by James Long
When she got to his house Ferney was up but sitting in his chair with a rug over his legs and she knew when she looked at him that in the three days since she’d seen him last he had lost a lot more than seventy-two hours from the dwindling store of his years. He wouldn’t let her fuss over him, though he allowed her to make them both tea.
‘Do you feel well enough to talk?’
‘For a bit.’
She felt tender towards him in his illness, wanting to tuck the rug in around his legs but she knew she couldn’t, knew she was prevented by a sense of his dignity and the strength of his character.
He looked at her hand and she knew he too had noticed the wedding ring, but he didn’t say a word about it.
‘Did anything come back?’ he asked suddenly. ‘After we talked before?’
‘Something turned up,’ she said. ‘Something that surprised me a lot. I showed the ring to . . .’ She was going to say ‘Mike’ but the oncoming word brought with it an unexpected sense of betrayal and she choked it off. Betrayal of whom, she wondered. Of Mike? No, of Ferney.
‘. . . to my . . . my husband.’ That sounded worse. How could Mike be her husband?
Ferney gave a look of deep understanding which disconcerted her completely. ‘He insisted on digging where the step was. I couldn’t stop him.’
‘Why should you want to?’
‘Because I knew there wasn’t anything else there.’
He nodded, pleased. ‘So what did he turn up?’
‘An old bottle. Very old, in fact. It says 1680 on it and it’s sealed up. He says he thinks it was a witch bottle.’
Ferney looked startled for a second, then he lifted his head in acknowledgement of dawning understanding and nodded. ‘That would be it. Daft idea. They thought it kept you safe from spells.’ He seemed to think some more. ‘Yes, I suppose that would definitely be it.’ He looked at her acutely. ‘It worries you.’
It wasn’t a question.
‘Yes,’ she admitted, ‘it does.’
‘Why?’
‘Because . . . because I didn’t have the slightest idea that it would be there.’
‘And that was a surprise?’
‘Yes.’ Another admission that called for an explanation for herself as much as for him. ‘Because since this all started none of it has really surprised me completely – but I didn’t know that until I had something to compare it all to and the bottle was that something. I simply didn’t know anything about it.’
‘Nor did I, but I can guess.’
‘Go on.’
‘You say it said 1680 on the bottle? Well it wouldn’t have happened in 1680. That was five years before the Duke of Monmouth came. The bottle wasn’t put there then, I’m sure. It must have been, let’s see now, a good twelve years, maybe even fifteen after that.’ He looked across at the shelves. ‘Pass me that book, would you, that big white one on the bottom shelf.’
She went to the shelf and ran her finger along a line of history books. ‘The Encyclopaedia of Dates and Events?’
‘That’s it.’ He coughed loudly, painfully, turning the pages. ‘Now, 1688. I thought so.’ He looked up at her searchingly, ‘You’ve got things that hurt inside your head. I know that. This might help.’
‘It does help. It has already,’ she said softly.
‘What really frightens you?’ he asked and she should have told him, should have said Boilman and Burnman, but you couldn’t just bring them up into the open like that, not without a bit of time, and thinking he was helping her he moved in to fill the lengthening silence.
‘I noticed before, you’re not too happy about horses.’
‘How did you notice that?’ she said, surprised.
‘When we talked about Monmouth and the others, arriving on their horses.’
She bit her lip, ‘It’s not a big thing. I don’t hate them at all, I’m just a bit nervous when they’re around.’ That was only the half of it, she knew at a deeper level, but a childhood of horses, constantly afraid, constantly told not to be so babyish by her distant, horsy mother, had layered deep scar tissue over the first fear.
Ferney nodded and looked down at the book again. ‘Now, 1688. Prince William of Orange landed at Torbay. Call it come-uppance for what the king did to Monmouth, if you like.’ He smiled at her. ‘It shouldn’t be like this. Me sitting here, telling you dry facts. It makes the words work much too hard.’
‘It doesn’t feel like that. I get pictures in my head.’
‘Join in, then. Tell me. It helps me fill in the gaps.’
This time she was a willing participant, waiting expectantly.
‘We went to Wincanton. You still called it by the old name, said it was prettier.’ He looked at her, questioning, but she frowned and shook her head.
‘Wyndcaleton,’ he said and the syllables chimed faintly somewhere. ‘Didn’t know anything special was going on that day. We were going to sell something. Eggs I expect, a basket each. We came in the east end of town and walked straight into it. Soldiers everywhere – the Irish beast, Sarsfield and his mob, Irish Dragoons they called themselves. There must have been a hundred of them. King James’s soldiers supposedly, but they were a bunch of ruffians really, barely a uniform amongst them that day, excepting Sarsfield himself and he was the most dangerous man you ever saw.’
Nothing substantial came into her mind, which disappointed her.
‘Are you all right?’ he said, and she wondered why he was so solicitous.
‘Yes.’
‘We didn’t want to walk through them. You couldn’t be sure what they’d do, except that it wouldn’t be nice. We’d seen quite enough of Sarsfield and his louts in the area. Then we saw the other lot coming out of town.’
