Ferney (3 page)

‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit past it, isn’t it?’

Her voice had soft wonder in it. ‘Poor thing. It’s been so brave. It just needs some love.’ She turned away from him. ‘It’s all right,’ she said,
‘we’re here now.’

They went on into the room at the end and he heard her give a small, sad groan. Here the house had suffered its death wound. The far end wall was bulging, cracked and crumbled, roof timbers
sagging into a gap, unsupported as the gable leaned outwards. There were no flagstones here, just wooden floorboards with their strength almost gone and white mould spreading across them. One had
been pulled up. There was a cast-iron range in the end wall and the nearer corner steps led down into the darkness of a cellar. Gally moved towards it and the floorboards creaked and cracked under
her. Before she got to the first step, her foot caught a lump of plaster lying on the boards and it shot forward into the hole, but instead of an eventual thump there was an immediate splash. Mike
knelt and peered down. Six inches below the level of the floor, black water glinted, sullen and disconcerting. The cellar steps disappeared into it. Fragments of dried, rotten wood from the boards
drifted down on to it as he looked and he saw them move with deliberate speed out of sight beyond the fringes of the hole in the planking.

‘It’s a stream,’ he said aghast. ‘It’s running water.’ He stood and stepped back, heard a footfall on the boards behind him and knew immediately with a rush
of shaming fear that where there had been two of them, there were now three.

He turned and found himself face to face with an old man, gazing at him with grim, questioning suspicion. Two clear eyes locked on his, challenging his presence with disconcerting authority.

Each day for the past six weeks, Ferney had walked to the main road to watch the digger’s metal mouth slicing cross-sections down into time, hoping to solve a cruel
mystery that had obsessed him for two thirds of his long life. He stood back, out of the way of the busy men and their machines, but sometimes the spring sunlight would trick him, splashing some
fragment of chalky rock to imitate the smooth gleam of bone. That would lure him forwards for a closer look and then the roadworkers, who usually ignored him, would turn on him and challenge his
purpose with inarticulate questions. They labelled him a mad old man. They didn’t know he was driven by deep sadness and ancient love.

So much had changed down by the road. By now, the hole was two hundred feet long and fifteen feet deep, eating out its void along the surveyor’s pegged and taped lines, eating up history.
The drivers slowing for the roadworks thought they were on the A303, but for more than ten centuries a narrower track had followed much the same course. For much of that time, the only deviations
from the track had been caused by slow, natural things, the patient inroads of a widening stream-bend, which gradually pushed the route southward for a hundred yards, or the fall of a huge elm,
forcing a kink in the track that stayed long after the last of the tree trunk had rotted into powder. In the eighteenth century, it became a turnpike built when the old ridgeway, with its
plummeting descent from the chalk downs, proved too difficult for carriage traffic. Even when the cars came and the track was ripped wider, pounded with crushed stone and cauterized with a band of
hot tarmac, the line of the route stayed the same.

It bothered him greatly that he didn’t know exactly where to look. Highway engineers, trained to see the world from a seventy-miles-per-hour perspective, were blind to the beauty of roads
that wandered along their way. Braking distances and visibility angles vectored together to spell hazard where the smaller lane crossed the road. The hole was their solution, the rough vacuum into
which a coarse concrete underpass would be moulded to solve the problem. They had uprooted everything Ferney needed to find his way.

The old man’s stock of memories had long ago overflowed into dungeons and his expeditions to retrieve them needed careful planning. They required a cue, often tiny but always precise. The
shape and colour of a freshly painted window might be enough, or perhaps the felling of a tree on the borders of the steadily shrinking woodland. From such a fixed point he could work carefully
backwards, using the details of that specific image until it blotted out the present and let him drag the memories up towards the daylight.

His last resort was the sense of smell, always a powerful short cut, and in this case there was a very particular smell. He needed to find the smithy which had stood here, somewhere in the
digger’s devastation. Once a smithy, at any rate, then briefly a primitive petrol station with a skeleton pump and gaudy enamel advertisements, then a ruin from which the stone had been taken
piecemeal to serve again in local walls, then afterwards – nothing, barely a bump in the verge. It was the smithy that obsessed him. Sitting up on the bank across the road, he watched the end
of his poker grow red in the blowlamp’s noisy flame, then he tipped a paper bag of hoof-parings on to the grass, plunged the poker into it and breathed in deeply.

