Ferney

by James Long

  ‘Morning, Mr Miller,’ he said.

  Ferney made a tiny nod to Mike and turned and surveyed the house, glancing back at Gally as if considering. He went to the right-hand end of the wall, thought for a bit and tapped at the ground with his stick.

  ‘It started coming in about here,’ he said, and Gally pushed a broken piece of wood into the earth to mark the spot. He turned and stared towards the trees up the slight slope, parallel to the road. After a minute or two of concentration, he walked slowly past the caravan to the hedge about thirty yards from the house.

  ‘Back here, I’d say,’ he called, pointing again. ‘A line from here to the house.’

  Gally, following him, pushed in another stick. ‘A straight line?’ she said.

  ‘Near enough.’ He considered again. ‘Get young Eric to start this end, in case I’m a bit out, and tell him to go gently.’

  Slash started up his digger, noncommittal. Mike, his face showing strong reservations, came to watch. The digger crashed through the undergrowth, crushing a bush, and Gally winced. It rocked to a stop, pivoted, and the grab came down for its first gouge of earth. It was on the third scoop that they heard, over the noise of the engine, a scraping sound. Looking into the hole, they saw that the digger had uncovered the top of an earthenware pipe, scarring but not breaking it.

  ‘Whoa there. Stop!’ Mike called urgently to Slash and pounded on the side of the cab with his fist as the grab reared up again.

  They looked into the hole.

  ‘It’s a drain, for God’s sake,’ Mike said crossly. ‘A drain or a water main. Lucky it didn’t break.’

  ‘Drains don’t run uphill,’ Gally objected, ‘and you told me the mains water came straight in from the road.’

  They both looked at Ferney. ‘Well, whatever it’s doing there, that’s your answer,’ he said. ‘You follow that down and you’ll see I’m right.’

  Mike wasn’t happy but they did it anyway. Slash was bullied into exercising restraint, scooping the earth out in conservative steps until he met the pipe each time and piling it beside the trench as they went. It still made a mess, but at least it was a dry mess and within half an hour it was clear that the pipe, which was about six inches across, did indeed run in a straight line towards the wall. After the first few yards the contours of the ground brought it much nearer the surface and for the most part there was little more than eighteen inches of earth covering it. They did the last bit with a spade while Slash ate his lunch. Ferney sat on a stone throughout, seemingly content to take in the sunlight. When they got near the wall of the house, they found they were digging into dampness. The stonework of the outside wall extended down into the earth, footed on to larger blocks. The pipe ended just two inches short of the wall and they could see the slow stream of water emerging from the end of it and making its way through the gaps in the stone into the cellar beyond.

  Mike and Gally looked at each other. ‘It’s as if someone did it on purpose,’ said Mike. ‘What other reason could there be?’

  ‘Perhaps someone tried to put in a water supply and they made a mess of it?’

  Mike considered, frowning. ‘If it went through the wall and there was a tap or something, okay maybe, but it never even went through the wall, there’s no hole. It’s not the usual water pipe, is it? It’s much bigger. Whatever, it should have been easy enough to put right. Someone just let it flood the house. Anyway, how did the old man know?’

  ‘Ask him.’

  Mike looked uneasy. ‘You ask him. He just looks straight through me.’

  Gally went to Ferney and sat down next to him.

  ‘That’s good, then,’ he said. ‘You can fix it now. Put it back as it was.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ she said, ‘but what was it? Why did someone put the pipe there?’

  ‘Some daft idea, I expect,’ he said, looking hard at her. ‘Someone probably had a good reason.’

  She knew that was all she was going to get out of him. ‘I suppose now we have to decide what to do with it.’

  He pointed with his stick past the end of the house. ‘Like I said, put it back where it was. It was a stream, you see, flowed under the ground as far as that ash, then came out and went down the valley.’

  She could see it in her mind’s eye and in that mental picture it carried with it a measure of life missing in the decay around her now.

  ‘Can you remember exactly how it was?’

