The Lives She Left Behind

by James Long

  She’s a girl on a hill-top who waits in the dawn

  To see if he’ll come from the east

  From behind the bright hills where the new sun is born

  Just when she’s expecting him least

  Just when she’s expecting him least.

  The boy on the ridge at the end of the day

  Is watching the way from the west

  From behind the dark hills, light is fading away

  And the sun is dying to rest

  And the sun is dying to rest.

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

  And their song is a secret that’s best left untold

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

  And lifetimes have passed since their song was first sung.

  He came to the bench on the hilltop and saw it through many different eyes. Most recently it sat heavily, a place for one man sitting as years passed, waiting in loneliness. It should be a place for two, a place of meeting, packed with love.

  The morning birds were carving sharp curls of song out of a high and empty sky. He stared north to where the stubby church anchored the village and saw someone there, far off, running between trees then dipping out of sight into the lower ground between them, and then he knew that she was coming to him and all he had to do was wait. The sun was behind him and she came into the field that curved up to where he was with her eyes screwed up and her hand out in front of her face as if to shade them.

  He stood stock-still next to the concrete pillar and she halted twenty yards from him, holding up her hand again as if to stop him approaching and give herself time. He understood perfectly. She looked all around her, breathing in the air of this place of theirs. He could see her inhaling the history to fill the vacancies inside her. She closed her eyes and he knew a storm of memory was flooding her head.

  She opened them again to see him waiting patiently, still little more than a dark shape against the sun. Filled with happiness, she came forward and the two of them met afresh where they had met so many, many times before. They stood a foot apart and both of them were bubbling with delighted laughter as they searched every surprising detail of each other’s face. There was no surprise when they finally let their eyes meet and see what they had always seen. Those old eyes fed starved souls. New hands searched new skin and new mouths met.

  After a long while, she stepped back from him. ‘Let me hear you,’ she said. ‘I want to know your voice.’

  ‘That’s easily done,’ he replied. ‘This is how I sound. Do you like it?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  Other voices reached them – a family walking the field path.

  ‘Where can we go?’ she asked.

  ‘Not to the house.’

  ‘I know. Where then?’

  ‘The old wild place,’ he said. ‘Will that do?’

  ‘Take me to the wild place,’ she answered.

  She stayed out of sight while Ferney retrieved her backpack from the hedge near Bagstone, then he took her hand and led her through the fields to the stone barn. He made her wait below while he climbed the ladder, taking her backpack with him. She heard him moving up above, tracking him by the groan of the planks and the fine fall of dust through the gaps between them.

  ‘You can come up now,’ he called and she climbed the wooden ladder to see the hay bed he had made under the rafters with her old sleeping bag, spread out, unzipped, as a covering.

  ‘Last night,’ he said. ‘I was here last night. I didn’t know for sure that you would be with me here today. I am so glad you are.’

  It seemed at first that there was no hurry at all. Nobody else would come to this private space. The tick of time had stopped and left a deep silence. They sat on the edge of the bales and stared at each other with their whole long history in their eyes, and she put her hand up to trace the shape of his face with her fingertips, feeling the tiny shock of a spark just before they touched his skin. Then they were both overtaken by an intense curiosity and began to explore the hidden shape of each other inside their clothes. A cavalcade of Ferneys came to her mind’s eye as they did. Dark and fair, tall and short, handsome and less clearly so, though always pleasing to her. She saw his eyes look at her with the same look that had been in all their eyes.

  There was no reticence because they knew each other far, far too well for that. There was no trepidation because they were both seasoned in the art of loving each other. Instead, there was a rising peak of sheer delight that they had once again been given young and perfect instruments on which to play their old and expert music. When there was nothing left to take off and they had discovered every unmapped inch of each other, it seemed that there was a hurry after all, as the years of separation ended.

  Afterwards, they lay staring into each other’s eyes as if they resented the time lost even in blinking. He kissed the tip of her nose.

