Ferney

by James Long

  ‘That’s all right, isn’t it?’

  ‘No it isn’t. You know that. It gives you a date too, doesn’t it? It feels like I’m sentencing you.’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s not like that. It’s just the way of things. Neither of us lives for ever, not in one go.’ He nodded towards her belly. ‘Anyway I wouldn’t miss this one for anything. Not unless they drag me off to hospital.’

  Gally looked out of the window to check that Mike was still busy. ‘Effie Mullard said she thought her daughter was a bit doolally because she had to move out of the house before she had her.’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘So . . . if anything goes wrong and you did have to go to hospital . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m asking if my baby . . . you . . . if my baby might have something wrong with him because you ended up in Yeovil.’

  His mouth twitched with a sudden pain. ‘I see what you’re getting at. No, I think just so long as you stay there in the right place, the stone will see you through. There’ll be nothing wrong with the baby.’

  ‘But if you’ve been taken off somewhere else, it might not be you?’

  ‘Then we’ll just have to see, I suppose. Maybe I’ll miss out. Maybe I’ll be back some other way, but that’s not what’s going to happen and even if it did, I’d find you.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘I think I do this time.’

  Mike came back into the hall and she was left in an unexpressed hollowness of doubt.

  They moved him in and it was clear to Gally straightaway that for Ferney, any slight difficulties that resulted from the separation from most of the familiar objects of his life were swamped by the huge comfort of being back in the most familiar place of all. He settled into his bed and his armchair which gave him a view out of the window at the back of the house, down the slope of the hill to the open lands. The pain was now coming at increasingly frequent intervals, but the move seemed to have given him a new serenity in dealing with it.

  On the first Monday morning, after Mike had left at the crack of dawn to drive off to his week at work, Gally lay in bed seeing five days full of unchaperoned danger ahead. It started from the first moment of silence after the car’s line of noise had dwindled into the startling pink of the striated horizon, and in her half-sleeping, half-waking state the window asserted itself for a moment as smaller, its bars thicker and the glass carving swirls of bright distortion out of the dawn. She sat up sharply, rejecting it, slamming the newer window back into place with a force that jolted her to her soul, then she sat there for an hour reviewing the certain unmistakabilities of her life and they seemed to add up to a shorter list than she would have liked. At the end of the hour, she heard Ferney shuffle to and from the bathroom and then she went downstairs, made him a cup of tea and, wrapped in a long dressing-gown, went to confront the issue.

  When she knocked there was silence and she pushed the door cautiously open. He was half-sitting up in bed gazing towards the window, his books neglected on the bedside table, and it took a few moments for him to register her presence. His face as he turned it to her seemed at first to have nothing of him inhabiting its diminished skin and bone, but then he came back from somewhere and animation slowly returned to the muscles around his cheeks, jaw and brow so that his eyes, tired and pained though they now were, came back to life and made him Ferney again.

  ‘How kind of you,’ he said as she put the teacup beside him.

  She crossed to the armchair and sat down with her own tea.

  ‘How did you sleep?’

  ‘So well that I don’t remember.’

  ‘Are you awake enough to talk?’

  ‘Yes. What’s bothering you now?’

  ‘I think I need some sort of code of conduct.’

  He knew what she meant without her having to say another word.

  ‘Haven’t you noticed?’ he said.

  ‘Noticed what?’

  ‘I haven’t led you back to anything for weeks now.’

  ‘You have. When you were telling us about the cross, the Glastonbury cross.’

  ‘You went back then?’

  ‘You know I did.’

  ‘I thought maybe you did. I wasn’t quite sure – but that wasn’t me, Gally dear, that was you. You know the trick now.’

  ‘But . . . okay, but when you talk about things like that it pulls the feet out from under me.’

  ‘I know when to push and when not to push. Whatever happens now is between you and the rest of yourself. I’ve done what you asked. I’ve helped you back to all that. It’s not for me to do any more than that.’

