Ferney (17 page)

‘Who are the men with the horses?’ She said it now, but in her mind it was her old voice speaking and all she did was repeat the words.

‘Well, we didn’t know, did we? Except that they had to be with the Prince of Orange and whatever they were like they had to be better than King James’s Irish thugs.’

Puffs of smoke erupted shockingly from the hedges in her memory. The sharp smell of black powder.

‘They’re firing at us!’

There was a quavering note of indignant distress in her voice. Ferney reached out for her arm and gripped it. ‘Not at us,’ he said urgently. ‘At each other. Stop now. It was
all over a long time ago.’ She looked at him and he relaxed his hold. ‘I‘ll tell you the way the books tell it. They say it was the first skirmish of the rebellion. The Prince of
Orange had landed down at Brixham in Devon. Dutchman or not, he had British soldiers with him, Mackay’s regiment. By the time they got here they needed packhorses, so a young lad called
Campbell took a few soldiers into town to get them and he met Sarsfield’s hooligans on the way out. It was our bad luck we got mixed up with them.’

That started her off again, pulled the curtains of her mind far enough apart to let in the hollow acid-wash of acute fear.

‘It feels horrible, Ferney. What was it? What happened?’

‘Nothing good.’ He weighed his words, gripped her arm tighter. ‘Not for you. Not for me. You . . . came to an ending there.’

‘I died?’

‘Yes.’

The simple statement reached into her head, connected and cauterized the raw stump of memory.

‘The books don’t say anything about
you
,’ his voice was quiet. ‘They say that Sarsfield and Campbell were both killed and thirteen of their men. They say that
the townsfolk didn’t like the Irish troops and they scared them off by telling them more of the prince’s army was coming. Thing was, the military kept their records and counted their
bodies, but there weren’t any reporters coming round to write down what happened to you and me and our like, not in those days. No one noticed us when it came to writing history.’

‘I died?’ Her voice quavered but her mind stopped searching. There would be nothing to find.

‘Yes. Not right away. Not there. It was a horse that got you. I don’t think you even knew. We were taking ourselves out of the way and I suppose it panicked. Bloody great thing came
leaping over the hedge at us and knocked you for six.’

‘Go on,’ she said. ‘I think I’m all right now.’

He looked suddenly distressed himself. ‘They wanted to take you into the houses. It was plain you were dying, but I didn’t want you to die there, see? We’re always afraid what
might happen if either of us died too far from here.’

That raised a tumult of questions in her head, but she pushed them aside for the present.

‘I got three boys to help and we brought you all the way back here on a litter. I don’t think you knew what was going on. I tried to do it all gently, but it was a long old way home.
Then almost as soon as we’d set you down in the house I saw you’d gone.’ He sighed and his eyes turned obliquely away to the long slant of years.

‘Did it matter?’ she said and he swung his gaze back to her.

‘I’m trying to understand,’ she said. ‘It’s more than I can take in, but if you know that . . . the other person will always come back, doesn’t that change
things?’

‘Do I have to explain that?’ His voice filled with pain and disappointment.

‘Yes, you do,’ she said, not as gently as she expected. ‘I’m not nearly as far along this road as you think.’

‘But you do know I’m telling you the truth?’

‘I don’t
know
, I
think
– that’s all.’ It was a mild lie, born of the need to preserve herself, to withhold full acceptance until she was sure it
was safe.

He shut his eyes for a long moment. ‘Do you hope that I am?’

Something in her didn’t want to say even that, but the answer was undeniable. ‘Yes, I do.’

He smiled then and she couldn’t help herself doing the same.

‘Death’s touched you in this life, hasn’t it?’ he said.

‘The baby.’

‘Not just the baby.’

‘No. My father too.’

‘It was very bad,’ he said and it was a statement.

‘Yes.’

‘We’ll talk about that when you want to.’

‘So what was it like for you when the thing with the horse happened?’

