The Lives She Left Behind

by James Long

  He needed air and clarity, so he walked out of the house and took the so-familiar path, worn to the bare earth these past years by just his feet and no one else’s. As he climbed the gentle dome of hill on grass cropped close by sheep, he saw the squat pillar of the surveyor’s triangulation point rise into view. He saw the old stone bench beyond it and to his surprise, which was really no surprise at all, he saw against the bright sky the hunched shoulders of someone sitting on it and knew exactly who it would be.

  ‘I heard what happened,’ the boy said as Mike walked up. He was staring at the ground. ‘It wasn’t anything I said. I just couldn’t stop them.’

  ‘You should be at school, shouldn’t you?’

  ‘I’ve finished my exams.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, suddenly tired by it all.

  The boy looked at him with something like a polite version of contempt on his face and his expression said, Come off it, this was my place long before it was yours. ‘They say you’ve been sacked.’

  Mike flinched. ‘Is everybody talking about it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t been – not sacked, just suspended.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You should be,’ said Mike. ‘It’s all because of you. I’m not meant to be talking to you. In fact you’d better go.’

  The boy looked around at the empty landscape and shrugged. ‘I’ll go if you want.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I need to ask you some things.’

  ‘That won’t help.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because questions have power and answers only drain their power away.’

  ‘I don’t know what that means. You know something about Gally, about where she is now. You have to tell me.’ Mike found himself looking around the edges of the hill as if she might appear at any moment, dancing towards him with a smile that would melt away the time between.

  ‘I don’t,’ said Ferney, and Mike couldn’t decide if he meant he didn’t know or that he didn’t have to tell.

  ‘I’ve got a question for you,’ the boy said. ‘Does this tune sound familiar?’ He hummed something which, Mike thought, could have been any of half a hundred folk songs.

  ‘No, it doesn’t, I—’

  ‘Well, what about these words? Have you heard them before? We’re never quite old and we’re never quite young and we . . . we something . . .’ His face was screwed up in concentration.

  ‘Listen, Luke – Ferney – I don’t even know what I’m meant to call you. Why the hell should I be interested in a song?’

  ‘Call me by my real name. I only wanted to know if you ever heard her sing it.’

  ‘Her? Gally? My wife? You wanted to know if my wife ever sang me that? Oh, I think that would definitely be my business if she had, not yours.’

  The boy shot him a startled look as if he had not expected such vehemence. He got to his feet and ran off down the hill and Mike shouted after him, ‘No, if you really want to know. No, she never did.’

  CHAPTER 13

  It was true and it wasn’t true. She had never sung Mike the song, but he had heard her sing it, just once, when she didn’t know he could hear.

  There was a place hidden away at the back of Bagstone where a wide path with flower borders curled down through trees into the stream valley, a green tunnel into the sunlight of the meadow beyond. When old Ferney died and Rosie was born, Mike saw a chance to start again. He craved peace for the three of them and he made Gally a private place to sit there in the shelter of the back wall. He let in the morning sun by pruning the lower branches of an old hollow tree and he moved earth by the barrow load to flatten out a small circular terrace. He had surprised himself by making two oak benches that did not wobble, and he found a cast-iron table at a local auction so that Gally could sit there with Rosie in the quiet time she liked at the start of every day.

  He had kept the benches and the table hidden behind the sheds until it was all ready. One Saturday morning he put everything in place and came upstairs to where she lay in bed with Rosie in her arms. He gave her the end of a piece of string with a green satin bow tied to it. She looked at it and smiled.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I needed some string.’

  It wasn’t sarcasm. He knew that if his present had just been string, she would have still found delight in it. ‘Try following it,’ he suggested. ‘You might need to put some clothes on.’

  ‘Do I get a cup of coffee first?’

  ‘Put your trust in the string.’

  She bathed him in her huge eyes, laughed in delight and handed him their sleeping child, then in her usual way she was out of bed and into her jeans and woollen work shirt so quickly that it looked like some trick film edit. Charged with Rosie’s safety, he was slower down the stairs but she waited for him at the front door, laughing more and more as she saw that the trail led outside.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘That’s more string than I ever dreamed of. It must have cost a fortune.’

  She walked slowly now, gathering it in careful loops as she went, around the far end of the house into the reclaimed wilderness beyond, to the terrace she had watched him build and to the table and benches which were his present to her, the table laid with a new chequered cloth.

  ‘Will you join me for breakfast at Gally’s place?’ he asked.

  ‘Today and every day,’ she said and turned to hug him and their child.

  With the air of a conjuror, he went behind the old tree and from the deep hollow in its heart he produced a vase of lilies, a basket of warm croissants and a pot of coffee.

