Ferney (45 page)

They were about to get back into the car when a white police car drove into the close and parked behind them. The man who climbed out was in sergeant’s uniform and he glanced at them
briefly before walking up the path to Ferney’s front door.

‘He’s only just come back,’ Gally called to the policeman, concerned. ‘He’s been in hospital.’

‘That’s all right,’ said the sergeant. ‘I won’t bother him for long. I’ve just got something for him.’

Gally stood in an agony of indecision. If this was, as she suspected, about the bones down at the roadworks, then she felt she ought to be there too, but no doubt the sergeant wouldn’t see
it that way.

‘Can we wait?’ she said to Mike. ‘Just until he’s gone?’

The man wasn’t more than a couple of minutes and, seeing them waiting, gave them a rather more curious look this time as he went back to his car.

‘I won’t be a second,’ said Gally.

Mary Sparrow opened the door to her knock. Ferney was sitting in his chair staring into space.

‘Is everything all right?’ she said.

Mary was hovering behind her and it was clear Ferney didn’t want to say much.

‘It’s fine. He just came to tell me they’d closed the file on the business down there.’

‘Was that all?’

‘Let’s talk about it later.’

When she’d gone and when he’d finally persuaded Mary he could get himself to bed quite happily, Ferney sat quietly, thinking about the mystery of Billy Bunter.

The policeman had been quite happy about it all.

‘We’re satisfied. He ended up in Dartmoor, you know – the lad that did it. You knew he died in prison?’

‘I knew that much. They wrote and told the vicar for some reason.’

‘He wrote an account of it while he was inside. It’s all in the files somewhere. No mystery.’

‘Wrote? I didn’t know he
could
write.’

‘Seems he did.’

‘How did he die? They never said.’

‘I don’t know.’ The sergeant clearly felt that was inadequate. ‘Would you like me to find out?’

‘I would.’

‘I’ll see what I can do. It might take a while.’ Poor Billy, Ferney thought when he was by himself again. He didn’t ask much and he didn’t get much. It wasn’t
right that they put a lad like that in Dartmoor, a lad who’d been so provoked and who wasn’t really answerable for what he did. He’d never been vicious. Naughty maybe, but not on
purpose. He didn’t really know about closed doors. You’d always find him where you didn’t expect him, nosing into things that weren’t his. All kinds of stuff used to go
astray when Billy was around, but you couldn’t blame him. Monmouth’s sword and the breastplates had probably gone that way. They’d certainly vanished after he’d been in one
day.

Gally and Mike went quietly back to Bagstone Farm and as evening came they lit a log fire and sat in the armchairs with the dim table lamps removing the evidence of modern
repair from the sitting-room. They sipped soup in mugs and gazed into the fire and a great gust of smoke swept out of the chimney as the wind raced across the roof.

‘Ah,’ said Mike. ‘It’s going to need a cowl or something.’

An iron plate in the chimney opening was what it needed, an iron plate with a two-foot hole. Gally looked at Mike in surprise. She hadn’t really noticed he was there. ‘I don’t
mind it,’ she said. ‘It covers up the smell of fresh paint.’

He rose to his feet, smiled and bowed. ‘Mrs Martin,’ he said, ‘shall we have an early night in our new bedroom?’

She suppressed a frown. It was as if a stranger had suggested making love to her here, in her house. The light was too dim for him to see her face and that gave her time to get back in control.
She followed him up the stairs.

‘I’m going to have a bath,’ she said. ‘I want to enjoy every bit of it.’

‘You’ve been using the bathroom for the last three weeks.’

It was true. In the evenings, after the builders had gone she had allowed that single infringement on the house.

‘Yes, but I only painted it yesterday. I didn’t want to spoil the feeling.’

She lay in the long bath, soaking in luxurious hot water. The smell of the fresh paint made it easy to be modern and the room seemed to hold no great connections. Of course, she thought, there
wouldn’t have been a bathroom. Perhaps this will be a safe place when I need to be Mike’s. This and the loo. The door opened and he came in with a tray and a bottle of Spanish
champagne. ‘Ta-raah.’

‘Oh my goodness.’

‘You’re allowed one drink, surely?’ he said. ‘Why stop celebrating? It’s a great day.’

