by James Long
The teacher was staring at a white gravestone. The boy moved forward carefully and quietly until he was just feet behind the man. He could read the simple inscription. It said ‘Ferney Miller. Born November 8th 1907. Died February 7th 1991.’
‘Ferney.’ The name burst out of him and the teacher turned sharply at the sound of his voice. ‘Ferney, Ferney, FERNEY! That’s it!’
‘What do you mean?’
‘That’s my name. It is, isn’t it?’
Michael Martin’s face was white. ‘Don’t say that. How can it be?’ he said.
The boy who had been Luke was dancing in his excitement, spinning round, jumping as if a wound spring had burst free inside him. ‘Because it is. You know it is. Tell me. It is, isn’t it? You have to say.’
The teacher shrank away from the demonic boy, bruised by his joy and the new energy that was overflowing out of him, shaking his head.
‘Say it,’ said the boy, and the teacher barely breathed the word.
‘Yes.’
‘Thank you, thank you,’ the boy called. ‘I am Ferney. Of course I am.’
The teacher sat down on the grass as if his legs had given way.
‘I guessed,’ he said. ‘I guessed but I didn’t believe it. I didn’t let myself. Those things you knew. The way you were in the car. You bastard.’
The boy flinched, looked at him in shock, took a step backwards.
‘You expect me to be glad to see you?’ the teacher asked. ‘You think this is some sort of cause for celebration after what you did to me? Don’t shake your head. You know what I’m talking about.’
‘I don’t,’ the boy managed to answer before his voice broke up and, to his fury, tears began to run down his cheeks.
That stopped the teacher. ‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘You’re just a boy. When did you start to know?’
The boy sniffed fiercely, wiped his eyes, tried to get back in control. ‘Yesterday.’
‘This is too much,’ said the teacher. ‘I’ve got to go,’ but the boy pointed to the bunch of wild flowers in his hand.
‘Who are those for?’ he asked.
The man shook his head, ‘As if you don’t know. They’re just for . . .’ but then his voice failed him too and he walked across to another new stone, laying the flowers down in front of it. The boy followed him, knelt and read the inscription out loud. ‘To the memory of Mary Martha Gabriella Martin and Rosie Juliet Martin, who died in love together. January 31st 1994.’ It shocked him and he did not know why. He had expected one name, a different name, though he did not know what it was.
‘Who were they?’ he asked. ‘Mary Martin? Martin? That’s your name.’
The teacher looked sharply at him. ‘My wife,’ he said curtly.
The boy looked back at the stone, mouthing the name. ‘Mary? Is that what people called her?’
‘She was Gabriella.’ The teacher chose the half-truth. He kept the other half to himself.
‘So who was Rosie?’ But Michael Martin turned his back on the stone and walked away. Then he stopped abruptly and looked back and his face had softened. An expression of mild wonder came over it as a spark of hope was born and turned into words.
‘If you’re back, then . . .’ He stopped himself.
‘Yes?’ The boy’s eyes were fixed on him. ‘What?’ But the teacher’s face closed like a steel gate slamming. ‘I’m going home,’ he said.
When the teacher left the boy stood utterly still, feeling his forgotten name washing through him, cleaning out the corners of his soul. He walked slowly around the whole graveyard, staring at the stones, feeling some vague recognition of almost every one of them, like a janitor unlocking rooms for the coming day. He looked at the church with its low tower and knew that since the days even before that stone church first stood, there had always been a Ferney here. With the dying girl on her litter fresh in his mind, he saw how this walled yard contained sorrow and loss and loneliness repeated through the ages, and he walked to the western corner where he had buried her that time. There was no sign of her grave in the place where he knew she lay, but overlapping it was a grey stone slab with a Victorian date on it and a stranger’s name. He minded that for a moment before he remembered how it was. Five deaths a year in the old village, thirty or more in the worst times – the sick times, the hungry times. He did the sums. Say seven hundred in a century, ten thousand since this church first stood. Of course she had vanished into the absorbing sponge of earth, dug over again and again, and so had he, time after time. Most of their memorials were long gone, wood rotting, stone washed and frosted smooth and cast away when nobody remembered any more.
He remembered.
He went back to his own gravestone, ‘Ferney Miller. Born November 8th 1907. Died February 7th 1991’, then searched along the eastern side until he found the one before, mossy and indistinct in weathered sandstone. He crouched and rubbed at the cuts with his finger, feeling the letters to spell them out. ‘F Carter, b 2 March 1878 d 14 April 1907.’ As he stood up, he saw there was more lettering below and tore handfuls of grass away to see the further words cut in later, deeper, by a different mason’s hand.
There was the record of her death, his wife’s death, eight months after his, and there was her name. Just five letters. The name he had been hunting for, the everlasting name that transcended every other wrong and arbitrary name with which she had ever been christened. He stared at it, traced the lettering with his fingers, said it to himself then said it again out loud, shouting it, astonished that he could have forgotten it, feeling every particle of every past version of her laughing with him from the earth now that he knew what she was called.
