The Lives She Left Behind (27 page)

‘Oh really. Jo Driscoll, woman of mystery. I suppose you have a secret cave where you dress up in your cape. I know your bra size. I know you prefer Grape Nuts to Sugar Puffs, though I
have no idea why. I know who you snogged first.’

‘Well, for all that, I do know him and I promise you don’t need to worry.’

‘Please, Jo, you’re going to come with us now, aren’t you?’ said Ali. ‘You’re not yourself. All that stuff about your name yesterday and now him. I think we
should head for a station and get back home. There’s a bus from Zeals to Gillingham. The woman in the shop said so. I think there are trains to Exeter from there.’

‘Why do you want to go?’

‘Because of you going off like that. It feels like things are falling apart. Where’s your backpack?’

‘No, I’m sorry, I’m going to stay here for a while. There’s stuff I have to sort out.’

‘But we can’t leave you here. What will we tell your mum?’

The girl facing them, who seemed so serene and certain of herself, suddenly faltered at that. ‘My mum? My mum.’

‘Your mum,’ said Lucy. ‘Your mum, Fleur. Remember her? Your just-ever-so-slightly-scary mum?’

Jo ignored her, staring at Ali. ‘I don’t know. Let me think. She won’t be back for a few more days. I’ll write to her.’

Lucy took Jo’s head in both hands, turning it and forcing the other girl to look at her. ‘You’ll
write
to her? Are we in the same century? Nobody
writes
.’

‘We can’t just abandon you,’ said Ali. ‘She’ll think we’re completely irresponsible. What can we possibly say? You decided to stay in a tiny little village
with someone none of us has ever heard of who’s wanted by the police?’

‘Ali’s right,’ said Lucy. ‘Listen, Jo, I never thought
I’d
be telling you to be more responsible but I have to say this is completely mad and I’d
rather not be eaten by your mother who, as we both know, can be a bit extreme.’

‘I’m staying here. It’s as simple as that. I’ll sort out my mum.’

‘But there isn’t even anywhere we can contact you.’

Jo frowned. ‘Yes there is. There’s a house called Bagstone Farm. It’s the far side of the village. There’s a man there called Mike. I’ll make sure he knows where I
am.’

‘Mike? Who is Mike?’

‘Mike Martin.’

‘How do you know
him
?’

‘He’s a teacher.’

‘The teacher from the dig? That Mike? Did they brainwash you when we weren’t looking? How come you’ve only just realised you know this place? You never said so yesterday. One
minute you’re in the tent with us and the next minute you’re called Gilly or Golly or something weird and you know a boy called Ferney, which doesn’t sound at all like a real name
either, as well as a man called Mike and a farm called whatever it’s called, not to mention an entire village.’

‘Please believe me. I’m fine. I’m not in any trouble and you don’t have to worry about me, okay?’

‘Have you got this man’s number?’ demanded Ali and Gally found, somewhere amongst the most recent shards of her memory, there was a number that she still knew. She wrote it
down for them, thinking as she did so that there didn’t seem to be enough digits and realising, too late, that this was a number from 1990.

‘Keep your phone charged,’ said Ali. ‘Have you got it on you? No, of course you haven’t. I bet you’ve left it in your backpack. Get it out. Switch it on. Listen,
Jo. You’ve got our numbers. Lucy’s phone is flat but you can call me.’

They had one last go at persuading her but she wouldn’t budge, so in the end the two girls walked reluctantly away, looking back frequently until they were out of sight. Gally climbed back
up the slope to Ferney.

‘That wasn’t easy,’ he said.

She didn’t answer and he realised that she was crying silently.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

It was a while before she replied. ‘I’m not their friend any more, am I?’ she said quietly. ‘I’ve lost them and the person I used to be. It’s like she’s
dead.’

‘You’re still her but you never were just her. You’re Gally. That’s much bigger than just her.’

‘Jo. I was Jo.’ She gripped his hand so tightly that he tried to pull it away and his eyes widened in surprise. ‘That’s my life walking away from me down there. Those are
people I care about.’

‘But we’ve got ourselves back. That’s everything.’

She relented a little then. ‘Yes, of course we have, but give me space to grieve.’ She let out a shuddering sigh and put her hand to her mouth. ‘They’ll tell my
mum.’

‘When?’

