Ferney

by James Long

  It was a stone landscape, shaped and unshaped. In their immediate surroundings the geometrical masonry of the other towers rose in stumpy crystal growths from their rougher bedrock. Gally exhaled the recent past into the warm dusk air as she looked down the hill to the splayed fingers of steep headlands that split the immense, gentled, evening sea.

  ‘Shall we go to the taverna?’ said Mike, putting his arms round her and when she covered his hands with hers, he thought everything would now be fine.

  The holiday was a respite from Gally’s secret and from Mike’s disquiet. For the next eighteen days they swam and sunbathed every day until he got restless, then explored monasteries, chapels and assorted remains until evening folded the shadowed mountains in towards them and tavernas called them with bulb festoons between the trees and laughter from unsteady metal tables. Gally and Mike became again what they had been, a happy, close couple feeding off the opposites in each other. Gally tried not to think of Penselwood and Ferney because, on the frequent occasions when such thoughts came creeping into her mind, it brought sharply home to her that a large wedge had been driven into her life. Here, with only Mike, it was much easier to be what she had previously been. However much she loved the cottage, however strong her confusing feelings for Ferney insisted on being, it was easier and simpler to be here, back in the old ways. From the second or third day in Greece, she had started to look towards their return to England with the dread of a schoolgirl on the first day of the holidays knowing that inevitable, irreversible time will slide the calendar to that sudden point where she would be looking back, not forward, at the pleasure. It wasn’t the escape from Ferney she was enjoying, it was the relief from her all-pervading sense of guilt.

  Time moved unfairly past until there was just one more full day left, a day that could not shoulder the burden of all the possible choices. They tossed a coin to decide what to do and Mike won, but in generous mood he chose a lazy day by the sea and she knew he had done it for her. In the evening they went to their favourite taverna for the last time. The waiter produced a bottle of wine and Mike moved to pour Gally a glass but she held up a hand.

  ‘No thanks, I don’t think I want any.’

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Oh yes. More than okay. I feel great. I think the baby’s telling me not to.’

  ‘The baby. Do you realize that’s the first time you’ve mentioned it since we’ve been here?’

  ‘You too, come to that. It doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking about him.’

  ‘Him?’ Mike looked astonished. ‘What’s with this him?’

  ‘Oh, just a feeling, I suppose. Anyway, have you been thinking about it?’

  ‘Of course I have. It just feels a bit risky to talk about it.’ He poured her a glass of water instead.

  ‘What sort of risk?’

  ‘Bad memories. Sadness. Things that might spoil the holiday.’

  ‘We have to look forward now,’ she said gently.

  ‘Oh, it’s so great to hear you say that. I hated watching you suffer. You seem to have suddenly got so much stronger.’

  ‘There’s no point in dwelling on that. I suppose after last time I thought maybe I was . . . defective? That all the other women in the world were having babies and it was like it was my fault that I wasn’t and it seemed so very sad that we should just, I don’t know, stop short I suppose.’

  ‘And that’s gone now?’

  She nodded. ‘I think so.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Maybe getting out of London.’

  It hit her only then, while she was talking, that she knew precisely what had changed, that it wasn’t just the sense of powerful magic contained in Ferney’s assurance that the baby, this baby that would drain him of his vitality, would come to its full term, but there was more. She would continue regardless. Life would not stop here. More than that, if she had lived so very many times, then presumably she had borne children. In fact for all she knew they might even be alive now. Whose children? Ferney’s? From the 1930s? She wondered if that was possible. They’d be in their late fifties now. Wouldn’t he have said? The thought was so strong that she feared for a moment that she might have spoken it and she had to check Mike’s face to make sure that she hadn’t. Suppose it were true? Amazing that she hadn’t thought of that before.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ asked Mike, watching her.

  ‘Nothing I can explain.’ She shook her head, smiled to chase away the unwanted thoughts and looked around for something to fill the void and keep them out. There was something she had been wanting to know. Over the door into the taverna was a painted sign, bleached blue paint, highlighted in yellow, neatly arched in a long curve. The way it was written suggested a quotation because under its end, in smaller letters, were two words that seemed to be a name and a date, 1803–1869. She spoke little Greek and had idly wondered several times what it said, but after nearly three weeks she did now at least understand the Greek alphabet. Deciphering the letters of the name aloud, she discovered that it wasn’t, as she had supposed, some local poet or author of whom she would never have heard. It spelt out the name ‘Hector Berlioz’. The composer did not seem an obvious source for a quotation.

  ‘Can you read that?’ she asked Mike and he looked at the words for a while.

  ‘ “Kronos” is time, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I don’t know the rest.’

  The waiter came to take their order.

  ‘Dolmades for Gally, the ones without the meat? I’ll have the souvlakia, please, and a big salad and while you’re here, could you translate that quotation for us?’

  The man smiled and didn’t need to look. ‘ “Time is a great teacher,”’ he said, ‘“but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.”’

