by James Long
So, when her physical recovery allowed, they had started on a quest in which he felt largely a passenger. They always went west. He tried to show her the Suffolk coast but she was merely polite about it. She amassed a box of Ordnance Surveys covering the whole of Wiltshire, Dorset and Somerset. He offered her Devon but it was beyond the range of her passion. She did not just want a house – she wanted a story. The villages they visited in search of the haven she needed were judged by their part in history, and usually found wanting. Only old cottages would do and the ones that came nearest were the ones where the owners could tell a tale or two of their past.
They came to a junction of lanes. ‘I think we ought to go home,’ Mike said. ‘It’s going to take ages to get back to London.’ He was thinking of the work he had to do, dusting down his lecture notes on early maritime trading links.
‘Just this one, I promise. Penselwood’s down there, it says. I want to see Penselwood. This is much more the sort of place.’
So close to the road that caused you pain, he wondered. Perhaps it wasn’t the road, perhaps it was some chance arrangement of the cones or the colour of the digger.
‘If you’d said that before we wouldn’t have wasted all day round Castle Cary,’ he grumbled. Then it struck him: ‘Penselwood? I’m sure I know that name.’
‘A battle?’
‘Maybe.’
She smiled happily, knowing she’d won as he turned the car down the lane.
They did a slow tour of scattered houses without ever being sure they had found the centre of the village. There was one ‘For Sale’ sign, but the tiny cottage behind it had fake carriage lanterns and fake bottle glass in plastic window frames and they didn’t even stop. Eventually, they turned and came back to where the road forked.
‘Nothing there,’ said Mike, relieved that she hadn’t decided to knock on anyone’s door.
‘Try down here,’ she said, pointing down the fork the other way. ‘It probably goes back to the main road anyway.’
He could see no reason to suppose that was true, but he did as she asked and they had only gone a short way down the narrow, curving lane when she said, ‘Stop a minute.’
‘What for?’
‘I just want to look.’
He didn’t argue because he could see that she was back – that higher Gally who always eventually came out from behind her clouds.
From anywhere else but that precise spot they might not have noticed it, or so Mike supposed at the time, but as soon as Gally got out she pointed at the ivy-covered silhouette of the chimney poking up behind the trees.
‘There’s a house in there,’ she exclaimed in delight. ‘Right where I wanted it to be.’
‘A house?’ he said as he got out to join her. ‘Where?’
To the north, beyond a sparse screen of trees, pasture stretched uphill. The ground to the south of the lane fell gradually away to the flat farmland stretching past Gillingham to Shaftesbury’s distant ridge. A trio of beeches on the edge of the road almost hid the house, the hint of a gable showing man’s intruding straight edges to those who looked hard enough. She was already at the gate, a rotten, slimy thing held by bent wire and baler twine. There was a small clearing beyond, perhaps a farmyard once, and he followed her through, feeling like a trespasser, envying her ease.
It was not much more than a shell, and a green, wet-looking shell at that, though it still had a roof. Long and low, the jumbled lines of stonework told of changes over the busy years. The roof-line took a curtsey towards the far end. Stone lintels topped glassless window frames filled with ivy, and from the middle of the house a buckled wooden-latticework porch jutted out, tilting down on to its knees from the weight of the creeper that had massed on it. The door was a sheet of stained plywood, held in place by a diagonal plank that spelled closure and abandonment. Everywhere there were creepers, wild bushes and saplings; nature’s demolition team inching apart the mortared joints of man’s temporary work. On the far side of the clearing, pines burst up through the deep undergrowth that covered the lower slope of the hill. Beyond the house, in among the bushes, were angles of walls, buried stumps of old stone outhouses and a collapsing corrugated-iron shed.
Gally turned slowly right round with her arms outspread then hugged herself and jumped up and down. ‘It’s perfect,’ she said. ‘This is it.’
Mike felt a cold shudder that started at his chequebook. ‘It’s a ruin.’