He looked back at the dates on that stone and found he could read a story in them. He had died at just twenty-nine. She had waited until she could bear it no longer and then she had followed him. No, there was more to it than that. Being born close by was always the safest way back to an easy return. She would have stayed her hand until some local girl was expecting.
Words whispered in his head from the grave in front of him. Her words. ‘We’re sentenced to life, you and me. It’s only bearable together.’ And he thought of the girl at Montacute. He had been drawn to her, drawn all that way until they had been only yards apart, linked by the electric earth, and in any kinder world they would have discovered each other within a minute. He had missed the chance, the huge chance, and now where was she? Out there, groping her way to him or not? Had the instinct that was guiding her faded as she left Montacute? Was she even now saying ‘No, let’s go home’ to her friends? ‘I don’t know why I wanted to go to Pen Selwood’? He knew there was no certainty unless she found this place and discovered the full truth of who she was. Every chance of happiness for the two of them hung in the balance. He stared down at the grass over her grave and shut out the background of the modern world and heard a voice, clear. ‘We’re never quite old and we’re never quite young,’ it said. The voice might have been his or hers. It had a lilt to it, the suggestion of a tune, and like some sort of code it unlocked an instruction in him, a deep impulse.
He left the churchyard, cycled eastward to a track through the woods on the edge of the village. He pushed his bike amongst the trees, knowing he had to find a pit – a place he could see clearly in his mind’s eye. Then he saw not just one pit but hundreds upon hundreds of them, stretching out between the trees on both sides for as far as he could see, a landscape of shallow, brambled craters. He stilled his mind and cast around, testing the air for the right direction, abandoning his bike and moving into the trees along the curving honeycomb of narrow earth ridges separating them. Following his instinct, he groped and sniffed his way to the right one, far from the track, and when he was certain, he knelt to rip out roots, shovelling the earth away with bare mole hands until he found what he was looking for. His fingers touched a smooth surface and he pulled out a plastic sandwich box, taped tight shut. He sat in silence, holding it, the first real, solid evidence of the truth of what his mind was
telling him.
It took a minute to gather the bravery he needed to peel away the tape. Inside he found a letter, as he knew he would – a message from his last self to the next. With it was a small package, well wrapped and heavy. He opened the envelope, sat for a while reading and thinking, then he pocketed some of the contents of the package, buried the box again and set out to follow the letter’s directions, cycling slowly off to beat the bounds of his land and find the rest of himself.
He stopped again almost immediately at a field corner where a row of stones chilled him, just one stub of wall acting as a windbreak to a feeding trough. The letter had advised him what to do.
‘Deal directly with your fears and her fears. There is no fear that stands up to explanation. Go open-minded through this place and stop where your skin crawls. Face it, know it and gain by it.’
He built the long-demolished cottage out of its diminished traces, saw the frantic daughter run out to seize his arm as he walked by one Victorian day, smelt the beery breath of the drunken father half his size again, a knife pressed against his wife’s throat. He had spoken the same gentling words he used for horses, soothing, soothing, soothing until the angry arm had calmed and drooped. It was not like learning, not quite like remembering – more a matter of unforgetting, knowing how to see what was already there, bringing back a confidence in how to be.
Fears were only part of it. On a south-facing hillside with a fine view he went back two hundred years to rescue a troubled painter from the petulant wreck of his easel, listened patiently to his complaints about the ungrateful world of art, discussed the painting of a picture with him and came away understanding something more of self-esteem. His tour continued back and forth through the carnage of the plagues, rebellion, the brutality of purges pagan, Catholic and Protestant as he circled the village, soaking up the sight of it now with eyes which mixed it with older times, blending in its history.
On Coombe Street past Pen Mill, the landscape dragged his eyes northward. Leaving his bicycle, he walked into the wide valley and stared across the grass to the woods rising, covering the castle hilltop. Old despair touched him and he stared at the woods, seeing them waver in his sight, shrinking, growing, through a thousand indistinct variations. He had a sense of running, legs pumping, and held on to it, welcoming and retaining that despair again, and when he looked up the trees were gone, the hill ahead of him was bare and the stone keep of the castle was rising on the mound that crowned it. His son’s name came back to him and he was running in sorrow and desperation to tell Gally the worst of news, chased all the way, chased to his death.
When he sobbed his way back to the modern age, remembering what sharp-bladed war was like, he sensed himself in all his ages, gathered round to comfort this fresh arrival, and he knew he had learned to wake them when he chose.
For the rest of the afternoon he wandered the lacework paths that crossed the fields and carried on where modern roads stopped short. The field names came back to him like blessings: the Level Piece, Broom Close, Roses Mead, Starveacre and Smoke Hay, Matrimony, Christenings and Matron’s Ground. He sat on the earth rampart of the second castle at Ballands, looking out at the valley westward, running his eyes over the hummocks and dips surrounding him on that open hillside, and found he knew what lay beneath each and every mound.
The young man who came to the third castle, Cockroad Wood, was no longer the half-boy who had started the journey. This castle guarded the western escarpment and the priory track. No stone keep here. No sign left of the wooden tower and the village which once sat inside the palisade, but Luke was entirely gone and Ferney had filled out, secure in the knowledge that he could conjure it back if he chose from the vast regained depths of memory.