  ‘Every inch,’ he said cheerfully, then looked at her with that same expectant, eager expression she had seen on his face before. ‘You could work it out if you put your mind to it, I expect.’

  ‘Could I?’ It seemed unlikely. ‘Would you show us?’

  So with little hesitation, except where the brambles were tangled, Ferney laid a trail of sticks through the undergrowth, down from the place where they’d uncovered the pipe, past the overgrown stub walls of what had once been a small barn to a point on the slope down into the valley where the leaf-covered earth still showed signs of a long-dry watercourse.

  ‘I’ll come back later,’ he said. ‘See how you’re going on.’

  At Gally’s insistence they carefully cleared the undergrowth from the route Ferney had marked before setting Slash to work again. He’d dug about twenty feet of ditch when the shovel struck something with a great clang and instead of lifting into the air again, stayed embedded. The power of the rams pulled the nose of the digger down so that its back wheels had daylight showing under them for a moment.

  Slash tried again more cautiously and the same thing happened. He left the digger idling while he jumped down. They gathered round the hole.

  ‘If that’s buggered the hydraulics I wouldn’t want to be paying your bill,’ he said sourly.

  Gally stepped down into the ditch with a spade and stood for a second, suddenly delighted with the way the day had turned out despite its unpromising start. The trees saturated her sight with rich slabs of green and her blood fizzed in her arteries. As she began to clear the earth away, a long white edge of stone emerged, its top lying only inches below the surface. She scraped and shovelled. ‘It’s huge,’ she said.

  ‘Looks like an old gatepost or a lintel or something,’ said Mike.

  ‘Too big for that,’ said Slash. ‘What shall I do? Dig round it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mike.

  ‘No,’ said Gally and he sighed.

  She put an arm round him. ‘Look, love, we’re almost at the point where the stream would come up to the surface anyway. We could do the rest with spades,’ she said. And put an end to the violence, she thought. ‘Anyway,’ she whispered, ‘it’ll save money.’

  Mike paid Slash far more than seemed reasonable and the JCB waddled off, belching smoke and spreading mud from its deep-cleated tyres all across the places it hadn’t yet despoiled. Gally felt the house and the valley relaxing as the birds began to sing again. An hour’s work with the spades saw the new channel completed. At the top, dry all the way up, it came to the point where the pipe leading to the house disappeared into the bank.

  Now that Ferney had gone and the job was nearly done, Mike seemed in a better mood. He got the pickaxe out of the boot of the car and handed it to her with a smile. She weighed it carefully, took aim and brought it firmly down on the end of the pipe. There was a loud crack and a gout of clear water spouted into the new ditch, soaking straight down into the gravelly substrata. Mike reached into the hole and pulled out broken earthenware.

  ‘I don’t think the pipe went any further. That seems to be the end of it, anyway,’ he said. ‘Now we just have to see whether the water goes where we want it to.’ He looked into the ditch. ‘It’s completely disappeared.’

  ‘It’s just running underground,’ Gally said confidently. ‘I’m sure it will reappear when it gets to the slope.’

  It did. It took a while to get there, but gradually, sluggishly, it began to wake up the old waterway, welling up to wash a way through the leaf-mould and the moss until it had, once more, a well-defined
path of its own. The water level in the cellar began to fall immediately, so Mike and Gally set to pulling up the line of old pipe.

  ‘Not a bad day’s work,’ said Mike.

  Gally smiled at him and said nothing because at that moment there were no words for what she felt. It was as if they had pulled off a hazardous rescue. The house was safe. More than that, the valley was, with every passing second, returning to some previous state of balance and harmony. She felt momentarily immensely strong and full of life, an overdose of life, pulsing upwards.

  Ferney reappeared while they were shovelling the earth back into the ditch that the digger had left.

  Mike was inclined to be friendly now that Ferney’s advice had achieved such a dramatic effect, but the old man didn’t help much by once again ignoring him almost totally.

  He addressed himself to Gally. ‘Did it work?’

  ‘It certainly did. Thank you very much. Come and see.’

