The Lives She Left Behind (13 page)

‘They didn’t exist,’ said Ali. ‘They were just a folk tale.’

‘You don’t know that.’

Ali went to buy a guidebook. Jo stood by the gate, imagining the gaunt remains as they had once been with a roof and glass in the windows and bright colours everywhere inside. She thought she
preferred the ruin.

‘Let’s go to the Tor,’ she suggested, so they walked out to the steep hill a mile to the east, climbing the path to the remains of the chapel on the summit. All the way up she
was remembering that first drive down to Exeter four years earlier, when she had seen this cone in the far distance and thought it was where she most wanted to be. Now she knew it had only been a
signpost, a finger pointing beyond the horizon. For all that, it felt immensely exciting because, as she reached the summit and the tower which was all that was left of the chapel, she knew this
was the frontier of her territory, a border post – and she knew she had looked out from her true home to see this same tower at the edge of her vision.

They sat down together with the evening sun behind them, staring out across the wide land.

‘I know two interesting things about this place,’ said Ali.

‘Do tell us, O fountain of wisdom,’ Lucy replied.

‘The first church up here fell down in an earthquake. Then Henry the Eighth hanged the abbot here.’

Lucy shivered. ‘There are some things you should keep to yourself,’ she complained.

‘This was St Michael’s church,’ said Jo. ‘So was the chapel that used to stand at the top of the hill at Montacute, where the tower is now. There are churches to St
Michael on a lot of hilltops. They believed St Michael fought Lucifer up in the air.’

‘That’s the sort of thing I expect Ali to know, not you,’ Lucy said. ‘So where do we go next?’

Jo, without hesitation, pointed out across the fields towards high ground in the far distance. Behind them, the sinking sun dipped below a band of cloud and lit up the horizon. In that sharp,
clear light, she saw another tower sticking up from the ridge.

‘There,’ she said, and Ali, peering at her map and twisting it one way then the other, nodded. ‘Yes, that’s about right,’ she said.

They camped at the edge of a wood near the village of East Pennard, tucking the tent out of sight, then they inspected the food they had bought in Glastonbury.

‘One tin of frankfurters. One baguette. Butter. One bag of mixed leaf salad,’ said Ali. ‘A feast.’ She tore the salad open. ‘Correction: one bag of compost claiming
to be a mixed leaf salad.’ She tipped it and brown liquid dripped out. ‘Just frankfurters and bread then.’

‘That’s boring,’ said Lucy.

Jo got up and gazed at the trees nearby. ‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘Look what we have here.’

Pale yellow crescents of fungi were growing from low down on one trunk. She broke them off, brought them back and began to clean them, rubbing them gently with her fingers. Lucy prodded one
fastidiously.

‘You can’t be serious,’ she said. ‘That’s not a mushroom. It’s more like some sort of tree disease. I’m not eating that.’

Jo smiled. ‘It’s the one we call the wood fairy’s saddle,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry. I’ve eaten them lots of times. They’re good.’

‘When have you eaten them? Where? In Exeter? I’ve never seen you eating them. People die of eating the wrong mushrooms.’

Jo shrugged, lit the camping stove, melted butter in the small aluminium pan, broke the crescents into pieces and began frying them.

‘I’ll try them first if you don’t believe me.’

‘That won’t help. You might die writhing in agony in twelve hours’ time.’

So the other two watched, shaking their heads, as Jo tore open a length of baguette, spooned in the mushrooms, added a frankfurter and ate them with enjoyment.

When they had all eaten, Ali got out the guidebook she had bought in Glastonbury. ‘Lucy,’ she said. ‘Just so you know, that story about Arthur and Guinevere is crap.’

‘No, it’s not. It was on the sign.’

‘Oh, right. The Abbot had some sort of vision so they dug a hole and, guess what? They found the skeletons and the little cross.’

‘There you are.’

‘No, it was all rubbish. The whole thing was a scam. The Abbey was in trouble. They bigged it up just to get lots of pilgrims to go there. That’s how they made their
money.’

Jo was far away, seeing the lead cross, feeling the weight of it in her hand, studying the crude letters incised into it, ‘
Hic jacet sepultus
. . .’ Dimly, she heard Lucy
ask, ‘What do you mean, the Abbey was in trouble?’