It was certainly a momentous day, a day of duties done and healing finished, but it was also a day in which she had crossed a threshold into a place where she had always been entirely
Ferney’s and now she had to find a way of sharing it. At that moment, only the bathroom seemed to protect her. ‘Stay and drink it here,’ she said. ‘Pull the chair
over.’

It was a good-sized room that had once been a bedroom and she’d found a lone armchair with a worn cover of green flowers on a yellow background that felt just right for it. Mike sat next
to her in the chair, drinking and reminiscing about how they’d first found the house and all the stages on the way to this day. He left Ferney entirely out of his account and she was glad. If
she pushed the old man out of her mind, too, she could make room for Mike and she concentrated on doing that.

‘Why don’t we drink the rest of this in bed?’ he said as he filled up her glass. She knew that one glass had been quite enough, sensitive to the delicate balance of her
baby’s world, but she allowed him the pleasure of pouring it. She was frightened of getting out of the bath, frightened of what might follow if she left this insulating room which eased the
dilemma of her faithfulness. She reached for his wrist as he poured and stroked it, understanding that he had a strong need to consummate this house with her, to declare it theirs.
‘It’s a big bath,’ she said, ‘and it’s still hot. Wouldn’t you like it?’

‘I’ll share it with you,’ he replied, smiling and looking into her eyes.

‘Yes,’ she said sensing a way out of the trap. ‘Come on in.’

He pulled his shirt over his head and she concentrated on his physical presence, the new muscles in his arms and shoulders, built up by the manual labour they’d done clearing the
surrounding land. He turned half away, stooping and hopping to get his jeans off, and she deliberately lingered on the curve of his neat buttocks into his narrow waist. It felt very calculated, but
she needed to guarantee him passion and she could feel on an animal level that her body was starting to respond to these messages she was force-feeding it. The champagne helped. He stood next to
the bath, wondering how to get in and she sat up, water cascading off her swelling breasts down to the large, seemingly independent convexity of her belly. She reached up to his neck and he bent to
a long kiss which swirled their arousal together. She felt his hand on one breast, brushing her nipple, sending shivers down to her groin and then his hand stroked over her belly and down and she
opened to him like a sea anemone in the warm water. After a long minute in which his tongue and fingers blotted out all else, she stood on trembling legs to make space for him in the bath and as he
lay down in the water, she sat on his chest, meeting his unfocused gaze as his hands reached up to cup her breasts and eased herself back on to him, driven by urgency so that the bathwater slopped
backwards and forwards escaping over the rim in small splashes as she moved faster and faster. She came with him to a gasping climax that was entirely on a physical level, but strong enough to stop
that mattering, then slipped down to lie squeezed against him by the constraints of the bath in a thought-free peace. Outside their slow time, the water seemed to grow rapidly colder and they got
out together, helped to dry each other then went next door into the bedroom. As Gally rolled into bed, utterly at home, she felt for this one time she had been as fair as she could be to both men
and avoided wondering what the future might bring. She and Mike were quickly asleep.

Three in the morning and the house’s bones creaked as the first frost of winter crisped on its roof and tested its newly strengthened joints in slow contraction. Gally’s calmer
dreams had often in the past been searching dreams where she would be misled by places that at first seemed familiar, pushing through crowds, trying to catch up with people who always disappointed
when they turned. Now, for the first time, her dreams were entirely delightful, putting her in the very centre of where she wanted to be, in a cocoon of comfort. In her sleep the lover who was the
other half of her turned to her and put his warm arms around her and she flooded with acceptance so that her spirit and her body welcomed him into her, and where their minds melted together she
wrapped her legs around him to crush them into matching physical unity. It was no dream, but she experienced every soft swollen movement of it through a filter of sleep and the end of it was a
soaring harmony of spiritual perfection and physical ecstasy that she knew went as far as it was possible to go in complete sharing. But then abrupt movement chased it away and dragged her to a
waking reality that was wrong and unexpected. A man was getting out of bed with harsh, angry movements and for that first moment of awareness the man was a stranger. In the second moment, he was
revealed as Mike.

‘What . . . what’s the matter?’ she said in a thick voice.

‘You’re the matter,’ he said bitterly.

‘Why? What did I do?’

‘You called out. Didn’t you know?’

‘No, I was asleep, I think.’

‘You called out “Ferney”.’

