Ferney

by James Long

  They were at the village by ten-thirty and, following an instinct that all Mike needed to put him right was something with a touch of age about it, she persuaded him to drive straight to the church, certain it would work some magic on him. It was small and stout, just a nave, a chancel and a low, square tower.

  They walked up the path to the porch, Mike slightly ahead as Gally lingered over the gravestones.

  ‘Look at the carving,’ he said as she joined him outside the door.

  ‘The lamb and the lions,’ she said without thinking as she looked up.

  He laughed. ‘Not from where I’m standing. Why do you say that?’

  She blinked and the stone panel swam into her view like an intruder, a Virgin and two kneeling figures. Abrupt dislocation assaulted her. Mike went into the porch.

  ‘Here’s your lamb,’ he said. ‘What a doorway! Look at these.’

  The columns at each side of the door had Norman zigzags flanking them. Capping the top corners of the door were two fine stone heads, a king and a queen, staring inwards towards each other.

  ‘Til Christmas falls on Candlemas, the King shall never kiss his lass.’ The words came into her head from nowhere in particular and she couldn’t place them. She said them out loud, a hook for Mike to bite on, hoping he would know and explain but he just looked at her.

  ‘You’ve been reading up about this place, haven’t you?’ he said. ‘I wish you’d told me.’

  There was a tiny note of peevishness in his voice. He’d never accused her of secrecy before.

  ‘No,’ she said, stung by it but confused by that same dislocating sense of déjà vu that was somehow a little out of register. Then it crossed her mind for the first time that she had perhaps come here before, as a child, on one of her parents’ trips south from the home they’d once had in Bath.

  She paused and played a deliberate game with herself as she followed Mike into the church, setting an image of the interior in her head before they opened the door, just to see if there was a reliable memory lurking from her childhood subconscious, but it was disappointing. The dark oak pews in her mind’s eye were lower, paler and more intricately carved in real life. The walls were plastered where they should have been whitewashed stone. She’d expected a gallery to her left and there was none. The whole interior of the nave seemed too high, too wide. She sighed, then took Mike’s hand to lead him over to admire the Norman font, a square fluted bowl on a round pedestal, knowing he’d like it, seeking to repair the tiny gap between them.

  Ferney saw them go inside the church as he came through the churchyard gate. His right hip and ankle were both giving him some pain that morning, a last legacy of his encounter with the truck. Down the lane beyond the gate he saw Barbara Nicholls walking back to her house, artificial hip joints swinging away. He shook his head at the thought, looked round at the graveyard in front of him and a bizarre picture came into his head of the inhabitants of future graves, lying there, all those lengths of grim bone screwed together with plastic joints. The Day of Judgement wouldn’t be quite so dreadful if the skeletons came crawling up through the mouldering earth to the squeak of pivoting nylon.

  The idea of Judgement Day had always made him laugh, to the fury of endless teachers and parsons. Religion in that form held no sway over Ferney, hadn’t for goodness knows how long. His purpose today had nothing to do with God. He was after information and the churchyard was one of his records, though parsons would keep thinning out the gravestones as if their brief authority gave them rights to abolish the dead’s enduring reminder. He walked carefully across the grass, found the stone he was after, knelt painfully to it and began to rub at the lichen in the indentations to make the date he sought stand out more clearly.

  It was in that position a few minutes later, lost in far-off thought, that he was brought back to himself by a man’s voice. Him, the husband, out of the church now, standing by the tree, giving his opinions at the top of his voice to her, to Gally. Ferney levered himself up on the old gravestone, feeling it wobble under his hand like a loose tooth. Another one that would soon be uprooted to add to the parson’s new wall, he thought, another link gone.

  ‘Well, that too,’ the man was saying, looking up into the branches of the great tree, ‘but yews were always holy trees. Early Christians worshipped under them. They were thought to give immortality. People used to think the yews drew off the harmful vapours that came out of graves.’

  Ferney snorted to himself, louder than he meant, and the man turned, startled.

  ‘What’s all that, then?’ Ferney said, ‘What you were saying.’

  ‘Oh, hello,’ the man said stiffly. ‘I didn’t see you. I was just telling Gally why yew trees were usually grown in churchyards.’

  ‘I heard,’ said Ferney. ‘But it’s not right, though, what you said, not the main reason anyway.’

  The man let a smile slip out before he could catch it. ‘Oh no?’ he said in a tone that irritated Ferney. ‘Why not?’

  ‘They had to grow yews,’ Ferney said. ‘Needed the wood to make bows. But yew berries, see, they’re poisonous. Couldn’t grow them just anywhere or the cows would die. Churchyard was the safest place. No cows in a churchyard.’

  ‘I’ve never heard that one before,’ said the man.

  ‘You’ve heard it now,’ said Ferney, turning his head abruptly to Gally and fixing his eyes on her without saying anything, his face softening.

  ‘We’re moving in today,’ she said. ‘Come round and see us.’

  He nodded. ‘I’ve got something for you. House-warming.’

  The caravan was an hour late, hauled by a tractor that sent most of its diesel fuel straight up to spatter the sky with a part-burnt black cloud. The van’s best travelling days were clearly over. Fifteen miles an hour and a mile at a time were now the limits of its aged ambitions. The roof moved more than the chassis as it heaved slowly over the bumps, swaying with a freedom that spoke of dereliction and leaky joints, but Gally thrilled to the sight of it, the guarantee that this night would really be their first within the boundaries of the space that was now theirs. The farmer took Mike’s money with the air of one who’d lost an eyesore and gained an unexpected bonus and looked around with an expression that spoke volumes about the unfathomable ways of town folk in the country.