  ‘When did we last do that?’ she asked and saw his eyes focus far beyond her as he felt back for the answer.

  ‘Years and years ago,’ he said. ‘Before the war. Seventy years, maybe eighty. You went missing. I never found you. Where did you go?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. I will soon. I know who I am now and that’s a start,’ she said. ‘I finally know. I was there all the time but I was trapped. I didn’t know why I felt so lonely until today.’ She smiled and nuzzled against his cheek and then without any warning at all, she burst into violent sobs.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘You’re here now. It’s okay.’

  ‘No, it isn’t. It should be.’

  ‘Listen, my lovely Gally, I know this much,’ he said. ‘It’s not easy being me and you. There’s a lot of waiting and hoping and loneliness in between. We only just get by at times like that. It’s easy to forget that when we’re together.’ He could see that just below the surface she was still on the very edge of a crisis, so he took it head on. ‘What happened to you in the churchyard yesterday, when you first arrived? I was watching.’

  She took in a gulp of air, tried to speak and failed.

  ‘Don’t rush,’ he said gently, smoothing the tears away from her cheeks with his fingers.

  ‘I walked in there and I felt so happy,’ she said slowly. ‘I knew I had come home. I took off a coat named Jo and there was me, Gally, underneath all the time. I found that somewhere in my head I had the answer to all kinds of things if I just looked, but something was pulling me and I went to the graves and the next moment I was drowning in sadness.’

  ‘Which grave?’

  ‘Did we have a child?’

  He watched her, not knowing how to reply.

  ‘We did,’ she said. ‘We had a son, didn’t we? It should have been his grave. I knew where I buried him.’

  ‘That was a very long time ago.’

  She frowned. ‘Was it? I didn’t think so.’

  ‘It doesn’t do to dwell on all the deaths,’ he said. ‘You have to balance them against all the life. There’s been just as much of that,’ but he could see it wasn’t working. Something stronger had taken root.

  She took her arms from round him and rolled away, curling up. ‘I think I might have done something terrible,’ she said in not much above a whisper.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Our child died,’ she said. ‘I let someone kill our child,’ and she began to weep.

  ‘There’s an old story you need to hear,’ he said. ‘Wait.’ He put his hands over his ears and she understood that he was clawing his way back there for her.

  He put himself in the churchyard when it was much smaller. One old stone stood upright like a rough-cut finger, but the other graves were only mounds with here and there a simple wooden cross. He sensed a crowd around them but they weren’t there for a burial or a christening or a wedding. They had been summoned for the feudal needs of war.

  He opened his eyes, put his hands down and turned to her. She was watching him intently, her eyes red and wet. ‘I t
hink I know what this is,’ he said. ‘I can tell you part of the story but it would be easier if we went back there to do it.’

  She shook her head. ‘No. I can’t. I went to the cottage first this morning and someone followed me to the church.’

  ‘Mike Martin.’

  ‘Yes. He said things I don’t understand. What did he mean?’ She began to cry again.

  He held her, hushing her with kisses and stroking her head. ‘I won’t let him hurt you,’ he said when she was quiet again.

  ‘No. No, he won’t hurt me. That’s not it. I think I hurt him. Did I? Do you know what I did?’

  Ferney said nothing.

  ‘I should have seen you first,’ Gally said, her arms tight around him. ‘I made the wrong choice. Why does everything have to be so complicated?’

  ‘The world’s changed,’ he answered slowly. ‘We’ve always been a universe of two, haven’t we?’ But everything is mapped out now. Even our hilltop. You saw what’s up there, didn’t you? Our everlasting, unchanging hilltop, and now there’s that concrete lump on top of it.’ He saw her puzzled look. ‘It wasn’t there last time you and I were properly together. Do you know why they put it there? To measure the whole country, to pin everything down to the nearest inch. The Ordnance Survey. “Ordnance” as in artillery. “Survey” as in maps to tell them where to aim their guns, how to destroy people. Everything’s mapped. People are mapped. We’re used to being left alone, aren’t we? The world doesn’t leave people alone any more. There are systems for everything, systems that ring bells if you’re not normal – and we’re not normal, are we?’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose we’ve ever been that.’

