Ferney

by James Long

  ‘With respect,’ said the doctor, with no respect, ‘I don’t see how you can.’

  Ferney’s face, so pale lately, flushed with more colour than Gally had seen in it for weeks and she was afraid for a moment that he would tell the doctor exactly what was wrong with his presumption. All he said, with slow-paced controlled fury, was, ‘You are a fool and I am staying here. Now bugger off.’ Then, paying the price of his emotion, he gasped in pain.

  Dr Killigrew chose to see only that and left the house with the arrogant speed of an insecure authoritarian, leaving Gally fuming in his wake. She kicked the door hard as he drove away without once looking back towards her, then went slowly upstairs.

  Ferney’s eyes were closed but they flickered open when she closed the door softly behind her.

  ‘You can’t get through to people like that,’ he whispered.

  She found she was crying. ‘We’ll stop him,’ she said.

  ‘There’s something I want to tell you.’ His voice was so faint she had to lean closer. ‘The policeman. He sent me Billy Bunter’s . . .’ He gasped then clenched his teeth in pain and it was all forgotten as she found the liquid for him, spooned it down and then sat there holding his hand until he went off to sleep.

  That evening she tried to ring Mike, but the phone rang and rang and he hadn’t come back at ten o’clock when the emotion of the afternoon turned to exhaustion and she fell asleep, fully dressed, on her bed.

  The dream was heading for its conclusion, her hands around her father’s neck, when she woke at four in the morning to the immediate and certain knowledge that Dr Killigrew’s plans did not matter one bit. A great silent voice was crying through the house. All the ranked generations of Ferneys and Gallys seemed to be there with her in the room, reaching out to her, helping her up from the bed with an intensity of love and pain. In the room at the other end of the house, she knew immediately, Ferney was dying.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  In the dark the house was a stone organ sweeping her to him down the wooden tube of its corridor in a whirl of inaudible music. Her skin trembling, she paused for courage outside his door, then pushed it open to enter the stage for his final act.

  He lay, head arched back a little like a bishop on a tomb, straight and white on the bed and she inched towards him in fearful reverence. He breathed in a light rhythm, slow and shallow, and his eyes were closed. They opened as she bent over him, focused beyond her, and in a remote breath of a voice he said, ‘Gally?’

  ‘Yes, I’m here.’

  ‘It doesn’t hurt any more.’

  ‘I’m so glad.’

  ‘Stay here.’

  ‘Of course I will.’

  There was a long silence and she kept still, bending over him while his eyes flickered shut then open again. The room was warm and the house was utterly quiet now that its summons had been met.

  ‘Don’t be afraid.’ She could barely hear his words.

  Pulling the armchair to the side of the bed, she tried sitting down, but he moved his head, looking for her, and though she could see his lips moving, the faint words weren’t clear.

  ‘I’m here,’ she said softly and with tremendous effort he summoned up a full voice, timeless and devoid of age. ‘Lie with me,’ he said.

  The bed was wide and she carefully lay down next to him, on her side, facing him with one of his hands clasped between both of hers. She had to lie curled, aslant, to make space for her full belly. The effort past, he had only a whisper left, but it was enough at this short distance.

  ‘I can see so much,’ he said in tones of delight.

  ‘What do you see?’

  ‘Maypoles. When the maypoles came back.’ The remains of his voice changed pace, becoming less deliberate – the accidental outer manifestation of what was passing in his mind. ‘Cheer for the king. Gally, there’s a king again. I don’t care for kings but we can dance now and that’s worth cheering for. Let’s dance. I love to dance with you. Come with me.’ He gave a small cry of delight and in her mind’s eye for a second she saw striped, fresh-painted maypoles, people whirling in cavalier joy. High poles, tall people. She and Ferney holding each other, scampering in their midst, so small, so happy, so complete.

  ‘The killjoys are gone.’ One of their voices said it but she did not know whose it was.

  ‘Kings,’ he whispered. ‘So few good men. Must tell the old stories. Who keeps the place right if we don’t? Who listens? Who listens now?’

  ‘I’m here. I’m listening.’ The countryside was listening, too. Beyond the house Gally felt the ridge crouched like a faithful dog sorrowing at the deathbed of its master, its protector, the articulator of its life story.

  ‘I knew you the first second. Standing in the house with him.’ He was back in the present. ‘It was like being kicked. I knew who you were, but I thought I must be wrong until he spoke your name. Why’s he there, Gally? Why’s he in the way?’

  She wanted to curl away from the question, but there was no possibility of escape from the stark truth his death was demanding.

  ‘I didn’t know. That’s why. You know that’s why. He’s good to me. He’s good to us. He was the most special person I’d met until I met you again.’

  The echoes of ‘until’ started tears springing in the corners of her eyes. This was her man dying here. Her only man.

  He was silent. His eyes closed again. A moth took off from the lampshade, swirled twice round their heads and settled on the wall. With his eyes shut he spoke in a voice that made no more noise than the moth’s wings.

  ‘Let not our divided hearts be sworn to any other,

  There’s love that stays and love that parts and love of sister, brother.

  Our halves are nothing on their own but half and half make one,

  And halves, divided, stand alone when the adding’s done.