  But that was how it was in the beginning. That was how it was before Rosie turned two. They had two years of joy, then Rosie changed and the misery began. That was the in-between time, the short gap before their lives together ended. He had started to spy on Gally, to watch over her and Rosie in a desperate wish to keep them safe. The effort of holding it all together was tugging Gally away from him into an arcane world in which her old, old selves came to the forefront more and his simpler, present Gally was hidden in them. She had been back there on the terrace, comforting the toddler who refused to be comforted. There was one small window in the kitchen wall, no more than a foot square, which looked out to the terrace. It was open an inch or two and he heard her voice, calm, reasonable, strained, trying to talk Rosie into some sort of peace. ‘There, I know. I know what it’s like. We’ll be all right. We’ll get through this. Just be a little patient, my love. We’ve had worse.’

  Then to his surprise, because she wasn’t a singer, he heard her voice lift into what might have been a lullaby, but with words he had never heard before.

  ‘No, we’re never quite young and we’re never quite old

  And we shouldn’t give tongue to what’s best left untold.

  For we’re never quite old and we’re never quite young

  And the earth will grow cold when our last song is sung.’

  But Rosie howled louder and Mike heard the despair in her voice as Gally tried to hug the fighting child and his blood ran cold.

  Six thousand days had inched by since Gally died. Most of those days had started with a snatched breakfast which was no more than refuelling. Many had ended in shallow sleep with the bedside light still on and a book spilling from his fingers. Sometimes he would wake at dawn on top of the bedclothes, still dressed. In all that time he had only once faced up to that place behind the house which represented all he had lost. That time, at least five years ago, he had fought his way through the undergrowth to no avail. The terrace had disappeared under a snarl of brambles. Even their precious hollow tree had fallen and its wreckage lay across where the path used to run. How could a tree fall so close, he thought, and him not know? Because it was only a small thing, a tree, compared to everything else that had fallen.

  He walked back into the yard now and looked towards the far corner of the house, seeing how badly he had le
t it go in the intervening years. On that very first day when she had found Bagstone, mobbed by the stems and tendrils which were prising it apart, Gally had immediately stepped in to start healing its wounds. He knew she would hate to see it as it was now. It wasn’t yet time to face what lay behind the house but the yard in front was another matter. His old leather gloves felt stiff until he had worked the fingers back to flexibility, then he went out to the shed to look for a scythe only to find a chest-high tangle of brambles barring the way to the shed door. Trampling them flat with his feet, he had to put his shoulder to it before the door would open, shunting a pile of debris behind it.

  Unexpected joy filled Mike as he got to work as if the energy he put into each swing of the scythe was turning back the reaper’s clock, preparing the way for the reversal of a death. He went on until dark and by eight the next morning, an hour before his appointment with the lawyer, he was at it again. The hour passed quickly and he was still slashing away when the woman arrived.

  ‘Gardening leave is only a name,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to take it seriously.’

  He thought perhaps she had come searching for an icebreaker. ‘It needs doing.’

  ‘It certainly does. What a funny village this is. I was early so I drove around. It’s all over the place, isn’t it? There are fields then a few more houses then fields again. There’s no middle, is there?’

  ‘It’s built on a non-nucleated medieval pattern,’ he answered absently.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sorry. It’s a survival of the way farming villages used to be. Quite rare. The gaps have usually been filled in by now.’

  ‘Oh. Was that the sort of thing you taught at the university?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But not now?’

  ‘Not any more, not at the school. School history these days is all World War One as seen by cartoonists.’

  ‘Do you miss the university?’

  ‘I miss having serious conversations.’ She recognised thin ice in the tone of his voice, a brittle bridge over a deep hole.

  She looked around the yard. ‘Did you have to do a lot to the house?’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘Were you living here while you did it?’

  ‘We camped out in an old caravan. Right there.’ He pointed to the side of the yard.

  ‘What was the house like?’

  ‘It had been empty for donkey’s years. There was a stream flowing through it.’

  ‘Did you enjoy doing it together?’

  He detected a test, a question designed to open a small window on his relationship with Gally. ‘Yes,’ he said firmly. ‘We were very happy. Gally absolutely loved it from the first moment she saw it.’ He didn’t say that she started seeing things, that she made him move the front door.

  Back in the kitchen, the lawyer opened her folder. ‘The police are likely to want to interview you soon,’ she said. ‘They’ll be talking to the parents again and to the boy, of course. I gather they haven’t seen him yet.’

  ‘And the school? I suppose they’re all talking about me there.’

  ‘I’m sure they are,’ she said. ‘That’s human nature, but there’s absolutely no point in worrying about that, is there? The school governors won’t be discussing it, not officially anyway. They have to stay out of this sort of thing while the police do their stuff.’

  ‘This sort of thing? I don’t like being this sort of thing.’

  She didn’t respond.

  ‘So what do we do?’ he asked.

  ‘We have a bit of time to get to know each other. I need to ask you more questions, I’m afraid. It will all help, I promise.’

  So they sat there through a long hour of morning while he searched his memory for details from the past, groping for the reasons for things, conscious all the time that he was producing a very imperfect explanation of who and why he was. They moved on to how he met Gally, how she had wandered into his history lecture one day.

  ‘Why was she there?’

  ‘She loved history.’

  ‘So you asked her out?’

  ‘She wasn’t a student.’

