Ferney

by James Long

  She wasn’t aware of going back to sleep, didn’t feel the paper slip from her fingers on to the floor. No more dreams troubled her and time jumped until the blast of Mike’s radio alarm – always an uncertain timekeeper – woke her with the seven o’clock news, just too far into the headlines to make sense.

  ‘. . . ing Minister for the past two years is expected to resign as a result of the allegations.’

  Thanks Mike, she thought. Bloody thing. She silenced it, stretched and listened. Birdsong and dappled sunlight washed across the caravan walls, filtered and directed by the trees’ small movements. Barefoot, she opened the door and stepped down into dew-damp grass, breathing air that had not yet lost its crispness to the pollen fermentation of the coming warmth. The new mortar on the underpinned wall stood out from the stonework, warning her just how easily a ruin could lose its glamour to the process of repair. She walked to that end, looked closely, then – as if to reassure the house – pressed herself face-first to the corner, spreading her arms along the two walls. Closing her eyes, it felt to her that the house had dwindled to the narrow strips of stone that she could feel against her body, as if the only stone that existed was that reverse, hard woman-shadow defined by her touch. She opened her eyes and the rest of the house came back but then she tilted her head, looking up at the sky, and the clouds’ slow passage made it seem that the sky was still and the house was slowly, powerfully, pushing her over. She stepped back, off balance, patted the wall and looked along it to where the remains of the lattice-work porch projected and at that point she remembered her dream.

  It was a quick sketch that she’d drawn in the moonlight and she found it under the bunk where it had slipped in the night. The house was outlined in hard, decisive strokes. There was no Bag Stone standing in her picture, but otherwise the proportions of the house were much the same as in the painting. The yard in front was much larger, more realistic. What made her stare was the people. In her semi-sleep, she had drawn in the couple from the painting, rough and less defined than the house. The man stood the same height as the woman. He had side-whiskers and a twist to one marked cheek but that was all you could make out. The woman was just an outline.

  Even that wasn’t what kept Gally staring. The couple in her picture weren’t standing at the gate as in the painting. The angle was different. They were standing outside the front door. She’d been drawing from life, though the pair of them must have stepped out of her dream. Something else had followed them from that dream. The front door was slap in the middle of the house, just as she wanted it to be, just as she knew it belonged, not off to the left where some interfering later builder had misplaced it when Victoria was newly crowned.

  Ferney had told her. ‘They put a new front door in then,’ he’d said. ‘Don’t know why they did it. I never got round to putting it right.’ She just hadn’t listened to him well enough.

  Walking eagerly back to the house, she searched through the ivy that covered that part of the wall, easing its stems apart and inspecting the stone behind. She was still there when the builders arrived.

  Rick called a cheerful ‘Good morning’ as he got out of the van. ‘What have you found?’

  ‘You tell me,’ she said, pointing. ‘Could this have been the original doorway?’

  He followed the line of the masonry. ‘I’d say so. Cut stone all the way down. Nice regular line both sides. That’s what it is, all right.’

  ‘Could we put it back?’

  ‘You might have to get planning permission, I suppose.’

  She thought of Mike’s objections.

  ‘Would it be expensive?’

  ‘Don’t reckon so. There’s a stone lintel still there. Wouldn’t need to cost much at all.’

  It was an odd sort of a day, still full of the emotional hangover of the day before. Whenever Ferney popped into her mind, which was often, she pushed him away, feeling unready to face his complications. Instead she drew all day, first the house as it was now, then a careful study of it with the door put back as it should be and then finally, dredging up details from her memory of Ferney’s picture and the clues left in the house’s old fabric, of it standing as it did then, complete with the leaning stone in front of it. After that she drew a face, the face of a thin man with a scarred cheek and long sideboards, the face from her dream.

  It was only when the builders left and the evening light duplicated the day before that she found herself thinking about doorsteps again and the obvious message that had been trying to claim her attention all day finally got through. If the door had been in the middle of the house, then the doorstep had been, too. She might have looked under the right step, but the step itself had been moved. She had been looking in the wrong place.

