The Lives She Left Behind

by James Long

  ‘I’ve never taken any drug,’ said Ali indignantly, ‘and I’m sure Jo hasn’t.’

  Fleur swung round on Lucy, who turned pink. ‘What about you?’ she asked, and Lucy said, ‘I haven’t either,’ in a small and unconvincing voice. She was pink not because she was lying but because she had recently tried to give her friends the impression that she was dangerously sophisticated in that direction.

  Fleur immediately forgot her promise and became angry. Drugs were the only explanation, she said. She was going to get to the bottom of this. Did they have Jo’s backpack? she asked, because she wanted to search it.

  They had no idea where Jo’s backpack was. It was still sitting, quite forgotten, in the hayloft over the old barn.

  ‘Have you talked to a doctor?’ Ali asked to try to deflect her.

  ‘I’m going to,’ said Fleur, ‘oh yes, but that will have to wait until this afternoon. Then there’s the other thing – this boy Ferney and the man, Michael Martin. You’ve hardly said anything about them.’

  ‘There’s not much to say. We only met the boy for ten minutes.’

  Fleur thought of telling them about the arrest but decided to keep that to herself for the moment. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘I need you two because I can’t stay here all day. I’ve got a site meeting to go to and the architect’s coming all the way from Bath.’

  ‘We can stay with her,’ said Ali.

  ‘No,’ said Fleur. ‘Definitely not. You will have to come with me, all three of you, then you two can look after her while I’m at the house. It’s down near the sea so I can drop you at the beach. She can be as crazy as she likes on the beach. She’s in bed. I get her up but she goes straight back there as soon as I’m looking the other way. Can you try? We need to go in half an hour.’

  On the stairs Lucy hissed, ‘What a bitch. She thinks it was our fault.’

  ‘She’s just worried, that’s all.’

  ‘The only person she’s worried about is herself.’

  They stood outside Jo’s bedroom door nervously until Lucy plucked up her courage and knocked lightly. ‘Jo,’ she called, ‘it’s only us.’

  There was no answer so they pushed the door open. Neither of them wanted to go in but neither of them wanted to go back downstairs to face Fleur. Jo was lying on her bed, flat on her back with her hands together in an attitude of prayer as if modelled in marble. She sat up when they came in and looked at them with hardly a hint of recognition. There were shadows under her eyes.

  ‘Jo? How are you feeling?’ Ali asked.

  ‘I killed him,’ said Jo in a tired voice.

  ‘You didn’t kill anybody. Come on, let’s get you up.’

  ‘You don’t know.’

  ‘I do know. I’ve known you for a long time.’

  ‘No you haven’t.’

  ‘I have to say you’re freaking me out a bit,’ said Lucy. ‘Can we talk about something else?’ But Jo shook her head.

  Ali thrust clothes at her, orchestrated with a false and cheerful chatter, helping her put them on. Jo was clumsy in her movements. They led her downstairs, out to the car park, and with great difficulty, because it was a two-door coupé, they persuaded her into the back of the BMW, next to Ali. The girls made brittle conversation and she showed no interest while Fleur drove in a grim silence out of Exeter and south-west on the A38. At last they came to a narrow road, undulating south through gentle hills. Fleur kept looking at the time and was driving fast, braking hard when they met anyone coming the other way.

  ‘They should widen this road,’ she complained.

  ‘My father says it takes sixty years to drive down here,’ said Ali, ‘because you have to go back to 1950. He says it’s the land that time forgot.’

  ‘Does he? He’s full of that sort of thing, is he?’

  A long hill took them down to Slapton. The first few houses were a modern rim around the village, then older cottages crept inwards to a width intended for horses. A church stood on the right, down the slope of a wide graveyard. Ahead, a dark stone tower thrust up from the trees. At the sight of it, something inside Jo seemed to switch on. She turned and leant over, staring at the tower through the side window. The road passed into a narrow canyon of high stone walls, then twisted through right-angle bends. Jo turned and gazed at the tower through the rear window as it came back into view.

  ‘I’ve been here,’ she said in a voice croaky with disuse.

  ‘Of course you have,’ said Ali encouragingly. ‘We had a picnic on the beach before exams. Slapton Sands, remember?’