As the world turned towards a cold dawn, curled miserably alone in the big bed, Gally could not drive away a relentless voice that seemed intent on stripping away all the
layers of pretence with which she tried to protect herself. If Mike had been there she could have calmed him down, forced him to listen to her apologies, kept him there and kept this voice away,
but Mike was not there. Mike had driven off into the night, the engine reaching a crescendo in each gear until distance claimed all evidence of it, and in his absence the voice had started and it
told her that she was running out of time for compromise. It was inside her, a grim questioner with no comfort in it that obliged her to sit in judgement on herself and would allow no inaccuracy in
the statements it demanded.

‘Is there space for Mike in your life?’

‘Of course there is. There has to be. I married him. He wasn’t happy before. I made him happy. I can’t take that away.’

‘Is there space for Mike?’

‘There has to be. I just can’t find the right way to fit them both in.’

‘Is there space?’

‘No. There has to be. No. There’s not.’

‘What must you do?’

‘Avoid hurting anyone.’

‘What must you do?’

‘Talk to them both.’

‘Who do you love?’

‘Both of them.’

‘Who do you love?’

‘It’s different.’

‘Who do you love?’

‘Ferney, but I . . .’

‘What must you do?’

‘Be true to myself.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Be me. Get back in touch with all the other bits I can’t reach.’

‘Can’t reach?’

‘Choose not to reach.’

That won her a short reprieve of silence. She went to the bathroom wrapped up in a long sweater and a dressing-gown to try to keep the voice away and sat there in the armchair for a long time,
fearing sleep and worrying about Mike. He would have gone to the flat. He would drive too fast in his anger. He would be utterly miserable. At five in the morning, when he should have got there and
the sky outside was still as black as it could be, she phoned, but the line was engaged and that must mean he had taken the phone off the hook. At least it meant he was there. She went back to bed
with a cup of tea, propped pillows up behind her and unexpectedly found herself waking in that position, four hours later, with the tea cold next to her.

She had so looked forward to that first morning, had even planned ahead that she would bring Mike a tray of croissants and coffee and they would eat it in bed, taking shared pleasure in the
unusual comfort of it all, but it seemed there was no pleasure to be had, just the faint echo of the unremitting voice. She phoned the flat again and even before it connected, she knew she would
hear the engaged signal. Dressed, she went downstairs and suddenly wondered how many times she had been down those stairs. The woodwork of these treads might be new, but that made no difference.
She had a pressing sense of all the streams of days that had begun this way, with that diagonal passage down from rest to action and before that, going back on this spot before there were stairs,
when it was just one storey, then one flimsy room where rest and work were divided only by the action of standing up. She was still here. All the other bit players in their life flared briefly and
whirled away and there was nothing enduring except her and Ferney and the house and the stone and of those four only the stone kept its outward form unchanged. It was disturbing to think of Ferney,
a mile away, dislocated in his temporary house.

I seem to be making so many mistakes, she said to herself sitting on a stool in the kitchen and a more friendly voice answered her.

‘You have forgotten too much.’

‘Remembering doesn’t seem to help.’

‘How could it not help? You know so much if you let yourself remember it.’

She had to go to Ferney. Mechanical duties called her, duties discussed with Mike before the night’s involuntary cry of betrayal. They had agreed she would check the old man had managed to
get himself breakfast. Prompted by the house or by the voice, for she could not tell whether they were the same thing, she was filled with resolution and, before she left, she went down the slope
to the hollow tree where the plastic bag, ignored these last weeks, now showed clearly in its hole in the bare trunk to anyone who might look. With it in her pocket she walked along the lane,
jacketed against the breath-fogging cold, and when she came to the gate up to the hilltop she turned off with no further conscious decision and didn’t slow down until the top of the rise
opened all the land below to her gaze. Frost pockets showed white streaks through the misty exhalations of the ditch-drained fields and the colours of that winter landscape were grey and a metal
green that was mainly blue. The seat was damp and cold and she sat on a scarf that had been in her pocket, folded back and forth across the stone. She found she was shivering and the cold gave her
an excuse, but making excuses was not part of her plan for the morning so she admitted that she was frightened. She got out the letter and read it again, then despite the cold she imagined herself
in the pale blue cotton dress he described, pink rosebuds in the pattern and her long blonde hair hanging over her shoulders, and as she did the coldness left her. Summer warmth struggled to
superimpose itself and the leaves came back, ghostly green on the bare branches.