  Gally knew it was true, knew that she was looking for him to make it all safe for her when the real danger was at large within herself.

  ‘Will you help me?’ she said. ‘I understand all that, but will you try not to trip me up with things that take me back there? I know exactly what the question is, but I don’t want to answer it bit by bit. I want to answer when the moment comes, otherwise I think it will get harder for me to know what I’ve got to do.’

  She was amazed that she could speak so calmly. Certainly she knew what the question was. The question was death.

  He sighed and she couldn’t tell if it was pain or not. ‘I’ll do my best,’ he said. ‘It’s difficult to be sure I can get the boundaries right, but I will try.’

  He came downstairs for a while during the morning and she made sure the fire was kept stoked up for him. She read to him for an hour, then the grim pain undermined his concentration and he went back to bed. The nurse came in the afternoon.

  That evening she sat in his bedroom armchair again watching him sitting up in bed, eating a tiny meal as the television launched into the six o’clock news. It was all about the Gulf, the Scud missiles, the air war. Ferney watched intently.

  ‘What do you think about it all?’ she asked when the news finally turned to lesser events. It was the first time all day she had asked him for an opinion, given him the invitation to delineate the boundaries she had requested.

  He gave her a look which said he was grateful for that trust. ‘The history books I’ve read make me wonder,’ he said. ‘It’s all a long, long process and I think the geography has got in the way of the history so the whole thing’s a bit stuck right now. Did you want a long answer or shall I stick to something short and pointless?’

  ‘A long one, please.’ The sound of his voice in this warm, familiar room set up little currents of satisfied pleasure just under her skin. It was rich and companionable and she didn’t want it to end.

  ‘The books tell you what’s happened so far, don’t they? Go right back and there were tribes, hating and fearing and preying on each other most of the time. Then you get towns and cities doing the same sort of thing until there’s a bigger threat and they get together. Then it’s little states. Then it’s big states and all the time it’s all those separate fearing, hating groups joining up into bigger groups and finding another foreign rival to hate. Do you see what I mean?’

  ‘I suppose I do. It sounds horrible. I thought you were going to be cheerful.’

  ‘Oh, but I am. That’s the point. Just look where we are now. That whole process can’t have suddenly stopped dead in its tracks, surely. I read a book on Switzerland last year. They were all separate groups living in the valleys just like tribes, you might say. The mountains gave them the ignorance to let them hate the people on the other side. Then they crossed the mountains. Now they’re a nation. We’ve just got to keep on crossing the mountains, haven’t we? Like England, Wales and Scotland stopping fighting and getting together. That’s got to go on.’

  ‘How can it?’ Gally asked gently. ‘Look at America. It runs right to the ocean all around.’

  His face lost its colour and she watched, feeling sympathetic pain as he struggled for breath for a whole minute, pushing the pain down. It subsided leaving him visibly weaker, shrinking in the bed in its backwash. After a long silence he pointe
d at the television and said in a smaller voice, ‘That’s a bridge. That thing. It’s got a lot wrong with it, but it lets you visit and when you see enough of a place it’s harder to hate it. We’ll get beyond the oceans somehow.’

  ‘You’re an optimist, then?’

  ‘Oh, that’s another question completely. All I’m saying is this nationalism business – it changes all the time. There wasn’t any nationalism in this country until Napoleon came along – not the sort of nationalism that had everyone spouting slogans and singing. That’s quite new really. Before that wars were just things the nobs organized, nobs and mobs.’ He fell silent, perhaps feeling he was getting a bit near the limits they’d agreed. ‘That’s in books,’ he said and she smiled.

