Ferney (24 page)

Gally looked at the tall towers ahead and tried unsuccessfully to picture it. ‘How did they get them in if they were fighting?’

‘They did harder things than that. Some of the towers were built completely under fire from beginning to end. The builders would do it at night. Can you imagine? Levering the blocks up,
one at a time in dead silence in case a sniper across the street hears you – always trying to make your tower higher than your neighbour’s so your cannon would have the
advantage.’

Gally had no insight into it, could glean no sense of this incomprehensible history from looking at the towers. They were clustered so closely together. She tried to assemble the imaginary
scene, relentless men crouched round hot iron guns, their cannon-balls bludgeoning each other, stone chips flying in crashing clouds of powder smoke. The towers were men-of-war in close combat,
ships which could never move apart on the wind or the tide. It was impossible to picture, sterile – but, perversely, as the landscape failed to respond to her, it gave her a strong momentary
sense of the contrast with Penselwood, where faint electric stirrings of shared history prickled with promise from every view.

‘How could they live like that?’

‘They’d have a general truce in the planting season or when they had to bring in a harvest – all the warring families working silently in the fields side by side and the ones
who stayed behind quietly restocking their arsenals.’ Mike had the academic’s gift of taking ownership of other people’s information as if the process of reading made it his
own.

Arriving at the house they saw how German and Swiss money had fleshed the angry bones of the surviving towers with the soft pleasures required by peaceful invaders, fitted kitchens displacing
the tough ghosts. Windows had been set into the upper storeys where, when the towers were new, the smallest chink would have been an invitation to sharp-eyed death. They climbed straight to the
roof and found there the one part of it where little had changed except the chances of survival. It put them at the centre of a hemisphere of visual drama – more than a hemisphere, because
below them the olive-bearded slopes fell steeply away so that they were poised above the whole world.

It was a stone landscape, shaped and unshaped. In their immediate surroundings the geometrical masonry of the other towers rose in stumpy crystal growths from their rougher bedrock. Gally
exhaled the recent past into the warm dusk air as she looked down the hill to the splayed fingers of steep headlands that split the immense, gentled, evening sea.

‘Shall we go to the taverna?’ said Mike, putting his arms round her and when she covered his hands with hers, he thought everything would now be fine.

The holiday was a respite from Gally’s secret and from Mike’s disquiet. For the next eighteen days they swam and sunbathed every day until he got restless, then explored monasteries,
chapels and assorted remains until evening folded the shadowed mountains in towards them and tavernas called them with bulb festoons between the trees and laughter from unsteady metal tables. Gally
and Mike became again what they had been, a happy, close couple feeding off the opposites in each other. Gally tried not to think of Penselwood and Ferney because, on the frequent occasions when
such thoughts came creeping into her mind, it brought sharply home to her that a large wedge had been driven into her life. Here, with only Mike, it was much easier to be what she had previously
been. However much she loved the cottage, however strong her confusing feelings for Ferney insisted on being, it was easier and simpler to be here, back in the old ways. From the second or third
day in Greece, she had started to look towards their return to England with the dread of a schoolgirl on the first day of the holidays knowing that inevitable, irreversible time will slide the
calendar to that sudden point where she would be looking back, not forward, at the pleasure. It wasn’t the escape from Ferney she was enjoying, it was the relief from her all-pervading sense
of guilt.

Time moved unfairly past until there was just one more full day left, a day that could not shoulder the burden of all the possible choices. They tossed a coin to decide what to do and Mike won,
but in generous mood he chose a lazy day by the sea and she knew he had done it for her. In the evening they went to their favourite taverna for the last time. The waiter produced a bottle of wine
and Mike moved to pour Gally a glass but she held up a hand.

‘No thanks, I don’t think I want any.’

‘Are you okay?’

‘Oh yes. More than okay. I feel great. I think the baby’s telling me not to.’

‘The baby. Do you realize that’s the first time you’ve mentioned it since we’ve been here?’

‘You too, come to that. It doesn’t mean I haven’t been
thinking
about him.’