  Mike gave a sharp laugh. ‘God, that’s good. Look at all my students. They’d understand so much more if they were sixty not twenty, but then they wouldn’t have time to use the knowledge. So many things are wasted on the young, aren’t they? Education, beauty. Wouldn’t it be good if you could learn all the lessons then start all over again with a young body?’

  He said it with no guile, as if it were the most natural thought in the world, and her heart missed a beat. She wondered for a moment if he had guessed something and seized the chance to bring it up. For whatever reason, he had created a sudden opportunity for her to open up and try to describe the tug-of-war facing her back home. She stood on the edge of the precipice, groped for an opening phrase and was fatally interrupted by the arrival of the salad.

  ‘There aren’t many olives in it tonight,’ Mike complained, and the waiter promised to bring him an extra dish.

  ‘Mike,’ she said as the man left. ‘That’s an interesting thought you . . .’

  He held up a restraining hand and stopped her in mid-flow. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Don’t forget what you were going to say, but you must look behind you.’

  Over the headland, the full moon was rising, painting the heave of the night sea with a band of skittering silver. Mike’s the moon, she thought again and he’s waxed while we’ve been here. He’s big now. I hope he stays that way. Mike himself destroyed the thought before it had time to set.

  ‘Haven’t you ever thought it was odd,’ he said, ‘that the sun and the moon look as though they’re the same size?’

  ‘Why should that be odd?’ she said quietly, and what made you settle on my metaphor? she thought.

  ‘Because the sun’s infinitely bigger and more important, after all. It’s pure coincidence that the moon subtends the same angle.’ Mike used words like subtend without thinking. ‘It’s a thousand-to-one chance against it working out like that.’ Still gazing up at it, he added, fatally, ‘It’s given us its best for the holiday. It’s on the wane from tomorrow,’ and shot her a startled look as she let out a single great sob.

  She clamped down to stem the salt sea that threatened to follow it and closed her eyes tightly until she was sure she had choked them off.

  ‘What
is it?’ he kept saying. ‘What’s the matter?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘The end of the holiday? Is that what’s wrong?’

  A nod, because in a sense, that was true.

  ‘Don’t you want to go back? Surely you want to get back to the cottage?’

  She just shook her head, but now she could open her eyes and blink and see that nobody at the other tables was looking, just Mike with fright in his eyes – fright and kindness.

  Then with extraordinary and unlikely insight, he said, ‘Is it about the glove? Monmouth’s glove?’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘I’ve wanted to ask you right through the holiday, but I thought I might . . . spoil things, I suppose. Is it?’

  ‘In a way, I suppose.’

  ‘You think the ring and the glove belonged to Monmouth so you’re sad that I threw the glove away?’

  She nodded.

  ‘That’s a big assumption you’re making, love. Just because the man at the museum told us about the drum and the armour, that doesn’t prove anything about the ring.’

  She turned and looked away because the decision she had to make was not to be influenced by the pleading in his eyes. She looked up at the moon and spoke to it as much as to him.

  ‘It was his. I know it was, you see.’

  ‘Well, we’ll see what the experts say, but you can’t know that, can you? You can only guess.’

  ‘Mike,’ she said very deliberately, ‘I’m not guessing. I knew the ring was there before I looked.’

  His mouth moved but he didn’t say anything. The waiter brought the souvlakia and they were both grateful for the respite before his departure rang the bell for the next round.

  ‘How could you know that?’ he said and his voice was nervous.

  She had to go on.

  ‘There are things I find that I know about Penselwood. Look, Mike, I have to tell you because it’s really hurting me. This is about Ferney.’

  His look broke her heart. She was astonished by the pain in it. It was as if she had said she was leaving him.

  ‘I knew it would be.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Because . . . because he likes you and he doesn’t like me and ever since he first showed up you’ve changed a bit. I know it’s good, a lot of it’s good, but I sometimes feel like you’ve gone sort of slanting away from me.’

  She reached across the table to take his hand but cutlery got in the way and took the softness out of it.

  ‘This is very difficult,’ she said, ‘and I know you’ll say it’s all nonsense, but please, please will you just let me say it all?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And . . . do you also promise not to say anything about this to anyone unless I say you can?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Especially to Ferney?’

  He frowned then nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ferney says – believes – he’s lived many times before. Always around Penselwood.’

  Mike snorted, saw an instantly guarded look start to close Gally’s face and held up both hands, palms forward, to try to nullify the snort. ‘Sorry, I’m listening. You mean, he told you the ring was under the step.’

  ‘No, he didn’t. He made me remember it myself.’

  There was a short silence while the implications of this sank in and then he gave a small groan. ‘You mean, he’s trying to say you’ve . . . lived before, too?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you believe him?’

  ‘Mike. He starts describing something and I get this amazing, clear picture of it, like a memory, not like imagination.’

  ‘How do you know the difference?’

  ‘Oh, lots of ways. It’s never a complete surprise, that’s one thing. And when I imagine things, everything shifts around. This doesn’t. I see it like you really see things, from one point of view.’

