Ferney

by James Long

  The old man said nothing and Gally recovered her wits first. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘We were just being nosy. Is it yours?’

  He continued to weigh her up with his chin set, then his gaze softened a fraction. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not now.’

  She smiled at him. ‘I love it,’ she said. ‘It’s just . . . well, perfect.’

  He looked around, sniffed and looked back at her, searching her face.

  ‘My name’s Gabriella Martin,’ she said, ‘and this is Mike, my husband.’

  He just nodded and continued to stare, as if used to disappointment. ‘And you are?’ she prompted, gently.

  ‘My name,’ he said, with an odd stress that said other definitions of himself were possible, ‘is Ferney.’

  She’d expected a surname, but she knew that was not what she’d got, and she also knew as soon as she heard it that this was someone she would like very much. Astonished at this thought, she fended him off with words to give herself space. ‘It’s so sad it should be left to fall apart,’ she said. ‘Do you know whose it is?’

  ‘I do. It’s private property,’ he said and she waited, but that was all.

  ‘We shouldn’t be here,’ said Mike. ‘Look, Gally, I think we should go and leave this . . .’ But the old man’s head lifted sharply and he broke in.

  ‘Gally? Who’s Gally?’

  She laughed. ‘That’s what I’m always called. I’m sorry, Mike’s right. We shouldn’t be here.’

  ‘No, no. Who gave you that name?’ he said, and she couldn’t tell whether it was excitement or affront in his voice.

  ‘I . . . well, I think I gave it to myself. It was all I could say when I was very little.’ She looked at him in surprise. ‘I’m really sorry if we’re trespassing. We ought to go.’

  But suddenly he didn’t want that at all. ‘There’s no need for that,’ he said and now his face relaxed. ‘No one will mind. Mrs Mullard – she has the title to it now. She lives way away down by Buckhorn Weston – never comes up here these days. Hasn’t been for years. You look round all you like.’

  ‘We want to buy somewhere in the country, you see. Mike’s away a lot and I don’t want to bring up a family in the town.’

  The old man stared at her, seemingly transfixed. ‘You’re having a baby, then?’

  Mike froze inside, watching to see how she would respond. Since the miscarriage, babies had been landmines, surrounding them on all sides. Every casual reference had the capacity to hurl Gally into a pit of sadness as soon as they were alone. Every nappy advertisement or passing pushchair could trigger tears. Now, to his astonishment, she laughed at the old man’s interest.

  ‘No, not right away. It’s just an idea at the moment.’

  Ferney was still looking hard at her and a slow smile that seemed to stretch long disused muscles spread across his face. For a moment, until he blinked hard, his eyes caught the light with a faint sheen of tears.

  Mike never understood the effortless process by which Gally and the old man stitched it all up between them without, it seemed, using conventional conversation at all. Ten minutes of half-sentences and oblique words left him nothing more than a baffled observer. At the end of it they said goodbye to the old man at the gate and he ambled off up the lane. Mike tugged the gate closed, the rotten string that stood in for a hinge gave way and the whole gate sagged sideways, twisting, diamond-shaped, into the hedge.

  ‘There,’ she said triumphantly, ‘you’ve broken it. Now we’ll have to buy it.’

  He was on the defensive, irritated at being somehow pushed out. Certain that she would want to talk about the possibilities, he was preparing a relentlessly logical defence but instead, when they drove off, she went into some sort of a dream. They joined the main road at the same roadworks, but this time they had no effect on her at all. That was a relief to him and he left well alone. In the end his lecture notes muscled themselves back into his thoughts and all the way to London his mind barely left them except for odd, unguarded moments when it drifted briefly to America and what might have been.

  It was Thursday before the subject came up again and then she only said, ‘You’re okay for Saturday, aren’t you?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Houses.’

  ‘The tarted-up toolshed at Donhead? I read the details. I thought you didn’t like it.’

  ‘No, not that horrid thing. We’re going to Buckhorn Weston.’

  The name rang no bells. ‘I haven’t seen that one.’

  ‘It isn’t a one. It’s a her. We’re going to see Mrs Mullard. I’ve written to her.’