‘It had burnt down,’ Jo said, ‘just a few years before. They had to rebuild. They had to start again. It was a huge fire . . .’ She remembered the call in the darkness,
remembered the whole village pouring out of their houses in the dark, chattering in horrified excitement as they ran through the village to the edge of the ridge, staring out westward to the bright
red glow on the far horizon, which grew until, even at that great distance, they could see flames leaping. They knew what lay out there. They knew what was burning.

The other two girls were staring at her and she realised she had been talking all the time.

‘Oh my God,’ said Lucy. ‘It’s the mushrooms. It must be. Are you feeling weird?’

‘I’m fine,’ she said, but she could see she had shaken them, even when they woke early the following morning. After that, she was careful to say little and leave the navigation
to Ali, although she could have found the way with her eyes shut. That was why they went too far north and Ali got them lost in lanes with no signs and fields with no landmarks. Jo didn’t
feel lost at all. From time to time she caught glimpses of the ridge to the east and as they came nearer, they all saw the tower sticking up from the trees.

‘We’re nearly there,’ Ali said. ‘If we go up the hill to that tower, we should be able to head south from there.’

They climbed the ridge, winding through the trees that stopped them seeing the tower again until they were almost on it. Three cars parked on the verge showed they were coming to something worth
stopping for and then the tower seemed to burst upward beside the road as they came out of the woodland and Jo’s heart lifted with it.

Dozer had dropped Luke at the turning where the roads split to Wincanton, Pen Selwood and Cucklington. ‘We’ll be back this way quite soon. Come and visit when
we’re digging,’ said the man. ‘Be seeing you.’

The boy waved his thanks as the truck drove away, then stood quite still, looking back the way they had come. For a moment he thought of cycling all the way back again to search for them but he
knew that was hopeless – a random line lancing out into a wide spray of possibilities of near-misses, of bad timing and hidden views. Would he sense her? From how far? A field’s width
on the wrong side of a concealing hedge?

Something old and experienced whispered in his head. Trust her. Wait here. Be here for her. When she gets here, you’ll know.

He wished he could send his mind reaching out from his body to find them, out there to the south-west. He tried to imagine that, probing beyond Wincanton, opening up his whole head to sense
something far off. Nothing came.

The road shimmered for a moment, shifted its shape, but modern noise drove it back to tarmac and the present and a green van, changing gear as it went past him. He calmed himself, breathing
deeply and evenly, blotting out the traffic’s roar from the main road close by. He remembered what he had just seen and played with the road, letting it dissolve from dark grey to brown and
white, rough earth and broken stone, helping it narrow to a track as the grass grew in from the edges and blurred the sharper modern boundaries. There were no more cars, only bird-song.

He looked up the curve of the lane towards old Pen, and in this quieter world he heard feet scuffing on the loose stone and the sounds of distress. Turning his head back towards Wincanton, he
saw four men approaching, coming from the distant town. They were young men, walking awkwardly, carrying something between them, one at each corner. Without knowing quite how, he found himself
walking as one of them, saw that his own hands were gripping a corner of their shared burden. Then he looked down at what they were carrying on their litter and saw the gasping girl with the white
face and the blood trickling from the corner of her mouth and her eyes fixed on his. As their eyes met, the narrow channels of his schoolboy heart were filled with adult love and horror.

‘I’m taking you home,’ an older voice said and it came, shaking, from his own mouth, familiar and bewildering.

Back across an hour or several hundred years, he saw the two of them behind the hedge, huddled, hiding from the sudden musket fire, caught up in someone else’s ambush. He saw the horse
plunge, black, through the bursting branches as he raised an arm as if he could fend it off. From below its belly he looked up at the stirrups and the trooper’s spurred boots as one hoof
punched down into her breast. The ground drummed and as the unheeding soldier galloped away bent on his escape he looked down at her – curling, soaked in her pain, and knew she could not
live.