Then he went home.
CHAPTER 11
Michael Martin left the graveyard fighting down a new hope that hurt like circulation returning to a frostbitten finger. Back at the cottage, he fumbled and dropped his front door key. It bounced under the bench inside the porch and as he reached for it his fingers met a pair of rubber boots, tucked out of sight underneath. He pulled one out. It was folded over and when he tried to straighten it, the brittle rubber came to pieces in his hand.
They were her boots, bought soon after she found the cottage, and she had last worn them more than sixteen years ago. The crumbling rubber swamped him with all the years and all the sorrow and he sat down on the bench, plunged into a well of regret, trying not to think about her and failing. He thought that if a fairy godmother granted him a second go at life, he would not have turned off the main road that very first day, back in 1990.
He knew he had only done it for her. She had become distressed in the tailback from an accident on the main road and he had turned left to get her away from it. She was often distressed in those days of miscarriages and nightmares and London life that had gone so wrong for them. They had been looking for a cottage and she had found reasons why every one was wrong until the chance diversion had brought them down this lane, as if by accident, and she had somehow seen it despite the swaddling camouflage of trees and creepers.
He could still feel the hot embarrassment of being caught trespassing by an old man who came in from the road to find them in the abandoned ruin. Brusque at first, he remembered how the man softened abruptly when he heard her name. She talked Mike into buying the house, then cherished it back to health – and he was always there, the old man, wandering in to watch over the work, coaxing on their efforts. She had seemed so much better, so much less troubled here in the deep country than at any previous time in the London part of their brief urban marriage. Then things began to change and Mike discovered the old man was filling Gally’s head with nonsense about past lives and long entanglements. He began to mistrust the old man, old Ferney.
He thought through it all, right through the whole sad, wonderful, dismal story, sitting there in the porch, with no sense that three full hours had passed. When he heard feet on the road he looked up to see a young man coming into the yard, a sturdy youth with dark brown hair and a tanned face. It took him a moment to realise it was Luke. This Luke no longer looked sixteen. This Luke filled his body in a different way, walking in with the confidence of age and the measured tread of certainty.
‘I know it all,’ he said as Mike looked up. ‘You don’t have to pretend.’
‘What do you know?’
‘I know her name.’
‘Gabriella?’
The young man laughed in joy, not in derision. ‘You didn’t call her Gabriella. You called her what she always called herself.’
The teacher looked at him with eyes that said Please, don’t let this start again.
‘You know what you called her,’ said the young man, and then spoke so deliberately that each of the four words had time to fill the air between them. ‘You called her Gally.’
‘That was short for Gabriella,’ Mike said as if to excuse himself.
‘Gally was never short for anything. It was always her name – always Ferney and always Gally, the two of us, always here, always together. You can’t deny it, can you?’
‘I wouldn’t even try,’ said Mike. ‘But I was here with her, not you. She was my wife, not yours.’
The boy shook his head briefly, violently, as if to break something loose. ‘That’s the bit I don’t understand. She married you. My Gally married you? She forgot so much that she did that?’
‘Oh, don’t worry, you went out of your way to explain her mistake,’ Mike snapped. As soon as he said it, the immensity of this conversation hit him. He had openly accepted the boy’s identity. It was out there in the air between them and there could be no more pretence. In the recess at the back of his disbelieving brain he had been watching out for this boy for all these intervening years, but now he had finally appeared, far from where Mike had expected him, tumbling into the Montacute trench babbling of vineyards, most of Mike still hoped it was a fantasy. He could no longer hold that hope. Old Ferney had infiltrated their lives
so completely that he came to the end of his final illness in their spare room in this house which was at the centre of it all. Back then, he had proved his story in ways that even Mike, the rational historian, had found hard to reject and now there was this final proof – the young Ferney undeniably standing in front of him.
‘Do you blame me?’ said the boy.
‘We took you in.’ Mike pointed up at the bedroom window. ‘We brought you here to die. You and your bloody promise. You took her away. You destroyed me.’
The boy seemed shocked. ‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because it’s what happened, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘Oh, how convenient. You remember what you choose to.’
‘Not everything. It comes back slowly. Sometimes the newest part takes longest.’
For a long minute the space between them was full of silent uproar.
‘It didn’t work, did it?’ said Mike.
‘What didn’t?’
‘All your planning. You haven’t got her back.’
‘No?’ said the boy, and Mike read his face in astonishment and suddenly dared to hope.
‘What do you know?’
The boy shook his head, looked away.
‘No, don’t do that,’ Mike burst out. ‘Look at me. You tell me. Has she come back too?’
A woman on a horse rode past, pulled up for a moment at the sound of his raised voice to stare in at them through the gate. For a moment Mike thought she was going to say something. He opened the cottage door and ushered the boy inside. The boy sat down at the kitchen table and ransacked the room with his eyes.
‘Don’t expect me to have all the answers,’ he said in the end. ‘It takes its own time.’
‘Is she coming back?’ Mike demanded.
‘She might be. It could go either way.’
‘It’s down to chance? Like it was when she and I came here?’