‘I think maybe it’s even worse for us when one of us dies,’ he said slowly. ‘For other people, I suppose it’s a bit more simple. Maybe they meet someone else, maybe
they don’t but if not, they haven’t got too long to get through by themselves. Even if they’re young, I mean thirty or forty years isn’t that long.’ He started to
cough again and it was a minute or two before he could talk. ‘For us, though, it makes you afraid. Chances are it’ll be ten years before you know the other one’s back – then
they’ll be far too young and other people always get suspicious when old men and young women get too friendly. Chances are you might not find each other at all that time or the next time or
the time after that.’

‘But that doesn’t mean you have to be alone, surely there are always other people?’

Ferney looked at her as though that remark was the true measure of how very much she still had to discover.

‘What have other people ever been to us? You might get a bit of warmth from them, but you can’t tell them, can you? Not so they really understand and if they did, all you’d get
would be jealousy. You’d be asking them to take second best.’

‘So what are we to each other, Ferney?’

‘The best, Gally, always the best. No one else ever comes near.’

‘You can’t just tell me that and expect me to understand it. I don’t know it’s true.’ Her distress showed in her voice and blurred her vision. It was always so
difficult to
see
him, she thought. The harder she looked the more he seemed to disappear, all except his eyes.

‘It
is
true.’

‘But . . . it does happen? There have been other people for us?’

‘Well you know the answer to that. There’s you and that Mike.’ He stopped himself saying the rest – that it hardly ever happened and that Mike was the only other one
she’d ever
married
.

‘He’s not “that Mike”. He’s just Mike and that’s really not fair.’

He started to cough again, bending painfully in his chair, and she wondered unworthily if he was using it to think up a response.

When he got it under control, he held up both hands in surrender. ‘I suppose it’s different when you don’t remember. Sometimes other people come into it when you do remember,
when you’ve been left by yourself, but they never amount to anything.’

‘The bottle?’ she asked, recognizing a certain slight jealousy in herself.

‘Some woman. Can’t even fix her name. Joan something? She tried latching on to me and I suppose I took a bit of comfort there, but not for long.’

‘How long?’ she said, and thought herself immediately absurd for borrowing the tone of an angry lover.

‘A year maybe.’

‘A year?’ She thought about that. ‘So why the bottle?’

He let out his breath in a long whistle. ‘Well, you came back, didn’t you? And then there was a whole lot of fuss about this and that.’

Fuss? He started to cough and at the end, shaken and white, he looked so tired and ill that the need to care for him came suddenly before the questions. She did what she could, trying to
persuade him to call a doctor, but he simply smiled and refused so firmly it left no room for discussion.

The curving dead end of bungalows which culminated in Ferney’s house was a machine-age comma stamped on to the gentler longhand of the overgrown rise of fields. Leaving
the last of the bungalows behind her, Gally walked slowly into a trough of increasing doubt. It felt perverse. The houses behind her were new, brick – overwhelming evidence of the modern
world. The lane ahead was ancient and leafy, and where buildings claimed their sporadic spaces their bones were of old stone whatever modern make-up they might wear. Walking from the new into the
old should have made it easier to stay in Ferney’s world, but it did not.

It’s Ferney himself, she thought. I’m moving out of his gravity. It’s only when I’m near that he can make me think like him. Every step took her further from his
influence and ever-present guilt came oozing in to fill the gap. Ferney made her forget Mike, which surely was cause enough. That was what the guilt said, but a more insistent voice was still
speaking and that voice, unforgivably, spoke a simple betrayal. Mike doesn’t measure up to Ferney, it said, and she tried to shut its echoes out. She walked faster and that helped. She fixed
Mike’s face in her mind as an icon and wrestled with the lines when they tried to subvert her by blurring treacherously into a vague sketch of someone else.

Halfway home she was able to persuade herself that she had won. Mike had started to set solid again and she tried phrasing promises to herself. I’ll keep my distance from Ferney, she
thought, just for a bit. I’m letting myself be carried along and I owe Mike much more than that. Putting on a determined face, she strode on.

