Ferney (50 page)

‘Slavery?’ Mike shook his head.

‘Well, peasants and that. The feudal times. It took the Black Death. Plague was the only thing that could loosen man’s stranglehold on his fellow men. The Wars of the Roses were the
same. All right, maybe men started that on purpose, but it soon got out of hand. It was real gang warfare, but at least it got rid of the barons, thanks be. They slaughtered each other. You know,
when they’re left to themselves men have always found ways to dominate their fellow men. Good men come in from time to time, but the difference they make usually crumbles. It takes natural
disasters to undo the strangleholds of power. Disasters are the only things that work long term and that’s a terrible thing to have to say.’

‘You don’t have much faith in human nature,’ said Mike.

‘The humans you can have faith in are the ones who see things every other way as well as their own. The ones who just see it one way have it so much easier. They can grab the reins without
having to stop and think. It takes a few of the horsemen of the apocalypse to stop them usually – and faith? Now that’s a truly dangerous thing.’ Ferney stopped talking as his
face screwed up in pain again.

They did what they could. He wouldn’t take any more of the painkiller and it seemed best to take him home. Mike insisted on doing that and she sat by the fire waiting for him to come back,
looking at the lead cross. She thought if she tried hard enough she probably could remember the cross itself as well as the surrounding circumstances, but enough was enough and it didn’t seem
a good idea to push her luck now that Mike seemed to have taken to Ferney as never before. He also seemed to believe.

He was away for a surprisingly long time and when he finally came back, he looked thoughtful.

‘I didn’t really like leaving the old boy,’ he said. ‘He had another bad go when we got there and he still wouldn’t take any more of that medicine.’ He sat
down and picked up the cross again. ‘What a day.’

‘What do you make of him now?’

‘I’m trying not to think about it. It goes against everything logical I believe in.’

He turned to her and there was clearly something on his mind. ‘Look, Gally, I stopped on the way back to think about all this. I don’t think he should be at home in the state
he’s in.’

‘Mike. It’s his choice. He really hates being in hospital. I’m quite sure he wouldn’t go back there voluntarily.’

‘No, I wasn’t going to say that.’ He looked nervous. ‘I wonder . . . whether we shouldn’t ask him if he wants to come here.’

‘He can come here. He’s just been here.’

‘I don’t mean to visit. I mean to stay, if you feel you’re up to looking after him, that is.’

It should have been a moment of joy but to Gally it felt as if a trap had just snapped shut around her.

They moved him in on Sunday the twentieth of January after spending a busy Saturday putting the finishing touches to a bedroom for him at the other end of the house to their
own. It had become impossible, in the ever-shifting shape of their triangle, for Gally to communicate to Mike the scale of her feeling about this. It was not straightforward fear, more a solemn
apprehension at the weight of the destiny which he was unwittingly loading on to her. It seemed to her that he had just stacked the cards to hand Ferney a huge advantage in a game where she was the
one who stood to pay the final price. If, however, she let him see the slightest loose end in her, he might start to unravel it and then she knew he would be horrified by what was revealed. He
seemed to have left her no way out except to confront the situation in which Ferney would pass the last days of his life and the last days of her pregnancy in the closest possible contact with her
in this house where their long bonding forces were the strongest. The old slanting stone drew her eye every time she looked out of a window like a finger pointing to a descending danger in the sky.
Was it a friend? It felt like one, but if so it was an implacable friend who would tolerate no disloyalty. The stone had its silicon finger in her soul now and there seemed to be no denying it.

Mike had an occasional streak of stubbornness which only needed the wrong person to goad him to bring it out and the wrong person in this case was a pompous doctor who was very doubtful indeed
about Mike’s plan. Dr Killigrew was absolutely certain that the best place for Ferney was hospital, possibly followed by a place in a hospice if he could find somewhere suitable, but he made
the mistake of implying that if Mike only knew as much about these things as he did then he would see the overwhelming strength of his case. That was a put-down of the type Mike was well used to in
the academic world and it was like a red rag to a bull. From that moment on he was absolutely determined that Ferney would come to Bagstone Farm whatever anyone said. Caught on the undeniable hook
of the artefacts the old man had produced, he was looking after Ferney as if he were some elderly example of an endangered species.

