by James Long
‘Okay, us. The baby growing there meant one of us would . . . start to die?’
‘It draws out the life,’ he said like a tired teacher explaining for the twentieth time that one plus one is always two. ‘You can feel it. Draws it out so you know it, you just know you’ll be that baby.’
‘Then, God Almighty. You being ill now. That’s because of me? Because of my baby? I’m killing you?’
‘It’s all right this time,’ he said. ‘The stream’s back. You’re back. There’s ways of making it come out well for us.’
‘What ways?’ she demanded. ‘What’s the stream got to do with it?’
‘Not now.’
‘Yes, Ferney. Now.’
‘No. There’s months yet. It’s the start that’s worst for me, then it gets better for a long while. I won’t go on being ill all the time, not until you get near your time.’
There was deep love in the old eyes that locked on to hers. As so often when she was talking to him, she had the sense of an abyss into which she might easily fall. She had to concentrate on the twentieth-century noises around her – the sound of distant cars, a helpful aircraft. If she let that slip, the lines of age on his face began to fade to an earlier familiarity and she feared where that might lead.
‘Just trust me,’ he said. ‘There’s a time to talk about these things.’
She was suddenly glad to leave the subject.
‘That prayer, Alfred’s prayer. I don’t remember ever learning it. Maybe I heard it at school or something.’
He knew what question she was asking. ‘It was always a favourite of yours.’
‘Did Alfred really write it?’
Ferney considered. ‘He wrote it down. Who’s to say if he heard it somewhere first? I reckon it sounds like him, though. It always meant more to you than me.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you’ve always believed in something and I haven’t.’
‘Don’t you believe in anything?’
‘I believe in life everlasting,’ he said simply. ‘Would you have me believe in Heaven?’
‘Maybe not for you . . . us,’ she said, ‘but what about all the others?’
‘That’s what you’ve always said.’
‘Don’t be so frustrating. I don’t know whether I’ve always said it. Just try to behave as if you’ve never heard it before, please?’
‘I don’t know if we should be talking about what happens when we die. Not yet.’
‘I don’t see why not.’
‘No, that’s right. You don’t.’
She looked at the set of his face and tried a different tack. ‘Is it all religions you’re against?’
‘I don’t know that much about the rest,’ he said. ‘I’ve read a bit but I don’t know them.’
‘What about Buddhists? They believe in reincarnation.’
‘Believe in it? You and me, we don’t just believe in it, we live it. It’s like saying you believe in toothpaste – you couldn’t make a religion out of that. Seems to me you can only call it a religion when it’s about faith. If you know something for absolutely certain, it sort of spoils it, doesn’t it?’
‘What’s so wrong with being a Christian?’
He made an expansive gesture that took in half of the horizon. ‘That’s what’s wrong with it.’
‘What?’
‘The effects. I’ve got no problem with loving your neighbour, though some of my neighbours have been pretty tiresome. Christianity’s all right for people. It’s the poor old world that’s suffered. You go back to pagan times, even the bloody Danes, they knew about nature. If you cut down a forest, you had the forest spirits to reckon with. It was all about keeping a good balance with the world.’
They walked on close together and she found it easy to match his step, sensing when he would slow down or turn to look around.
‘Surely Christianity doesn’t . . .’
‘Christianity doesn’t give a toss,’ he said loudly. ‘First time round it wasn’t so bad. Those Irishmen at Glastonbury, they didn’t have any inclination to possess the world, but dear oh dear, when the Saxons got converted, do you know what the message was then?’ He put on a pompous voice and Gally wondered if he was aping some long-dead bishop. ‘ “God has put all this here on earth for you, my children. Use it as you will.” That’s what Christian teaching’s always been about. God made the world for us so we can do what we want with it – animals too.’ He snorted. ‘We’ve been paying the price of that ever since. It’s no good you looking shocked. You know it’s true really. If I had to be anything, I’d be a Hindu. At least they believe the world has a spirit too.’
