by James Long
They turned right at Pear Ash and the woodland lay ahead.
‘They were just stone quarries really,’ he said without much enthusiasm. ‘For grindstones or something like that, back from when they couldn’t really dig deep shafts. They’d just make a hole, get out what they could then dig another one next to it.’
The track through the wood brought them abruptly into a twisted and unlikely landscape. The trees to their right took precarious root on the narrow ridges between the pits where ferns and brambles half-filled the innumerable hollows. It was familiar in several different, conflicting ways.
‘It’s like the trenches,’ she said, and realized that was a new type of recognition, overlaying a dimly-felt, much older one. ‘The First World War without the mud.’ Something else nagged her. ‘Pen Pits, of course. There’s a Paul Nash painting, isn’t there? I didn’t realize it was here.’ She looked at Mike. ‘Why are you smiling?’
‘Oh . . . It’s just nice when you remember things in ways I can understand,’ he said ruefully. ‘We could go on a bit. There’s a Norman castle at the end of the track, or perhaps you knew that already?’
She ignored the crack. ‘Is there much of it left?’
‘The mound of course and a few stones where the keep was. It is odd though, just like the man at the museum said, there were three castles built here, all about the same time, quite soon after the conquest, all within about a mile of each other. I don’t know anywhere else like it for that.’
Fear came suddenly snaking through the trees to her and she had to hide it from him.
‘You go on,’ she said and looked down through the trees into the open grassy valley below, the valley where the water meadows had once been and where the Frenchmen had . . . What Frenchmen? Had done what? No answer came and she felt a strong need to be by herself. ‘I’d like to sit in the sun for a bit.’ She patted her tummy as though that explained it and he instantly gave in to the unchallengeable mystery of pregnancy.
‘Are you sure? I won’t be long.’ She knew he wouldn’t mind the excuse to lose himself in some ruins for a while. ‘Where shall I see you?’
She pointed down into the valley. ‘At the far side, where the path goes. It’ll be in the sun.’
Mike looked, couldn’t see a path but chose not to mention it. Gally picked her way through the foliage down the slope of the hill and he carried on along the ridge. He had gone perhaps two hundred yards when he saw a movement in the undergrowth ahead to his right, where the tree-trunks crowded more thickly between the pits. He stopped. Too large for a rabbit or a fox. It was behind a tree. A deer maybe? More movement revealed a man, back towards him, stooping down.
Mike kept quite still – sure, for no good reason that he could name except perhaps the look of the man’s tweed jacket, that it was Ferney prowling about in the pits. Seized by the idea this might be the chance to get to the bottom of some of the old man’s peculiarities, he began to move very softly closer.
Ferney had to count from the big tree, stooping stiffly under the branches, to make sure he was in the right hollow. He had always kept maps, but there were times when they were apt to go astray, so mostly he tried to remember. He got down into the crater, looked around carefully for a few seconds and then began to probe with his trowel through the roots and leaf-mould down at the bottom to find the stone. It was harder to lift than he remembered.
Richard Wellesley-Cave had been the first to come up here with his hired diggers, brought every day by carriage from Mere to stand there muttering over the little bits of this and that they were unearthing, making unshakeably wrong pronouncements over every tiny find to suit his set ideas. Every lump of accidentally flaked stone was a domestic tool. Every rabbit leg bone was a skeletal sign of ancient man. It was eighteenth-century mumbo-jumbo and if Wellesley-Cave had suddenly declared the latest bones to be Adam’s rib, Ferney would not have been at all surprised. The one time Ferney had taken him something recognizable, a broken antler pick from the Bronze Age digging, he had flung it off into the undergrowth in scornful rejection. After that, when Ferney unearthed the garland stone and recognized the age in it, he kept it to himself with few qualms. Still, Wellesley-Cave had paid good money for their scrabblings as had so many after him. The pits were ancient and mostly deserted even in Ferney’s earliest memories back in the old times of his first lives. Even the marks of the Romans were still fresh in comparison – the stones of their high road still more or less in place, being forced slowly apart by the extraordinary undeniability of each spring’s new vegetation. In that time the walls of a villa still stood on the flat land down to the west of the ridge, shunned by people who invested the lost sophistication of its structure with unearthly powers. The mosaic floor, half covered in the heavy shattered curves of broken roof tiles, revealed part of a bearded, helmeted head and, on the other side of the fallen roof-beams that heaped up in its centre, a fist holding lightning bolts. The braver children would go to look at it as a rite of manhood then rush away in terror of the devils who were said to haunt the sad, silent place.
The pits, though, held no such mystery for Ferney. Though their heyday was well past there’d usually been someone there, down through the first centuries of his ages, scraping a precarious living digging between the old workings to get to the broken, plundered layer of green sandstone that could be hacked out, shaped and sold for grinding. None of the antiquarians who brought successive new ideas to the site believed his simple explanation. There was no glamour in grindstones and, anyway, he never pressed it hard enough to interfere with the employment it brought. It did give him an idea, though, an idea he had used ever since.