‘When she gets home. A week maybe.’

‘We’ll sort something out. A lot can happen in a week. Let’s live for now. Please don’t be sad. You are my lovely Gally who is finally back where she should
be.’

‘That’s not all of it, is it? There was Mike and there still is Mike.’

‘He’s not important in this.’

But Gally was remembering the distraught look in Mike’s eyes and her acute uneasiness at the message in the stone and feeling a tangled net of responsibility and guilt. ‘You
can’t say that,’ she said. ‘He seems so hurt. Why do I feel so terrible? Isn’t it because of Edgar and Sebbi?’ She said the names as if they were children only just
lost.

‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘That’s all far too ancient. Yes, it ate away at your soul for a very long time, five or six hard lifetimes, but you were cured of that. Someone
helped you recover. We’ll come to that.’

She shivered and Ferney felt it. ‘You don’t like it here.’

‘It’s just a grassy mound,’ she said. ‘I like the way the grass has covered it and softened it and taken away its teeth, but I know it used to have teeth and I still hate
the castleness of it.’

‘You always have. You’ve never had any time for armies. The land soaks into us and we soak into it and all that happens there gets stirred up and dissolved in time and we’re
just on the end of all that. Did you hate Montacute too? I bet you did. I think something led me there, not just you. Montacute matters.’

‘It’s a powerful place,’ she said. ‘When I was there, I told a story round the campfire. It came to me and took me over.’

‘I know. Dozer told me when I went back to look for you.’

‘You went back?’

‘Of course. Anyway, that wasn’t about Edgar. That was Sebbi.’ He sighed. ‘Edgar was already dead. I buried him myself, a long way away. I’ll tell it all when I get
it straight, but not now. Listen, we don’t carry these hurts with us any more. They would overwhelm us if we did. That first time it took years and years to get beyond it. We learnt that
lesson.’

‘So why do I still feel so bad?’

‘We’ve been buried all over that graveyard, you and me. There’s hardly a spot in it we haven’t occupied. You were looking at the old grave but there’s a newer one
on top of it and I think that’s what makes you want to cry. It says Gabriella Martin on it. That was you, you know that.’

‘And I was married to Mike,’ she said, as if that part still made no sense. ‘You’ve seen it. Who was Rosie?’

‘That’s the bit I don’t quite know yet,’ he said. ‘We will have to remember exactly what happened. Fears are easier to fight when you can name them but right now I
think we have to move on. There’s good and bad in every place round here. Look around you now. Let’s try and get back to the good. Forget the castle. Remember later on.’ He
pointed down to the flatter mound of the bailey below. ‘Do you remember the woman with the pigs?’

‘What woman?’

‘See if I can help you get there. The palisades. Imagine the stakes still there but pretty rotten. Lots of them broken and lashed together with twine, bits of branch filling the gaps,
anything she had lying around. Okay? She kept the pigs in there, rooting around. She lived up here in what was left of the old tower. She stretched pigskins over the beams to keep the rain
out.’

‘Wait,’ said Gally, looking slowly around with eyes focused eight hundred years away. ‘Was there a skull on top?’

‘That’s it. A stag’s skull with only one antler, up on the roof peak.’

‘Yes. Let me get it.’ Gally stared down, imagined the gap-toothed wooden poles, caught a shred of them and pulled them into focus. ‘She was the wise woman. She was Freya or . .
.’

‘Freda? Is that right?’

‘Freda. I liked her. She showed me how to use cowslips.’

‘You showed her more than she showed you. You just did it so she never knew she was being shown.’

‘I don’t remember that part.’

‘Things come when it’s time for them. It’s time for us now. We’ve found our way back and we’re the right age.’

She held both his hands in hers and stared into the deep familiar comfort of his eyes with huge joy unfolding inside her. ‘Yes. I know how good that is, even if I can’t quite see the
edges of it yet.’

‘It doesn’t have edges.’

‘But what do we do now? We can’t stay sitting here forever. Where do we go?’

‘We have to ask him to let us use the house.’

‘Bagstone? How can we do that?’

‘It’s your house too.’

‘Be kind, Ferney.’ Gally sighed. ‘If it’s my house too, then I’m his wife. How do you think that will feel? It was me and him, wasn’t it? You were an old
man.’