The path had taken them to the corner of Coombe Street, where houses dotted the old Roman lane and Penselwood’s intricate contours opened up a long valley down to the east below them, speckled with sheep. A Fleet Air Arm Harrier from Yeovilton cut the sky with a roaring sword of noise which rose to a shriek as it slowed to a hover in a violent battle with gravity. It hung in the sky, driving out all thought of anything except itself before banking away and battering them with the departing earthquake vibration of its jet pipes.
It was like a jug of cold water over Gally’s head, bringing her blinking back to an awareness of the overwhelming strangeness of all the man at her side had to say. ‘So what about Alfred’s prayer, then?’ she said rather tartly. ‘Why do I bother with that?’
‘I always said it was because you liked Alfred.’
‘Huh? I liked King Alfred?’
‘You had a lot to say about him.’
‘Are you pulling my leg?’
He stopped, looked round to see no one was close and pointed down the valley. ‘What’s down there?’
She couldn’t and wouldn’t play that game. ‘Sheep.’
‘I mean down at the bottom.’
‘Some sort of old factory from the look of it.’ A mile off, down the far end of the combe at the back of Bourton, was a hotch-potch of old stone mill buildings with modern corrugated iron mingled in.
‘That’s the Egbert Stone, down there,’ he said with dignity and she suppressed what might have been a tiny guilty flash of recognition. ‘It stands at the three counties boundary, just by the edge of the river. That’s where he came.’
‘Why?’
‘To raise the troops against the Danes.’
‘Why there?’
‘They reckon it was a good, hidden spot. I reckon it was because he didn’t have much cash. You didn’t have to pay soldiers, you see, not until they had to leave their county. He got away cheaply that way. Three counties’ worth of men for nothing until they marched off. You said he was the finest man you ever saw.’
‘So you’re saying we saw King Alfred?’ she said and the sound of the words made it seem completely absurd.
‘No, I didn’t. It was just you that saw him.’
‘Why?’
He looked wistful. ‘You were eighteen,’ he said. ‘I was only four. My mother wouldn’t let me go.’
The Harrier’s air-rending reverberations were gone and so was its effect. He spoke with the utter clarity of simple truth and disbelief was no longer an option.
In the next few days a test confirmed to Mike the pregnancy that Gally had not doubted for a second.
‘How do you feel about it?’ he asked her as they sat, wearily, in the caravan one evening.
‘It’s okay. I think it will be fine.’
‘You must take it easy.’
‘Mike, the doctors last time said it wasn’t anything I did. It was just one of those things that happen. I’m not some delicate Victorian who has to go to bed for nine months.’
‘I know you’re not.’ He meant it. There was a sea-change going on in Gally that mixed hope and doubt together in him. She was still wearing his ring with no further signs of any of the irrational, fretting discomfort that had pierced him to the quick before. He used to feel, despite everything she said, that it was a rejection of him in some degree rather than just a
physical phobia. It comforted him greatly that she could now wear it with ease, but he knew the old man was intricately tied up in all of this and that was where the doubt came in. He didn’t know where Ferney’s true aims lay, but he was aware that they were focused entirely on Gally. While they were doing some sort of good he was trying not to interrupt, although it was something that called for a very close watch.
‘I suppose it’s all right for you to fly?’ he said as they packed.
‘Of course it is. If you think I’m going to miss three weeks in Greece for a mild attack of pregnancy, then you’ve got another think coming. It’s fine.’
The holiday had been planned for a long time and though Gally felt some regrets at entrusting the house entirely to the builders for so long, even she was looking forward to a break from the caravan’s cramped environment.
Mike was still wondering about Ferney’s horse theory. As it was the summer vacation, most of the researchers to whom he had access were off enjoying themselves. One of his PhD students, a solitary, pallid person who liked spending his summer months in library gloom researching pre-Black Death epidemics in Anglo-Saxon England, had agreed over the phone to check the databases for any mentions. His letter arrived, enclosing a few photocopied sheets, the morning they were due to go and Mike was delighted.
