by James Long
Praise for Ferney
‘Long’s unpretentiously told time-slippage romance is played out against a bewitchingly bucolic setting’ Independent
‘A story of love and self discovery that resonates across the ages’ Nicholas Evans
‘It has been compared to The Time Traveler’s Wife, but I think Ferney is much better’ New Books Magazine
‘The book is a lovely puzzle . . . an enthralling, ambitious novel with distinct echoes of Hardy’ Mail on Sunday
‘An historical novel, a love story and a tale of time slippage, just the tale you need when you want to escape into a book and forget the world for 480 pages. Fresh and intriguing, the detail is done with a master’s touch. There’s many a current bestseller in this vein that can’t hold a candle to Long’s involving story’ Publishing News
James Long is the author of non-fiction, historical fiction and thrillers. A former BBC correspondent, he lives in Bristol.
Also by James Long
Hard News
Collateral Damage
Game Ten
Sixth Column
Ferney
Knowing Max
Silence and Shadows
The Balloonist
Writing as Will Davenport
The Painter
The Perfect Sinner
With Ben Long
The Plot Against Pepys
First published in Great Britain by Quercus, 2012
This paperback edition published by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2016
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © James Long 2012
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
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® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Paperback ISBN: 978-1-47114-315-1
ebook ISBN: 978-1-47114-298-7
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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For Pam
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 1
Joanna’s father Toby had wanted to call her Melissa but he played no part in the final decision because he died more or less in childbirth. Her mother Fleur dismissed the name out of hand and even Toby’s death did not change her mind.
So it was that Joanna Mary Driscoll was born at 8.15 in the morning on the last Wednesday in May of 1994, breathing in the air of the York Hospital Maternity Unit with a puzzled and anxious look in her pale blue eyes. Toby would have picked her up and comforted her but he had been dead for over an hour by that time, driving straight into an oncoming petrol tanker as he left the hospital car park in an unreasoning panic. He was racing home to collect Fleur’s bag of vital accessories – left behind by him, as she pointed out, when her waters broke.
They didn’t tell Fleur about the accident until after Jo had been delivered, and something began to go wrong between mother and daughter as soon as they did. Fleur, the few remaining soft parts of her beginning to harden over, looked grimly at her baby with blame already hanging in the air between them.
Fleur had been the main wage earner in the marriage and she went back to work as soon as she could, so Jo was cared for by a succession of nannies mostly too young to show her more than an inept sentimentality. Over the next few years, the ones who were old enough to understand rapidly fell foul of Fleur when they dared to imply she might do well to spend a bit more time with her daughter. It was just after one of these had left, fired abruptly the previous evening as soon as she had finished the ironing, that Fleur found she had no alternative but to take Jo with her on her day’s business.
That was why Jo, as a toddler, quite baffled by the world, found herself in the village of Stamford Bridge, a few miles outside York, tagging along as her mother strode round a ramshackle Georgian mansion. Fleur was barking questions at the cowed girl from the estate agents, who was starting to understand why her more experienced colleagues had suddenly found pressing alternative duties.
Jo started to cry when she looked out of the patio doors across the farmland behind the house. Irritated, Fleur asked her what was wrong, but she couldn’t explain because she didn’t know. At four years and two months old, how do you decode a tide of adult grief without any protecting drainage channel of words or concepts? All Jo knew was that the bit that she was just starting to understand as herself was shredded by a turmoil of utter sorrow bowling down at her from across that bleak field.
Fleur tried to reason with her but reason had nothing to do with this. Crying turned to howling and then into such an utter loss of control that the young estate agent found herself propelled forward to bend down and clutch the tiny girl to stop her damaging herself while the mother’s mouth tightened in anger as she stood and watched.
After ten minutes, all the muscles Jo was using to cry and writhe were so worn out that she heaved to a halt, rolled over towards the window and stared out in a dull torpor. That was when Fleur finally picked her up, taking care to keep the child’s tear-stained cheeks away from her silk blouse.
‘No more?’ she said. ‘You’ve finished then?’ and the little girl pointed with an unsteady finger out across the fields as if that explained everything.
Driving back home to York brought a change in Jo that her mother was too annoyed and too busy with her own thoughts to recognise. Sitting strapped in her child seat, Jo tried to turn her head to look behind, then stared out of the window when a bend in the road allowed a brief glimpse of the receding village. She had a picture of a bridge in her head but it faded away so sharply that she gave a little sniff of surprise. It left something behind. All at once, and for the first time, Jo felt her separateness, aware suddenly that she was one single person, different to this mother in the front seat. Furrowing her brow, she began to explore herself, trying to test out where she stopped and started.
