Ferney (44 page)

She could only nod for fear her voice would catch.

‘You’ve got that memory working more, haven’t you?’ he said. ‘And it took you somewhere painful.’

She nodded again.

‘Was it the promise? The promise you made on the hill?’ He was watching her closely.

‘No.’

‘I hoped it would be. Never mind what it was then. Probably something I wouldn’t enjoy.’

She found her voice though it was not as steady as she wanted. ‘I only seem to go back to the bad things.’

‘You’re a learner driver, Gally. They’re the easiest ones to hit. You’ve got a choice: either stop doing it or learn to do it better, and that’s no choice
really.’

‘Mike’s outside waiting for me. I talked to him a lot this morning. Last night was dreadful, really dreadful, so I had to.’

Ferney nodded encouragement and she went on. ‘I know what you’ll say. You’ll say that Mike is only a very small part of our lives, but he’s been a very big part of this
life and none of this is his fault. I have to think of him. What can I do?’

He stretched his neck, easing his head on the pillow, and considered. ‘I suppose you could say that these doctors are making it all a bit easier,’ he said. ‘They say this old
carcass has just about had it.’ He was completely matter-of-fact. ‘A few months and that’s it.’

‘How many months?’ she said quietly.

‘Three or four. Maybe a bit more with a lot of extra cutting, but I said I didn’t want that.’

‘Oh Ferney, I’m too new to this not to be upset,’ she said and leaned forward in her chair so that her forehead rested against his chest.

‘No need,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back in a new set of clothes before you can say knife. Then just give me a few years to grow up.’ He stroked her forehead with
lover’s fingers. ‘You do realize,’ he went on quietly. ‘When I’m eighteen, say, you’ll be in your forties.’

‘Stop it. I can add up.’ She sat up straight again. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

‘I do.’ His voice sounded younger and stronger. ‘The way
he
sees life, I’m not going to be a problem for very much longer. Tell him what the doctors said. You
can even tell him you’ll stay away from me these next few weeks if you want to. If it helps him, it doesn’t hurt us, does it? I know I’ll be seeing you later, but he doesn’t
believe that, so that’s all he’ll care about. There’s just one thing I ask in return.’

‘I can guess what that is.’ Her voice was sombre.

‘Yes, you can. You’ve got to tell me you’ll just try remembering one more time. Up on the hill. You’ve got to hear yourself out, Gally. You’ve got to hear your
promise. You told me to say that to you.’

‘I don’t know what will happen, Ferney. I couldn’t stop yesterday. I couldn’t get myself out of it.’

‘I can tell you why. Underneath you’re worrying about that promise all the time, aren’t you? You’re thinking about remembering and you’re fearing remembering and
that’s what’s steering you straight into all the black bits. Don’t do it like that. Just do what you know you’ve got to. Listen to yourself and that won’t happen any
more. Use the words I gave you. They won’t take you anywhere bad.’

‘But what happens
after
I listen to myself?’

‘That’s your choice, but at least you will have had your say.’ She nodded agreement. ‘What about you? Are you coming home?’

‘I plan to be out in a week or two.’

‘Who’s going to look after you?’

‘It’ll work out. I’m not fading away in here, that’s for sure. I’m going out on my terms, in my place. I’d be daft to stay here. Not right over a maternity
ward with babies popping out ten times a day. You never know what might happen.’

She laughed and as if that showed she had a sufficient reserve of strength to handle it, he said, ‘So what was it you remembered this time?’

‘You. Being killed.’

‘There’s a few of those. When?’

‘By the Normans, down below the castle.’

‘Oh yes.’ He looked quite calm. ‘And?’

‘And? Well, I was such a coward. I could feel it, all the fear.’

‘Gally, you were always troubled in that life by fear, but I saw you overcome it time and again. You couldn’t have stopped them.’

It was like the therapist all over again. You couldn’t have saved your father. You were only ten. Your arm was broken.

‘I always feel guilty, Ferney, terribly guilty. I always know that a man died because of me. I thought it was my father. Perhaps it was you.’

She was hoping for some relieving, final word of absolution.

‘I died because of the Frenchmen, not because of you. What could you have done, sent them back to Normandy? Some chance. No one died because of you.’ He smiled and pressed her hand
and it didn’t seem to help one little bit.