  Another hole to dig? Her soul was reaching for the spade while her head recoiled. Then the logical side of her found a justification – a double check, the location of the door and the hidden golden ring – twin fancies that she could test at the same time. She knew it would be simpler if they were false.

  There was no stone to lift this time, but the earth was very hard. An ivy root grew right in the middle of where she had to dig, promising to make life difficult, so she started to one side of it, realizing it was likely to be a long and awkward job. She had dug out only four small spadefuls when the edge of the blade snagged in something springy. Thinking it was the ivy root, she felt down into the earth with her fingers and touched the end of a thick fold of flaking, damp leather.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Gally climbed up to the hilltop again in the last of the light. In her pocket was wrapped-up terror. The approaching darkness was her deadline. While daylight held she could just about control the eddies in her unquiet mind, but she knew when night came the new fears shaken into life by Ferney would reinforce the legions of familiar devils. She also knew that had not been his aim and hoped he had the power and the will to help.

  Logic told her there was no reason for him to be there on the hill again, but something else that was off to one side of logic mumbled its disagreement. That uncertainty allowed her to go, otherwise the fear of definitely seeing him, of having to confront the situation, might have proved stronger than her need. The curve of the hill kept its secrets until she was fifty yards from the summit, then she stopped abruptly. The sun was gone, but its rearguard had left the western sky flat, clear and bright and Ferney’s immobile shape was sharply outlined against it.

  She stood and looked. His back was towards her and she turned to circle round below the top of the hill, wanting to come on him from the front so that they could move more gently into each other’s full awareness. As soon as she came into his view, he lifted a hand in calm benediction and she had time, stepping nervously almost on tiptoe up the rise, to study him. It might have been the light, but she felt she could see signs in his face of a younger man and curiosity joined with her vast need to gain the upper hand over her hesitancy.

  ‘I have to talk to you,’ she said when she came up to him.

  He smiled, shuffled sideways and patted the stone next to him. She sat, aware that they were close together.

  ‘Have you been sitting here long?’

  ‘Since noon,’ he said. ‘Once up the hill’s enough for me.’

  ‘You were waiting for me.’

  He just smiled again. There would be no unnecessary words from this man.

  ‘That was quite a strange thing you did to me,’ she said. ‘It was very upsetting. I’m . . . well. I suppose I’m in a bit of a mess. I need to understand.’

  He nodded, then kept his silence for a while and she thought perhaps he was choosing a starting-point.

  ‘There’s a lot you would understand already if you let yourself know it,’ he said eventually.

  ‘I’m not sure what you mean.’

  ‘Are you not? Let your head try to tell you. You might find it’s not all a complete surprise.’

  He turned his head and looked hard at her as he said it and abruptly she found it diffic
ult to focus on his face.

  ‘Mr Miller,’ she said, trying to keep some distance between them, ‘turning it back on me like that doesn’t help. I don’t want to listen to that. I want you to tell me plainly and simply what you mean.’ She was pleased that she had managed to say it firmly, but in the next moment she let out an unexpected, partly suppressed sob and he made a gentle noise of sympathy.

  ‘I’m not Mr Miller,’ he said. ‘Not to you. Just Ferney. Surnames come and go, don’t they? We should take it a bit at a time. It is for the best.’

  She found it impossible not to believe that simple statement.

  ‘Ferney,’ she said. ‘Please. It’s going to be dark soon. I think I would rather just hear whatever it is you’ve got to say straight out.’

  He turned away from her and she was glad to be relieved of the pressure of his disconcerting gaze.

  ‘Well, I wonder if you would? I hope so,’ he said. ‘I know how the dark bothers you. That’s one of the things you need to understand.’

  ‘The story you told . . . you made me tell. How did you do that? You were leading me, weren’t you?’