‘Him?’ Mike looked astonished. ‘What’s with this
him
?’

‘Oh, just a feeling, I suppose. Anyway, have you been thinking about it?’

‘Of course I have. It just feels a bit risky to talk about it.’ He poured her a glass of water instead.

‘What sort of risk?’

‘Bad memories. Sadness. Things that might spoil the holiday.’

‘We have to look forward now,’ she said gently.

‘Oh, it’s so great to hear you say that. I hated watching you suffer. You seem to have suddenly got so much stronger.’

‘There’s no point in dwelling on that. I suppose after last time I thought maybe I was . . . defective? That all the other women in the world were having babies and it was like it
was my fault that I wasn’t and it seemed so very sad that we should just, I don’t know, stop short I suppose.’

‘And that’s gone now?’

She nodded. ‘I think so.’

‘How?’

‘Maybe getting out of London.’

It hit her only then, while she was talking, that she knew precisely what had changed, that it wasn’t just the sense of powerful magic contained in Ferney’s assurance that the baby,
this baby that would drain him of his vitality, would come to its full term, but there was more. She would continue regardless. Life would not stop here. More than that, if she had lived so very
many times, then presumably she
had
borne children. In fact for all she knew they might even be alive now. Whose children? Ferney’s? From the 1930s? She wondered if that was
possible. They’d be in their late fifties now. Wouldn’t he have said? The thought was so strong that she feared for a moment that she might have spoken it and she had to check
Mike’s face to make sure that she hadn’t. Suppose it were true? Amazing that she hadn’t thought of that before.

‘What are you thinking about?’ asked Mike, watching her.

‘Nothing I can explain.’ She shook her head, smiled to chase away the unwanted thoughts and looked around for something to fill the void and keep them out. There was something she
had been wanting to know. Over the door into the taverna was a painted sign, bleached blue paint, highlighted in yellow, neatly arched in a long curve. The way it was written suggested a quotation
because under its end, in smaller letters, were two words that seemed to be a name and a date, 1803–1869. She spoke little Greek and had idly wondered several times what it said, but after
nearly three weeks she did now at least understand the Greek alphabet. Deciphering the letters of the name aloud, she discovered that it wasn’t, as she had supposed, some local poet or author
of whom she would never have heard. It spelt out the name ‘Hector Berlioz’. The composer did not seem an obvious source for a quotation.

‘Can you read that?’ she asked Mike and he looked at the words for a while.

‘ “Kronos” is time, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I don’t know the rest.’

The waiter came to take their order.

‘Dolmades for Gally, the ones without the meat? I’ll have the souvlakia, please, and a big salad and while you’re here, could you translate that quotation for us?’

The man smiled and didn’t need to look. ‘ “Time is a great teacher,”’ he said, ‘“but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.”’

Mike gave a sharp laugh. ‘God, that’s good. Look at all my students. They’d understand so much more if they were sixty not twenty, but then they wouldn’t have time to use
the knowledge. So many things are wasted on the young, aren’t they? Education, beauty. Wouldn’t it be good if you could learn all the lessons then start all over again with a young
body?’

He said it with no guile, as if it were the most natural thought in the world, and her heart missed a beat. She wondered for a moment if he had guessed something and seized the chance to bring
it up. For whatever reason, he had created a sudden opportunity for her to open up and try to describe the tug-of-war facing her back home. She stood on the edge of the precipice, groped for an
opening phrase and was fatally interrupted by the arrival of the salad.

‘There aren’t many olives in it tonight,’ Mike complained, and the waiter promised to bring him an extra dish.

‘Mike,’ she said as the man left. ‘That’s an interesting thought you . . .’

He held up a restraining hand and stopped her in mid-flow. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Don’t forget what you were going to say, but you must look behind you.’

Over the headland, the full moon was rising, painting the heave of the night sea with a band of skittering silver. Mike’s the moon, she thought again and he’s waxed while we’ve
been here. He’s big now. I hope he stays that way. Mike himself destroyed the thought before it had time to set.