A new dream attacked her in the night when soft sleep had opened her defences. No one held her back this time. She smothered her fear and walked weightlessly towards the car,
orange fire boiling through the coils of smoke, and pulled open the door with the immense power of her two strong arms. Her father’s face turned gratefully to her and she was so pleased to
see the fire hadn’t yet charred it as she had feared. She pulled him out by his neck and the flames died, smothered in water, but immense sadness seized her as he slumped limply to the
ground, knowing, despite or because of everything she’d done, that he was dead.

Mike woke her.

The trees were bare and a north wind pushed freezing sheets of air through the caravan’s breached seams, its stiff curtains swaying inwards, needles moving on a dial of
discomfort. Ever since they had first seen the house in the spring, it had been tucked inside the protecting fold of the trees. Now the landscape had been opened up, stripped of cover by the wind,
but, just in time, the house was ready for it. Free of the scaffolding it was prepared to stand up for itself against anything the winter might bring.

The last thing to go was the builders’ pile of rubble, but Gally was absolutely insistent, despite the frost on the inside of the caravan windows in the morning and the chill of damp in
their clothes, that she would not move into the house until that final sign was gone. She bullied and cajoled Rick and his team into working overtime on the final Saturday morning to shovel all
their leftovers of broken blocks, plaster fossils, cable offcuts and plastic pipe into the back of their truck. As they were doing so she carried the remaining bedding and clothes into the house,
and a £20 note persuaded Rick to hitch the caravan to the truck’s tow-bar and take it with them to the dump.

Only then, when the smell of the truck’s exhaust had blown off towards Shaftesbury, did she let Mike walk in through the front door with her, allowing herself the full sensation of
ownership and appreciation. The house was sparsely furnished and they would need to find a lot more furniture to pad it with all the soft, comfortable corners she saw in her mind, but Gally had
already found old carpets and armchairs in a local auction which looked as though they had always belonged. She wanted to be able to sit in comfort in whichever room suited her, chasing the sun as
it swung through the house. Curtains that had once been her grandmother’s hung in most of the windows, providing another direct and familiar touch to help her root herself in this present
time. When their silent, appreciative walk through the ground floor reached the kitchen, Mike opened the fridge and pulled out a bottle wrapped in tissue.

‘Champagne to mark the occasion. Well, fizzy grape juice, actually, in deference to our tiny friend.’

‘We mustn’t be late.’

Mike looked at his watch. ‘No problem, we’ve got over an hour.’

It had been his own idea that they should drive Ferney home from the hospital. Mike had offered it as a small consolation prize and a part of his personal penance on the day that they had
finally left Monmouth’s ring at the Taunton Museum, Gally handing it over with sadness and resignation after they had received a polite but pressing letter on the subject of legal
requirements. Until then they had hardly talked about Ferney, but Gally could see that, of all Mike’s conflicting emotions, the one that came out on top was his continuing feeling of guilt at
what he saw as his contributory role in his collapse.

‘When the old man’s home, who’s going to look after him?’ he had asked diffidently.

‘Oh, I gather there’ll be a nurse popping in every now and then and Mary Sparrow says she’ll help out too.’

‘Mary Sparrow?’

‘You remember, “my muffeties”? The one who laughs a lot?’

‘Oh,
her
. Poor old Ferney. What about you?’

‘What about me?’

‘Well, you can help out a bit too, I suppose?’

You would pitch me, all unthinking, back into the maelstrom? The words stayed inside. It was a gift expressed as a duty and she must take it gingerly. ‘Every now and then,
maybe.’

‘Look, I won’t mind. As long as things stay on an even keel. We’d better offer to fetch him, anyway.’

He knew exactly what the hospital had said about Ferney’s limited time and, as Ferney had anticipated, it seemed to draw a bottom line under the extent of his hostility. Being a decent man
he understood and was shamed by the knowledge that Ferney’s coming death made him feel reassured. It made all the difference and was awful because of that, but it served to increase his new
determination that they should be generous with their help in Ferney’s remaining weeks.

‘I suppose he’ll have to go back in again at some point,’ he said.

‘Why?’ She was startled.

‘Well, I mean. If it’s cancer, he’s going to get worse, isn’t he? He can hardly stay at home.’

