Ferney

by James Long

  ‘Who did that?’ said Mike incredulously and then she was equally astonished at the sudden realization that it shouldn’t be there at all. When they left it had still been lying flat, partly buried by a long accumulation of earth and leafmould.

  ‘The builders must have done it.’

  ‘But why? We didn’t tell them to.’

  ‘Well, no, I suppose we didn’t . . . but we did say we were going to do it some time, didn’t we?’

  ‘Some time, maybe, but not now. I told them exactly what we wanted them to do while we were away. I gave them a list, damn it.’

  ‘Perhaps they did it all.’

  ‘Perhaps they did, but they didn’t even ask us where we wanted the bloody thing.’

  ‘It’s all right, love, it’s in the right place. That’s where . . .’ She was about to say ‘where it’s always been’, but changed it in time. ‘That’s where it is in the picture.’ It wasn’t quite, but she knew with some inner certainty that was only due to artist’s licence.

  ‘He’s behind this, isn’t he?’ said Mike grimly. ‘He’s been in and somehow he’s persuaded them to do it.’

  It seemed likely, though she didn’t want to admit it.

  ‘Let’s go and see what’s been going on in the house,’ she said quickly.

  She went inside, hoping he would follow, hurt and sorrowful that all the conflict they had left behind had stayed here to come leaping out of the shadows and chase away the holiday calm. If it was Ferney’s idea, it was hardly diplomatic. She hoped the builders had simply taken it into their heads to do it as some sort of a surprise, but she knew that if they had it would be different, standing there the wrong way round or at the wrong angle, not just perfectly so. The change inside was startling enough to provide a diversion. The upstairs floor was in place, new boards on the old beams, and they’d started making good the damaged sections of plasterwork in the downstairs walls. The new staircase was in and now that they could walk freely upstairs across defined, reliable floors it had begun to feel like a habitable house again. She found herself longing for it to be finished, to be able to sit down in a comfortable chair in her parlour and look out at the sunshine.

  Mike had followed her and came up the stairs behind her. ‘Not bad,’ he said grudgingly.

  ‘It’s better than that,’ she said. ‘I think they’ve got on really well.’

  ‘I’m glad they didn’t spend all their time putting stones up.’

  ‘Don’t go on about that. What’s wrong with you?’ she said, not as gently as usual. ‘They’ve done much more than I expected and anyway I think it’s really great to have the stone back there. You should be pleased.’

  He looked slightly ashamed of himself. ‘I would be. It’s just that it’s our house and I want things done the way we want.’

  ‘Well, I’m half of the our and the we and my half likes it. Come and look at it with me.’

  She took his hand, dry and long-fingered with brittle papyrus sunburn circles crumbling fragments of skin into her palm, and led him out to the stone. The geometry of the house felt complete and satisfactory to her as though the stone that faced them focused it all. When Mike had argued against putting it up again he’d said it might look fake and fanciful, but it could never look either of those things. It held mystery and gravity and it was not to be approached lightly.

  ‘I don’t know about this,’ said Mike as they walked slowly towards it. ‘It’s not very . . .’ he searched for a word ‘. . . cosy.’

  ‘You wouldn’t want it to be, would you?’

  ‘Don’t you feel it? It’s sort of . . . severe, I suppose.’

  ‘I don’t mind that. It’s what it is.’

  They stopped short of it and the stone loomed above them, a little taller than Mike at its oblique tip. Gally wanted to touch it, perhaps even to press herself against it to welcome it back, but Mike’s doubtful presence inhibited her.

  ‘Good evening,’ said Ferney’s voice behind them. ‘Did it give you a surprise?’

  He must have seen us down on the road, she thought, delighted to hear his voice, completing the satisfaction of the stone’s return, but at the same time she wished he hadn’t come at that precise moment and knew that it would set Mike in his opposition. Ferney was standing by the open gate, one hand resting on it, on the edge of their property, perhaps unsure about intruding.

  ‘Yes, it certainly did,’ she said. ‘Hello, how are you?’ and speaking over the top of her, Mike said, ‘Yes, it did. Was it something to do with you?’

  ‘I’d have to say it was, I suppose. You did agree you wanted to put it up, so I talked to the builders. They had to get a little crane in from Wincanton to lift it, but they’ve done a good job bedding it back in. It took them an hour or two to get it just right, mind.’

  That was too much for Mike. ‘I have to say I’m not entirely happy about it, Mr Miller.’ Gally thought that was just the way he would sound when he was handing back an unsatisfactory essay to one of his students. ‘The thing is, I didn’t really want them to do it right now. There were other jobs that were a bit more important.’

  Ferney looked evenly at him with an air of resigned patience. ‘I’m sorry to hear that. I made sure to ask them to do it after they knocked off at the end of the day, you see, as overtime. I thought it would be a nice surprise when you came home.’

  Mike’s voice rose. ‘Overtime? They did it on overtime?’ He turned wordlessly to Gally, then back to Ferney. ‘That really is a bit much. We have a tight budget to get this house done and I don’t really think it’s up to someone else to come butting in ordering cranes and telling builders what to do in overtime that I’m paying for.’