  And so it was that very much against his better judgement they found themselves pulling up in front of a secluded and ramshackle house, flanked by disintegrating outbuildings in paddocks fenced by rusty chicken wire. Mrs Mullard was an old vixen, an English gentlewoman gone wild, as gnarled as a briar root, and she didn’t miss a trick. The door, covered in convex scales of fossilized green paint that clung on only at their centres, was whipped open before they knocked – the curtains had been twitching as they pulled up outside – and Gally was drawn in by a bony hand before she’d had a chance to say a word.

  ‘Come and sit down,’ said the old lady. She would not have been much over five foot two if she stood straight, and her arched spine lopped a further four inches off that. The room into which she led them had its parched floorboards half-covered in irregular patches of lino. She settled herself into the one complete article of furniture, a cracked brown leather armchair, and smiled questioningly while Gally and Mike perched on the unpadded frame of an old sofa. Mike expected Gally to say something, but she just smiled back and he felt, with sudden panic, a need to take the initiative.

  ‘We were at Penselwood last weekend,’ he said, ‘and . . .’

  ‘Eggs,’ said Mrs Mullard. ‘I expect you’re wondering how we live. It’s eggs.’ She half turned and with a stentorian bellow that gave the lie to her apparent octogenarian fragility, yelled ‘BESSY!’

  A grey, slack-mouthed woman, less old but more aged, appeared at the door. Mrs Mullard wagged a finger at her. ‘Go and get an egg, Bessy.’

  Gally stared after her as she went out of the room and Mike watched her, as ever, for signs of an unexpected problem, but she seemed on top of the world today, in charge of herself. She’d thrashed awake only once the previous night and gone back to sleep quickly, though he had more difficulty in doing so. Bessy came back on dull feet and the egg she carried in her large hand was passed around for their solemn inspection.

  ‘Perfect,’ said Mike. ‘Lovely brown colour and, er . . .’ Why did I say ‘and’? he thought desperately. There is no ‘and’. Mrs Mullard was looking at him, eyebrows raised. ‘. . . shape,’ he ended lamely.

  ‘We’ve got fifty hens now,’ she said.

  ‘We just went to Penselwood by chance,’ he said. ‘We didn’t . . .’

  ‘Oh yes! Penselwood,’ she said. ‘I don’t expect you know why it’s called that, do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There used to be a tunnel from the church to the big house, you know.’ She paused. Mike looked at her expectantly. She beamed. He waited. She rubbed her hands together. The explanation seemed to be over. Gally had said nothing since they arrived and Mike felt he had to go on.

  ‘We happened to see your cottage,’ he said in a rush. ‘At least someone said it was yours.’

  ‘Riding gloves,’ she said. ‘That’s another thing we do. We make riding gloves.’

  Gally leaned forward then and said, as though carrying on some earlier conversation, ‘Ferney said you might feel the time had come for you to pass it on.’

  ‘That’s what he said to me.’

  ‘You’ve talked to him?’

  ‘He walked over to see me yesterday.’

  ‘Walked?’ said Mike. ‘It’s miles.’

  Mrs Mullard frowned at him, unable to comprehend his meaning, and turned back to Gally. ‘I always wanted to get it nice again myself, but sometimes the
re’s no talking to that man. He just goes on and on at you.’ She looked cross for a moment, but then a little wry smile crossed her face. ‘Perhaps he’s right. You’ll make a better job of it and anyway it’s drier here. You can ask him about that, the old rascal. You’ll have to undo all that.’

  Gally nodded as if that made sense. ‘You’re happy about doing this, are you?’

  ‘I suppose I must be.’

  Mike had lost control again, barely able to believe the speed with which peculiar alliances were being forged around him. He broke in. ‘I’m sorry, I’m not quite with all this. Are you saying you’ll sell it to us? Because we’d have to get a survey done and a few things like that.’

  Mrs Mullard’s face slowly creased up, she bent further and further forwards until he was looking at the thin crown of her head and she began to wheeze. He watched in alarm and then a gout of laughter burst out of her and another and another, an altogether too powerful physical experience for her ancient, tiny frame, as dangerous as boiling tar in a porcelain cup. ‘A survey?’ she eventually said. ‘A survey?’ and then she was off again.