  Half-hearted I should never find my matching half elsewhere.

  Without your half, my sister kind, my sum will be despair.’

  The sun grew bright and the room spread out. He finished with a theatrical groan, then sprang up off the couch and she laughed with delight.

  ‘That’s what you get when your tutor insists on teaching you mathematics and all you have in your soul is poetry,’ he said. His eyes twinkled and he was beautiful in his doublet and hose and she thrilled to the verve of him. ‘I do mean it, though,’ he said. ‘Our father has a husband up his capacious sleeve for you, Gally my sister-love.’

  ‘Do you know that? Who is it?’ she asked, afraid.

  ‘Thomas Phelips who will have the Montacute estate when the time comes, as well as that great house they’re planning if they ever get round to building it.’

  It was inconceivable to her.

  ‘I shall tell him I will not.’

  ‘And he will say it is not for you to decide.’

  ‘This is dreadful. I’m sure it has never happened before.’

  ‘We have never been brother and sister before.’

  ‘Nor have we both been born into fortune.’

  ‘I don’t call this fortune,’ said Ferney impatiently, striding to the window and, putting one foot up on the window seat, he leaned on his raised knee as he looked out at the formal gardens. ‘I call this prison. Sneaking to your room, knowing what they’d say if we were found together. This isn’t fortune. When we’re poor nobody else owns our hearts. Everything else maybe, but not our hearts.’

  ‘And no one does now.’

  ‘But they think they do.’

  ‘I can’t be told to spend the rest of my life with anyone else,’ she said, as the idea he had planted doubled and redoubled into its full enormity.

  ‘And nor can I.’ He sprang away from the window, ran and slid to her on his knees, burying his head in her lap. She stroked his hair, loving him with the full love that results from having no fear of ever being denied or rejected or cut short.

  In the present, silent room where Ferney lay sharing the faint echoes of it through antennae ext
ended by the altered brain chemistry of his approaching death, she called in her sixteenth-century voice: ‘What will happen to us?’ and a whispered answer came back with the certainty of history behind it, ‘The Sweat.’

  Words danced in her head, sweat, sickness, sweat and under them another insistent interloper – skimmington, the skimmington.

  ‘He’s dead,’ said her brother beside her bed in the middle of the night. ‘The sweating sickness.’

  ‘Dead? Father?’

  ‘Yes, dead. The servants have run from the sickness. We must go. Come with me.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Back home to the Bag Stone. The cottage is empty.’

  ‘You know that?’

  ‘I went back there to see. We can be there together. No one will know who we are. We can be properly together, sister-love.’

  The skimmington skirled its sinister sibilance.

  ‘Come with me.’

  Come to what? She scented distress down that road and Ferney’s death reverie rescued her, turning them both away to a hilltop road of dressed chalk and stone on a dreamlike day in sparkling January where a laughing man in a stovepipe hat beckoned, shouting, ‘Come Ferney, come Gally. Now. The char volant will wait no longer and the wind is rising, my beauties.’

  ‘There are fresh miracles every day,’ said Ferney, running hand in hand with her to the spindly carriage. ‘Good morning, Captain Hudson.’

  ‘Good morning to you. Get in, get in,’ he cried back. ‘You shall be the first.’

  The horses were grazing, uncoupled from the traces, and long cords led from the captain’s hands where he sat ready on the box to the great frames his men held a hundred yards ahead. ‘Have you been eating well?’ he roared. ‘It’s weight I need, weight at the back there.’ Gally and Ferney were laughing too much to answer, settling themselves on the plank that served as a seat across the back of the platform.

  The captain glanced over his shoulder. ‘Get ready now,’ he bellowed to his men. ‘She’s running up astern. Launch when she’s on the beam.’

  Behind them the London stagecoach, paint and varnish shining, swayed out of the trees on to the plain.

  ‘Stand by for the maiden voyage of the char volant,’ bawled the captain. ‘Wait for it. LET GO!’

  The men thrust the unwieldy frames up and the wind took them streaming into the sky with long tails steadying them as they climbed. The captain, strapped to his seat, had his arms braced against wooden posts. Holding the kite cords like reins, wrapped round his wrists, he was pulled forward by the strength of their tug and the carriage began to roll with increasing speed, Ferney cheering loudly from the back. In seconds they were barrelling across the plain, yawing as the wind took the kites crazily off to one side, the captain fighting with the lines to pull them straight again. Passengers on the stagecoach looked across at them, astonished, and the driver thrashed his whip across the backs of the startled, nickering horses to take on the outlandish challenge or perhaps simply to try to get clear of this alarming sight that was racing along beside him. The char volant, towed by the soaring kites, accelerated to the speed of a galloping horse and then beyond into a sensation of bucketing, breathtaking pace that was completely new to Gally, exhilarating and terrifying in equal measure. The kites were primrose yellow against the winter-blue sky. The coach was dwindling behind them.

  ‘This is the future,’ shrieked the captain. ‘Gurney’s steam coach will never beat the horses. The char volant will double their speed. We can fly with the wind.’

