by James Long
‘Gally, you were always troubled in that life by fear, but I saw you overcome it time and again. You couldn’t have stopped them.’
It was like the therapist all over again. You couldn’t have saved your father. You were only ten. Your arm was broken.
‘I always feel guilty, Ferney, terribly guilty. I always know that a man died because of me. I thought it was my father. Perhaps it was you.’
She was hoping for some relieving, final word of absolution.
‘I died because of the Frenchmen, not because of you. What could you have done, sent them back to Normandy? Some chance. No one died because of you.’ He smiled and pressed her hand and it didn’t seem to help one little bit.
A new dream attacked her in the night when soft sleep had opened her defences. No one held her back this time. She smothered her fear and walked weightlessly towards the car, orange fire boiling through the coils of smoke, and pulled open the door with the immense power of her two strong arms. Her father’s face turned gratefully to her and she was so pleased to see the fire hadn’t yet charred it as she had feared. She pulled him out by his neck and the flames died, smothered in water, but immense sadness seized her as he slumped limply to the ground, knowing, despite or because of everything she’d done, that he was dead.
Mike woke her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The trees were bare and a north wind pushed freezing sheets of air through the caravan’s breached seams, its stiff curtains swaying inwards, needles moving on a dial of discomfort. Ever since they had first seen the house in the spring, it had been tucked inside the protecting fold of the trees. Now the landscape had been opened up, stripped of cover by the wind, but, just in time, the house was ready for it. Free of the scaffolding it was prepared to stand up for itself against anything the winter might bring.
The last thing to go was the builders’ pile of rubble, but Gally was absolutely insistent, despite the frost on the inside of the caravan windows in the morning and the chill of damp in their clothes, that she would not move into the house until that final sign was gone. She bullied and cajoled Rick and his team into working overtime on the final Saturday morning to shovel all their leftovers of broken blocks, plaster fossils, cable offcuts and plastic pipe into the back of their truck. As they were doing so she carried the remaining bedding and clothes into the house, and a £20 note persuaded Rick to hitch the caravan to the truck’s tow-bar and take it with them to the dump.
Only then, when the smell of the truck’s exhaust had blown off towards Shaftesbury, did she let Mike walk in through the front door with her, allowing herself the full sensation of ownership and appreciation. The house was sparsely furnished and they would need to find a lot more furniture to pad it with all the soft, comfortable corners she saw in her mind, but Gally had already found old carpets and armchairs in a local auction which looked as though they had always belonged. She wanted to be able to sit in comfort in whichever room suited her, chasing the sun as it swung through the house. Curtains that had once been her grandmother’s hung in most of the windows, providing another direct and familiar touch to help her root herself in this present time. When their silent, appreciative walk through the ground floor reached the kitchen, Mike opened the fridge and pulled out a bottle wrapped in tissue.
‘Champagne to mark the occasion. Well, fizzy grape juice, actually, in deference to our tiny friend.’
‘We mustn’t be late.’
Mike looked at his watch. ‘No problem, we’ve got over an hour.’
It had been his own idea that they should drive Ferney home from the hospital. Mike had offered it as a small consolation prize and a part of his personal penance on the day that they had finally left Monmouth’s ring at the Taunton Museum, Gally handing it over with sadness and resignation after they had received a polite but pressing letter on the subject of legal requirements. Until then they had hardly talked about Ferney, but Gally could see that, of all Mike’s conflicting emotions, the one that came out on top was his continuing feeling of guilt at what he saw as his contributory role in his collapse.
‘When the old man’s home, who’s going to look after him?’ he had asked diffidently.
‘Oh, I gather there’ll be a nurse popping in every now and then and Mary Sparrow says she’ll help out too.’
‘Mary Sparrow?’
‘You remember, “my muffeties”? The one who laughs a lot?’
‘Oh, her. Poor old Ferney. What about you?’
‘What about me?’
‘Well, you can help out a bit too, I suppose?’
You would pitch me, all unthinking, back into the maelstrom? The words stayed inside. It was a gift expressed as a duty and she must take it gingerly. ‘Every now and then, maybe.’