  His words were all about facts, costs, bills, but the feelings that fuelled them were more visceral – intrusion, resentment, fear.

  Ferney screwed up his face as if trying to make sense of this. ‘You didn’t pay for it,’ he said in a tone that said it should be obvious. ‘Not any of it. I paid them, of course. Wasn’t going to make anything of it, but if that’s why you’re getting upset I’d better set you right.’

  ‘You paid them?’ said Mike stupidly. ‘With your own money?’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t use anybody else’s.’ Ferney frowned. ‘I expect you’ve had a long journey. I’ll be off.’ He looked hard at Mike and turned away.

  Gally had hung back. This was between them and anything she said would seem disloyal to one or the other. The new closeness of the holiday had been shredded up and blown away by the conflict and she felt torn in two by it. She made a half gesture of waving goodbye to Ferney’s departing back and went to Mike who was standing there with his hand to his mouth.

  ‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘I’ve really put my foot in it.’

  ‘You could go after him.’

  ‘No, I couldn’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Mike looked around at the house and the stone. ‘The money’s not the only thing. Okay, I was wrong about that but he’s still messing about without asking us. The money thing just makes me sound as though I’m being horrible, that’s the trouble.’

  ‘He did it to be kind to us.’

  ‘Did he? If he wanted it back up it wasn’t for us. He does things for his own reasons, that man.’

  ‘Which are?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Mike laughed ruefully. ‘Maybe he’s planning to sacrifice me on it.’ He ruffled her hair.

  ‘You deserve it.’

  ‘Maybe. I’m sorry we walked straight back into all this. We never asked him about the business down the road with the bones. Will you go and see him in the morning, take my apologies along?’

  ‘Coward.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  They went to bed early, tired by the travelling, still on Greek time. Mike fell asleep immediately, but Gally found her mind returning to the crater by the main road, the crater that stirred up draughts of nervous unease in the pit of her stomach, wondering about the bones. She lay there for a long time, star
ing through the gap between the curtains out at the spangled sky beyond the trees, groping without success for a meaning. Mike was breathing evenly in deep sleep and after an hour she sat up carefully, switched on her table light and read history for a while. When her eyelids finally started to droop she put the book down, reached to turn off the light and saw, just as it went out, Monmouth’s ring where she had put it when they unpacked, on the ledge that served as a bedside table.

  The dream didn’t start for a while.

  Gally slept soundly until the nadir of the night, close to four o’clock when the spirit seems at its lowest ebb and whatever warmth was left in the caravan had drained into night-black. Then, groping out of vague comfort into a dream-pit, fear overwhelmed her. She said ‘no’ for the tenth time, shouting in dream silence, and the man, excited in his cruelty, waved an abrupt hand to the soldiers who pinioned her arms, forced her stumbling through the archway where the rank swirl of hot pitch-smoke gagged in her throat.

  And there stood the Burnman.

  ‘Just doing my job,’ he said in his slow, cracked lilt. ‘Just a job.’

  ‘Show her your work,’ said the doom-voice behind her, ‘so she learns to say yes,’ and though she’d seen it so many times before, she still retched in horror as he pulled the half-cooked grey forearm, curled hand stiff at the end, from the pile on the ground and plunged it, turning, into the tar. The cauldron was a car, burning, and she could not move towards it, could not help – then it was a cauldron again. Her scream came up inside her then, but not until he pulled it out, the hot tar dripping, cooling to dull black, and thrust the claw into her face did it cross the barrier of sleep to ring out through the night and shock Mike awake.

  When his own racing heart quietened, he calmed her as he was so used to doing in London.

  ‘What was it?’ he said as he felt her start to relax.

  ‘Them.’

  ‘Both of them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you all right now?’

  ‘I think so.’

  She wasn’t. Twisting acid guilt had her. She’d killed him, killed him by not fighting free. The therapist had told her to say to herself, you were injured, you were far too young, you could not have helped, and she repeated that mantra over and over until it built a frail wall between her and the receding dream. She kept silent.

  For all that, Mike sensed it and lay quietly alert, breathing deeply as if he were sleeping until he was sure she was completely asleep again and only then did he let himself follow her.

  Ferney took Mike’s second-hand apology in his long, country stride when she met him in the lane on the way towards each other in the morning. It always seemed so easy to run into Ferney, as if they could each sense the other’s intention. She’d woken very early again, while Mike was still snoring gently, and had gone straight to the stone to experience its return in the clarity of a Sunday morning liquid with far birdsong. The nightmare-scar had robbed her sleep of some of its benefit, leaving a sourness in her head, but on an impulse she stood against the stone as she had once stood against the corner of the house and it magnified the pulse of the blood in her, the pulse of two hearts not one, so that she became clearly aware of the baby growing inside her.

  Who are you? she asked it, but there was no discernible answer, just the microscopic tickle of cells dividing. The stone’s slant seemed at odds with its mass, denying its weight. The builders had done their job cleverly. She ran her hands up its surface almost to the top and the tiny channels, facets and craters of the stone’s ancient division from its mother rock were no strangers to her touch. It strengthened her.