A sudden piercing vision as if a powerful light had been switched on. In her mind’s eye a small band of men were leading a string of horses down a track between hedges. There were low roofs beyond. She saw them stop, half of them turning back, leading the horses to safety. There was no doubting it, nor the acute fear it brought with it.
He saw her expression change. ‘You’ve got it.’
‘Yes, I think so . . . I don’t like it.’
‘Take it easy on yourself, then. Let it go. Don’t try to remember. Listen to me and I’ll tell you.’
He might as well have told her to turn off the sun.
‘Who are the men with the horses?’ She said it now, but in her mind it was her old voice speaking and all she did was repeat the words.
‘Well, we didn’t know, did we? Except that they had to be with the Prince of Orange and whatever they were like they had to be better than King James’s Irish thugs.’
Puffs of smoke erupted shockingly from the hedges in her memory. The sharp smell of black powder.
‘They’re firing at us!’
There was a quavering note of indignant distress in her voice. Ferney reached out for her arm and gripped it. ‘Not at us,’ he said urgently. ‘At each other. Stop now. It was all over a long time ago.’ She looked at him and he relaxed his hold. ‘I‘ll tell you the way the books tell it. They say it was the first skirmish of the rebellion. The Prince of Orange had landed down at Brixham in Devon. Dutchman or not, he had British soldiers with him, Mackay’s regiment. By the time they got here they needed packhorses, so a young lad called Campbell took a few soldiers into town to get them and he met Sarsfield’s hooligans on the way out. It was our bad luck we got mixed up with them.’
That started her off again, pulled the curtains of her mind far enough apart to let in the hollow acid-wash of acute fear.
‘It feels horrible, Ferney. What was it? What happened?’
‘Nothing good.’ He weighed his words, gripped her arm tighter. ‘Not for you. Not for me. You . . . came to an ending there.’
‘I died?’
‘Yes.’
The simple statement reached into her head, connected and cauterized the raw stump of memory.
‘The books don’t say anything about you,’ his v
oice was quiet. ‘They say that Sarsfield and Campbell were both killed and thirteen of their men. They say that the townsfolk didn’t like the Irish troops and they scared them off by telling them more of the prince’s army was coming. Thing was, the military kept their records and counted their bodies, but there weren’t any reporters coming round to write down what happened to you and me and our like, not in those days. No one noticed us when it came to writing history.’
‘I died?’ Her voice quavered but her mind stopped searching. There would be nothing to find.
‘Yes. Not right away. Not there. It was a horse that got you. I don’t think you even knew. We were taking ourselves out of the way and I suppose it panicked. Bloody great thing came leaping over the hedge at us and knocked you for six.’
‘Go on,’ she said. ‘I think I’m all right now.’
He looked suddenly distressed himself. ‘They wanted to take you into the houses. It was plain you were dying, but I didn’t want you to die there, see? We’re always afraid what might happen if either of us died too far from here.’
That raised a tumult of questions in her head, but she pushed them aside for the present.
‘I got three boys to help and we brought you all the way back here on a litter. I don’t think you knew what was going on. I tried to do it all gently, but it was a long old way home. Then almost as soon as we’d set you down in the house I saw you’d gone.’ He sighed and his eyes turned obliquely away to the long slant of years.
‘Did it matter?’ she said and he swung his gaze back to her.
‘I’m trying to understand,’ she said. ‘It’s more than I can take in, but if you know that . . . the other person will always come back, doesn’t that change things?’
‘Do I have to explain that?’ His voice filled with pain and disappointment.
‘Yes, you do,’ she said, not as gently as she expected. ‘I’m not nearly as far along this road as you think.’
‘But you do know I’m telling you the truth?’
‘I don’t know, I think – that’s all.’ It was a mild lie, born of the need to preserve herself, to withhold full acceptance until she was sure it was safe.
He shut his eyes for a long moment. ‘Do you hope that I am?’
Something in her didn’t want to say even that, but the answer was undeniable. ‘Yes, I do.’
He smiled then and she couldn’t help herself doing the same.
‘Death’s touched you in this life, hasn’t it?’ he said.
‘The baby.’
‘Not just the baby.’
‘No. My father too.’
‘It was very bad,’ he said and it was a statement.
‘Yes.’
‘We’ll talk about that when you want to.’
‘So what was it like for you when the thing with the horse happened?’
‘I think maybe it’s even worse for us when one of us dies,’ he said slowly. ‘For other people, I suppose it’s a bit more simple. Maybe they meet someone else, maybe they don’t but if not, they haven’t got too long to get through by themselves. Even if they’re young, I mean thirty or forty years isn’t that long.’ He started to cough again and it was a minute or two before he could talk. ‘For us, though, it makes you afraid. Chances are it’ll be ten years before you know the other one’s back – then they’ll be far too young and other people always get suspicious when old men and young women get too friendly. Chances are you might not find each other at all that time or the next time or the time after that.’