  He stood where he was but looked over towards the new stream course beyond the caravan.

  ‘Did you find anything?’

  ‘No,’ said Gally, wondering what he meant, then she thought again. ‘Well, yes, I suppose we did. The digger hit a huge slab of stone.’

  Ferney walked fast then, straight to the spot. The gravel marking the sunken stream course was wet in the bottom of the new trench. It ran in a dog-leg round the excavated shape of the stone, a seven-foot finger. He climbed down on to the stone, knelt awkwardly and brushed more of the earth off it.

  ‘You’ve found it then,’ he said.

  ‘Found it? What is it?’

  He looked up at her as if she ought to guess. ‘It’s the Bag Stone, isn’t it? Been fallen down a good many years. It ought to be put up again.’

  ‘Why?’ said Mike. ‘What for?’

  This time Ferney did take brief notice of him. ‘Because that’s how it belongs. It’s been standing here for a lot longer than it’s been lying down. House takes its name from it.’

  Mike looked around. ‘I suppose it might look nice over there, between the trees.’

  Ferney looked at him with a fierce expression on his face.

  ‘It’s got its own place – right here. It’s always been here.’ He turned to Gally and softened. ‘You come down to my house. I’ll show you. There’s a picture.’ More quietly, but not so quietly that Mike couldn’t hear, he said, ‘Just you.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Mike had been invisible somewhere inside the ruins of the biggest shed for much of the morning, old, splintered planks cartwheeling out of the door from time to time on to a growing pile outside.

  He came out and headed for the caravan, brushing the loose feathery flakes of rot from his sweater.

  ‘Did you find my shirts?’ he called over his shoulder. ‘There are none left at the flat.’

  ‘Hello, darling,’ she said. ‘I’m sure that’s what you meant, so I’ll say it for you. Just to save you time.’

  He held up his hands. ‘Sorry, sorry, but I really mustn’t be late. The department’s whole budget depends on the next two days.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You won’t forget the oil tank’s being delivered at four o’clock?’

  ‘I won’t forget.’

  ‘I hope . . . I hope you’re going to be all right on your own.’

  ‘I sleep well here,’ she said, suspecting it was the thought of leaving her to her nightmares that troubled him most. ‘We’ll have to get used to living this way. I’ll be all right.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I mean, you can’t even ring me. We must get a phone in.’

  ‘Go on. I’ll be fine.’ She kissed him, waved goodbye and was glad when he didn’t ask what else she had planned.

  ‘See you Thursday,’ she called as he drove out on to the lane. ‘Drive carefully.’

  She felt a twinge of guilt for not telling him her intentions, but she knew he wouldn’t like it and she wasn’t going to change her mind. Ferney had invited her and she wanted to go despite Mike’s underlying hostility. There was an odd, illicit thrill about it which she knew was ridiculous. She knew there was no real reason to worry and it was better not to bother Mike.

  She walked towards the village pondering that. Without any conscious thought process her feet took her towards Bleak Street, and by the junction she turned in and began to open the gate of the ivy-clad stone cottage on the corner. The sight of a blue BMW parked in the driveway stopped her in her tracks.

  Gripping the gate tightly, she backed slowly out and latched it again as she stared over it at the car. It made no sense, but then the house made no sense either. An abrupt revelation came to her with the disorientating force of the moment in a dream when you realize you’re walking down a crowded street with no clothes on. She didn’t know where Ferney lived. She had set out without knowing and without it occurring to her that she didn’t know and her feet had somehow brought her here. That was cause for concern. What new hole had opened in her mind? But in any case, this certainly wasn’t right, not this expensively converted film set of a cottage with its clean, raked gravel, mountain bikes leaning against the wall and automatic intruder light next to the burglar alarm box up by the thatch.

  The dislocation almost winded her, making her gasp at her own absurdity. What if she’d knocked on the door? Why on earth had she come here? She turned quickly away, aghast at herself. Someone had given her wrong directions. Ferney himself, maybe. No, not him. He’d never said where he lived. Perhaps she’d dreamed it? Stupid, stupid, stupid, she said to herself.