The smoke was acrid with hot iron and singed horses’ hooves, stinging his nose and throat, but then the scent claimed precedence and, as he looked back at the road, the other sight took
over. The traffic shimmered into transparency. The road’s borders, hacked back for high-speed safety, filled again with untrimmed nature. The outline of the trees was still uncertain,
shifting, until he trapped the corner of a roof-line, pulled it into shape and the rest of the details obediently followed, filling in like a photograph developing in solution.

In a haze, blotting out everything except the vision in his mind, he got to his feet, the poker dropping from his hand to scorch his shoe, unnoticed, as it fell. He hung on to the vision,
suddenly sure of his direction. Across the stony track ahead was the low, uneven roof of the smithy and the shed beyond it. He was young, strong, determined, full of anger, full of grief. The
smith, Cochrane, was in there, somewhere in his harsh darkness of iron, earth and anvils, on fire with rum or torpid in its wake. Whatever stage the tide of rum had reached, Ferney knew the fury in
him would smother Cochrane’s strength.

Forgetting that all he had sought was the precise placing of the smithy’s walls, dragged along by the rage he had disturbed, old Ferney stumbled down to the verge to settle a score whose
issue had been in no doubt since 1933. Down the track, on the fringe of his vision, a horse and cart moved slowly closer. Two more steps, and where his eyes saw the old grass verge, his feet felt
anachronistic smooth road. Another two steps and a shrieking wedge of solid, violent air slammed him in the chest, hurled him up and backwards to fall thudding in the long grass behind, piling the
years brutally back on to him.

The truck driver wrestled his snaking, screaming vehicle to a halt. He took a long breath, finding himself trembling uncontrollably, then climbed down from the cab, looking fearfully back at the
roadmen gathering around the thing on the verge, the thing that must certainly be dead. He ran towards them but even before he got there, he found himself reprieved. The old man he had glimpsed
almost under his front wheels was already up on his feet, dismissing the surrounding crowd with anger in his stiff arms, banging the dust from his clothes.

‘You missed him,’ said a man in dirty overalls, hefting his shovel. ‘All you did was blow him off his feet. Not your fault. He’s a mad old fart.’

The driver pushed past him. ‘Are you all right, mate?’ he asked.

The old man looked more confused than anything else. He just nodded.

‘You stepped right out. Didn’t look, did you?’

‘There was nothing coming.’

‘Course there was. There was me and my truck for a start.’

The old man turned and began to walk off.

‘He might drop dead any minute,’ said the driver to the people round him. ‘I’m not taking the blame. Here, let’s have some names and addresses.’ But no one
seemed to want to be a witness and in the end, with the jam building up, he went back to move his truck.

A car had pulled out of the queue and was bumping down the grass verge.

‘Some people got no patience,’ said the driver to himself.

Ferney’s left knee ached as he walked off. He wanted to be back home, safe. Once he was on the field path he started to feel a little better, the motion helping, like working a rusty
gate-hinge back and forth. The hedge blocked his view of the disturbing road and he forced his legs to drive him on up the hill against the gravity that grew ever stronger as he got older. Up had
usually meant safety. Down in the flatlands there had always been the threat of sudden harm. Halfway up he stopped to get his breath, sitting on a tree stump and feeling some sort of peace
spreading through him.

Ten minutes later, he climbed the stile in to the lane and that was when he saw the car parked by the cottage and heard voices coming from inside.

Gally felt completely safe inside the house and though she turned quickly when she heard Mike’s gasp, she was not nearly so startled by the old man’s sudden
presence. When they shared their impressions afterwards, she found herself unable to tell Mike the complete truth. They both saw the same man, and on a physical level they both recorded the same
information. He was shorter than Mike, a little under six feet tall, and if his age had started to shrink him, so far it seemed only to have condensed his vitality into a more concentrated form. He
looked fit and weathered and his eyes of seafaring blue had escaped the watery weakening of the years. They burned from a face that was tanned and sculpted by the wind over strong cheekbones and a
square jaw. Hair flecked dark among the grey might have led you to guess his age at somewhere in the sixties and to miss the target by a score of years.