‘That just means no one’s had a chance to spoil it.’
‘It will cost a fortune to fix.’
‘How do you know?’
‘It’s not for sale.’
‘Well, you can’t have it both ways. If it’s not for sale, it won’t cost a fortune.’
He smiled, turned and squeezed between the bushes and the end wall. The far side of the house was covered in cracked rendering. The ground fell away into a little valley, choked with the soapy corpses of fallen trees, fused under a shroud of moss. Gally moved past him and went down on her knees in the leaf-mould and the brambles, delving with her fingers into the dense decay.
‘Look,’ she said. A line of flowers he didn’t recognize was pushing its way through. In front of them, a row of curved tiles edged what had once been a flowerbed.
‘Someone loved this once. Think what it would look like if we cleared the valley. We could plant daffodils all the way down.’ She got up. ‘Come on,’ she said, grabbing his hand and pulling. ‘Let’s look inside.’
The plywood sheet where the door had once been was no obstacle. It was nailed to a rotten frame that crumbled as she pushed it. ‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if we should . . .’
‘It’s all right.’ She sounded excited. ‘No one’s going to mind.’
It seemed to him suddenly that going inside would be a good idea. The desolation they would find would persuade her this was not the comfortable country haven she craved and for which they had searched all these past weekends. That thought overcame his scruples about trespassing, but once indoors he soon found the house was not on his side in the matter. Under the vegetation, the roof was obviously still good. It still felt like a house. She stopped in front of him, seemed about to speak, but then moved on. They were in a passage that ran the length of the building, filled with green ivy half-light. Four large rooms opened off it in a line. There were stone flags on the floor in the first three, covered by decaying domestic jetsam – tiles, yellowing magazines and a discarded boiler, red with rust. Below each window there was an arc of damp on the stones, very clearly defined, where the house had said, ‘Stop, that’s far enough.’ Apart from that it was dry; damaged by intruders, not by weather. Horsehair plaster hung in long dusty strips from the walls and holes had been poked in the ceilings so that splintered laths dangled, rimming the edge of the holes like exit wounds.
‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit past it, isn’t it?’
Her voice had soft wonder in it. ‘Poor thing. It’s been so brave. It just needs some love.’ She turned away from him. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, ‘we’re here now.’
They went on into the room at the end and he heard her give a small, sad groan. Here the house had suffered its death wound. The far end wall was bulging, cracked and crumbled, roof timbers sagging into a gap, unsupported as the gable leaned outwards. There were no flagstones here, just wooden floorboards with their strength almost gone and white mould spreading across them. One had been pulled up. There was a cast-iron range in the end wall and the nearer corner steps led down into the darkness of a cellar. Gally moved towards it and the floorboards creaked and cracked under her. Before she got to the first step, her foot caught a lump of plaster lying on the boards and it shot forward into the hole, but instead of an eventual thump there was an immediate splash. Mike knelt and peered down. Six inches below the level of the floor, black water glinted, sullen and disconcerting. The cellar steps disappeared into it. Fragments of dried, rotten wood from the boards drifted down on to it as he looked and he saw them
move with deliberate speed out of sight beyond the fringes of the hole in the planking.
‘It’s a stream,’ he said aghast. ‘It’s running water.’ He stood and stepped back, heard a footfall on the boards behind him and knew immediately with a rush of shaming fear that where there had been two of them, there were now three.
He turned and found himself face to face with an old man, gazing at him with grim, questioning suspicion. Two clear eyes locked on his, challenging his presence with disconcerting authority.
CHAPTER TWO
Each day for the past six weeks, Ferney had walked to the main road to watch the digger’s metal mouth slicing cross-sections down into time, hoping to solve a cruel mystery that had obsessed him for two thirds of his long life. He stood back, out of the way of the busy men and their machines, but sometimes the spring sunlight would trick him, splashing some fragment of chalky rock to imitate the smooth gleam of bone. That would lure him forwards for a closer look and then the roadworkers, who usually ignored him, would turn on him and challenge his purpose with inarticulate questions. They labelled him a mad old man. They didn’t know he was driven by deep sadness and ancient love.