  An old woman was walking a small dog and stopped, smiling, when she called to her.

  ‘Mr Miller? Yes, of course, he’s down in the little close. Down there and right.’ She looked a shade doubtful. ‘Is he expecting you? He can be a bit short with visitors, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Yes, it’s all right. He invited me.’

  ‘Well, that is something.’

  The back lane led to a cul-de-sac. It was, in a different way, equally bewildering, so much so that she thought she must have misunderstood the directions. It was a modern bungalow, set at the far end a little bit away from its neighbours, with the open hillside stretching up beyond it. Its white rendered walls were topped by wavy red concrete roof tiles, but its huge picture windows looked out at a garden which was, in contrast, from an earlier age. There was no grass to be seen at the front, just wide flower beds with hollyhocks, lupins and marigolds, but in among them were stranger bedfellows. She almost laughed when she spotted the neat rows of carrot seedlings, beans and young cabbages, dotted amongst the flowers, pea-sticks stuck up beyond a clump of honesty. A miniature climbing rose was trained round the expanse of plate glass that made up the door.

  She saw Ferney sitting in an armchair in the corner of the front room. He was watching television and didn’t notice her. Through the glass she heard a line or two of dialogue in the clipped English tones of an old black-and-white film. ‘If you weren’t there, how do you know you didn’t do it?’ said a voice. She knocked, the sound was immediately switched off and he called, ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Ferney?’ she called. ‘Mr Miller? Hello? It’s Gally. Gally Martin.’

  She wasn’t sure how he’d react after the scene over the fallen stone, but whatever Ferney might feel about Mike, his reply showed it didn’t extend to her. There was obvious pleasure in his voice.

  ‘Gally?’ he called. ‘The door’s open. Just you come on in now.’

  The room beyond the hall was another surprise. The television set was enormous, flanked by shelves crammed with books and video cassettes. There was a state of the art CD player with big speakers. The armchairs were modern and comfortable, but all else was simply and beautifully furnished with old oak English furniture. She wanted to take everything in slowly, but Ferney was looking at her from his chair with an expression she couldn’t read, demanding her attention. She saw with concern that he didn’t look at all well. There was a touc
h of grey in his face and the marks of age seemed more prominent.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ she said. ‘I took you literally. Tell me if you want me to go away.’

  ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘never. Come and sit down by me. I’m sorry, I’m not feeling too good today. You found your way all right?’

  ‘A woman I met had to tell me where you were.’ She found herself admitting, ‘I went to the wrong place. I can’t think why, but I was quite sure you lived somewhere else.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘An old cottage down at the end of the road with a big box hedge.’

  He stared intently at her. ‘Lamberts Lea?’

  She thought back to the name on the gate. ‘Yes, that’s the one. I must have been dreaming. For some reason I thought you lived there.’

  His eyes seemed to be watering. ‘You remembered,’ he said.

  ‘Remembered?’

  ‘I did live there. With my wife. Not lately, though.’

  ‘Oh, I see. I don’t think I knew,’ she replied uncertainly. ‘Unless you told . . .’

  He coughed once, then twice, then uncontrollably, his body heaving as he scrabbled for a tissue from the box next to him. Gally darted forward, found one and put it in his hand, then crouched by him until it stopped.

  ‘Have you seen a doctor?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t need one,’ he wheezed. ‘I know what’s wrong. How’s it going at your place?’

  ‘The water’s almost gone. The cellar’s going to need quite a lot of work to put it right, but it’s drying out really fast. I’m so grateful. The builders are coming to start fixing the end wall. The stream’s running really well.’

  ‘And you?’ he said. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ In her own ears her voice sounded defensive.

  ‘I just wondered. It’s a bit of a strain, moving.’

  ‘No, it’s . . . easier being here,’ she said.

  He looked into her face for the space of three heartbeats and she was seized by his eyes. They had no trace of age in them. ‘And what about the stone?’

  ‘Oh . . . Well, you know . . .’