  ‘Gally, he’s persuading you, that’s all. He reads all those books and he dreams up ideas and he hooks you with them, don’t you see? How on earth would he know it was the same you who lived three hundred years ago? It’s ridiculous, surely you can see that?’

  ‘He’s not saying it just happened once,’ said Gally, surprised that Mike should think that. ‘He’s saying it happens over and over again. It’s always been like that, him and me.’

  ‘Oh, what?’ Mike sat in silence then looked wildly all around, his mouth moving, before he swung back to her. ‘I get it. You mean he’s telling you that the two of you have always been a couple?’

  ‘No, not always, but often.’ It was like breaking bad news. She could have said ‘usually’, but ‘often’ seemed kinder.

  Mike started to sound angry. ‘You must be able to see what he’s doing, surely? He’s just a lonely old man and he fancies you something rotten so he’s spinning you a yarn. You can’t be taken in by that?’

  ‘You promised you’d listen.’

  ‘I am listening, but it’s just nonsense.’

  She sighed. ‘It’s not nonsense.’ She looked around at the Greek trees, the Greek sand, the hushed wavebreaks of the Greek sea and distance undermined her. ‘At least, I don’t think it is.’

  He was smart enough not to trumpet the small victory. ‘Eat your food,’ he said softly. The fat was congealing white on his pieces of lamb and she picked at the salad. There was so much more she had wanted to say.

  ‘How do you feel about him?’ Mike asked.

  That was the hardest question to answer because she had shied away from answering it to herself, let alone to him.

  ‘I’m very fond of him,’ she said. ‘I do feel like I’ve known him for a long time.’

  ‘Should I be jealous?’ He said it as a joke but it was far from that.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said, ‘he’s over eighty,’ but she knew that wasn’t the point. When, before coming here, she thought of Ferney it wasn’t the ageing, present envelope that came to her mind, it was the living essence of the man – an essence that had always joined with her own fiercely, brightly, fully. Being here, she found herself looking at the memory of that emotion rather than the emotion itself and that made it easier to pass the question off.

  ‘I don’t know what to make of this,’ Mike said unhappily. ‘Do you think, maybe, it would be a good idea if you stayed away from him when we get back?’

  ‘Mike, he’s very old and he hasn’t been well and I think he’s going to die quite soon. Surely it can’t hurt if he takes a little comfort from talking to me?’

  ‘It can hurt. You’ve shown it can hurt.’

  ‘It does me good, too. He makes me feel much more, well, calm I suppose.’

  Mike nodded, unable to deny the truth of that.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Gally said and meant it. ‘I didn’t mean to do this at all. This holiday is so precious. I don’t want to ruin it. Let’s just stop talking about it for now.’

  ‘Can you do that?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said firmly, aware that there was so much more they hadn’t even touched on – the baby for a start and all that might imply. ‘Eat up and let’s go for a walk along the beach. I want to share it with you.’

  Each managed to pretend that their sadness was simply the sadness of the holiday ending. They papered over the cracks with a walk along the shore, then drove back to the village for glasses of ouzo on the roof of the tower as the night whispered past. In bed, with wide-open windows failing to stir the room’s stored daytime heat, they made love like gentle strangers, both feeling it was expected of them.

  The morning jumped on them with demands of travel and timing that, for Gally, made the leave-taking an unsatisfactory and rushed affair of stolen backward glances as the last reality of the village was wiped away by a bend in the road. Slow steps of readjustment took them through the airport check-in, the departure lounge and on to the plane, but even then there was the sight of Greece beyond the window to anchor her. The final residue of the holiday was only rinsed away when London appeared below the
wings and Mike said, ‘I wonder how the builders have been getting on?’

  It was better to have told him something than nothing, she thought as they drove down the A303, and it was probably better to have told him something than everything. In his own time he would get round to asking more questions. She just hoped she would know what answers to give.

  They usually turned off to avoid the roadworks, but when they got close they could see something was going on ahead.

  ‘What’s all that?’ said Mike, slowing.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  It might be another accident, he thought. That would be a bad way to arrive, but whatever it was seemed to be happening off the road. The trafffic was slowing to look but there was no blockage. In any case he feared the place still had the power to worry her. He glanced at her, but if any emotion showed in her face it seemed to be mild, curious excitement.

  ‘You want to see?’

  ‘Yes, let’s.’

  ‘Something’s definitely happened. There’s two police cars there.’

  A small knot of people clustered by a digger and Mike pulled on to the verge when he’d turned off the main road and switched off the engine.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s see what’s going on.’ Gally found she still didn’t like the place, but she followed him with an increased pulse rate and slight shortness of breath.

  A section of the great excavation had been cordoned off with incident tape and in the bottom of the trench a man in overalls was busy. A sudden burst of irrational fear stopped Gally in her tracks. Mike hailed their postman who was standing on the fringes of the group of men. As she saw Ferney, talking to a policeman on the far side of the ditch, he lifted his face and stared at her and she heard the postman say, ‘It’s a body. Bones, I should say. The digger uncovered them a couple of hours ago. Coroner’s men have been down and some of these forensic people, they say.’