‘That was a mistake, no more. You married him when you had forgotten about me. You were far away. We know what that’s like when you’re far away.’

Gally went on exploring the growing knowledge and growing disquiet within her. ‘That’s no excuse. You have to face it. For quite a few years he was the centre of my life. I married
him. I’m afraid I am still the centre of his. I can’t be hard on him.’

‘We need somewhere to be, you and me. It has to be there. It’s not just a house. It’s our root.’

‘The village is our home. We’ve lived in other houses.’

He looked at her with eyebrows raised.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘Only when we had to, but it is possible.’

‘Imagine trying to move into somewhere else. Two sixteen-year-olds. Have you even got a bank account? I haven’t. That’s not the point though. Bagstone is the only place where
we fit. You know that.’

‘How’s this going to work?’ she asked. ‘I haven’t got much money left.’

‘I’ve got money. You remember?’

She screwed up her eyes. ‘Remind me?’

He pointed down the hill. ‘See that tree? See my mark on the trunk? Six feet this way, two feet down, a box with something in it. I never know exactly what until I dig them up. Sovereigns,
often. All over the place – here, the Pen Pits, the woods by the house. Stuff from the good times.’

‘A week,’ she said. ‘We’ve got a week to sort it out before my mother gets back.’ She got up. ‘I’m going to talk to him.’

‘Be careful. Don’t let him drag you into his world again.’

He walked with her to the southern edge of the village then he climbed to the hilltop and she went on towards the house. When she got there, she saw two cars parked in the yard.

Mike knew he had got it badly wrong as soon as Gally ran from the churchyard, but he was in a state of such complete confusion as he walked home, replaying the scene word by
word, that he had no idea what else he could have said to change the outcome. There was already no room for doubt by the time she called him by his name in the churchyard. He had known who she was
with a lurch of his heart as soon as she had come to his gate. Her strange new shape did not matter. The eyes were all it took, but her eyes had only shown pity and then fear at his response.

He sat in his kitchen, hoping she would come back so much that he thought he had conjured the knock on the door out of pure imagination. He opened it to Rachel Palmer, who looked at his
expression and stepped back.

‘Is this a bad time?’ she asked.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘No. Come in.’

‘I think we really need to talk.’ She looked grim. There was no trace of the foothold of friendliness they had established before.

‘You got there in time?’ he asked.

‘In time for what?’

‘For your daughter.’

‘Yes. Look, we haven’t got long.’ She stared at him. ‘I did leave you a message? You must listen to your machine, Mike. It was important.’

‘There’s been a lot going on.’

‘They want to interview you under caution this afternoon. They’re still trying to find the boy. They might come back looking, you know. They mustn’t find him here. Do you know
where he is?’

‘No.’

‘He’s not helping by hiding.’

‘I don’t suppose he’s hiding. He’s just . . . being himself.’

‘Himself? Well, that’s the other thing, isn’t it?’ Here it comes, he thought. She sat down at the kitchen table. ‘You left things on a pretty strange note last
time,’ she said. ‘We do have to talk about that.’

‘Perhaps we should just pretend I never said it.’

‘In many ways I wish we could, but I have to deal with it because I think you meant it, didn’t you?’

He opened his mouth to answer and closed it again.

‘I’ve thought about it a great deal, Mike. I want you to understand something. I have to be able to rely on you and your answers to my questions. The whole thing falls to pieces
otherwise. If I can’t rely on logic, we’re both lost. Now, look – I realise it’s not uncommon when people have been bereaved for them to take comfort in believing all sorts
of things they would never have considered before. There’s no shame in that. When you’ve had a great loss, you have to find ways of dealing with it. I come across it surprisingly often.
Sometimes people just need to kid themselves a bit and there may be no harm in that. Do you know what I mean?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘I would suggest the best way forward would be to talk to somebody about it, someone with a bit more professional experience.’

‘I’m very happy with you. You’re very professional. I don’t need another lawyer.’

‘I don’t mean another lawyer. I mean a counsellor or perhaps a psychotherapist even. Someone who would help you come to terms with everything.’

‘Oh, I don’t need that,’ he said in surprise.

‘I think you do. What are you going to say in court? If I could tell there was something odd going on, then believe me, the court will spot it just like that. What will you say when they
ask why you were spending time with the boy? You can’t tell them all that stuff you told me, can you?’