  ‘No, I mean here. I’ve been here.’ She stared back until another gentle slope took the village out of sight, then slumped into her former torpor.

  They came down to the junction with the coast road, into the great sweep of Start Bay. Fleur slewed to a halt in the car park where the American war memorial stood.

  ‘I’ll be an hour,’ she said. ‘I’ll pick you up here. Be ready.’

  Jo opened the door by herself and the girls smiled as if a child had just learnt a new trick. Her mother drove away, back to the village.

  ‘Come on then,’ Lucy said. ‘Race you to the sea.’

  They plunged down through the shingle towards the waves, Lucy out in front, then Ali shouted, ‘Wait! She’s not coming.’

  It took them longer to scramble back up the steep shingle bank. They stared along the beach and couldn’t see her anywhere, then Ali turned to look inland. Jo was already far away, walking fast back towards the village and the tower.

  ‘What’s she doing?’ Lucy asked in exasperation.

  ‘I haven’t a clue, but we’d better go after her.’

  They had to wait for a line of summer tourists’ cars to go by, then run to catch her up, but even then she wouldn’t slow down or respond to them. At the outskirts of the village she stopped dead and stared up. The black wreck of the massive tower loomed ahead above the walls, haloed by a dozen rooks wheeling and rasping.

  ‘It was new,’ she said in a tone of wonder.

  ‘What was?’ asked Lucy.

  She pointed at the tower.

  ‘Well, of course it was, once. Everything was new once. I weighed six pounds three ounces once.’

  Jo was looking all about her. There was no obvious way to get to the tower. She walked up a short drive to locked gates and rattled the handle, then she came back down to where the two girls stood.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘It’s further up.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The way in,’ was all she answered and they followed her along the road.

  ‘What’s she doing?’ Lucy whispered.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ali whispered back, ‘but she sounds different, more like she’s making sense.’

  Jo turned into a narrow entry. A whitewashed pub stood in a yard at the end. Its name, The Tower Inn, was lettered in a gap between the upper windows. The tower itself hulked over it on the far side of a high wall. Round turrets ran up its four corners. One still rose to its full height above the main walls but the other three had crumbled, broken off level with the ragged top of the parapet. An elderly couple were sitting at a wooden table outside the pub.

  ‘It was here,’ said Jo.

  ‘What was?’

  ‘The Chantry. This was the guest house. We stayed here.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Ferney and me.’

  ‘Ferney? The boy from the village? When?’

  ‘For the opening.’

  ‘Did they used to open it?’

  The elderly couple had stopped drinking and were taking an obvious interest in the girls.

  ‘When it was new. When he built it.’

  ‘Oh, ha ha,’ said Lucy. ‘It must be at least three hundred years old.’

  ‘More like six hundred,’ said the woman at the table. ‘We’ve just been reading about it. This man Sir something or other built it in thirteen something.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Lucy. ‘It’s always nice to get precise information. See, Jo? Th
irteen something.’

  ‘It was an honour that he invited us. He let Ferney read it out. Ferney could read, you see.’

  ‘I should hope so,’ said Lucy. ‘If you came here with Ferney, why doesn’t your mum know? She’s never heard of him,’ but Jo just frowned and turned away.

  Ali put her mouth up to Lucy’s ear. ‘Be gentle,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t put her off.’

  Jo turned back to them. ‘He read it well,’ she said. ‘I was proud.’

  ‘What did he read?’ Ali asked in her encouraging voice.

  ‘Would you like to hear it?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  Jo looked at the ground, concentrating, then turned to stare back at the tower again and delivered her words to the stones.

  ‘Old men who stay behind, do not inflame the young with words of war,’ she began, and her voice had a rich depth and an intonation that was entirely unfamiliar to them. ‘The ruin that you risk should be your own, not theirs. Young men take care. To make you fight they first must make you fear, then out of that shape hate.’

  ‘Mould hate, dear,’ said the old woman at the table. ‘It’s “mould”, not “shape”.’

  They turned to look at her in surprise.

  ‘You know it too?’ asked Ali.

  ‘Well, I don’t know it but it’s what we’ve just been reading. I’ve got it here.’

