The Lives She Left Behind

by James Long

  She approached the stone obliquely and stopped short as if it might bite her. She read the inscription then she looked at the date, so soon before her own birth, and understood that she had been Gabriella, that the bones of a body she had once inhabited lay down there under the grass, but she stared, baffled, at the other name – the chiselled name of Rosie. She stooped and through her fingertips, raking the roughened edges of the cuts, she felt the tangled sadness of this stone. It wasn’t the whole story, just another door creaking open inch by inch, but it brought tears to her eyes and when she looked up and saw a man watching her from twenty yards away – the grey man from the cottage who was also the teacher from the dig – she did not have to search far to know who he was.

  A dream had woken Mike early – a dream that he was holding Gally, her back curved against his chest. He had taught himself to reject that dream as soon as it began so as not to wake to an impossibly cold reality. He got up in case he dreamt it again and went outside, still in his bare feet, stopping on the step to inspect the state of the yard. A puff of cool wind touched his face and he felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. He thought he was being watched from the road and dismissed it as an absurd fancy until he heard a faint noise, the scrape of a shoe on the road surface, and turned to catch just a flash of colour through the trees as someone walked off. Bare feet on gravel slowed him down and it took him twelve painful steps to reach the gate, and by the time he had tugged it open all he could see was the disappearing back of a girl, rushing away round the curve of the lane. Back inside, he scrabbled for socks and shoes and then went after her, making the wrong call at the junction, then turning back when he saw only clear road ahead and going as quickly as he could up the other way, catching a brief glimpse of her when the banks allowed, far ahead of him. He felt a double dose of dread – that this might all be coincidence, she might be a passer-by with nothing to do with him, someone who would panic if she saw him following. Even worse, this might be no coincidence at all and then what would he do? Approaching the church, he saw her only fifty yards ahead. She had slowed down and he hung back, watched her walk towards the porch and turn for a moment to look across the graves. That was when he recognised her as one of the girls from the Montacute dig and knew there was only one reason why she had come to the house that morning – that this was no coincidence, that she was Gally. His wife was back from the dead.

  The feeling of dread did not go away because that absurd fact brought with it so many other consequences.

  To his great surprise, Mike felt unaccustomed anger at the boy who had kept back the extent of what he knew. He now understood why Ferney had appeared from nowhere at Montacute. His anger didn’t stop there and, watching the porch, he stepped back behind the bushes to deal with the rest of it.

  He realised he was also angry with her, with what she had done and what she had put him through all these years – so startlingly angry that when she came from the porch towards the grave he stayed where he was, until he saw her kneel down and stare and touch the stone and start to cry silently. That was when he went towards her and she turned and saw him and stood and held out her hands, turning her palms outward in a gesture full of sorrow and apology.

  He stumbled towards her as if drawn in dread to confront a ghost and she saw how harshly time had trampled him, and between the moment he started to move and the moment he arrived in front of her, staring wide-eyed, she even knew his name.

  ‘Mike,’ she said. ‘Oh, poor Mike,’ and all he could do was shake his head from side to side, until his legs seemed to give up so that he sat down heavily in the grass, collapsing back to lean against the next stone. She retreated a couple of paces and sat down too, cross-legged. It felt safer to set a distance between them but she could not face the intensity of his gaze, so that she snatched looks at him then felt her eyes ricochet away until some sort of shame dragged them back to him again.

  ‘You knew me,’ he said.

  ‘I knew your name.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  He felt to her like one small wave in an entire rolling ocean but she couldn’t say that.

  ‘I knew you,’ she said, ‘but I’m not sure how.’

  ‘Look at the stone.’ His voice sounded harsher. ‘Do you see? Gabriella, that was you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Gabriella Martin. Married to Michael Martin – to me.’

  ‘You?’ It seemed absurd to her, ‘And you knew me?’

  ‘I followed you from Bagstone. Who else could you have been? I’ve been waiting for you.’

  She was staring at him, taking the years off his face, trying to fit the bewildering intrusion of this man into their place. She shook her head. ‘You’re here,’ she said as if that were the oddest thing imaginable.

  ‘Of course I am. We lived here. You know that.’

  She did in a way but it felt like the last few words of a long, long book.

  ‘He was wrong,’ Mike said. ‘He said you wouldn’t remember.’

  ‘Who said that?’

  Mike flinched at her question. He felt an urgent opportunity to snare her memory somewhere in their joint history before he lost the chance to his rival. ‘Come on, Gally,’ he said. ‘We lived in London. Coldharbour Road? You worked at the community centre?’ She only stared at him in bewildered silence. He persisted, looking for something that might feel more light-hearted. ‘The railway ran past the garden. You pretended we were trainspotters.’

  Stranded on the blankness of her gaze he flailed around searching for any other happy time. ‘What about Greece? Our last . . . our holiday? There was a saying painted on a restaurant wall. You—’

  ‘I don’t remember Greece. I remember here.’ She steeled herself and looked at the gravestone. ‘Who was Rosie? Tell me that.’