Stumbling along the road again, he clutched the rough litter with this man’s hands, listening to every hard breath, and fixed his eyes on hers as he saw her dwindle from him. He was
flooded with the certainty of loss and the need to get her home before she died. The house was four hundred strides away, three hundred, two hundred, and she had to be there in time to feel its
safety comforting her death.

A horn shocked him back and the dusty path grew hard and dark again. He stepped aside out of the way of the car whose driver mouthed cross words through the glass, and of course by then the
litter and his dying wife had gone, back to their own time – back to the time when Dutch William marched in to deal with cruel Catholic James and a forgotten skirmish claimed her life. In
that memory she whispered a different name to Luke and she had a name too, and he hadn’t pinned them down in time so they had blown away with the car horn.

He came back into a world where Dutch William meant nothing to him at all and where only one thing had not changed. The house stood just ahead. Bagstone was at the centre of all this, that he
knew. The teacher was squatting there and he was quite sure the teacher knew his real name. Nobody answered his knock and he sat down in the porch, determination and certainty growing with every
breath as the vast shape of an old man’s memory surrounded him, even if he could not yet open its doors or discern its detail. He tried to wring the past out of the house, staring at the
stones as if his history was written on them, and that was when it became clear to him that the cottage was not his only resource – that there was a better place to go, a place where the past
really was written in stone.

He walked north through the diffuse village, past fields punctuated by the occasional cottage, knowing his way so long as he left it to his legs and not his head. He came to the churchyard at
the far side of the village and wandered through the older graves until he arrived at a crooked stone splashed with lichen, its cut letters washed almost smooth by a thousand storms. A tremor from
the past stopped him there. He crouched to stare at the lettering, trying to see any clear form in the remains of the grooves. He felt them with his fingers and found only ambiguous erosion but
then something came out of memory into his left hand, an iron tool, and he found himself cleaning out the letters. A matching mallet bulked from nowhere into his right hand. There he was in the
deeper silence of past times, halfway through the task of deepening the first cuts, chasing out sharp sprays from the new stone. He was cutting the stone for her, set up on a trestle right by the
fresh grave, somewhere back in the long age of hand-power and horsepower.

He was young and she had been young, and that time a new fever got her for which she had not found a remedy.

‘I’ll see you soon,’ she had said before she closed her eyes. The sadness got him. The letter he was shaping was a ‘G’ but he could not find the next one however
hard he tried.

Movement caught his eye across the graveyard, beyond the trees, and brought him back. A man walking, slowly. He saw Michael Martin stop and look down. The boy rose carefully to his feet, circled
round between the bushes as if he were stalking an animal, keeping to the outer edge of the graveyard all the way until he stood a few yards behind the man. Here the stones were modern, crisp and
upright.

The teacher was staring at a white gravestone. The boy moved forward carefully and quietly until he was just feet behind the man. He could read the simple inscription. It said ‘Ferney
Miller. Born November 8th 1907. Died February 7th 1991.’

‘Ferney.’ The name burst out of him and the teacher turned sharply at the sound of his voice. ‘Ferney, Ferney, FERNEY! That’s it!’

‘What do you mean?’

‘That’s my name. It is, isn’t it?’

Michael Martin’s face was white. ‘Don’t say that. How can it be?’ he said.

The boy who had been Luke was dancing in his excitement, spinning round, jumping as if a wound spring had burst free inside him. ‘Because it is. You know it is. Tell me. It is, isn’t
it? You have to say.’

The teacher shrank away from the demonic boy, bruised by his joy and the new energy that was overflowing out of him, shaking his head.

‘Say it,’ said the boy, and the teacher barely breathed the word.

‘Yes.’

‘Thank you, thank you,’ the boy called. ‘I am Ferney. Of course I am.’

The teacher sat down on the grass as if his legs had given way.

‘I guessed,’ he said. ‘I guessed but I didn’t believe it. I didn’t let myself. Those things you knew. The way you were in the car. You bastard.’

The boy flinched, looked at him in shock, took a step backwards.

‘You expect me to be glad to see you?’ the teacher asked. ‘You think this is some sort of cause for celebration after what you did to me? Don’t shake your head. You know
what I’m talking about.’

‘I don’t,’ the boy managed to answer before his voice broke up and, to his fury, tears began to run down his cheeks.