‘I don’t really understand why you’re not keener on this,’ he complained to Gally as they struggled into the bedroom with a set of shelves he had bought for
Ferney’s books. ‘Let’s put it over there, near the bed.’

‘I . . . just don’t know if we’ll be able to cope,’ said Gally.

‘A bit further over. Do you think the work will be too hard? The nurse is coming twice a day and Mary Sparrow says there’s two or three others will come and help if you
want.’

‘I’ll manage. Here?’

‘That’s fine, I’ll just get something to put under this corner. It’s rocking a bit.’

He went downstairs, leaving Gally wondering at the perversity of events. I suppose I just have to look on the good side, she thought. They’d be taking him back to hospital otherwise and
then wouldn’t I be equally bothered? It didn’t help. It still felt as though she was setting out on an extremely hazardous venture. The coming birth felt remote and the issue it would
bring seemed so theoretical that at times she could choose not to think about it. The coming death, too.

They went to get him together, loading the boxes of books Ferney had selected into the boot of the car with his clothes and making a collection in the hall of all the other things he had
earmarked for his comfort – a radio, the TV, the video, piles of tapes. He had been waiting in his armchair and while Mike was outside, packing the stuff away, Ferney beckoned Gally to him.
His voice had become noticeably weaker.

‘I know it’s not what you want.’

‘Oh, Ferney. I do really. I’m just . . . worried.’

‘Don’t be. It will be the way it has to be.’

The baby kicked hard and she put her hand on where its feet had made their presence felt.

‘Ferney, there’s a date in my life that I can’t avoid. My body’s counting down to it. The middle of February is coming whether I like it or not.’

‘That’s all right, isn’t it?’

‘No it isn’t. You know that. It gives you a date too, doesn’t it? It feels like I’m sentencing you.’

He shook his head. ‘It’s not like that. It’s just the way of things. Neither of us lives for ever, not in one go.’ He nodded towards her belly. ‘Anyway I
wouldn’t miss this one for anything. Not unless they drag me off to hospital.’

Gally looked out of the window to check that Mike was still busy. ‘Effie Mullard said she thought her daughter was a bit doolally because she had to move out of the house before she had
her.’

‘Could be.’

‘So . . . if anything goes wrong and you did have to go to hospital . . .’

‘What?’

‘I’m asking if my baby . . . you . . . if my baby might have something wrong with him because you ended up in Yeovil.’

His mouth twitched with a sudden pain. ‘I see what you’re getting at. No, I think just so long as
you
stay there in the right place, the stone will see you through.
There’ll be nothing wrong with the baby.’

‘But if you’ve been taken off somewhere else, it might not be you?’

‘Then we’ll just have to see, I suppose. Maybe I’ll miss out. Maybe I’ll be back some other way, but that’s not what’s going to happen and even if it did,
I’d find you.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘I think I do this time.’

Mike came back into the hall and she was left in an unexpressed hollowness of doubt.

They moved him in and it was clear to Gally straightaway that for Ferney, any slight difficulties that resulted from the separation from most of the familiar objects of his life were swamped by
the huge comfort of being back in the most familiar place of all. He settled into his bed and his armchair which gave him a view out of the window at the back of the house, down the slope of the
hill to the open lands. The pain was now coming at increasingly frequent intervals, but the move seemed to have given him a new serenity in dealing with it.

On the first Monday morning, after Mike had left at the crack of dawn to drive off to his week at work, Gally lay in bed seeing five days full of unchaperoned danger ahead. It started from the
first moment of silence after the car’s line of noise had dwindled into the startling pink of the striated horizon, and in her half-sleeping, half-waking state the window asserted itself for
a moment as smaller, its bars thicker and the glass carving swirls of bright distortion out of the dawn. She sat up sharply, rejecting it, slamming the newer window back into place with a force
that jolted her to her soul, then she sat there for an hour reviewing the certain unmistakabilities of her life and they seemed to add up to a shorter list than she would have liked. At the end of
the hour, she heard Ferney shuffle to and from the bathroom and then she went downstairs, made him a cup of tea and, wrapped in a long dressing-gown, went to confront the issue.