  His face tightened. He looked down too, then back at her. ‘You ask me that? You must know.’ He saw blank anxiety in her face, eyes searching the hard, hopeless letters in the stone. ‘Gally, listen. That can wait, can’t it? Come with me. Let’s go home. I’ve missed you so much.’

  ‘Home?’

  ‘Our home. Bagstone.’

  ‘That’s not our home.’ She looked at him with horror, got up and began to back away. ‘Who do you think I am?’ she said. ‘Look at me. I’m not your wife,’ and she turned and ran away, ran from him, from the man who had been her brief, mistaken husband, and he didn’t try to follow. But as she ran, she was carrying his awakening memory with her.

  She came to a fence, climbed it without looking back, hesitated for only a moment then knew where to go. She followed the edge of Broom Close and Clover Ground and on up the rise to the top of the hill and there, two dark bars broke the sky against the risen sun – the concrete pillar and the outline of the man standing beside it.

  CHAPTER 19

  Ferney had watched the three girls enter the village from behind a garden hedge, then from the shelter of the churchyard wall, scurrying, bent low, from one vantage point to the next. Now he had eyes only for the revealed Gally and was astonished that he could ever have thought the blonde girl might have been her.

  He could have stepped out and declared himself to her but he knew that moment should be just between the two of them. Nothing and nobody else should get in the way.

  He watched her walk into the church porch, heard her voice say ‘Hello’ with a surge of pleasure and knew who she was greeting. He saw her walk out of the porch towards the newer graves, expecting her to look round at all the places where all their bones had been laid in calm acceptance. Instead she seemed to buckle as if someone he could not see had punched her in the stomach and then, as he watched in consternation, she was violently sick on the grass.

  It would pass, he told himself. She would surely go on to do what each of them had always done. She would walk in a wide, sampling circle through the village, getting back the measure of it, then she would sense the pull from the high ground at the centre of their territory. She would make excuses to her fri
ends and climb up to the stone bench on the hilltop and he would be there before her. When they left the churchyard, he trailed them to the place where the shop used to be, watched from the field as they sat drinking tea, feeling her in his head, but then they all walked away, the wrong way. He saw her begin to hold herself and to walk in an entirely unfamiliar way. She felt no longer his. He stopped then and saw them dwindle down the lane and was considering racing after her, shouting, making her come back when he heard an old instinct speak reassuringly inside his head. Don’t, it said. Let it come to her by herself. Just trust.

  He walked back to the churchyard, stopping where she had doubled over, so close to her latest grave, but graves held no great fear for either of them. He studied the stone again, considered the mystery of Rosie and, to his surprise, began to feel some deep disquiet stirring inside him. Gally must have had a daughter – a daughter with the teacher, this man Martin whose surname was on her stone – and both of them had died, mother and daughter.

  Children had never been part of their way of doing things, not since the twins such a very long time ago. He looked at the grave and it moved. The stone faded away and the earth pushed up into a long mound half a pace to the right and he was all the way back there. There was a wooden cross, two pieces of adzed oak pegged together, and she was standing next to him, looking down – Gally with her hand in his, cloaking him in love and sorrow.

  ‘This is where I put you,’ she said. ‘You and him. You are back and I am back but our two sons are not. At least we have Sebbi here within our care, but Edgar is so far away and I don’t know if I can bear that. What was it like, the place where you buried him? Tell me again. Tell me exactly.’

  ‘It was by the landing of a bridge over a narrow northland river, whose name I never knew. The river had a muddy bottom with weed growing at the edges and there were small black fishes hanging in the stream when the fighting stopped, flicking their tails. They told me that when there was a cold, dry wind you could see high ground to the north, but I didn’t see it. My eyes were never clear enough.’

  ‘I would like to see him. Will we go there some day?’

  They were standing outside the churchyard hedge where she had buried them in the dark of the night, beyond the boundaries of the church. It was twenty years on and the Norman grip was tight, the troubles over. He let the wooden cross fade away and the churchyard grew out to take him back inside it. The marker stone they put there later to replace the rotted wooden cross had itself been frost-flaked to blankness and vanished in a year when neither of them had been old enough to save it. The mound had sunk away but he thought he could still trace its outline, even now.

  There was a puzzle here. What had the power to hurt her so much now? Was it the new grave or the old? This modern daughter or their ancient son? Rosie still meant nothing to him that he could clearly identify. All he could find in himself was a slight sense of alarm, too fragile to inspect. Ferney walked away from the graveyard knowing only one thing for sure. He could not leave the village. She had stepped straight into some sort of trouble and he had to be the beacon to bring her back safely. She might be coming back even now.