So much had changed down by the road. By now, the hole was two hundred feet long and fifteen feet deep, eating out its void along the surveyor’s pegged and taped lines, eating up history. The drivers slowing for the roadworks thought they were on the A303, but for more than ten centuries a narrower track had followed much the same course. For much of that time, the only deviations from the track had been caused by slow, natural things, the patient inroads of a widening stream-bend, which gradually pushed the route southward for a hundred yards, or the fall of a huge elm, forcing a kink in the track that stayed long after the last of the tree trunk had rotted into powder. In the eighteenth century, it became a turnpike built when the old ridgeway, with its plummeting descent from the chalk downs, proved too difficult for carriage traffic. Even when the cars came and the track was ripped wider, pounded with crushed stone and cauterized with a band of hot tarmac, the line of the route stayed the same.
It bothered him greatly that he didn’t know exactly where to look. Highway engineers, trained to see the world from a seventy-miles-per-hour perspective, were blind to the beauty of roads that wandered along their way. Braking distances and visibility angles vectored together to spell hazard where the smaller lane crossed the road. The hole was their solution, the rough vacuum into which a coarse concrete underpass would be moulded to solve the problem. They had uprooted everything Ferney needed to find his way.
The old man’s stock of memories had long ago overflowed into dungeons and his expeditions to retrieve them needed careful planning. They required a cue, often tiny but always precise. The shape and colour of a freshly painted window might be enough, or perhaps the felling of a tree on the borders of the steadily shrinking woodland. From such a fixed point he could work carefully backwards, using the details of that specific image until it blotted out the present and let him drag the memories up towards the daylight.
His last resort was the sense of smell, always a powerful short cut, and in this case there was a very particular smell. He needed to find the smithy which had stood here, somewhere in the digger’s devastation. Once a smithy, at any rate, then briefly a primitive petrol station with a skeleton pump and gaudy enamel advertisements, then a ruin from which the stone had been taken piecemeal to serve again in local walls, then afterwards – nothing, barely a bump in the verge. It was the smithy that obsessed him. Sitting up on the bank across the road, he watched the end of his poker grow red in the blowlamp’s noisy flame, then he tipped a paper bag of hoof-parings on to the grass, plunged the poker into it and breathed in deeply.
The smoke was acrid with hot iron and singed horses’ hooves, stinging his nose and throat, but then the scent claimed precedence and, as he looked back at the road, the other sight took over. The traffic shimmered into transparency. The road’s borders, hacked back for high-speed safety, filled again with untrimmed nature. The outline of the trees was still uncertain, shifting, until he trapped the corner of a roof-line, pulled it into shape and the rest of the details obediently followed, filling in like a photograph developing in solution.
In a haze, blotting out everything except the vision in his mind, he got to his feet, the poker dropping from his hand to scorch his shoe, unnoticed, as it fell. He hung on to the vision, suddenly sure of his direction. Across the stony track ahead was the low, uneven roof of the smithy and the shed beyond it. He was young, strong, determined, full of anger, full of grief. The smith, Cochrane, was in there, somewhere in his harsh darkness of iron, earth and anvils, on fire with rum or torpid in its wake. Whatever stage the tide of rum had reached, Ferney knew the fury in him would smother Cochrane’s strength.
Forgetting that all he had sought was the precise placing of the smithy’s walls, dragged along by the rage he had disturbed, old Ferney stumbled down to the verge to settle a score whose issue had been in no doubt since 1933. Down the track, on the fringe of his vision, a horse and cart moved slowly closer. Two more steps, and where his eyes saw the old grass verge, his feet felt anachronistic smooth road. Another two steps and a shrieking wedge of solid, violent air slammed him in the chest, hurled him up and backwards to fall thudding in the long grass behind, piling the years brutally back on to him.