Crouched there, he had a sudden memory of Billy Bunter. The boy-man had been much in his mind lately since they’d found the bones. It was a matter of grief to him that they’d taken Billy so far away to serve his sentence and that Ferney had failed to do his duty by him, the one who had visited on Cochrane his deserved, second-hand vengeance. Billy had found him up here more than once and he’d had to sit, humouring the big, loving fool, knowing he couldn’t risk digging with such a curious audience on hand.
He worked the trowel in, levered the stone up with it and scraped around underneath until he struck a metallic edge. The box he pulled out was wrapped in the remains of a piece of oilcloth. Its seams were soldered shut all the way round and he inspected it carefully for damage before he put it in his bag. Then he drew out another box – this time a food container in white Tupperware with a snap-on lid. It was wrapped round with heavy-duty adhesive tape. He scraped away enough earth to fit it into the hollow under the stone and carefully pushed and pressed the earth back in place until there was little sign of his handiwork. He rose to his feet, looked around again, failing to see Mike behind a tree-trunk thirty yards away, and made his own way back to the path. Behind him, Mike moved carefully forward, marking the spot and, using his fingers, began to dig into the crumbling, loose earth.
Buzzing in Ferney’s mind still was the Cumberlidge life and what had followed because it was important to him that, despite the vicar’s interruption, he should get back to remembering the bit that mattered, the bit that came after. He took the slope down into Coombe Bottom and headed south across the rough grazing, between the cows, towards Pen Mill. It was here, under the hedge on the far side, that all had come good, when – his impossible journey almost completed – all his wishes had come true and his mind had righted itself. He had limped across the field, fearful of having to try out his newly-rediscovered English, twisted by a French tongue, on any stranger in this time of war. He had failed to see the girl sitting under the hedge until he was almost on her, then she, as if she had been waiting for him for years, rose with slender grace and said, ‘Hello? Who are you? Are you Ferney? You are, aren’t you?’ and he had replied, ‘Bien sûr, c’est moi,’ then seeing the astonishment on her face, had begun again with difficulty, ‘Yes . . . truly, it is me.’
The girl in his mind’s eye came together with the gir
l who now rose out of the same place ahead of him. ‘Ferney? Why are you speaking French?’
‘Well now. How did you come to be standing here?’
She looked as though she had to think about that one, then frowned a little. ‘Oh. It’s Mike. I said I’d meet him here. He was going to look at the castle. Have you seen him?’
‘No, but it is very right that you should be here.’ They sat down on the grass, against the fence.
‘I was thinking about the time when we came closest to losing each other for ever,’ said Ferney.
Gally stopped him. ‘I don’t know if this is the moment to talk. I’ve had a problem with Mike this morning.’
‘A problem about me?’
‘Yes.’
He needed no explanation. ‘It’s always a problem when you tell anything to other people. We don’t fit into that world.’
‘I don’t know how to deal with it. Has this kind of thing happened before?’
He didn’t want to tell her the truth, that it had never happened – that though they had been separated, never before had the grip loosened so much that they could make any significant commitment to someone else, even, so far as it was possible to know, in the forgetful times. He doubted that she could take the consequences of that at this moment.
‘You don’t like driving, do you?’ he asked.
He could see her instantly start to ponder the possibilities behind the question.
‘I did,’ she said. ‘I’m not so sure I do now, since I came here. I think I might get a bicycle. Why?’
‘People don’t have so much time for the detail now,’ he said, giving her the less vital of the two answers. ‘You don’t have to take so much responsibility for something you can rush through, do you? You don’t drop litter on your own doorstep – at least some do, but there was never any hope for that sort. When everybody walked everywhere, most places seemed like your doorstep. You looked after it because four miles an hour wasn’t very quick and anything ugly, anything broken was in your sight for long enough to rankle. Now it’s all whizz and gone. People chuck packets out of the window. They dump stuff beside the road. What does it matter so long as they can go off at sixty miles an hour to somewhere else?’
‘And?’
‘What do you mean, “and”?’
‘I know your tone of voice. That question wasn’t about litter, it was about you and me.’
He snorted with laughter and took her hand and the warmth of his skin sent the two halves of her in opposite directions, her rational mind creasing, appalled, and her heart soaring in recognition of the love that poured through her.
‘It was.’ He was content to look at her for a long moment and all she could see was the essence of him shining in his eyes, dizzying. ‘It’s like I said before. Cars can take us apart just like that now. The way it used to be, when either one of us died then the nearest woman carrying – expecting I mean – would be bound to live quite close. Even if it was some grand lady passing in a carriage, chances were she wouldn’t come from that far off. Now people race around all over. You could be carried off anywhere, with anyone passing by down on the road who’s got a baby growing. It’s a lottery.’
‘Yes, I know. There’s nothing to be done about it, is there?’ she said. ‘And this time, I mean, I did come back, didn’t I?’
‘You did and I’m glad you did, but here you are and I’m the age I am and you’re the age you are.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Oh yes it does,’ he said firmly, ‘it matters a lot. This old crock of a body of mine has no pleasure in it for you. You’ve got your other man. How long could I stand that for, do you think? We need to be of an age, you and me, and together. That time before, when we were so far apart – that was terrible.’ He looked around. ‘I was so far away that I had no idea what all the memories meant. In the place I was, they just came out as madness. My responses were all wrong, you see? People marked me down as mad and I started to believe them – pictures in my head, words that didn’t mean anything, fears and dreams and all that.’