  ‘So now this man is in the house that should be ours and these days houses are worth a king’s ransom and people don’t let them fall down any more. So many times we’ve just wandered back into the ruins and set it right again. Not this time. He thinks it’s his but it’s our house and it’s our village.’ He sat up and reached for his shirt. ‘First things first. Let’s get you right. Let’s make sure you understand the things that hurt, then they won’t hurt any more. I know where we should go. It’s quiet and safe and nobody will find us if we don’t want them to.’

  That was what he thought.

  CHAPTER 20

  They walked, hand in hand and utterly at home, through the village’s northern outskirts to a place where a cone of earth rose in the trees. Climbing to the top, they sat and looked down through the fringe of trees to the wide world where the ridge dipped down to modern times.

  ‘We must untangle this,’ Ferney said. ‘We must put your old sorrow back where it belongs. It was before they made this place. It all started at the church.’ Gally felt him move a little bit away and knew he was only partly in her own time. ‘Imagine the church, not like now. Timber.’

  She could see the wooden building and was excited by the clarity of her vision. ‘Yes,’ she said, but the silence ran on and he seemed to be losing the trail, breathing hard, frowning.

  ‘What was the weather like?’ she asked on a hunch.

  He nodded. ‘It was raining,’ said Ferney. ‘Drizzle. Britnod didn’t like rain.’

  The name brought a broad face to her mind – often suffused red, a deep ravine of scar-tissue diagonally across one brow.

  He started again with new strength in his voice.

  ‘We were called to the church in the autumn,’ he said. ‘You, me, all of us. The thane, Britnod, said he needed twenty men. He was a short man, wasn’t he? He stood up in the pulpit wet through, in an ugly mood, and told us we owed him our service.’

  He seemed in his stride now, talking from a place a thousand years away. He had his arm round her and she could feel the drops of water from his soaked sleeve trickling down her shoulder blade and into the wool as they stood together towards the back of the nave. She was no longer listening to Ferney’s account but to Britnod himself. They both were. Ferney might have fallen silent for all she knew.

  ‘You can come forward of your own accord or I can force you. It’s your choice.’

  ‘What’s it for?’ called a voice, and there was laughter because they all knew the answer.

  ‘William the Bastard, that’s what it’s for. Keeping your homes and your loved ones safe from the godless Normans, that’s what it’s for. Who’s first?’

  She felt Ferney shake his head and knew he had no intention of stepping forward. Harold and William were equally godless to him, as foreign as each other in the longer scheme of things. She knew exactly what he thought about war or riot or rebellion – that when you let the fever, the bloodlust take over, you lost the triumph of humanity over the animal. Eight men volunteered right away. The six brutes from the forest hovels who enjoyed any sort of fight, the scarred youngster with the wild eyes who was always boasting of his sword skills though he possessed no sword, and muddled old Dern, who put his hand up to anything and usually did it badly.

  ‘Eight,’ said Britnod. ‘Well, I’ll count that as seven. I need thirteen more.’ There was silence. ‘I remind you it is the King’s service. It’s for Harold Godwinson who is master of us all.’

  ‘He’s not my master and he’s never been my friend,’ called the same voice.

  ‘Harold needs you and Harold will pay you. If you don’t have weapons, I will provide.’

  That brought three more shuffling forward.

  ‘What’s more, I will feed you on the way to the muster. After that the King will feed you.’

  Two more joined them.

  ‘Where is the muster?’ called a voice from the back.

  ‘A week east.’

  ‘That’s a long way.’ It seemed to douse any remaining enthusiasm.

  ‘No more? Right then. I gave you your chance, now I’ll choose the rest.’