‘That must be where he got it from,’ he said. ‘The Lynn White book, Medieval Technology and Social Change. I remember it. It’s very good.’ He was sitting at the caravan table as Gally sat on the step in the sunlight. The builders worked away carefully repointing the front wall around the new doorway and she was keeping a close eye on them.
After he’d been silent for some time she prompted him. ‘What does it say?’
He sounded doubtful. ‘It’s not exactly the same. It says it happened in the eleventh century. I’m sure he said it was the tenth. Maybe he just got it wrong. It talks about the move into bigger villages, but there’s only one line which supports his gene pool idea and that’s something about farmers finding it easier to get suitors for their daughters.’
‘Same thing, surely?’
‘Maybe,’ Mike looked doubtful. ‘It’s just it doesn’t go nearly as far. Anyway it’s all useful material if I can get a better line on it. It’s a bit difficult, but you have to admit he might have something. All that “full of beans” and “chalk and cheese” stuff. How am I meant to tell if it’s just homespun or if it’s the real thing?’
‘Surely homespun is the real thing.’
They could have gone off quietly on their holiday if Gally hadn’t remembered, just before they left the caravan, about the Stuart ring.
‘Wait a minute,’ she said and opened the cupboard where she’d left it. There was no sign of it. ‘It’s gone,’ she said, ‘the ring’s gone.’
‘No it hasn’t,’ he said calmly. ‘I put it in my money belt. I thought it was safer to take it with us.’ He unzipped the pouch and showed her.
‘What did you do with the glove?’ she said, looking around.
‘Glove? That crusty old bit of leather? Was that a glove? I threw it away. Surely you didn’t want it?’
‘Monmouth’s glove? You threw away Monmouth’s glove?’
The words were out, shaking in the air between them, and he looked at her in utter astonishment.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Every word they spoke in the car to Gatwick, waiting in the departure lounge and squashed in the ungenerous seats of the charter flight Boeing to the Aegean was brittle and unsuccessful. They’d passed an ugly accident near Andover, paramedics and police working on someone trapped in the front seat of a Lotus sports car wedged and foreshortened under the back of a petrol tanker. Usually Mike would have distracted Gally, got her to turn away, but in this conversational desert his words would have stood out like oak trees, so he watched her wrestle with her horror, sneaking glances at the scene, tensing up, looking away then always turning back. He accelerated hard as soon as he could to leave it behind. Still bewildered by the alien passion of her fruitless search of the dustbin and the skip, he then tried unwisely to engage her in artificially cheerful speculation about the Greek tower-house they had arranged to rent. It all sounded wrong to his ears as soon as it left his mouth and it only added to the blockage in their communication. His words slid off Gally, generating only monosyllabic shards, dredged up from some distant place, conversational returns into the net. She wasn’t angry, she was dreadfully sad, so sad that even the sight of the accident only disturbed her briefly and he couldn’t understand. Even she wasn’t all that clear. The ring itself was a strong witness to a previous time, but gold is too unchanging to measure the years well. The glove’s decay was something she had been keeping for a quiet moment, an organic cross-reference, rich in finite age. Its loss left her bereft.
It was the worst moment for Mike since they had first come to the village and met the old man. He felt more than ever out of his depth in this new shadow world where so much went on that he could not see for himself. He knew that his whole life would be impoverished and desiccated if he were to lose Gally and yet he seemed to be blundering further and further in that direction. It had been bothering him that she didn’t seem to want to talk about the baby and, thinking it might be the fear of another miscarriage that stopped her, he hadn’t been pushing her. He had high hopes of this holiday – a chance to get away from new influences and to take stock – but now he seemed to have wrecked it in advance by a single act whose consequences he had not for a moment considered.
In the silent separation of the car, anger at Ferney fermented in him. By the time they reached the airport Mike was determined that he would have this out, not with Gally but with the old man himself, and if Ferney had been there in the crowd by the check-in desk Mike would have overcome all his scruples about age, infirmity and politeness and pushed the matter to a conclusion. He was prepared to fight not just for his own sake but for Gally too, because he didn’t understand what was being done to her and he didn’t want to believe it might be good for her.