Gally knew Ferney would not go back, not unless they strapped him to a stretcher. He would want to be home, of that she was quite sure, however he contrived it. If not, then she would have to be
at the hospital with him.

They collected Ferney at half past two and he was able to walk quite well by himself out to the car although they were both ready near him in case. In the weeks he had spent in hospital the same
thought had concerned him and he had been slowly pulling together his strength to try to outflank the enemy growing inside him for as long as he could. Gally had seen him in rationed, safe doses,
taking contentment from simply being with him as they were now, refusing to take any of the complex back-tracks available. The image constantly projected on to him by the hospital had made it
simpler. All the staff saw him as an old man and concerned themselves with the dignity of his coming end. Left to herself Gally would have seen only his eyes containing the loving light of all
their pasts and the promise of all the futures, but, surrounded by nurses tending him with such kind dismissiveness, she saw as well the body beyond the eyes and could play the nurses’ game
of supposing him to be almost at an end.

He hadn’t referred to her promise on those visits. She knew that he only had to look at her to see she had not yet fulfilled it, but he seemed calm enough about that.

Mike was solicitous and formally polite with him. Gally was in the back of the car. Ferney’s bungalow was warm, prepared and waiting for him, but he had other ideas. ‘You’ve
moved in? You’re in the house?’

‘Yes. As of this morning,’ said Mike.

‘Just as well. The cold’s coming clipping in now. Can I see it?’

‘You want to see the house?’

‘If it’s no trouble.’

‘We thought we ought to get you home.’

‘It won’t do any harm.’

From the back Gally could read Mike’s double-talk. Ferney in the house might lessen his own hold on it. He was afraid that regained ground was about to be lost again. Ferney read him too
and trumped him.

‘I would really like to see it just once more.’

Mike could not say no to that.

It was a new and delicious experience, coming into the yard for the first time with no caravan, no builders’ vans, no scaffolding and with the Bag Stone leaning like a great tent peg to
anchor the house. Loving satisfaction swelled through Gally as she leaned forward to look at it between the men in the front seats and to share it, to earth it, she reached out, one hand on
Mike’s shoulder and the other on Ferney’s. To her discomfiture Mike twitched his shoulder as if her hand was an unexpected irritation while from Ferney, her left hand tingled with an
electric redoubling of the pure pleasure she felt.

She stayed in the car for a second to catch her breath while Mike came round to the passenger’s side and helped Ferney out, then she followed them into the house and heard Ferney say,
‘You’ve got it about right, I think.’

He walked slowly into the sitting-room where the wide stone fireplace stood ready to feel its first warmth for sixty years.

‘That chimney smokes when the wind’s in the north. It comes down off the hill. You’ll have to put a bit of a choke in, I expect. Best way’s an iron plate up in
there,’ he thrust his stick up into the wide mouth of the chimney, ‘an iron plate with a two-foot hole in it should do the trick.’

Mike frowned slightly.

‘Can I look upstairs?’ said Ferney eagerly.

‘Can you manage it?’

‘I’d run up if my legs weren’t out of practice.’ At the top he stood on the landing looking in through the open doorway of their bedroom and she sensed that it would hurt
him to go in and see the evidence of the bed she would be sharing with Mike that night, nor did she want him to see it.

‘What do you think?’ said Mike.

‘I think it’s back to its old self and it’s been a very happy house,’ said Ferney. ‘Thank you for letting me see. I’ll be off home now.’

‘Fine,’ said Mike. ‘I’ll help you back to the car.’

‘Oh that’s all right, I’ll walk,’ said Ferney. ‘If you wouldn’t mind dropping my bag some time.’

‘No, that’s out of the question. The hospital would never forgive us.’

Protesting, they got him into the car, took him back to his bungalow and arranged a comfortable chair for him. Gally made him tea and Mary Sparrow arrived to fuss around him, bringing a huge pie
in a china dish.

‘I’m glad you’re back,’ said Gally. ‘I’ll come tomorrow,’ and bent to kiss him on the cheek. It was the first time she had done so in this oddly
separate intimacy of their present lives and it was not at all like kissing a much older man. So much joy surrounded them for that warm second when her cheek was against his that it was a wrench to
stand straight again.