That night, Jo lay i
n her bed knowing she was alone, that beyond the tips of her fingers and her toes nobody else was there who knew what she was feeling in the exact way she felt it. She wanted Francesca to read her the rest of The Gruffalo but Francesca had been sent away. She picked up the book from her bedside table, struggling with both hands, and opened it to look at the pictures, trying to find the last one they had looked at together before Francesca had kissed her goodnight and gone to finish the ironing – before she had heard loud voices downstairs and her mother shouting. She let the book fall on the bedcover and saw the bridge again, in shape after shape, all imagined, all wooden, all sad. Clutching the woollen doll another lost nanny had bought her, she held it squashed against her chest, fearing that if she let it go someone might come and bury it in the earth by that bridge. Then she began to cry silently, keeping the sobs inside for fear of footsteps on the stairs.
Lost in that misery, someone quietly spoke a name inside her head, touched her on the forehead – behind the forehead where it really hurt, kissing the tears away from the inside. In the filtered evening gloom of the curtained room someone was there with her, giving her courage, telling her she was not alone after all and everything really would be all right. Something like a story without words filled the room, sealed off the rest of the house and brought her safety. It was a story about friendship and love, a promise of the future – even better than The Gruffalo, thought Jo as she fell asleep.
When she woke in the morning, she was so delighted by the visit that she told her mother about it at breakfast. A week later, her mother took her to a large, quiet house near the Minster where a quiet man sat in a quiet room and asked her lots of questions with long, quiet silences in between.
‘Your mother tells me you have a new friend.’
She nodded.
‘She says your new friend is called “Girly”. Is that right?’
It was near enough, so she nodded again.
‘Is that Girly?’ he asked, and it took her a moment to realise that he was pointing at the woolly doll. She was so surprised at his mistake that she laughed out loud.
‘That’s a toy,’ she pointed out in a kind voice so he would not feel hurt. You would have thought a grown-up would know that.
Afterwards she sat in the waiting room, watching Antiques Roadshow on television while the quiet man talked to her mother.
‘It’s nothing to worry about, Mrs Driscoll,’ he said. ‘A high proportion, perhaps even a majority of children of Joanna’s age have imaginary friends. It can be a reaction to all kinds of things – a bit of stress, a bit of loneliness, sometimes neither of those. It’s often the more intelligent children who need to have someone they can talk to. It may be an animal or a fairy or another child.’
‘This one isn’t any of those,’ said Fleur. ‘She talks as if it’s a grown woman.’
The psychiatrist was about to suggest this might be a mother substitute but he looked at the jut of Fleur’s jaw and thought better of it.
‘There’s another thing. She keeps eating grass.’
‘Grass?’
‘Well, plants and leaves. Things from the garden and the hedges. I told her she would poison herself and she just said no, she wouldn’t, and it made her feel better.’
‘That’s probably harmless,’ said the psychiatrist uneasily. ‘Animals do it. Let’s look at the other side of all this. What is it you like about your daughter?’
‘Like?’
‘Yes. Well, all right. What pleases you? What does she do right?’
All that came into Fleur’s head was that her daughter was surprisingly good at predicting the weather but that felt more like an irritation than an accomplishment, starting from the fine, warm day when Jo had developed a wobbly bottom lip when she wasn’t allowed to bring her raincoat with her and they had both been soaked by a downpour that seemed to come from nowhere.
‘She’s very tidy,’ Fleur said, but it didn’t seem an adequate response.
Back home, Fleur often found herself wanting to shout ‘Don’t watch me like that’ when she saw her daughter’s eyes following her. What she meant was ‘Don’t need me like that’, which you might say was not her fault, going straight back to her own mother and her mother’s father and grandfather, and on backwards veering between genders for thirty, forty, fifty generations – all the way back to one who started the whole chain reaction without any parental influence whatsoever. Perhaps any one of them could have broken the chain by deciding to do it differently. Could have done, but didn’t.