‘Look, I won’t mind. As long as things stay on an even keel. We’d better offer to fetch him, anyway.’
He knew exactly what the hospital had said about Ferney’s limited time and, as Ferney had anticipated, it seemed to draw a bottom line under the extent of his hostility. Being a decent man he understood and was shamed by the knowledge that Ferney’s coming death made him feel reassured. It made all the difference and was awful because of that, but it served to increase his new determination that they should be generous with their help in Ferney’s remaining weeks.
‘I suppose he’ll have to go back in again at some point,’ he said.
‘Why?’ She was startled.
‘Well, I mean. If it’s cancer, he’s going to get worse, isn’t he? He can hardly stay at home.’
Gally knew Ferney would not go back, not unless they strapped him to a stretcher. He would want to be home, of that she was quite sure, however he contrived it. If not, then she would have to be at the hospital with him.
They collected Ferney at half past two and he was able to walk quite well by himself out to the car although they were both ready near him in case. In the weeks he had spent in hospital the same thought had concerned him and he had been slowly pulling together his strength to try to outflank the enemy growing inside him for as long as he could. Gally had seen him in rationed, safe doses, taking contentment from simply being with him as they were now, refusing to take any of the complex back-tracks available. The image constantly projected on to him by the hospital had made it simpler. All the staff saw him as an old man and concerned themselves with the dignity of his coming end. Left to herself Gally would have seen only his eyes containing the loving light of all their pasts and the promise of all the futures, but, surrounded by nurses tending him with such kind dismissiveness, she saw as well the body beyond the eyes and could play the nurses’ game of supposing him to be almost at an end.
He hadn’t referred to her promise on those visits. She knew that he only had to look at her to see she had not yet fulfilled it, but he seemed calm enough about that.
Mike was solicitous and formally polite with him. Gally was in the back of the car. Ferney’s bungalow was warm, prepared and waiting for him, but he had other ideas. ‘You’ve moved in? You’re in the house?’
‘Yes. As of this morning,’ said Mike.
‘Just as well. The cold’s coming clipping in now. Can I see it?’
‘You want to see the house?’
‘If it’s no trouble.’
‘We thought we ought to get you home.’
‘It won’t do any harm.’
From the back Gally could read Mike’s double-talk. Ferney in the house might lessen his own hold on it. He was afraid that regained ground was about to be lost again. Ferney read him too and trumped him.
‘I would really like to see it just once more.’
Mike could not say no to that.
It was a new and delicious experience, coming into the yard for the first time with no caravan, no builders’ vans, no scaffolding and with the Bag Stone leaning like a great tent peg to anchor the house. Loving satisfaction swelled through Gally as she leaned forward to look at it between the men in the front seats and to share it, to earth it,
she reached out, one hand on Mike’s shoulder and the other on Ferney’s. To her discomfiture Mike twitched his shoulder as if her hand was an unexpected irritation while from Ferney, her left hand tingled with an electric redoubling of the pure pleasure she felt.
She stayed in the car for a second to catch her breath while Mike came round to the passenger’s side and helped Ferney out, then she followed them into the house and heard Ferney say, ‘You’ve got it about right, I think.’
He walked slowly into the sitting-room where the wide stone fireplace stood ready to feel its first warmth for sixty years.
‘That chimney smokes when the wind’s in the north. It comes down off the hill. You’ll have to put a bit of a choke in, I expect. Best way’s an iron plate up in there,’ he thrust his stick up into the wide mouth of the chimney, ‘an iron plate with a two-foot hole in it should do the trick.’
Mike frowned slightly.
‘Can I look upstairs?’ said Ferney eagerly.
‘Can you manage it?’
‘I’d run up if my legs weren’t out of practice.’ At the top he stood on the landing looking in through the open doorway of their bedroom and she sensed that it would hurt him to go in and see the evidence of the bed she would be sharing with Mike that night, nor did she want him to see it.
‘What do you think?’ said Mike.