‘But that doesn’t mean you have to be alone, surely there are always other people?’
Ferney looked at her as though that remark was the true measure of how very much she still had to discover.
‘What have other people ever been to us? You might get a bit of warmth from them, but you can’t tell them, can you? Not so they really understand and if they did, all you’d get would be jealousy. You’d be asking them to take second best.’
‘So what are we to each other, Ferney?’
‘The best, Gally, always the best. No one else ever comes near.’
‘You can’t just tell me that and expect me to understand it. I don’t know it’s true.’ Her distress showed in her voice and blurred her vision. It was always so difficult to see him, she thought. The harder she looked the more he seemed to disappear, all except his eyes.
‘It is true.’
‘But . . . it does happen? There have been other people for us?’
‘Well you know the answer to that. There’s you and that Mike.’ He stopped himself saying the rest – that it hardly ever happened and that Mike was the only other one she’d ever married.
‘He’s not “that Mike”. He’s just Mike and that’s really not fair.’
He started to cough again, bending painfully in his chair, and she wondered unworthily if he was using it to think up a response.
When he got it under control, he held up both hands in surrender. ‘I suppose it’s different when you don’t remember. Sometimes other people come into it when you do remember, when you’ve been left by yourself, but they never amount to anything.’
‘The bottle?’ she asked, recognizing a certain slight jealousy in herself.
‘Some woman. Can’t even fix her name. Joan something? She tried latching on to me and I suppose I took a bit of comfort there, but not for long.’
‘How long?’ she said, and thought herself immediately absurd for borrowing the tone of an angry lover.
‘A year maybe.’
‘A year?’ She thought about that. ‘So why the bottle?’
He let out his breath in a long whistle. ‘Well, you came back, didn’t you? And then there was a whole lot of fuss about this and that.’
Fuss? He started to cough and at the end, shaken and white, he looked so tired and ill that the need to care for him came suddenly before the questions. She did what she could, trying to persuade him to call a doctor, but he simply smiled and refused so firmly it left no room for discussion.
CHAPTER NINE
The curving dead end of bungalows which culminated in Ferney’s house was a machine-age comma stamped on to the gentler longhand of the overgrown rise of fields. Leaving the last of the bungalows behind her, Gally walked slowly into a trough of increasing doubt. It felt perverse. The houses behind her were new, brick – overwhelming evidence of the modern world. The lane ahead was ancient and leafy, and where buildings claimed their sporadic spaces their bones were of old stone whatever modern make-up they might wear. Walking from the new into the old should have made it easier to stay in Ferney’s world, but it did not.
It’s Ferney himself, she thought. I’m moving out of his gravity. It’s only when I’m near that he can make me think like him. Every step took her further from his influence and ever-present guilt came oozing in to fill the gap. Ferney made her forget Mike, which surely was cause enough. That was what the guilt said, but a more insistent voice was still speaking and that voice, unforgivably, spoke a simple betrayal. Mike doesn’t measure up to Ferney, it said, and she tried to shut its echoes out. She walked faster and that helped. She fixed Mike’s face in her mind as an icon and wrestled with the lines when they tried to subvert her by blurring treacherously into a vague sketch of someone else.
Halfway home she was able to persuade herself that she had won. Mike had started to set solid again and she tried phrasing promises to herself. I’ll keep my distance from Ferney, she thought, just for a bit. I’m letting myself be carried along and I owe Mike much more than that. Putting on a determined face, she strode on.
The halfway point was only the eye of the storm. As soon as she came in sight of the house it caught her unawares. She saw thatch again for just a moment where there were only slates, expected a warm greeting where there were only busy builders and was forced to accept that there were two sources of the power twisting her brain, not one. It felt more like a promise than a threat and as she came closer to the house so she became more aware of the tiny
process of growth going on in her womb. It must be all right this time. This had to be the right place for her baby. She doubted she had the inner reserves to go again through that valley of pain into the tear-filled vacuum beyond. For the three remaining months after the miscarriage, when her body should have been swelling and ripening, she had been no more than a shadow, disrupted physically, mentally and chemically, always aware of the calendar of what should have been. This time it would be all right.
She faltered at the gate, but Don Cotton the builder was standing there talking to his foreman Rick and he hailed her. They were planning an assault on the roof and she was forced back across the divide into the present. It wasn’t what she’d wanted to hear.
‘You’d better tell your old man it’s going to be cheaper in the end to strip this side off completely and start again,’ he said. ‘You’ll get away with patching up the far side, but there’s a lot of dodgy rafters in the middle there. If you leave them you’ll just be storing up trouble for yourself in the long run.’
She looked up at the roof, imagined it renewed, straightened out, with regular tiles, and knew it couldn’t be. The house begged for slow, organic healing, not transplant surgery.
‘No, that’s not the way I want it,’ she said, ‘that’s too brutal.’
‘Perhaps I’d better have a word with Mr Martin when he comes back,’ said the builder unwisely. ‘I’m just worried about his chequebook.’