  Standing near the back, Ferney and Gally were keeping their twin sons Edgar and Sebbi behind them as if to hide them – their fine twin sons, their wondrous mistake. Gally’s brews had not stopped the twins’ conception. They told each other Edgar’s energy had overpowered anything she could have done to stop him. He showed every sign of having hogged her womb too. Sebbi was a much weaker baby and always in the physical shadow of his twin. They had arrived to make a world of four where they had been two for so long and fifteen years of delight followed, full of a fresh and different love.

  ‘They’re like spears,’ she had said one day, watching them breaking in a colt.

  ‘How?’

  ‘We hurl them forward into the future. They follow their own course, but they carry the faint trace of our hands on them always, and on the spears they hurl in turn.’

  ‘We have our own futures.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We have both but this is just as wonderful.’

  Britnod called Edgar’s name out first.

  Gally gasped as her son stiffened and stepped forward, then gasped again as Britnod called for Sebbi too. That was when Ferney discovered there was one single thing that could still make him go to war.

  ‘Wait,’ he called. ‘Leave them be. I’ll take their place.’

  Gally clutched his arm and he whispered urgently in her ear, ‘Let go. I know how to stay alive. They don’t and they only get one chance.’

  Britnod glared at him. ‘You offer one of you for two of them?’

  ‘They’re boys. I’m a man.’

  ‘I don’t give a toss. They’re big enough and I have to come up with the numbers. You don’t make two, you make one. Come if you want. You’re a hard sod and I’ll be glad to have you, but one of them comes too. You choose which.’

  ‘I can’t make a choice like that,’ said Ferney, horrified.

  ‘Then get your woman to choose, before I count to ten.’

  The same rude voice from earlier said, ‘Didn’t know you could,’ which prompted a gale of laughter and left Britnod flushing even darker.

  ‘Choose now, woman, or all three of them go, I swear.’

  And Gally was trapped in a mind-stopping moment
of wanting to refuse but knowing Britnod held the power of the King’s law. Her arm went out of its own accord to pull weak Sebbi to her. She saw Ferney step forward and Edgar follow him and called out in anguish to them and a voice was calling back – two voices calling ‘Jo, Jo!’

  The note she had left behind in the tent said she was going back to the village. ‘We’ll have to look for her,’ Ali said and got out the map. The same picture was in both their heads – the moment when they would have to tell Jo’s mother they had lost her daughter.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The castles,’ said Lucy. ‘This all started with our stories round the fire.’

  So they climbed the ridge in search of their friend, feeling like rescuers, but what seemed precise and easy in terms of symbols and inches on a map was much less obvious on the ground. The first castle proved a disappointment. A field path led to a gently sloping valley.

  ‘Where is it?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘Look at the ground. Can’t you see the ramparts?’

  ‘Ramparts? Those are speed bumps. My granny could storm those and she’s got bad knees.’

  ‘Well, they would have been much deeper back then and they would have had palisades running along the—’

  ‘I think you’ve mistaken me for someone who’s interested.’

  They could see down into the valley ahead and along the fall of the hill to both sides and there was no sign of Jo. Back on the road, a car pulled up opposite them and the driver called to them. He was middle-aged, powerfully built in a dark jacket – a little bit dangerous.

  ‘You two,’ he said. ‘Do you know a boy called Luke Sturgess?’ Ali and Lucy eyed him warily and shook their heads. ‘You might have seen him,’ said the man. ‘He’s about your age. Take a look at this.’ He held out a photo but they stayed where they were, too far away to inspect it.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ said the man. ‘I’m a police officer. Here.’ He pulled out a card.

  Lucy walked slowly closer and the policeman held the photo up to her. ‘What’s he done?’ she asked.

  ‘Never mind that. Do you know where he might be?’

  Lucy frowned at the photo. ‘No,’ she said, ‘but we’re looking for someone too. A girl with dark hair and a blue backpack? Red jacket? We’re a bit worried.’