The Lives She Left Behind (25 page)

He raced back to Pen, remembering an old refuge for times like this. He could see it in his mind – a stone barn in a narrow field out of sight of the farm. Which farm? The farm towards the
wood, towards the pits. He cycled up the lane, worried suddenly that the barn might have fallen into ruin, even more worried as he came near that it might now be a house, like others he passed,
absurdly domesticated like a pig in a party frock. He climbed the field gate and looked along inside the thick hedgerow and his heart jumped to see it was still there, magnificently unchanged from
when he had last used it. When was that? he wondered. Eighty years ago? More? It had stood there in one form or another for half a millennium before that. He pulled one swaying door open enough to
slip in, climbed a ladder through the trapdoor to the hayloft and found it still half-full of last year’s hay. Pulling bales together into a bed on the old elm boards, he spread the remains
of a horse blanket over it and lay down to think, to cast his memory back like a fly on a line, upstream on time’s river, right through into the deep yellow evening, remembering the girl from
Scotland and all the other girls who were all the same girl. He was filled with the saturation of the memory of love and the deep desire for things to be put right again.

In the early morning, as bars of sunrise slipped between loose tiles above, he woke and looked for her and remembered with a soul-scouring pang that a quarter of a thousand
years had passed since the Scots Gally, but before the sorrow could take hold he knew that mattered not at all because she was close by once more.

He wondered just how she would be this time. ‘I have to take care,’ that one had said, the Scottish one, in the first flush of talking when she had slipped halfway back to being pure
Gally again and the way she spoke had already begun to change. ‘I take fire quickly. Anger clutches me. It is the way this body chose to work.’ Of course he knew that. There was that
steady, central core that made them who they were but there were also the different glands, different brains, different fingertips or nerve endings or retinas or eardrums that could change the way
their spirit met the world – hurdles they would always learn to leap. The Scottish girl was slender, snub-nosed, wide-eyed. They were not always so lucky in their bodies and that first moment
of meeting had taken many forms.

He knew he was lucky this time. That dark hair and the soft brown eyes were all he wanted, but what had met her here? Why had she found horror when their world of Pen should have wrapped its
warmth around her? The tombstone was the reason and he did not fully understand and somehow he had to understand to see her through.

Although it was so very early, he saw movement in the farm’s kitchen as he passed so he knocked and asked for a slice of bread and a drink of water as wanderers always used to do, and the
woman there looked a little stunned but fetched what he needed. Then he walked rapidly up to the hilltop, feeling a sense of urgency, certain she was coming. As he walked, he sang the song which
was haunting him – the song he didn’t really know he knew until he sang it out loud, the song with a hundred variations in it, adjusted by the different habits of speech at each of its
rebirths.

He came to the bench on the hilltop and saw it through many different eyes. Most recently it sat heavily, a place for one man sitting as years passed, waiting in loneliness. It
should be a place for two, a place of meeting, packed with love.

The morning birds were carving sharp curls of song out of a high and empty sky. He stared north to where the stubby church anchored the village and saw someone there, far off, running between
trees then dipping out of sight into the lower ground between them, and then he knew that she was coming to him and all he had to do was wait. The sun was behind him and she came into the field
that curved up to where he was with her eyes screwed up and her hand out in front of her face as if to shade them.

He stood stock-still next to the concrete pillar and she halted twenty yards from him, holding up her hand again as if to stop him approaching and give herself time. He understood perfectly. She
looked all around her, breathing in the air of this place of theirs. He could see her inhaling the history to fill the vacancies inside her. She closed her eyes and he knew a storm of memory was
flooding her head.

She opened them again to see him waiting patiently, still little more than a dark shape against the sun. Filled with happiness, she came forward and the two of them met afresh where they had met
so many, many times before. They stood a foot apart and both of them were bubbling with delighted laughter as they searched every surprising detail of each other’s face. There was no surprise
when they finally let their eyes meet and see what they had always seen. Those old eyes fed starved souls. New hands searched new skin and new mouths met.

After a long while, she stepped back from him. ‘Let me hear you,’ she said. ‘I want to know your voice.’

‘That’s easily done,’ he replied. ‘This is how I sound. Do you like it?’

‘Of course I do.’

Other voices reached them – a family walking the field path.

‘Where can we go?’ she asked.

‘Not to the house.’

‘I know. Where then?’

‘The old wild place,’ he said. ‘Will that do?’

‘Take me to the wild place,’ she answered.

She stayed out of sight while Ferney retrieved her backpack from the hedge near Bagstone, then he took her hand and led her through the fields to the stone barn. He made her wait below while he
climbed the ladder, taking her backpack with him. She heard him moving up above, tracking him by the groan of the planks and the fine fall of dust through the gaps between them.

‘You can come up now,’ he called and she climbed the wooden ladder to see the hay bed he had made under the rafters with her old sleeping bag, spread out, unzipped, as a
covering.

‘Last night,’ he said. ‘I was here last night. I didn’t know for sure that you would be with me here today. I am so glad you are.’

It seemed at first that there was no hurry at all. Nobody else would come to this private space. The tick of time had stopped and left a deep silence. They sat on the edge of the bales and
stared at each other with their whole long history in their eyes, and she put her hand up to trace the shape of his face with her fingertips, feeling the tiny shock of a spark just before they
touched his skin. Then they were both overtaken by an intense curiosity and began to explore the hidden shape of each other inside their clothes. A cavalcade of Ferneys came to her mind’s eye
as they did. Dark and fair, tall and short, handsome and less clearly so, though always pleasing to her. She saw his eyes look at her with the same look that had been in all their eyes.