When she knocked there was silence and she pushed the door cautiously open. He was half-sitting up in bed gazing towards the window, his books neglected on the bedside table, and it took a few
moments for him to register her presence. His face as he turned it to her seemed at first to have nothing of him inhabiting its diminished skin and bone, but then he came back from somewhere and
animation slowly returned to the muscles around his cheeks, jaw and brow so that his eyes, tired and pained though they now were, came back to life and made him Ferney again.

‘How kind of you,’ he said as she put the teacup beside him.

She crossed to the armchair and sat down with her own tea.

‘How did you sleep?’

‘So well that I don’t remember.’

‘Are you awake enough to talk?’

‘Yes. What’s bothering you now?’

‘I think I need some sort of code of conduct.’

He knew what she meant without her having to say another word.

‘Haven’t you noticed?’ he said.

‘Noticed what?’

‘I haven’t led you back to anything for weeks now.’

‘You have. When you were telling us about the cross, the Glastonbury cross.’

‘You went back then?’

‘You know I did.’

‘I thought maybe you did. I wasn’t quite sure – but that wasn’t me, Gally dear, that was
you
. You know the trick now.’

‘But . . . okay, but when you talk about things like that it pulls the feet out from under me.’

‘I know when to push and when not to push. Whatever happens now is between you and the rest of yourself. I’ve done what you asked. I’ve helped you back to all that. It’s
not for me to do any more than that.’

Gally knew it was true, knew that she was looking for him to make it all safe for her when the real danger was at large within herself.

‘Will you help me?’ she said. ‘I understand all that, but will you try not to trip me up with things that take me back there? I know exactly what the question is, but I
don’t want to answer it bit by bit. I want to answer when the moment comes, otherwise I think it will get harder for me to know what I’ve got to do.’

She was amazed that she could speak so calmly. Certainly she knew what the question was. The question was death.

He sighed and she couldn’t tell if it was pain or not. ‘I’ll do my best,’ he said. ‘It’s difficult to be sure I can get the boundaries right, but I will
try.’

He came downstairs for a while during the morning and she made sure the fire was kept stoked up for him. She read to him for an hour, then the grim pain undermined his concentration and he went
back to bed. The nurse came in the afternoon.

That evening she sat in his bedroom armchair again watching him sitting up in bed, eating a tiny meal as the television launched into the six o’clock news. It was all about the Gulf, the
Scud missiles, the air war. Ferney watched intently.

‘What do you think about it all?’ she asked when the news finally turned to lesser events. It was the first time all day she had asked him for an opinion, given him the invitation to
delineate the boundaries she had requested.

He gave her a look which said he was grateful for that trust. ‘The history books I’ve read make me wonder,’ he said. ‘It’s all a long, long process and I think the
geography has got in the way of the history so the whole thing’s a bit stuck right now. Did you want a long answer or shall I stick to something short and pointless?’

‘A long one, please.’ The sound of his voice in this warm, familiar room set up little currents of satisfied pleasure just under her skin. It was rich and companionable and she
didn’t want it to end.

‘The books tell you what’s happened so far, don’t they? Go right back and there were tribes, hating and fearing and preying on each other most of the time. Then you get towns
and cities doing the same sort of thing until there’s a bigger threat and they get together. Then it’s little states. Then it’s big states and all the time it’s all those
separate fearing, hating groups joining up into bigger groups and finding another foreign rival to hate. Do you see what I mean?’

‘I suppose I do. It sounds horrible. I thought you were going to be cheerful.’

‘Oh, but I am. That’s the point. Just look where we are now. That whole process can’t have suddenly stopped dead in its tracks, surely. I read a book on Switzerland last year.
They were all separate groups living in the valleys just like tribes, you might say. The mountains gave them the ignorance to let them hate the people on the other side. Then they crossed the
mountains. Now they’re a nation. We’ve just got to keep on crossing the mountains, haven’t we? Like England, Wales and Scotland stopping fighting and getting together.
That’s got to go on.’