  ‘What is it?’

  The woman looked at the sheet of paper. ‘It’s called the Declaration of Sir Guy de Bryan.’

  ‘Where did you get it from?’

  ‘The village shop. Sorry, do go on, dear, I didn’t mean to interrupt. It’s lovely to hear the words out loud. Do you know the rest of it?’ but Jo took no notice of her. She seemed to have lost her thread.

  ‘When did you learn it?’ the woman asked.

  Now Jo finally seemed to register her. ‘Long ago,’ she said.

  ‘Long ago? Well, that’s a shame,’ said the old man. ‘The shop woman’s been telling porkies and it was such a good story.’

  His wife continued for him. ‘She said they’d only found it recently. Dug it up or something. She said it was so good they thought they’d print it. It was a lovely tale.’

  ‘They’ve only had it in the shop two weeks,’ her husband added. ‘We’re one of her first customers. This is a first edition, this is.’

  ‘It talks all about it on the bottom here. Shall I read it out?’ The woman bent her head. ‘Sir Guy de Bryan’s Declaration was inscribed on a stone tablet on the wall of his Chantry tower at Slapton, built in 1372 so that masses could be sung for his soul. The Chantry fell into ruin in the sixteenth century after Henry the Eighth’s dissolution of chantries and monasteries. Only the tower and the walls of the Tower Inn, on the site of the original guesthouse, still remain. Broken fragments of the Declaration survived in a worn condition. When further missing pieces were discovered in recent years, it was possible to assemble the whole text. It stands out as a heartfelt rejection of war by one of the most honourable warrior knights of the fourteenth century.’

  Jo looked round at them and her eyes were shining with pleasure. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘Now shall we go back to the sea?’

  ‘Oh, yes please,’ said Ali. This time Jo walked more slowly and to start with she seemed to have a clear awareness of her two friends, though still with a reserve as if they had only recently met.

  ‘What did you mean back there?’ Lucy asked her. ‘You said you stayed there.’

  ‘Did I? I thought I had.’

  ‘It must have been in the pub.’

  ‘It probably was.’

  ‘Your mum would know.’

  ‘Perhaps she would.’

  ‘Are you feeling better?’

  ‘I’m – I’m glad to be here. I’m pleased to see you,’ but that was it until they got to the sea, where she seemed at first to be looking for something she couldn’t find, then became fascinated by the Start Point lighthouse at the western end of the bay, until all at once distress swept over her and she sat down on the shingle, wrapping her arms around her knees, and began to weep.

  The girls sat down each side of her. ‘What’s happened to you, Jo?’ Ali asked gently, stroking her arm, but she got no response at all.

  ‘Look,’ said Lucy. ‘Shall I show you the pictures I took on the dig?’ She held her mobile phone up in front of Jo. ‘See? That’s you two putting up the tent, and there’s Andy and the boys. That’s the tattooed bloke – what was he called? Dozey? There’s Ali and Conrad.’

  ‘I didn’t know you’d taken that,’ said Ali, embarrassed.

  ‘Now we’re walking. That’s Glastonbury and that one too, and that’s the view from King Arthur’s Tower—’

  ‘Alfred’s,’ said Ali.

  ‘Whatever, and that’s – oh no, you don’t want to see that. Let me . . .’

  But Jo had reached out to grab the phone from Lucy’s hand and was looking at it with an expression of delight on her face. ‘Ferney,’ she said and looked eagerly around her as if the phone was a mirror, reflecting him somewhere behind her. She frowned when she couldn’t see him, looked at the phone again and turned it over as if that might help.

  ‘Where is he?’ she asked. ‘That’s his picture,’ as if the other two might not understand. ‘I need him. Do you see? He knows how to make it all better. He was here. We sat on this beach and the men with the boats had houses here. They’ve gone. They’ve all gone.’

  ‘He’s not here, Jo.’

  ‘I’m not Jo.’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘I’m Gally. That’s my name.’

  Lucy looked at Ali, eyebrows raised. ‘All right . . . Gally,’ she said, ‘why don’t you tell us about Ferney?’