Jo became a very quiet little girl when she was at home. At school, she could talk to her secret friend in her head, but she learned to close that door when she knew her mother was around and that meant that at home she was only half a person. At night, when her mother was downstairs, she could talk again, sometimes out loud, and her friend would be there to reassure her, to go over the events of the day with her and show her how to smooth away the sharp parts. She didn’t know that Fleur could creep up the stairs, leaving the television turned up to cover her. She didn’t know that from the other side of the thin plywood that had turned the old doorway between their rooms into a clothes cupboard, her mother could hear anything she said and write down what she heard. That was why, once or twice a year for the next five years, Fleur would take her daughter to another quiet specialist and then another, always hoping they would take it more seriously than they did. She wanted them to treat her daughter like you treat an old house for woodworm, as if a spray from some magic chemical might make her normal.
When Jo was nine, Fleur went to a parents’ evening at her school. It was an expensive private school and she went because she had recently bought the vicarage next door. As a speculation it looked like being rapidly rendered unprofitable by unexpected problems in the roof and she thought perhaps the head might see it as a worthwhile investment to help the school’s expansion. That meant serving her time by sitting down to listen to Mrs Hedges, Jo’s teacher, and it soon became apparent that Mrs Hedges had something to say.
‘I’m very interested in an expression Joanna used in class, Mrs Driscoll. It’s not one I’ve heard before.’
Fleur’s first thought was that her daughter had used a swear word because it would not have surprised her at all that Mrs Hedges hadn’t heard it. Mrs Hedges seemed to have only a small fingerhold on the real world that Fleur inhabited, the world of business. She had no time for the whimsical and indulgent take on childhood that Mrs Hedges had displayed on the few occasions they had met. She did not see it as a teacher’s function to show undue fondness for the children in her care nor to bring them up in the belief that the world was a benevolent place only distinguished from fairy tales by the absence of talking rabbits.
‘What did she say?’
‘We were discussing proverbs, you see? It’s such a good way to get them to look at language and culture and history.’
The only proverb that immediately came to Fleur’s mind was ‘A fool and his money are soon parted’, a statement of which she thoroughly approved, so she simply raised her eyebrows and Mrs Hedges, sensing a chill without understanding why, floundered on.
‘I asked them if they knew any proverbs and she put her hand up, you see? She doesn’t often do that so I went straight to her and she said this odd thing.’
‘Which was?’
‘She said, “The mist on the hill bringeth water to the mill.” Now, I wonder, is that something you say in your family?’
‘No. Why on earth would anyone say something like that?’
Mrs Hedges opened a folder and Fleur noted grimly that the cover was decorated with stuck-on pictures of roses. ‘Then she said, “Women’s jars bring men’s wars.” At least I think that’s what it was and, um, yes, “The hasty hand catches frogs for fish.”’
‘And is that supposed to mean something? It sounds like nonsense.’ Fleur looked across the school hall to where Jo and a group of other children were being rehearsed in some entertainment that she feared the paren
ts would be expected to sit through at the end of the evening.
‘I was hoping you could tell me,’ said the teacher. ‘I took the one about mist and mills to mean that good things come out of bad and I looked up the frogs one on the internet. It says it’s very old and Sir Walter Scott used it in Ivanhoe. I wondered if you’d been reading Ivanhoe to her or something like that?’
‘No.’ Fleur hadn’t been reading anything to Jo and wasn’t sure if Ivanhoe was a poem or a book.
‘And the women’s jars thing? I can’t find any trace of that.’
‘I have no idea. Does this matter?’
‘Well, yes, I think perhaps it does. Since then her writing has really taken off. She’s turning out to be very imaginative. She has been writing some lovely stories.’
Mrs Hedges delved into the rose-covered folder again and any other mother there would have smiled and reached for the papers she brought out and been thrilled that their daughter was showing early literary talent but Fleur, who was not any other mother, had something more pressing on her mind. She looked across the room and saw Justin Reynolds, a member of the Council Planning Committee, just getting to his feet from another session at another table. She left Mrs Hedges stunned by the speed of her departure, though somewhat relieved.
In the car on the way home, as Jo waited without success for any mention of the songs she had sung in her first ever public performance, her mother said, ‘I’ve arranged for Maria Reynolds to come and play.’
‘With me?’ asked Jo, surprised.
‘Well, of course, with you. Who do you think she’s coming to play with? Me?’
To Jo that somehow seemed less unlikely. The closest she had ever come to Maria Reynolds was in the brief moment before Maria had pushed her over in the playground. She said nothing.
‘Where do you get all these sayings from?’ her mother asked. ‘All this stuff you’ve been spouting in class about mists and frogs and jars. Have you been reading books?’ It sounded like an accusation.
‘Someone told me.’
‘What someone?’