The halfway point was only the eye of the storm. As soon as she came in sight of the house it caught her unawares. She saw thatch again for just a moment where there were only slates, expected a
warm greeting where there were only busy builders and was forced to accept that there were two sources of the power twisting her brain, not one. It felt more like a promise than a threat and as she
came closer to the house so she became more aware of the tiny process of growth going on in her womb. It must be all right this time. This had to be the right place for her baby. She doubted she
had the inner reserves to go again through that valley of pain into the tear-filled vacuum beyond. For the three remaining months after the miscarriage, when her body should have been swelling and
ripening, she had been no more than a shadow, disrupted physically, mentally and chemically, always aware of the calendar of what should have been. This time it would be all right.

She faltered at the gate, but Don Cotton the builder was standing there talking to his foreman Rick and he hailed her. They were planning an assault on the roof and she was forced back across
the divide into the present. It wasn’t what she’d wanted to hear.

‘You’d better tell your old man it’s going to be cheaper in the end to strip this side off completely and start again,’ he said. ‘You’ll get away with
patching up the far side, but there’s a lot of dodgy rafters in the middle there. If you leave them you’ll just be storing up trouble for yourself in the long run.’

She looked up at the roof, imagined it renewed, straightened out, with regular tiles, and knew it couldn’t be. The house begged for slow, organic healing, not transplant surgery.

‘No, that’s not the way I want it,’ she said, ‘that’s too brutal.’

‘Perhaps I’d better have a word with Mr Martin when he comes back,’ said the builder unwisely. ‘I’m just worried about his chequebook.’

‘There’s no need for that,’ she said stiffly. ‘You may treat
your
wife like that, Mr Cotton, but I can promise you I speak for both of us.’ She saw Rick
grin behind his boss’s back. ‘I’ve told you right from the start that I don’t want the house looking like some horrible modern conversion.’

‘Well, you’re obviously the one calling the shots,’ he said irritatingly and looked round at the house. ‘Though I must say I don’t know what you see in all the old
stuff that makes it so worth keeping.’

Far too much, thought Gally wearily, as a heavy ball of inaccessible information rolled around her skull.

She immersed herself in the garden for a few hours, working away on the far side of the house to clear the old borders and free the flowerbeds from the obscuring, harsh-stemmed invasion of
weeds. I do this well, she thought. I don’t ever have to wonder which the weeds are. Is that because I’ve done it so many, many times? Logic and intellect couldn’t help her, but
the calm, repetitive work gradually pushed out deliberate thought and she had time to be nothing but herself. In this meditative state the question still forced itself on her, but on a level that
seemed to dwell slowly in her soul, not quickly in her intellect. She pulled up a weed with hands that had always been hers and yet all at once seemed not to be hers. Dropping the fractured stalk,
she gazed for a long time at her fingers and thought they had become less real, less intrinsically part of her, nothing more than a soft, convenient, temporary machine – the latest in a long
line. She liked her hands. They were graceful hands and the receptive, sensitive skin of her fingertips gave touch a high ranking in the order of her senses.

It came to her abruptly that they would not always have been like this. What if they had been malformed, damaged? What if chance genes had thickened the skin, dulled her ability to sense the
world? Would that not have tilted the balance that made her what she was? It would certainly have changed her perception. The conviction grew in her then that she was not what she thought. If there
was an enduring Gally, and now she was back at the house there was no longer anything inside her arguing against that with any conviction, then it would have had to sit inside a shell that had at
least some temporary say in what that composite creature was.

She rocked back on her heels as the implication spread slowly through her, trying to imagine how different it would be if she were shorter, fatter, lame. She found herself feeling the shape of
her own head with hands coated with parching earth-dust. If her brain were smaller, physically different, what then? Would she be a different mongrel Gally? If a different body held different
glands would she be faster to anger, less able to reason?

For just a second she had a clear idea of the way past the blockage in her head – that if she let go of trying to find this modern version of herself in the past and could focus instead on
the bit that was always there, she would have much more chance of breaking through. Trying to pursue that idea before it fled, a voice broke in to interrupt and sabotage her attempt, an old female
voice rich with indignant affront.