  ‘I love him,’ the girl said, and her face had come back to life, her eyes glistening as she looked from one to the other of them. ‘Where is he? Do you know? I have to find him. It’s not worth it without him. It never has been. He knows everything about me. He knows how to make it right and I know how to make it right for him. He brought me here when I needed healing and Guy needed healing too, and we talked here until we had the words that said exactly what we felt. Do you see?’ The girls were stunned by her utter certainty. ‘Will you help me find him?’ she said.

  ‘When you say Guy, is that the same Guy the woman just told us about?’ Ali asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In . . . um . . . 1370? You remember that?’

  ‘I can remember bits of all our lives, all the way back. Ferney and Gally, Ferney and me.’

  ‘And this man, Guy?’

  ‘Oh, poor Guy,’ said Gally. ‘We had him in the cottage, you see. I was looking after him. The cuts were bone-deep and they weren’t clean. Then Ferney heard noises outside but when he ran out the men had gone, ridden off, but they had left him lying there.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The dead man – well, a boy still really. Guy hadn’t known him, you see? In the fight, he had a cloth round his face and it was kill or be killed. He had no choice. It was awful for him. He shouldn’t have got up but when he heard the fuss he came limping out, leaning on the wall, and he saw what we had lying at our feet. He knew him then. He knew his own son and in case he didn’t after all those years apart, they had painted Guy’s own crest in blood on the boy’s shirt. So do you see? It was Molyns’ revenge. Guy was grieving and I was grieving because we both killed our sons, and that’s why Guy did it. That’s why he built his Chantry here.’

  ‘Are you sure you killed somebody?’

  ‘Oh yes. I killed her.’

  ‘You said you killed your son.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I don’t even know what a chantry is,’ said Lucy to get back to more solid ground.

  ‘It was for his soul, so the priests would say prayers for his immortal soul to free it from his sins. He thought he would suffer eternity in purgatory otherwise. Ferney told him he was wrong.’ The girl’s voice became matter-of-fact, almost amused. ‘
He told him there was no purgatory and we should know, but Guy said that might be true for us but not for him. So we shared our sorrow and we wrote the words for both of us because I had killed my son too, you see?’

  ‘Poor Gally,’ said Lucy in a soft voice.

  ‘Did it help?’ Ali asked.

  ‘Not the building, not all the priests, not all the masses they sang. But the words helped.’

  ‘Your mother’s here,’ said Ali, looking up the shingle bank to the figure of a woman beckoning to them from the top.

  ‘She’s not my mother. I must find Ferney. Will you help me, please? You’re my friends. He’s the only way for me. Please?’

  They heard Fleur shouting.

  ‘We’d better go.’

  They steered her back to the car, one each side, and Fleur looked at them questioningly.

  ‘It’s fine,’ said Ali. ‘We’ve been just fine.’

  ‘I’m actually quite hungry,’ said Lucy. ‘Do you mind stopping at the shop?’

  Fleur pulled over with a bad grace in Slapton’s narrow street and Lucy came back to the car with a carrier bag, offering sandwiches. Jo took hers but inspected the triangular plastic box with puzzled fascination, tapped it against the window, then handed it politely back.

  It all stopped being fine as soon as they drove out of Slapton because Jo’s distress mounted to the point where she was twisting violently to see behind her, clawing at the door handle, sobbing and calling out in strings of disconnected and mostly incomprehensible words.

  Fleur pulled over, got out slamming the door, and made a call on her mobile. ‘We’re going straight to the surgery,’ she announced when she got back in. ‘I’m not taking her home like this. I thought you said she was okay.’

  ‘She was.’

  As they approached Exeter, Jo quietened down and curled herself up, twisting to one side as much as the seat belt would let her. The surgery was a private practice in a leafy street just outside the city centre and a nurse came to the car to help them get Jo inside. Halfway in, Jo seemed to come to herself for a moment. She stopped, clutched Lucy’s sleeve and said, ‘Find him. Tell him. Tell him I’m sorry,’ then the girls had to sit and wait while Fleur and Jo were taken into the consulting room.

  ‘This is all wrong,’ said Lucy when they were alone. ‘I sometimes think her mother doesn’t give a toss for her.’