‘I think it’s back to its old self and it’s been a very happy house,’ said Ferney. ‘Thank you for letting me see. I’ll be off home now.’
‘Fine,’ said Mike. ‘I’ll help you back to the car.’
‘Oh that’s all right, I’ll walk,’ said Ferney. ‘If you wouldn’t mind dropping my bag some time.’
‘No, that’s out of the question. The hospital would never forgive us.’
Protesting, they got him into the car, took him back to his bungalow and arranged a comfortable chair for him. Gally made him tea and Mary Sparrow arrived to fuss around him, bringing a huge pie in a china dish.
‘I’m glad you’re back,’ said Gally. ‘I’ll come tomorrow,’ and bent to kiss him on the cheek. It was the first time she had done so in this oddly separate intimacy of their present lives and it was not at all like kissing a much older man. So much joy surrounded them for that warm second when her cheek was against his that it was a wrench to stand straight again.
They were about to get back into the car when a white police car drove into the close and parked behind them. The man who climbed out was in sergeant’s uniform and he glanced at them briefly before walking up the path to Ferney’s front door.
‘He’s only just come back,’ Gally called to the policeman, concerned. ‘He’s been in hospital.’
‘That’s all right,’ said the sergeant. ‘I won’t bother him for long. I’ve just got something for him.’
Gally stood in an agony of indecision. If this was, as she suspected, about the bones down at the roadworks, then she felt she ought to be there too, but no doubt the sergeant wouldn’t see it that way.
‘Can we wait?’ she said to Mike. ‘Just until he’s gone?’
The man wasn’t more than a couple of minutes and, seeing them waiting, gave them a rather more curious look this time as he went back to his car.
‘I won’t be a second,’ said Gally.
Mary Sparrow opened the door to her knock. Ferney was sitting in his chair staring into space.
‘Is everything all right?’ she said.
Mary was hovering behind her and it was clear Ferney didn’t want to say much.
‘It’s fine. He just came to tell me they’d closed the file on the business down there.’
‘Was that all?’
‘Let’s talk about it later.’
When she’d gone and when he’d finally persuaded Mary he could get himself to bed quite happily, Ferney sat quietly, thinking about the mystery of Billy Bunter.
The policeman had been quite happy about it all.
‘We’re satisfied. He ended up in Dartmoor, you know – the lad that did it. You knew he died in prison?’
‘I knew that much. They wrote and told the vicar for some reason.’
‘He wrote an account of it while he was inside. It’s all in the files somewhere. No mystery.’
‘Wrote? I didn’t know he could write.’
‘Seems he did.’
‘How did he die? They never said.’
‘I don’t know.’ The sergeant clearly felt that was inadequate. ‘Would you like me to find out?’
‘I would.’
‘I’ll see what I can do. It might take a while.’ Poor Billy, Ferney thought when he was by himself again. He didn’t ask much and he didn’t get much. It wasn’t right that they put a lad like that in Dartmoor, a lad who’d been so provoked and who wasn’t really answerable for what he did. He’d never been vicious. Naughty maybe, but not on purpose. He didn’t really know about closed doors. You’d always find him where you didn’t expect him, nosing into things that weren’t his. All kinds of stuff used to go astray when Billy was around, but you couldn’t blame him. Monmouth’s sword and the breastplates had probably gone that way. They’d certainly vanished after he’d been in one day.
Gally and Mike went quietly back to Bagstone Farm and as evening came they lit a log fire and sat in the armchairs with the dim table lamps removing the evidence of modern repair from the sitting-room. They sipped soup in mugs and gazed into the fire and a great gust of smoke swept out of the chimney as the wind raced across the roof.
‘Ah,’ said Mike. ‘It’s going to need a cowl or something.’
An iron plate in the chimney opening was what it needed, an iron plate with a two-foot hole. Gally looked at Mike in surprise. She hadn’t really noticed he was there. ‘I don’t mind it,’ she said. ‘It covers up the smell of fresh paint.’