  ‘So long as it’s blowing the right way,’ Ferney shouted back, but the captain, letting go of both cords as the track ahead turned sharply to the right, took no notice. The kites whirled off, tumbling to the ground, and the carriage bounced to a halt.

  They were walking back to the house. ‘There’s always something new,’ Ferney said, his arm comfortably around her.

  ‘Not always something quite so new as that.’

  ‘No, thank heaven, but the more I see, the more I learn to see.’

  She understood. ‘Every sunset, every flame.’

  ‘Infinite variety.’

  Back in the house they stood admiring the new painting, still bright in its bold colour, commanding the wall. She loved to see the image of the pair of them standing by the gate – the house and the stone completing their triangle. It was a record of themselves that they had never had before and she wondered how they could preserve it for their futures. In that transported state, all her reticence suspended, she finally understood how completely she belonged to Ferney and he to her and that what was between them ran very much deeper than any love she had previously imagined or heard described. They were indeed two halves whose joining produced a state of ecstatic understanding that was entirely unique. Nothing could go wrong for long unless they lost each other in the crowded speed and distance of this new time.

  The joint dream was broken then, as his hand tightened convulsively on hers. She came back to the bedroom in its stillness with an answering spasm inside her and stroked his hand, murmuring comfort for them both. When she saw his lips move she had to put her cheek almost alongside his to hear.

  ‘I wish they hadn’t burnt the colours. Colours were joy. They burnt the colours in the churches. Didn’t like the churches, but I liked the colours. Henry made them. They burnt them or they covered them with paint. Colours are fear now, not joy. Painters are afraid of colour. Pictures should be bright. Our picture should be bright. It was bright.’

  ‘We can clean it. It will be bright again.’

  ‘Clean it so you can always see us there.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Say the prayer for me. Alfred’s prayer.’

  She said it in a low voice which trembled just a little: ‘Thou art the end and the beginning. Thou carriest me. Thou art the way and the journey’s end. Even so, God, be my companion today.’

  ‘Gally?’

  ‘Yes, my dearest?’

  ‘Be my companion.’

  ‘I am. I always will be.’

  ‘Come with me.’

  He turned his head slowly and looked at her and all she could see was the light in his shining eyes which was the sight she knew best and loved most in the world and as she looked at it, the light seemed as much in her as it was in him. A moment came in the pin-drop quiet of that room when all the light was within her. Then she looked at him with a full feeling of life inside her and his eyes were uninhabited. She bent and kissed his forehead and a strong swelling pain told her that in this moment when life had left him, her time had come too.

  Outside the window a faint line of pink showed on the horizon and she tried to be sad that Ferney had missed the dawn, but knew that this was his dawn. She left the room as the contraction passed and went carefully down to the telephone knowing she held a powerful life within. The phone at the flat rang six times before Mike’s sleepy voice answered.

  ‘Umm hello?’

  She didn’t know how to announce herself because Ferney seemed to own all the available aspects of her and she could not be disloyal to him.

  ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Gally? What’s happened?’

  ‘Ferney’s . . . gone.’

  ‘Oh God. When?’

  ‘Just now.’

  ‘Was he . . . were you with him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘By yourself?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘Oh, Gally. I’m on my way.’

  ‘If you want to. There’s something else.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The baby’s started.’

  He told her to call the hospital, the doctor, the police, Mary Sparrow and everyone else he could think of. She got him off the phone as soon as she could and went back to the bedroom to sit next to Ferney’s body.

  His voice called from corners of the room or perhaps from corners of her head: ‘Come with me.’

  Another
strong contraction took her like an earthquake of the flesh and she heard him again: ‘Come with me.’

  What was here next to her on the bed was a mockery of what he had been, a meaningless husk. What was to come was a child. Of course she would love her child, all the more because it was Ferney, but what comfort would there be for her? What she yearned for was to have him there, strong and young and with her so that they could share each other in every way. She found herself crying and once she had started the tears came stronger and stronger until she was pouring aching tears at the loneliness that faced her. It felt at that moment as though this next childhood were a prison sentence, an emotional separation laid out in years and tens of years from the man she longed for. She went in her head back to the top of the hill on that day with the garland in her hair when she had told Ferney what they must do and this time she found herself astride him, united in love and pure delight and she could feel every atom of him and every spark of his soul and she knew she must have this again, that she must do this deed and she could not deny the inevitability of the solution she had herself invented.

  She quietened down then, became purposeful, shutting Mike out of her mind and considering the ways. As soon as the baby was born she must do it, before what pretended to be normal life caught her in its deceiving grip. Ferney’s painkiller was on the table and beside it stood the almost unused bottle of his powerful sleeping tablets. She took them in her hand, went down to the kitchen, stopping on the way to sit on the stairs with another powerful contraction, and then she crushed the tablets into the mixture, pouring the result into a small bottle which she topped up with brandy. Putting the bottle in the bag she had packed for the onset of birth, she began to climb the stairs to Ferney’s room.

  This time the voice was within her: ‘Come with me.’

  The contractions were coming faster now, so she turned back to the telephone.

  The 999 operator answered immediately and asked her which service she required.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m not sure whether this counts as an emergency or not. I’m having a baby and the contractions are coming quite fast now.’