  Gally looked at Mike with an attempt at a straight face. ‘I think what Mrs Mullard means,’ she said, ‘is that a surveyor will tell you it’s a complete ruin and we already know that.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said the old lady as the spasms subsided, ‘but the wallpaper in the end bedroom’s very nice, one and tenpence a roll. It should clean up well. Don’t let him start digging. That’s the main thing. He was always digging. If you take my advice you won’t let him near the place at all.’

  Gally nodded. ‘It will be all right.’

  ‘He’ll want to know about the money,’ said Mrs Mullard, nodding towards Mike but otherwise treating him as if he wasn’t there at all. ‘I’ll write.’

  Two days later she did write, and what she wrote came as a surprise to both of them, delighting Gally and depriving Mike of his best argument against buying.

  ‘We ought to pay her more than that,’ said Gally over breakfast. ‘I don’t think we should take advantage of her, do you?’

  ‘I doubt anyone’s ever managed to do that. You’re the only one who thinks it’s wonderful. She knows it’s a ruin and so do I.’

  ‘Anyway, we can definitely buy it.’

  ‘Just hold on. We can’t rush in like that. God knows what it would cost to put it straight. We need builder’s estimates, all that sort of thing.’

  Gally said nothing, looking out of the kitchen window at the west London traffic, then she tried another tack. ‘Did you say there was a battle there?’

  He looked up from the letter. ‘Huh?’

  ‘At Penselwood.’

  ‘Yes, there was. I looked it up. It’s a bit before my period.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Er, seventh century some time – 658, I think. Cenwalh, king of Wessex. Also called Cenwalch. Came back from exile, thrashed the Britons at Peonnum or Peonnan as it’s sometimes spelt.’ He looked into the middle distance past her. ‘One of the turning-points of British history, when the Saxons pushed out the Britons. Only thing is, Hoskins insists Peonnum wasn’t Penselwood after all. He says it must have been further west, somewhere much nearer Exeter, though I must say that doesn’t seem to square with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles.’

  When he focused on her again, Gally was staring at him with a touch of wildness in her eyes. She sighed as if pushing off a sudden pain then jerked out of it and nodded firmly.

  ‘I bet it was Penselwood,’ she said. ‘If we lived there, I’m sure you’d be able to find out.’

  Gally got her way, in which there was no great surprise to be found, and things happened quickly, which was perhaps more of a surprise. Time usually pressed only lightly on Gally’s heels. She obeyed a natural rhythm which scorned the clock, and was apt to rebel against the ticking demands of the deadline or the rendezvous, to Mike’s occasional despair. That didn’t mean she was lazy, just that she followed her own course, and if something had to be done she did it when it suited her. On a balmy morning in June, without the need for an alarm clock, she shook Mike out of bed at sunrise, pushed his exploring hands gently but firmly away and had him dressed, breakfasted and outside in the car like some giant schoolboy in the hands of an efficient parent.

  ‘We’ll be far too early,’ he complained. ‘The caravan’s not coming until midday.’

  ‘Aren’t you excited?’ she said. ‘I can’t wait to get there. It’s ours. Tonight we’ll be staying in our very own cottage.’

  He looked across at her as he weaved in and out of the early morning traffic heading for the M3 and her happiness rubbed off on him. ‘Not exactly in it,’ he said, ‘just outside it, maybe, if the caravan turns up.’

  ‘It will,’ she said.

  They talked until they reached the motorway of how it would be, camping out on their new doorstep, of the logistics of water, gas and chemical loos. For Gally it was a happy rehearsal of pleasures to come. For Mike, a careful checklist of things they might have overlooked. He fell silent as they reached the motorway. They’d done this journey four times in the brief month that the purchase had taken and some central doubt gnawed at him, a doubt he didn’t want to take out and examine for fear it might solidify in the light of reason and refuse to go back. It was a muddled doubt all about his centrality in Gally’s life, a small, intricate, demanding universe of two that seemed so much less secure when exposed to this new turning in their short life together. Keeping her on an even keel was fraught with problems. This new venture seemed already to have brought her more peace and happiness than he had seen since they first met, but he was worried by the possibility that it might be a pipe-dream, that the reality might disappoint her so much that it would provoke a dive to new depths, depths where he might no longer be able to reach her and coax her back and that was the most frightening thought he knew.