This new Gally who wore his ring, who woke far less often – though still too often – from the Burnman’s horrors, whose burden of guilt and fear was noticeably lighter than it had formerly been, disturbed him. He had come to know and almost to rely on her terrors, to feel that he had a role in helping her fight them off. Unable to face the fact that the source of his concern might be his replacement in that role, he preferred to think of Gally as a dupe of some strange influence that would let her down when her need was greatest. He forgot for the moment Ferney the book-lover, Ferney the theorist, the Ferney to whom he could relate, and branded him instead unbalanced and intrusive, a danger to the careful nurture of his damaged woman.
Ferney of course was not there at the check-in desk and the confrontation could happen only in Mike’s mind. Tension ebbed a little in the no man’s land of the plane and they both read books. He knew the holiday was not after all lost as soon as the aircraft door opened on the ground in Greece and the English machine-air was washed from the plane by a warm flood of thyme and pine resin. It was air that had boisterously enveloped and sidelined a million modern intrusions and it blew away the remaining links to the direct source of Gally’s distress and Mike’s concern so that, quite suddenly, everything seemed fine.
They collected their hire car at Kalamata and wound their way down the Gulf of Messenia into the old wild land of the Mani with the Taygetus Mountains rising to their left. It was the first time Gally had been more than fifteen miles from Penselwood since they had bought the house. A more familiar Gally came out from inside the taciturn stranger and enfolded it, to Mike’s enormous relief.
Afternoon was turning into evening as they came to their first, startling sight of the village – a miniature, primitive Manhattan skyline of medieval stone skyscrapers. In the plane, accepting his rebuff, Mike had sunk into Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Mani, greatest of all the English books on Greece, and now he began to regurgitate its contents.
‘They’re from the days of the Maniot blood feuds,’ he said. ‘The families would spend literally years trying to destroy rival families in the same village.’
‘Vendettas?’
‘Not like the Italians, not over women or insults or anything like that. It was all about power and influence, being boss. One family would see another one getting too big for its boots and decide to have a crack at it. They’d ship in cannon from Venice or maybe from London, haul them up to the top of the towers and just batter each other to pieces.’
Gally looked at the tall towers ahead and tried unsuccessfully to picture it. ‘How did they get them in if they were fighting?’
‘They did harder things than that. Some of the towers were built completely under fire from beginning to end. The builders would do it at night. Can you imagine? Levering the blocks up, one at a time in dead silence in case a sniper across the street hears you – always trying to make your tower higher than your neighbour’s so your cannon would have the advantage.’
Gally had no insight into it, could glean no sense of this incomprehensible history from looking at the towers. They were clustered so closely together. She tried to assemble the imaginary scene, relentless men crouched round hot iron guns, their cannon-balls bludgeoning each other, stone chips flying in crashing clouds of powder smoke. The towers were men-of-war in close combat, ships which could never move apart on the wind or the tide. It was impossible to picture, sterile – but, perversely, as the landscape failed to respond to her, it gave her a strong momentary sense of the contrast with Penselwood, where faint electric stirrings of shared history prickled with promise from every view.
‘How could they live like that?’
‘They’d have a general truce in the planting season or when they had to bring in a harvest – all the warring families working silently in the fields side by side and the ones who stayed behind quietly restocking their arsenals.’ Mike had the academic’s gift of taking ownership of other people’s information as if the process of reading made it his own.
Arriving at the house they saw how German and Swiss money had fleshed the angry bones of the surviving towers with the soft pleasures required by peaceful invaders, fitted kitchens displacing the tough ghosts. Windows had been set into the upper storeys where, when the towers were new, the smallest chink would have been an invitation to sharp-eyed death. They climbed straight to the roof and found there the one part of it where little had changed except the chances of survival. It put them at the centre of a hemisphere of visual drama – more than a hemisphere, because below them the olive-bearded slopes fell steeply away so that they were poised above the whole world.
