he said. ‘Now it’s your turn. Imagine this. You’re down at the house. The same house you’ve got now. It’s thatched, not tiled. Just
like in the picture. No kitchen on the end and the old stone’s still there, leaning over a bit, but still there. Imagine it.’ He watched her and she closed her eyes. ‘Can you see
it?’