  West London wasn’t Washington, but at least life there was a known quantity. He went backwards and forwards to the university, where no one seemed to prize him greatly. His dreams were of American academic glamour, of a world where an English accent would put some sort of seal on his special access to history, of Georgetown bars where he might have drunk pungent bourbon as colleagues toasted him for his latest paper. Since he turned the job down, he had kept those dreams entirely to himself for Gally’s sake. It was as simple as that. Given the choice she won every time because, shining through all the recurrent, desperate distress, was a golden core of love, the only lubricant to ease the joints of his dry life.

  Mike’s parents had equipped him perfectly for life in an ivory tower. His father had only ever spoken to him in awkward monosyllables as if to a complete stranger. In his patchy, clouded memory of his childhood his mother had been warm and loving once, but that had congealed into a disapproving resentment of the world that had failed her. By the time he was eighteen she had taken against everything including, to his bewilderment, him. She was almost mad.

  Gally had dazzled Mike with the undreamed-of possibility of love, joy and friendship, although she had warned him straight away that all was not as simple as he hoped. Confronted and appalled by the evidence of the disabling desperation that would ambush her, he still believed he could help. It seemed to him to be only a thin layer over the essential her, a coat of camouflaging paint that he could, given time, rub off. It proved to be persistent paint. The miscarriage had brought the chance of therapy and the counsellor, seeing them both together at the start, took the obvious cues from his prompting. Nightmares? What were they about? Burning. He supplied the answer when she proved reluctant and what could the counsellor, a wise woman with a creased, warm face, do but take on board such an obvious trauma? Seeing her father die as the flames burst through their twisted car, restrained by the men who had pulled her clear as she fought helplessly to get back to him, was certainly the stuff of nightmares. Not just nightmares but guilt, too, and the explanations were entirely convincing. She would feel guilt that she had not saved him, bu
t she must understand that she had been ten years old, shocked, with a broken arm, and that the exploding fuel tank left nobody there the scope to help. She must get that clear.

  For all Mike’s hopes, the counselling never even scratched the surface of Gally’s troubles. She took it all politely, thanked the woman for her time and her help and went right on having the nightmares. For all that, Mike believed he was getting better and better at handling it, that he could usually hold and cajole her back to the happiness which he felt convinced was her natural state. Life in the country, from her reaction so far, promised much, but it also threatened. He would be further away, less able to help, and he feared her ability to get through each day without his watchful presence. He feared also that the derailing forces in her life were so powerful that she might be sent veering away from him.

  Gally glanced at him and perhaps read something of his doubt. ‘Am I rushing you?’ she asked gently.

  ‘No more than usual.’

  ‘You’ll see I’m right,’ she said. ‘It’s going to be just perfect.’

  ‘I don’t know what we’re getting into,’ he replied slowly. ‘Maybe we won’t like the people. We haven’t really looked at the village at all.’

  ‘We can soon fix that,’ she said briskly. ‘That’s just a treat to come. I’m sure you’ll like it.’ Then she looked at him more gently. ‘I wish you could feel it like I do. It’s like home already.’

  ‘I’m sure I will,’ he said, not totally truthfully.

  The processes of conveyancing had brought with them, unasked and surprisingly unexpected, a name for their new house – Bagstone Farm. Mike had only thought of it in the abstract and the name had disconcerted him, with all its implications that the house carried with it a history, a known niche within a working community that its camouflaged dereliction had allowed him to ignore. Easier to think of it as just ‘the cottage’, a hidden, forgotten place in which they could start again, a clean slate. Gally didn’t see it that way. She’d felt the name was the final perfect touch, repeating it over and over again as she shuffled through all the photographs they’d taken, drawing pictures, planning the slow healing of the injured building.