Mike saw an authority that made him feel short-trousered, tongue-tied and defensive. Feeling they had been caught where they had no right to be, his own uncertainty sketched a fierceness on to
his image of the man’s face that, by any objective standard, was not there. Beyond that, the outward clues – the open-air look, the comfortable tweeds and well-kept leather boots
– made Mike feel all the more an urban intruder. The man who stood staring at him looked as if he owned the place – and not just the house, perhaps, but everywhere round about. Those
opening seconds cemented for him a view of Ferney that was to persist for a very long time.

Gally was a searcher of faces. In London she would scan crowds restlessly, incessantly, in shops, on tube trains or simply walking down the street. In the car she would crane back for a better
view of the people they passed. In the first few seconds of Ferney’s appearance, she thought there was more to find in his face than in any she had ever seen before. Afterwards, when she had
time to sort out the tumult he raised in her, she remembered patience, a peace that was not just peace, but an acceptance of the way things had to be, coupled with strength – a philosopher
king with a sword and a book of verse. If that sounded fanciful enough, what she really couldn’t tell Mike was more fanciful still. A certainty had risen in her that this was someone
important who had been missing for a long time, as if a favourite uncle had finally returned from years abroad. In the second of seeing him she also left behind the last shreds of the distress she
had felt down on the road, as if he had turned her towards a fresh view.

The old man said nothing and Gally recovered her wits first. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘We were just being nosy. Is it yours?’

He continued to weigh her up with his chin set, then his gaze softened a fraction. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not now.’

She smiled at him. ‘I love it,’ she said. ‘It’s just . . . well, perfect.’

He looked around, sniffed and looked back at her, searching her face.

‘My name’s Gabriella Martin,’ she said, ‘and this is Mike, my husband.’

He just nodded and continued to stare, as if used to disappointment. ‘And you are?’ she prompted, gently.

‘My name,’ he said, with an odd stress that said other definitions of himself were possible, ‘is Ferney.’

She’d expected a surname, but she knew that was not what she’d got, and she also knew as soon as she heard it that this was someone she would like very much. Astonished at this
thought, she fended him off with words to give herself space. ‘It’s so sad it should be left to fall apart,’ she said. ‘Do you know whose it is?’

‘I do. It’s private property,’ he said and she waited, but that was all.

‘We shouldn’t be here,’ said Mike. ‘Look, Gally, I think we should go and leave this . . .’ But the old man’s head lifted sharply and he broke in.

‘Gally? Who’s Gally?’

She laughed. ‘That’s what I’m always called. I’m sorry, Mike’s right. We shouldn’t be here.’

‘No, no. Who gave you that name?’ he said, and she couldn’t tell whether it was excitement or affront in his voice.

‘I . . . well, I think I gave it to myself. It was all I could say when I was very little.’ She looked at him in surprise. ‘I’m really sorry if we’re trespassing.
We ought to go.’

But suddenly he didn’t want that at all. ‘There’s no need for that,’ he said and now his face relaxed. ‘No one will mind. Mrs Mullard – she has the title to
it now. She lives way away down by Buckhorn Weston – never comes up here these days. Hasn’t been for years. You look round all you like.’

‘We want to buy somewhere in the country, you see. Mike’s away a lot and I don’t want to bring up a family in the town.’

The old man stared at her, seemingly transfixed. ‘You’re having a baby, then?’

Mike froze inside, watching to see how she would respond. Since the miscarriage, babies had been landmines, surrounding them on all sides. Every casual reference had the capacity to hurl Gally
into a pit of sadness as soon as they were alone. Every nappy advertisement or passing pushchair could trigger tears. Now, to his astonishment, she laughed at the old man’s interest.

‘No, not right away. It’s just an idea at the moment.’