  ‘I wasn’t suggesting there was anything wrong.’

  She went on asking about Gally but Mike thought she was taking care not to probe too far – asking about her moods, then bending the subject back to safer ground when Mike touched on her nightmares and her sudden daytime fears and hesitated in his description. It never took her long to get back to it.

  ‘Did she ever have any treatment?’

  ‘Not after we met. She got a lot better when we moved here.’

  ‘And . . . from then on?’

  ‘She was fine.’

  He knew perfectly well what it was that she wanted to ask. It was the same question that had lurked in the background of every conversation, every phone call, and every letter from Rupert and his handful of other caring friends in the years immediately afterwards. He decided to get it out in the open on his own terms.

  ‘Listen. The inquest decided the balance of her mind was fine, that she wasn’t depressed, that she was happy and logical at the time of her death and there was no reason for her to take her own life or to . . . to take Rosie with her. That’s what they decided after listening to all the evidence and that’s what the record says.’

  The woman in the chair opposite him rocked backwards as if he had thrown a punch at her. ‘Okay, I admit that was what I was getting at.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Perhaps that came out a bit strong.’

  ‘No stronger than the time a judge told me off for wearing distracting earrings.’

  He looked at her then, sufficiently surprised to see her properly for the first time. ‘Can they do that?’

  ‘Judges can do whatever they want.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I took them off and suppressed my desire to tell him I didn’t like his wig.’

  He looked at her sober grey clothes and realised that might not be all that she was. It began to dawn on him that she was a person, not just some embodiment of the legal system foisted on him by strangers – that she might really be an ally.

  She looked back at him. ‘You don’t think it was an accident, do you?’ she asked gently.

  ‘It must have been,’ he said. ‘I know it must have been. She didn’t leave me a letter. She would have left me some sort of explanation, wouldn’t she?’

  ‘I’m sure she would,’ said the lawyer quickly, but in fact neither of them were sure.

  After that she stayed on safe ground – his professional history, his teaching record, and so on. Then, just as she was gathering her papers and was getting ready to go, she asked the hand-on-the-doorknob question and he knew it was the one she had really come to ask the whole time. There was a preamble.

  ‘The police might decide this complaint is a waste of time,’ she said. ‘That’s the best outcome we can hope for. It seems the boy’s parents don’t have a very good reputation apparently.’

  ‘Not parents,’ he said. ‘The man isn’t Luke’s father. I’m sorry – I’m just being a pedantic schoolteacher, aren’t I? Go on.’

  ‘No, you’re quite right. She’s not the problem but he has a record of minor violence. He causes trouble with the neighbours – malicious complaints about everything under the sun. This could be just another one.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘Did I say but?’

  ‘Your voice did.’

  ‘Did it? Yes, well, of course there’s a but. There’s a but the size of an elephant. What was going on with you and the boy? In the car and then back here? I need the real reason, Mike. I need something that will stand up in court.’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t really know.’

  ‘That won’t do. Imagine it. They will demand an answer. The judge will make sure they get one. You can’t say you don’t know.’

  That word ‘court’ burrowed into his head. How would he reply to a prosecutor? There were no answers that could stand that test.


  ‘All I did was give him a lift.’ He explained about the dig and Luke’s sudden appearance. ‘I didn’t even know him before that. Then he came here. I didn’t ask him to.’

  ‘But why?’

  He wondered what on earth he could say and a half-truth presented itself. ‘He’s interested in the history of the place.’

  ‘The house?’

  ‘And the village. He’s into local history.’

  ‘So you talked about the past?’

  He could agree to that without any hint of a lie.

  ‘That’s an unusual boy,’ she said. ‘I can barely get my daughter to talk about the present.’

  ‘How old is she?’

  ‘Twelve. Thirteen next month.’

  ‘Do you have any more?’

  ‘No. Is that it, then? Is it really just that you talked about history?’

  Something slipped in Mike’s head. The mention of her daughter had distracted him for a second and he dropped his guard. ‘And Gally.’

  ‘Gally? Your wife? You talk about your wife. Why?’

  ‘Because . . .’ He had almost said ‘because he knew her’, but he stopped himself. He said, ‘Because he understands,’ and that was no better. The lawyer leapt on it.

  ‘How could he possibly understand something like that? Don’t you realise how strange that would seem if you said it in court? It’s . . .’ She searched for a word. ‘It’s weird.’

  ‘You find me weird?’

  She looked at him without answering for a long count of seconds. She had kind eyes.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. Perhaps I should have used a different word. That wasn’t very professional. But okay, yes, I find it weird. Here’s a better word, a real lawyer-word. It’s inappropriate and I expect that’s a word we’ll be hearing a lot more of.’

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘In this case, it means that you’ve been talking about the wrong things to the wrong person and that it’s not fair to saddle a teenager who is a casual acquaintance with adult angst he can’t possibly be expected to understand.’

  Mike realised how many misconceptions were locked up in that one sentence but the truth was a path leading straight over a cliff. He tried evasion.