  He left the church and took the field paths to the hilltop, his senses stretching out to see her, smell her, find her. The bench was empty and he lifted himself to sit on the edge of the concrete bollard of the trig point to gain that little extra height. He knew they would need a safe place when she came back. He thought of going to Bagstone, of banging on the door and demanding that Mike let them stay, but he could not take her there with that man occupying their house and so much of recent history unresolved. He set his mind roaming to try to solve the problem and found himself standing on the grass where the trig point would one day be, staring north to where she was walking up the slope towards him. She was there and she was not, fading and shredding, refusing to stick with any one physical shape. The trees were wrong. The willows were modern, out of place, keeping her out – so he felled them with a sweep of his eyes and saw five great elms thud upward in their place. The hedgerow wriggled and thickened and hooves clattered in the lane down below. He was trimming the middle elm, removing a bough which fell to the ground, and then he was standing right by it on the edge of the field, sawing the fallen limb into a pile of logs, smelling the sapwood. The handle of his saw was elm, the same wood as the logs it cut. The iron of the blade was soft but it was the best they had though the teeth needed filing and resetting four times in a working day. He turned, the saw still in his hand, and there she was. A young girl in pale green with a mop of golden hair, walking down the hill on tussocks of grass, a sacking bag slung over her shoulder. She paused, shading her eyes to stare, then dropped the bag, gathered her skirts and ran towards him, a complete stranger who was no stranger at all. He stared back, straining to make out the newest face of this old, old love. She ran straight into his arms and though he had never before held this body, he had always held the girl who looked at him from behind those bright eyes.

  They folded to the grass and kissed, filling the gaps of taste and touch and smell with a devouring hunger. They held each other as hard and as close as two people can, feeling each other’s faces, drinking each other in and learning the freshness of their new skins for enough time for the sun to move a handspan before either of them tested their new voices on the other, then Ferney said, ‘How far?’

  ‘Two months walking,’ she said and he had trouble understanding because the two was a ‘twae’.

  ‘From where?’

  ‘Frae Dumfries.’

  He had no idea where that was.

  ‘Scotland,’ she said, and he drew in his breath because Scotland was dangerous. The Pretender had brought his troops down almost to the gates of London in the winter, driven off only when German George pulled England’s army back from France.

  ‘That’s for us to know. Just us. Don’t tell anyone else.’

  ‘I’m nae fool,’ she said. ‘It comes back. I’ve kept silent. Ha’ ye got the hoose?’

  ‘The house? No. Not yet.’

  ‘Where then?’

  ‘There is a place.’

  That brought him back to the world of modern concrete. He eased his cramped legs down from his seat on the bollard, knowing now she would not be here today and needing to sort out a shelter for them. That reminded him of Cucklington and the family that no longer felt anything like his own, so in the early evening he cycled there, found the house empty and, to keep them at bay, wrote a note to say he had left home, that he would contact them soon and his mother should not worry.

  He raced back to Pen, remembering an old refuge for times like this. He could see it in his mind – a stone barn in a narrow field out of sight of the farm. Which farm? The farm towards the wood, towards the pits. He cycled up the lane, worried suddenly that the barn might have fallen into ruin, even more worried as he came near that it might now be a house, like others he passed, absurdly domesticated like a pig in a party frock. He climbed the field gate and looked along inside the thick hedgerow and his heart jumped to see it was still there, magnificently unchanged from when he had last used it. When was that? he wondered. Eighty years ago? More? It had stood there in one form or another for half a millennium before that. He pulled one swaying door open enough to slip in, climbed a ladder through the trapdoor to the hayloft and found it still half-full of last year’s hay. Pulling bales together into a bed on the old elm boards, he spread the remains of a horse blanket over it and lay down to think, to cast his memory back like a fly on a line, upstream on time’s river, right through into the deep yellow evening, remembering the girl from Scotland and all the other girls who were all the same girl. He was filled with the saturation of the memory of love and the deep desire for things to be put right again.

  In the early morning, as bars of sunrise slipped between loose tiles above, he woke and looked for her and remembered with a soul-scouring pang that a quarter of a thousand years had passed since the Scots Gally, but before the sorrow co
uld take hold he knew that mattered not at all because she was close by once more.

  He wondered just how she would be this time. ‘I have to take care,’ that one had said, the Scottish one, in the first flush of talking when she had slipped halfway back to being pure Gally again and the way she spoke had already begun to change. ‘I take fire quickly. Anger clutches me. It is the way this body chose to work.’ Of course he knew that. There was that steady, central core that made them who they were but there were also the different glands, different brains, different fingertips or nerve endings or retinas or eardrums that could change the way their spirit met the world – hurdles they would always learn to leap. The Scottish girl was slender, snub-nosed, wide-eyed. They were not always so lucky in their bodies and that first moment of meeting had taken many forms.

  He knew he was lucky this time. That dark hair and the soft brown eyes were all he wanted, but what had met her here? Why had she found horror when their world of Pen should have wrapped its warmth around her? The tombstone was the reason and he did not fully understand and somehow he had to understand to see her through.

  Although it was so very early, he saw movement in the farm’s kitchen as he passed so he knocked and asked for a slice of bread and a drink of water as wanderers always used to do, and the woman there looked a little stunned but fetched what he needed. Then he walked rapidly up to the hilltop, feeling a sense of urgency, certain she was coming. As he walked, he sang the song which was haunting him – the song he didn’t really know he knew until he sang it out loud, the song with a hundred variations in it, adjusted by the different habits of speech at each of its rebirths.