  ‘It’s all about the past. Do you have any idea how much of you is tied to the past?’

  She let her breath out in a sigh. ‘Everybody tells me that. I know it is. I’ve gone over and over things that . . . things that happened to me when I was little. They all keep saying it should help, but it doesn’t.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean by the past. That’s recent. What about the real past? History?’

  She looked at him, wondering. ‘I’ve often felt like there’s a big bit of me inside I can’t get at,’ she said. ‘Is that what you mean? I can’t go anywhere without wondering what really happened there, what it was like. There’s so much of history that’s lost and just a few dried old tatters pressed out in books.’

  ‘History’s much shorter than people think.’

  She laughed then, caught by the absurdity. ‘What?’

  ‘You don’t know what I mean? Well now, I was born in 1907,’ he said deliberately, scratching at the ground with the end of his walking stick as if to inscribe the date. ‘You stretch my life forward from there and you get to here. Thing is, though, to me it really doesn’t feel like this life of mine has taken all that long. It’s rushed by, really, that’s how years are when you’re living them. They don’t use up much time at all.’ He looked hard at her. ‘You can do sums. You tell me what happens if you stretch my life back the other way.’

  She understood straightaway what he meant, worked it out in her head. ‘Eighty-three years back the other way? You get to 1824.’

  ‘Eighteen twenty-four. Go back again from there.’

  ‘Another eighty-three years? 1741.’

  ‘And once more.’

  ‘Makes 1658.’

  ‘That’s right, 1658. Only four of my lifetimes back from here and there you are. Think about that. Oliver Cromwell died. The plague hadn’t come yet. It would be another few years before they did the right thing and let London burn down.’ He looked at her keenly. ‘Do you know what I’m trying to say?’

  It didn’t seem to be an answer to the main question in her mind but it touched a deep feeling in her.

  ‘Yes, I think I do. None of it was very long ago.’

  ‘Most people wouldn’t see that,’ he said. ‘For most people, they think back to when they were babies and that’s nothing, that’s just like yesterday. Fifty years in your lifetime is hardly time to get your garden right. Ask them to go back just one year before they were born, though, and that’s something else, that’s ancient history, isn’t it? Go back further beyond that, it’s all pretty much the same, 1812, 1585, 1066. It doesn’t make much odds. It’s like you said, it’s dry old stuff in a book. Dates are just page numbers.’

  A car horn down in the lane stopped him for a second. ‘You and I know it isn’t like that. Henry the Eighth? Five old man’s lives back. The Magna Carta and all that rubbish? Eight lives. It’s nothing, is it?’

  The idea caught her with such intensity that, for a moment, it pushed the other questions aside.

  ‘That’s what I try to tell Mike,’ she said. ‘He makes it sound as if it was all so long ago that evolution’s had time to change people completely, as if we’re different from people in history. I’m always trying to persuade him it’s just the circumstances that change, that people stay pretty much the same.’

  ‘How could he know? He wouldn’t understand that.’

  Ferney’s tone was dismissive and Gally felt she had to be loyal. ‘He tries. He knows a lot more about it all than anybody else I know.’

  Ferney made a little sound of amusement. ‘Thinks he does, you mean. Doesn’t know as much as you.’

  She felt on dangerous ground, tried to change the subject. ‘What do you mean by Magna Carta and all that rubbish?’

  ‘Makes me laugh, the Magna Carta, the way they teach it these days as if it set everyone free. D-Day for the peasants, that’s the way they teach it in schools. Wasn’t like that, was it? Just a private deal with the barons, nothing to do with ordinary folk. Ordinary folk didn’t even know about it.’

  ‘Didn’t they?’

  ‘Well, did they? You tell me.’

  She started to feel he was pulling her back towards that mental cliff edge from which he’d conjured the Duke of Monmouth’s shade.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, more emphatically than she had intended.

  ‘You do, Gally. Just like you knew where the ring was.’

  All the fear flooded back.