  In the next two weeks they quickly fell into a gentle pattern in which she pottered about the house, gradually tackling the small jobs that fine-tuned it to her vision. With each day, Ferney was less able to sustain a long conversation without breaking off for long moments in which he would wrestle with his cruel, multiplying invader and she would have to sit there in her own minor harmony of pain wishing she could help with more than words. If she had to go out, pedalling down from the ridge to the nearest shops for supplies, she would try to do it when the nurse, a capable and sympathetic woman, was there or else she would ring for Mary Sparrow to come over, but on those occasions Ferney would make a face and ask her not to be too long. In the evenings he would go to sleep early. She knew the nurse had left tablets he could take to help him sleep, but she let him have the dignity of making that decision without her interference. She would sit downstairs by the fire, certain that if he needed her she would know. On one such evening, early on, she found herself deeply aware of the new life inside her in a more direct way than she had been before. At the same time, she felt a faint finger of Ferney’s pain feel towards her from the room upstairs and as she put down her book, disturbed by it, the pain hardened inside her into an uncomfortable muscle spasm that tightened and pulled into cramping discomfort low down in her guts. It caught her off balance, just as she was reaching out towards Ferney’s pain and as she was wide open, it magnified her own and had her gasping and confused with its twisting squeeze until it had its way and started to subside. Then she recognized it as a contraction and curled up around her belly to protect it, feeling the muscles gradually return to their normal state. She waited for a long, suspended time, staring into the fire. A log tipped, its balance eaten by the flames, and overbalanced, coughing sparks but no more pain came. Braxton Hicks, she said firmly to herself, just a Braxton Hicks contraction – not the beginning of the end, not yet. It made her think, for all that, and the experience looming in the fog of the near future seemed more like a reef than a harbour.

  In the firelight she took an inventory of herself and her resources and had a sense of the progress she had made in the months since that panic attack down by the roadworks. No more Boilman, no more Burnman. They were history now, not horror. The old nightmares had gone. The new one hadn’t. She didn’t understand the change, but perhaps she would in time. Guilt went with it still. She felt less irrational fear now, a touch of claustrophobia maybe. I am getting better, she thought, it’s wisdom I’m still short of.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by headlights turning across the window with the descending growl of a car entering the gate and it was then for the first time that she realized this was Friday and the footsteps approaching had to be Mike. They met in the hall and he studied her as if he were not sure what he would find.

  She kissed him on the cheek and he raised an eyebrow.

  ‘That’s a bit formal.’

  He put his arms round her and kissed her on the mouth and she had to suppress the reaction that it felt an intrusion.

  ‘Have you had a good week?’

  ‘All right in parts. How’s it been with Ferney?’

  ‘He’s going downhill.’

  ‘Have you been able to cope?’

  ‘Oh yes. The nurse is pretty good.’

  He looked round the hall. ‘You’ve painted the doors.’

  ‘Do you like them?’

  He thought the green she had used was too dark and said, ‘Yes,’ with just a shade too much enthusiasm, so she knew he didn’t.

  The weekend passed quietly with her inhabiting the no man’s land between the two men. Each day as Ferney diminished in tiny stages which could only be noticed, like the movement of an hour hand, by looking away, she found herself more and more in touch with the new life inside her and able to imagine it taking on the mental outlines of a person. On Sunday morning she took Ferney his breakfast as Mike prepared hers downstairs. Ferney’s face was stretched on a bony rack of pain and she stood by him, holding his wrist in support, feeling a one-way flow of life between them that she knew would now be evident whenever she stepped into the inner circle of his presence.

  When he recovered and even smiled a little, she had to bend to hear him.

  ‘I want to pay my keep,’ he said.

  ‘No, that’s fine.’

  He frowned. ‘I don’t want you to say that. It isn’t fine. Listen to me.’

  She saw it mattered to him and kept silent.

  ‘Go to the bungalow for me. There’s a room at the back – before the one where the picture is?’

  Gally remembered the quick glimpse of shelves and a row of clocks, Ferney’s odd storeroom. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Go in there. By yourself, if you can. There are some tobacco tins on the right, under a green cover. Bring me one.’

  Mike wanted to come too when she said she was going to get something for Ferney.

  ‘I’d rather we didn’t leave him by himself,’ she said. ‘Do you mind staying?’