  She walked slowly away, looking back at the stone every few paces, feeling some tangible force in the currents of her blood that was more potent than before. Mike’s loud snores came through the walls of the caravan like warnings of battle. The discord of the previous evening seemed worse with time and he had after all asked her to apologize on his behalf. Ferney might well be up and she decided there was no harm in walking over to check the bungalow for signs of life. She’d gone less than a hundred yards, startling a small crowd of rabbits that fled into holes in the high bank, when she saw him ahead in the lane and he waved his stick in greeting.

  He seemed cheerful enough. ‘It came as a bit of a shock, I expect,’ was all he said when she gave Mike’s apologies. ‘No need to worry. I probably shouldn’t have done it. He still doesn’t like me much, does he?’

  She was suddenly embarrassed, hesitant. ‘I told him a little bit while we were on holiday, about you and about me.’

  He shot her an appalled look. ‘You didn’t. What made you do that? I don’t think that was a very good idea.’

  ‘He’d sort of guessed a bit of it. About the ring. It was a long way away from here.’

  That seemed to make more sense to him than to her. ‘It’s always different when you’re away,’ he said, nodding, and gave her a considering look. ‘You don’t look too great considering you’ve had a holiday.’

  ‘I’m okay, I just didn’t sleep as well as I might have done last night.’

  ‘Bad dreams?’

  ‘Did I tell you that?’

  He shrugged it off. ‘Have you got time to come and sit down for a minute?’

  ‘I’ve left Mike asleep,’ she said. ‘I suppose I shouldn’t be too long.’

  He nodded at the gateway to the field that sloped up from the house. ‘Let’s go through here, then. You can see down to your place, so you’ll know when he comes out.’

  They sat side by side on the grass looking south. The roof of the house poked out of its little clump of trees below and the caravan showed no signs of life. The Bag Stone was foreshortened from this angle and Gally could see clearly how the little depression and the green line of vegetation that marked the course of the buried stream brushed past its heel.

  ‘Do we have to talk about the dreams?’

  ‘Only if you want to. It might help, though.’

  ‘It’s past now,’ she said, ‘for the time being.’

  He nodded down at the caravan. ‘I wouldn’t want to get halfway. Best save that for when there’s lots of time.’

  ‘And for when I’m feeling brave. I’ve got a lot of other questions to ask, though.’

  ‘Tell me what they are and I’ll tell you which ones we’ve got time for.’

  ‘There’s the stone. I’m glad to see it up again. I know that’s how it belongs, but it’s got another side to it. Mike says it’s not cosy. I know what he means. Oh, and we both wanted to ask you about the bones, down at the road yesterday. They said you’d been talking to the police about them for a long time. What’s that all about? That’s if you don’t mind.’

  ‘How could I mind? It’s you as much as me. The bones and the stone. The end and the beginning you might say. It’s quite a lot to ask. Was that all?’

  ‘No it wasn’t. There’s lots more, like why shouldn’t I have talked to Mike?’

  ‘And?’

  ‘There’s one really big thing.’

  ‘What is it?’

  Would it sound silly? She didn’t care. ‘Have I got any children?’

  ‘Oh, well now.’ He blinked. ‘Shall we do that one first? I don’t really know because I don’t know where you’ve been lately, you see.’

  ‘Mrs Mullard told me your wife was called Gally and she disappeared.’

  ‘Well, she’s right enough about that.’

  ‘So . . . that was me.’

  ‘Of course it was.’

  ‘There’s no “of course” about it. I don’t know anything about her, about your wife, I mean, about me.’

  ‘You would if I helped you. Anyway, you did know something about her. You went to our old house, didn’t you? That first time. Only time we ever lived there was that time, you and me.’

  At that moment, beset by so much uncertainty, she felt more like a daughter than a wife.

  ‘Anyway, I went away. Is that right?’

  ‘You’ve never
ever gone away from me by choice, nor have I ever done that to you,’ he said with force.

  ‘So it wasn’t by choice.’

  ‘That’s right. I had some ideas but I couldn’t tell for certain. I knew you must be dead.’

  Gally flinched. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘How wouldn’t I know? I couldn’t feel you anywhere. It had to be, didn’t it? I’d messed things around down there, you see,’ he waved an arm down at the cottage and the stone. ‘Stupid of me after all those years.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Have I got to spell it out?’

  ‘Yes, you’d better.’

  ‘Some things were obvious, I suppose. We always knew it was the stone that did it, that brought us back. The night it fell down, we feared that might be the end of it. We even had a go at putting it back up again. Couldn’t do it, but anyway we both knew pretty soon that nothing had changed. It was only later, after you were gone, I first got the idea that it might be the water that mattered too. I thought it was the combination, you see, the water going past the stone. I’d changed the course of the water, you see, to get her out of the house and then you went missing and suddenly it all felt . . . dead, you might say – like things had changed for ever.’

  She was struggling to understand, reluctant to interrupt.