There was no reticence because they knew each other far, far too well for that. There was no trepidation because they were both seasoned in the art of loving each other. Instead, there was a
rising peak of sheer delight that they had once again been given young and perfect instruments on which to play their old and expert music. When there was nothing left to take off and they had
discovered every unmapped inch of each other, it seemed that there was a hurry after all, as the years of separation ended.

Afterwards, they lay staring into each other’s eyes as if they resented the time lost even in blinking. He kissed the tip of her nose.

‘When did we last do that?’ she asked and saw his eyes focus far beyond her as he felt back for the answer.

‘Years and years ago,’ he said. ‘Before the war. Seventy years, maybe eighty. You went missing. I never found you. Where did you go?’

‘I don’t know yet. I will soon. I know who I am now and that’s a start,’ she said. ‘I finally know. I was there all the time but I was trapped. I didn’t know
why I felt so lonely until today.’ She smiled and nuzzled against his cheek and then without any warning at all, she burst into violent sobs.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘You’re here now. It’s okay.’

‘No, it isn’t. It should be.’

‘Listen, my lovely Gally, I know this much,’ he said. ‘It’s not easy being me and you. There’s a lot of waiting and hoping and loneliness in between. We only just
get by at times like that. It’s easy to forget that when we’re together.’ He could see that just below the surface she was still on the very edge of a crisis, so he took it head
on. ‘What happened to you in the churchyard yesterday, when you first arrived? I was watching.’

She took in a gulp of air, tried to speak and failed.

‘Don’t rush,’ he said gently, smoothing the tears away from her cheeks with his fingers.

‘I walked in there and I felt so happy,’ she said slowly. ‘I knew I had come home. I took off a coat named Jo and there was me, Gally, underneath all the time. I found that
somewhere in my head I had the answer to all kinds of things if I just looked, but something was pulling me and I went to the graves and the next moment I was drowning in sadness.’

‘Which grave?’

‘Did we have a child?’

He watched her, not knowing how to reply.

‘We did,’ she said. ‘We had a son, didn’t we? It should have been his grave. I knew where I buried him.’

‘That was a very long time ago.’

She frowned. ‘Was it? I didn’t think so.’

‘It doesn’t do to dwell on all the deaths,’ he said. ‘You have to balance them against all the life. There’s been just as much of that,’ but he could see it
wasn’t working. Something stronger had taken root.

She took her arms from round him and rolled away, curling up. ‘I think I might have done something terrible,’ she said in not much above a whisper.

‘What did you do?’

‘Our child died,’ she said. ‘I let someone kill our child,’ and she began to weep.

‘There’s an old story you need to hear,’ he said. ‘Wait.’ He put his hands over his ears and she understood that he was clawing his way back there for her.

He put himself in the churchyard when it was much smaller. One old stone stood upright like a rough-cut finger, but the other graves were only mounds with here and there a simple wooden cross.
He sensed a crowd around them but they weren’t there for a burial or a christening or a wedding. They had been summoned for the feudal needs of war.

He opened his eyes, put his hands down and turned to her. She was watching him intently, her eyes red and wet. ‘I think I know what this is,’ he said. ‘I can tell you part of
the story but it would be easier if we went back there to do it.’

She shook her head. ‘No. I can’t. I went to the cottage first this morning and someone followed me to the church.’

‘Mike Martin.’

‘Yes. He said things I don’t understand. What did he mean?’ She began to cry again.

He held her, hushing her with kisses and stroking her head. ‘I won’t let him hurt you,’ he said when she was quiet again.

‘No. No, he won’t hurt me. That’s not it. I think I hurt him. Did I? Do you know what I did?’

Ferney said nothing.

‘I should have seen you first,’ Gally said, her arms tight around him. ‘I made the wrong choice. Why does everything have to be so complicated?’

‘The world’s changed,’ he answered slowly. ‘We’ve always been a universe of two, haven’t we?’ But everything is mapped out now. Even our hilltop. You
saw what’s up there, didn’t you? Our everlasting, unchanging hilltop, and now there’s that concrete lump on top of it.’ He saw her puzzled look. ‘It wasn’t there
last time you and I were properly together. Do you know why they put it there? To measure the whole country, to pin everything down to the nearest inch. The Ordnance Survey. “Ordnance”
as in artillery. “Survey” as in maps to tell them where to aim their guns, how to destroy people. Everything’s mapped. People are mapped. We’re used to being left alone,
aren’t we? The world doesn’t leave people alone any more. There are systems for everything, systems that ring bells if you’re not normal – and we’re not normal, are
we?’

‘No, I don’t suppose we’ve ever been that.’

‘So now this man is in the house that should be ours and these days houses are worth a king’s ransom and people don’t let them fall down any more. So many times we’ve
just wandered back into the ruins and set it right again. Not this time. He thinks it’s his but it’s our house and it’s our village.’ He sat up and reached for his shirt.
‘First things first. Let’s get you right. Let’s make sure you understand the things that hurt, then they won’t hurt any more. I know where we should go. It’s quiet and
safe and nobody will find us if we don’t want them to.’

That was what he thought.

They walked, hand in hand and utterly at home, through the village’s northern outskirts to a place where a cone of earth rose in the trees. Climbing to the top, they sat
and looked down through the fringe of trees to the wide world where the ridge dipped down to modern times.

‘We must untangle this,’ Ferney said. ‘We must put your old sorrow back where it belongs. It was before they made this place. It all started at the church.’ Gally felt
him move a little bit away and knew he was only partly in her own time. ‘Imagine the church, not like now. Timber.’

She could see the wooden building and was excited by the clarity of her vision. ‘Yes,’ she said, but the silence ran on and he seemed to be losing the trail, breathing hard,
frowning.