‘Like me, you mean?’
‘This was where we sorted it out. It was right here we met up again when I finally got back.’
‘You were in France.’
‘You know that?’
‘You were speaking French just now.’
‘I was. I was in France. There was a sea and a war between us. I thought that was the end of us. Killed in France and then born in France, all because my father sent me to fight. My memory came to me one day, as clear as you like. That’s what got me back.’
‘You got back from France in a war. The First World War?’
‘No, no,’ he said with a touch of the schoolteacher chiding a child for not trying hard enough. ‘This was 1810. Napoleon.’
‘How did you do it?’
‘You dragged me back. There came a time when all I could think about was you and I could suddenly hear the English voices in my head.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Thirteen maybe. Thirteen when I sort of woke up. Before that it was different. The two who were my parents that time – they weren’t happy together at all. He was quite an old man – over forty. He had a fishing boat and when the weather was too bad he worked leather – a bit of cobbling, a bit of saddlery, all sorts. She was a Gascon, almost a Spaniard, always on at him, always on at me, too, for being so daft. If I wanted peace I had to go down to the stones in the evening. I’d been drowned there you know, at Carnac. In the navy. Have you heard of Carnac?’ She nodded. ‘Great avenues of them, the most amazing sight you ever saw – all cut by hand and set in their right place. The people round there, they wouldn’t go near when it got dark. They were frightened, superstitious folk. All round those parts, the farmers would leave one corner of a field bare on every farm. That was for the devil to use so he wouldn’t spoil the rest of their land.’
Gally smiled but Ferney, looking at her, shook his head. ‘It may sound silly now, but they believed it then. There’s something about that sort of belief. You let it in and it’s like the first little stick that might catch in a rock on its way down a river. That stick catches another two and they catch ten more, then a log and before you know it the whole river’s blocked. It doesn’t do to start fearing nothing in case it brings something that’s worth fearing. Anyway that sort of superstition played its part. The father – his hands got too stiff to work and we were all short of food and the woman had had enough of starvation and sea fogs. She was a shrewish sort. She heard there was a chapel at Tréguier where women went to pray for the deaths of their husbands – “Our Lady of Hate” it was called – so she took herself off there thinking that if the Lady heard her prayer then she was still young enough to marry again. Only thing was . . . Ferney paused for effect and looked again at Gally ‘. . . it did for both of them. When she came back to Carnac, he was laid out as stiff as a board and I was howling and screaming by him, from seeing him die. She thought she’d head south right away and leave us both behind, but the villagers got wind of where she’d been and they didn’t let her. They took her down to the stone rows and left her there, bound tight, hand and foot, lashed to one of the stones so she couldn’t move. Two nights she was there and I’d creep in and out of them looking at her – a bit torn, I suppose, and certainly confused. I hated her for what she’d done to my father, but I knew she was all I had.’
‘What happened to you?’ Gally said softly, thinking this felt all new to her as though he’d never told her the full story before.
‘Two men came and took me away back to the houses, where they made me eat. I crept out later for another look but there was no sign of her – just cut ropes with a mark or two of blood on them. The next morning I went away. It was the first time I’d ever left the area round the stones and there wasn’t a clear thought in my head, just all the usual jumble of nonsense words and pictures. I headed off east to start with, I think. Then as soon as I got an hour or two away, something seeme
d to clear just a little in my head. Whatever it was, it started calling me north. I was lucky. I had a ride from a carter, I remember, and I slept under his cart that night and shared his food. He didn’t seem to mind my ways. When I woke up my head was full of words, as usual, words that had never made any sense, but now I was starting to know what they meant.’
‘You realized you were English?’
‘It wasn’t like that at all. I didn’t know what they were then, but I saw you. Not your face, you know how it is, but you. I could feel you like a magnet, away to the north. I knew I could find you if I went there and I started asking what was to the north. Brest, Morlaix, people would say, Saint-Pol de Léon, places like that – but they didn’t mean anything to me.’ He pronounced the place names as a Frenchman would.
‘How did you get here?’
‘I just walked. I didn’t have any food, but even then, when there’d been so much to fear, the country people would share with you if they saw you were harmless, particularly if you were simple. I walked for three more days. I didn’t have to work out my way, I shut my eyes when I wasn’t sure and I could see glimpses of you and the hill with the village on it, like following a compass. All the memories started pouring back, properly this time, making sense. It was too much to take in to start with, so I was walking like I was in a dream. I suppose it could have been more than a young boy could bear but the me part came back too, the older part, confident and strong, so that I was in charge of it and in fact all my fears and worries started easing away. I could feel myself getting stronger and stronger and knowing more and more. The further north I got, the clearer it was. I couldn’t sort out where I was, though. I knew I’d never been in this place before, but I didn’t seem to have the right knowledge to make sense of it – then one evening I came over a hill and there in front of me was the sea. Oh, that was a shock. You were still pulling me that way and there was nothing but the grey waves. Then for the first time, I really understood how it was and that undid me for a bit.’