The truck driver wrestled his snaking, screaming vehicle to a halt. He took a long breath, finding himself trembling uncontrollably, then climbed down from the cab, looking fearfully back at the roadmen gathering around the thing on the verge, the thing that must certainly be dead. He ran towards them but even before he got there, he found himself reprieved. The old man he had glimpsed almost under his front wheels was already up on his feet, dismissing the surrounding crowd with anger in his stiff arms, banging the dust from his clothes.
‘You missed him,’ said a man in dirty overalls, hefting his shovel. ‘All you did was blow him off his feet. Not your fault. He’s a mad old fart.’
The driver pushed past him. ‘Are you all right, mate?’ he asked.
The old man looked more confused than anything else. He just nodded.
‘You stepped right out. Didn’t look, did you?’
‘There was nothing coming.’
‘Course there was. There was me and my truck for a start.’
The old man turned and began to walk off.
‘He might drop dead any minute,’ said the driver to the people round him. ‘I’m not taking the blame. Here, let’s have some names and addresses.’ But no one seemed to want to be a witness and in the end, with the jam building up, he went back to move his truck.
A car had pulled out of the queue and was bumping down the grass verge.
‘Some people got no patience,’ said the driver to himself.
Ferney’s left knee ached as he walked off. He wanted to be back home, safe. Once he was on the field path he started to feel a little better, the motion helping, like working a rusty gate-hinge back and forth. The hedge blocked his view of the disturbing road and he forced his legs to drive him on up the hill against the gravity that grew ever stronger as he got older. Up had usually meant safety. Down in the flatlands there had always been the threat of sudden harm. Halfway up he stopped to get his breath, sitting on a tree stump and feeling some sort of peace spreading through him.
Ten minutes later, he climbed the stile in to the lane and that was when he saw the car parked by the cottage and heard voices coming from inside.
Gally felt completely safe inside the house and though she turned quickly when she heard Mike’s gasp, she was not nearly so startled by the old man’s sudden presence. When they shared their impressions afterwards, she found herself unable to tell Mike the complete truth. They both saw the same man, and on a physical level they both recorded the same information. He was shorter than Mike, a little under six feet tall, and if his age had started to shrink him, so far it seemed only to have condensed his vitality into a more
concentrated form. He looked fit and weathered and his eyes of seafaring blue had escaped the watery weakening of the years. They burned from a face that was tanned and sculpted by the wind over strong cheekbones and a square jaw. Hair flecked dark among the grey might have led you to guess his age at somewhere in the sixties and to miss the target by a score of years.
Mike saw an authority that made him feel short-trousered, tongue-tied and defensive. Feeling they had been caught where they had no right to be, his own uncertainty sketched a fierceness on to his image of the man’s face that, by any objective standard, was not there. Beyond that, the outward clues – the open-air look, the comfortable tweeds and well-kept leather boots – made Mike feel all the more an urban intruder. The man who stood staring at him looked as if he owned the place – and not just the house, perhaps, but everywhere round about. Those opening seconds cemented for him a view of Ferney that was to persist for a very long time.
Gally was a searcher of faces. In London she would scan crowds restlessly, incessantly, in shops, on tube trains or simply walking down the street. In the car she would crane back for a better view of the people they passed. In the first few seconds of Ferney’s appearance, she thought there was more to find in his face than in any she had ever seen before. Afterwards, when she had time to sort out the tumult he raised in her, she remembered patience, a peace that was not just peace, but an acceptance of the way things had to be, coupled with strength – a philosopher king with a sword and a book of verse. If that sounded fanciful enough, what she really couldn’t tell Mike was more fanciful still. A certainty had risen in her that this was someone important who had been missing for a long time, as if a favourite uncle had finally returned from years abroad. In the second of seeing him she also left behind the last shreds of the distress she had felt down on the road, as if he had turned her towards a fresh view.