‘Haven’t you ever thought it was odd,’ he said, ‘that the sun and the moon look as though they’re the same size?’

‘Why should that be odd?’ she said quietly, and what made you settle on my metaphor? she thought.

‘Because the sun’s infinitely bigger and more important, after all. It’s pure coincidence that the moon subtends the same angle.’ Mike used words like subtend without
thinking. ‘It’s a thousand-to-one chance against it working out like that.’ Still gazing up at it, he added, fatally, ‘It’s given us its best for the holiday.
It’s on the wane from tomorrow,’ and shot her a startled look as she let out a single great sob.

She clamped down to stem the salt sea that threatened to follow it and closed her eyes tightly until she was sure she had choked them off.

‘What is it?’ he kept saying. ‘What’s the matter?’

She shook her head.

‘The end of the holiday? Is that what’s wrong?’

A nod, because in a sense, that was true.

‘Don’t you want to go back? Surely you want to get back to the cottage?’

She just shook her head, but now she could open her eyes and blink and see that nobody at the other tables was looking, just Mike with fright in his eyes – fright and kindness.

Then with extraordinary and unlikely insight, he said, ‘Is it about the glove? Monmouth’s glove?’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘I’ve wanted to ask you right through the holiday, but I thought I might . . . spoil things, I suppose. Is it?’

‘In a way, I suppose.’

‘You think the ring and the glove belonged to Monmouth so you’re sad that I threw the glove away?’

She nodded.

‘That’s a big assumption you’re making, love. Just because the man at the museum told us about the drum and the armour, that doesn’t prove anything about the
ring.’

She turned and looked away because the decision she had to make was not to be influenced by the pleading in his eyes. She looked up at the moon and spoke to it as much as to him.

‘It was his. I
know
it was, you see.’

‘Well, we’ll see what the experts say, but you can’t
know
that, can you? You can only guess.’

‘Mike,’ she said very deliberately, ‘I’m not guessing. I knew the ring was there before I looked.’

His mouth moved but he didn’t say anything. The waiter brought the souvlakia and they were both grateful for the respite before his departure rang the bell for the next round.

‘How could you know that?’ he said and his voice was nervous.

She had to go on.

‘There are things I find that I know about Penselwood. Look, Mike, I have to tell you because it’s really hurting me. This is about Ferney.’

His look broke her heart. She was astonished by the pain in it. It was as if she had said she was leaving him.

‘I knew it would be.’

‘How did you know?’

‘Because . . . because he likes you and he doesn’t like me and ever since he first showed up you’ve changed a bit. I know it’s good, a lot of it’s good, but I
sometimes feel like you’ve gone sort of slanting away from me.’

She reached across the table to take his hand but cutlery got in the way and took the softness out of it.

‘This is very difficult,’ she said, ‘and I know you’ll say it’s all nonsense, but please, please will you just let me say it all?’

‘Yes.’

‘And . . . do you also promise not to say anything about this to anyone unless I say you can?’

‘Yes.’

‘Especially to Ferney?’

He frowned then nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘Ferney says – believes – he’s lived many times before. Always around Penselwood.’

Mike snorted, saw an instantly guarded look start to close Gally’s face and held up both hands, palms forward, to try to nullify the snort. ‘Sorry, I’m listening. You mean, he
told you the ring was under the step.’

‘No, he didn’t. He made me remember it myself.’

There was a short silence while the implications of this sank in and then he gave a small groan. ‘You mean, he’s trying to say you’ve . . . lived before, too?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you
believe
him?’

‘Mike. He starts describing something and I get this amazing, clear picture of it, like a memory, not like imagination.’

‘How do you know the difference?’

‘Oh, lots of ways. It’s never a complete surprise, that’s one thing. And when I imagine things, everything shifts around. This doesn’t. I see it like you really see
things, from one point of view.’

‘Gally, he’s persuading you, that’s all. He reads all those books and he dreams up ideas and he hooks you with them, don’t you see? How on earth would he know it was the
same you who lived three hundred years ago? It’s ridiculous, surely you can see that?’