  ‘I don’t know what I knew. I think you led me into saying it. Why did you do it? You knew I didn’t like rings. It hurts and . . .’ She stopped.

  ‘Go on,’ he said gently.

  ‘It scares me,’ she said quietly.

  ‘I wouldn’t choose to scare you for the world,’ he said. ‘What I’m trying to do is stop you being scared. I’m trying to show you the reason for it so you’ll know there is no reason any more. If I really scare you, you tell me so I know, so we can sort it out. You’ll understand one day. But I didn’t really lead you into saying anything. It came from you. Did you find it?’

  She didn’t want to answer but he waited her out and in the end she had to say something. ‘I don’t know,’ she said in the end. ‘I found some old, curled-up leather.’

  Ferney nodded. ‘His glove, that would be. That’s what it was in. You’ve brought it.’

  It wasn’t a question. She put her hand in the deep side pocket of her jacket and, with enormous reluctance, brought out a plastic bag. In the fading light he took it, looked at it thoughtfully, then reached in and pulled out the twisted, earth-caked lump. As he forced it open, parts of it flaked and broke away and out of the middle he took an intricate round object. The thin band of the ring was obscured by dirt, but set in the top of it was a stone and when he rubbed it carefully back and forth against his sleeve, it caught the last of the evening light and hurled it back at their eyes in a white flash.

  ‘Put it away,’ Gally said urgently, looking around the hill’s dark margins in horror, then caught herself doing it and wondered why. Ferney put his hand out and patted her arm.

  ‘No need for that now,’ he said. ‘That’s what I want you to understand. Last time this saw the sun, it stood to kill those that hid it, just as the axeman killed the man who gave it to them. Not now. They’ve given up looking for his friends a long time back. You’re free of that now, Gally. You must understand that. There’s no need for fear.’

  A sudden gust of colder evening air made him cough. A bat wove dancing darkness round their heads. He held the ring out to her and she made no move to take it, but his hand stayed there, offering it across the air and in the end, with a great effort of will, she reached out, hesitated and then almost snatched it. As she felt the weight of it and all it had seen, she knew it was exactly what he said it was and in accepting that, the fear prompted by it stepped out of its blind box in her mind and came i
nto the open to be recognized and weighed. She let out a deep sigh, looking at the ring, turning it over and over. For now, she felt no need to know more about it so she put it back in the glove again. Other questions were more pressing.

  ‘Who do you think I am?’ she said.

  ‘You’re Gally.’

  He said it as though that obvious answer spoke volumes. Gally had a sense that she had but to lean towards him, let him draw her into it and all that she now was would melt from her. She thought suddenly of Mike, stepped back from that abyss, held on to the picture of her husband and of her beside him.

  ‘That’s no more than a name,’ she said. ‘I’ve only just met you and you’re not being fair. Either tell me what you mean or stop it.’

  ‘Just a name?’ he said and laughed softly. ‘It’s a name, but it’s not just a name. Ferney and Gally, they’re a bit more than just names. You want me to tell you directly? Yes, I could tell you,’ he was speaking calmly and kindly, ‘but that would be just words and words like that fight their own meaning. You’ve got to tell yourself, really. Tell yourself how you found that ring for a start.’

  ‘Maybe you put it there in my mind,’ she said. ‘The way you were questioning me. Maybe you were forcing me to think what you wanted.’

  He shook his head. ‘Don’t be so daft. That’s just nonsense, whatever you call it, witchcraft, telepathy, whatever. I can’t do that. Never met anyone who could. It’s much simpler than that. It was you. You remembered it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You did, didn’t you, and that’s not all, is it? You dug it up, so you remembered where the door used to be.’

  She jumped to her feet, feeling the good being undone, knotting her hands together.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Stop it. How can you say things like that? How can you say I remembered it? Something that happened three hundred years ago?’

  ‘Only four lifetimes.’

  Now she felt uncomfortable towering over the old man, and in sitting down again the sudden belligerence went out of her.