  It was raining; she would have walked anyway, but he made a big thing about her taking the car and so as to limit the disagreement she gave way. She picked up the mail from Ferney’s mat – it was mostly junk apart from two magazines, an electricity bill and a rather official-looking white envelope – then, with a sense of keen anticipation, she went into the room at the back of the house.

  It was not nearly so full, she was sure, as when she had glimpsed it previously. All but one of the clocks she had seen had gone. The remaining one was an old bracket clock shrouded in a clear plastic bag which contained a sachet of crystals inside it, marked ‘desiccant’. Another shelf, she could see, held a few toys in boxes, from Dinky cars of the sixties through to modern plastic. Most of the rest of the shelves which had previously been piled high now contained only folded sheets and rugs except in a corner where one sheet covered several lumpy shapes. Though she felt trusted by Ferney to use her eyes, she respected his privacy too much to lift the covers. She knew perfectly well without having to risk any journey into her memory that what she could see was the remaining currency of his squirrel-caches of objects, the means by which he had learnt to transfer wealth between his generations. He must have been busy putting them back in the ground.

  She followed his instructions, lifted the cover and found two square Navy Cut tobacco tins. They were heavy for their size and she took one, covered up the other and returned to Bagstone Farm after checking that all was well with the rest of the house.

  When she gave the tin to Ferney he was clearly pleased. He held it in both hands and had trouble managing even that moderate weight. He fumbled with the lid, failed, sighed and she took it from him again.

  ‘Shall I do it?’

  He nodded.

  Inside the tin was a folded plastic bag and inside the bag were twenty coins, heavy coins carrying inscriptions and Queen Victoria’s head. They shone golden.

  ‘Sovereigns,’ Ferney whispered. ‘I’ve got a number you can ring. There’s a man at Shaftesbury gives me a good price for them. They’ll help pay the bills.’

  The man arrived with cash on Tuesday. Gally dreaded his questions, but he didn’t seem inclined to ask any. He wore a fur hat and had thick glasses and his car was a highly-polished old Rover.

  ‘It use
d to be the Queen’s,’ he said as he got out when he saw Gally looking at it. ‘Mr Miller’s staying with you, is he?’

  ‘Yes, he’s not too well. He asked me to fix it with you.’

  ‘I’ve done a lot of business with him over the years. He’s a good man. Give him my best wishes.’

  That was the extent of his curiosity. He peeled £20 and £50 notes off a large roll and left without a backward glance.

  The crisis came in the form of Dr Killigrew on Wednesday afternoon. He arrived unannounced, which was quite rude enough, but it was clear to Gally from his whole haughty approach that he saw her as an obstacle that simply had to be swept aside. Even before he’d seen Ferney he started laying down the law that he thought they’d come to the end of what they could hope to do at home.

  ‘We are coping,’ said Gally defiantly, keeping him from going straight upstairs.

  ‘It’s not within your realm of competence. He needs a proper regime of pain management,’ said the doctor. ‘He’s got to be in a suitable place for that.’

  ‘This is a suitable place. He’s very happy here.’

  ‘But you’re not even family, are you?’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  Upstairs he behaved as though Ferney were an imbecile, speaking loudly and slowly to him.

  ‘Mr Miller. We’re going to see if we can’t move you to somewhere nice. I think you need a bit of special looking after. How would that be?’

  ‘I’m staying here,’ said Ferney.

  ‘Yes, yes. I’m sure Mrs Martin’s seeing to you very well, but it wouldn’t be good for you. We’ll have to see.’

  ‘No we won’t,’ said Ferney, summoning fresh strength into his voice. ‘It’s got nothing to do with you. I want to stay.’

  ‘Look, Mr Miller, I’ve got your best interests at heart and I do know what I’m talking about.’ The words were caring, but the voice betrayed them. ‘We can do a lot more in hospital to help you through this than we can if you’re here. You should listen to advice.’

  ‘I know what it’ll be like.’