He rose to his feet, smiled and bowed. ‘Mrs Martin,’ he said, ‘shall we have an early night in our new bedroom?’
She suppressed a frown. It was as if a stranger had suggested making love to her here, in her house. The light was too dim for him to see her face and that gave her time to get back in control. She followed him up the stairs.
‘I’m going to have a bath,’ she said. ‘I want to enjoy every bit of it.’
‘You’ve been using the bathroom for the last three weeks.’
It was true. In the evenings, after the builders had gone she had allowed that single infringement on the house.
‘Yes, but I only painted it yesterday. I didn’t want to spoil the feeling.’
She lay in the long bath, soaking in luxurious hot water. The smell of the fresh paint made it easy to be modern and the room seemed to hold no great connections. Of course, she thought, there wouldn’t have been a bathroom. Perhaps this will be a safe place when I need to be Mike’s. This and the loo. The door opened and he came in with a tray and a bottle of Spanish champagne. ‘Ta-raah.’
‘Oh my goodness.’
‘You’re allowed one drink, surely?’ he said. ‘Why stop celebrating? It’s a great day.’
It was certainly a momentous day, a day of duties done and healing finished, but it was also a day in which she had crossed a threshold into a place where she had always been entirely Ferney’s and now she had to find a way of sharing it. At that moment, only the bathroom seemed to protect her. ‘Stay and drink it here,’ she said. ‘Pull the chair over.’
It was a good-sized room that had once been a bedroom and she’d found a lone armchair with a worn cover of green flowers on a yellow background that felt just right for it. Mike sat next to her in the chair, drinking and reminiscing about how they’d first found the house and all the stages on the way to this day. He left Ferney entirely out of his account and she was glad. If she pushed the old man out of her mind, too, she could make room for Mike and she concentrated on doing that.
‘Why don’t we drink the rest of this in bed?’ he said as he filled up her glass. She knew that one glass had been quite enough, sensitive to the delicate balance of her baby’s
world, but she allowed him the pleasure of pouring it. She was frightened of getting out of the bath, frightened of what might follow if she left this insulating room which eased the dilemma of her faithfulness. She reached for his wrist as he poured and stroked it, understanding that he had a strong need to consummate this house with her, to declare it theirs. ‘It’s a big bath,’ she said, ‘and it’s still hot. Wouldn’t you like it?’
‘I’ll share it with you,’ he replied, smiling and looking into her eyes.
‘Yes,’ she said sensing a way out of the trap. ‘Come on in.’
He pulled his shirt over his head and she concentrated on his physical presence, the new muscles in his arms and shoulders, built up by the manual labour they’d done clearing the surrounding land. He turned half away, stooping and hopping to get his jeans off, and she deliberately lingered on the curve of his neat buttocks into his narrow waist. It felt very calculated, but she needed to guarantee him passion and she could feel on an animal level that her body was starting to respond to these messages she was force-feeding it. The champagne helped. He stood next to the bath, wondering how to get in and she sat up, water cascading off her swelling breasts down to the large, seemingly independent convexity of her belly. She reached up to his neck and he bent to a long kiss which swirled their arousal together. She felt his hand on one breast, brushing her nipple, sending shivers down to her groin and then his hand stroked over her belly and down and she opened to him like a sea anemone in the warm water. After a long minute in which his tongue and fingers blotted out all else, she stood on trembling legs to make space for him in the bath and as he lay down in the water, she sat on his chest, meeting his unfocused gaze as his hands reached up to cup her breasts and eased herself back on to him, driven by urgency so that the bathwater slopped backwards and forwards escaping over the rim in small splashes as she moved faster and faster. She came with him to a gasping climax that was entirely on a physical level, but strong enough to stop that mattering, then slipped down to lie squeezed against him by the constraints of the bath in a thought-free peace. Outside their slow time, the water seemed to grow rapidly colder and they got out together, helped to dry each other then went next door into the bedroom. As Gally rolled into bed, utterly at home, she felt for this one time she had been as fair as she could be to both men and avoided wondering what the future might bring. She and Mike were quickly asleep.