  ‘You’ll have your work cut out here, then,’ he said.

  ‘We don’t mind,’ said Gally.

  ‘I’ve got diggers and all that if you need them,’ he said, thinking of the wad of Mike’s notes in his pocket.

  ‘We might well,’ said Mike. ‘There’s some drainage to sort out.’

  ‘You know where to find me. I can send someone down,’ he said, and soon the tractor’s hubbub was fading down the lane.

  They weren’t left alone for long. Gally was pulling the musty cushions out of the caravan to air them in the sun when a white pick-up bounced in through the gate and rocked to a halt.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Martin? Don Cotton. You phoned me, right?’

  The builder. Standing there, summing up the evidence to feed into the quote. Mike could see him trying to put it together, glancing casually as though the game wasn’t obvious at the car’s number-plate – four years old, therefore an uncertain indicator, the caravan – no help there, their clothes – ditto, they were dressed for hard labour. Mike opened his mouth to speak in a deliberately roughened and slurred accent. It wouldn’t have fooled the builder for a second, but in any case Gally’s educated vowels cut the air before him and he swore to himself.

  ‘Great,’ she said. ‘I’m so glad you’re here. When can you start?’

  He was a short man who addressed everything sideways, his body never facing the way he spoke. He had a big jaw and a flattened nose, the face of a man who would fight over imagined insults in his cups.

  ‘In a hurry, are you?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Gally.

  ‘No, not really,’ said Mike.

  The builder looked first at the cracked and
broken gable end of the house, making expensive sucking noises and shaking his head a lot, ignoring their questions. He picked an unnecessary amount of loose stone and mortar out of the biggest crack, then turned and went inside.

  ‘You’ve got your own private river,’ he said when he’d looked below the floorboards.

  ‘What’s the best thing to do?’ said Mike.

  ‘Put a pump in. Get it dried out and we’ll see what we’ve got.’

  ‘Need more’n a pump,’ said a voice from the doorway. They looked up and Ferney, a brown felt hat in his hand, was standing there, stooped forward and bent to one side against the door frame. His white hair was neatly brushed and there was a primrose in the buttonhole of his old tweed jacket.

  ‘Well, you do keep popping up,’ said Mike, a shade sourly, thinking Ferney should have knocked until he remembered there was no knocker.

  ‘Where else would I be?’ said Ferney with a note of surprise.

  ‘Now you’re here, can we help you?’

  ‘I can maybe help you,’ said Ferney, ‘if you want. I came with a present.’

  Gally walked over to him. ‘That’s lovely,’ she said. ‘Come and sit outside with me. It was nice of you to take the trouble.’

  Mike stayed with the builder for a little longer as the man went on scratching and fiddling his way through the decay, noting large figures in his book which could have been lengths but were probably money, then curiosity got the better of him and he went to join them outside. As he walked into the dark hall, they were framed by the doorway, outside in the sun, warm and bright together. He paused in the doorway as he realized they were unaware of him there. He felt individual, separate. Gally had sat Ferney on a folding chair on the grass beyond the door and he was handing her a brown paper bag.

  The object she drew from it was obscure, a mottled ring of horn perhaps or some sort of soapstone. Mike couldn’t tell. It seemed to have holes around its circumference and areas of latticework. Ferney watched Gally closely from his position next to her. Mike watched them both from inside, excluded and puzzled. Gally held it in her hands and looked at it, very still, then turned it slowly. She lifted her eyes and she and Ferney stared at each other. Then she rose slowly to her feet, walked a few steps to the rough grass inside the hedge and began to pick flowers, threading them one at a time into the holes in the ring.

  Ferney clasped his hands together then reached each arm right round and hugged himself as if holding something in. Gally picked faster and faster, laughing out loud, then twirled round and lifting the ring, a garland now, sat it on her head where it nestled, perfectly accenting her hair like a flower fairy in a children’s book.

  ‘There,’ she said, ‘is that right?’

  Ferney nodded silently. Mike felt an oddly bitter pang of annoyance. Gally was always buying hats and hair bands and scarves to wind through her hair but she’d wear them once and put them aside in disappointment. He’d bought many of them himself and always somehow missed satisfying whatever itch drove her after them. Now someone else was basking in the reaction he had never had. He stepped into the sunlight which seemed suddenly less radiantly yellow now that it was no longer rationed by the dark doorway and looked closely at the flowers for the first time.

  ‘Gally!’ he said. ‘They’re cowslips, for God’s sake. You’re not meant to pick cowslips. They’re threatened. You must have known that, surely?’

  She stared at him, affronted, as if she didn’t recognize him, and put a hand slowly to her head. He wished he could open his mouth and draw the words and their sting back in from the echoing air, then she looked at Ferney and Mike saw her eyes widen. With two quick steps, she crossed the space to where Ferney sat and Mike went forward too, struck by the alarm on her face.

  Tears were rolling down Ferney’s cheeks.

  ‘You knew, you knew,’ he said in an old, cracked voice full of acutely painful joy, then before they could do anything he was up and away through the gate as if it was all too much to bear.

  ‘You didn’t have to do that,’ Gally cried, turning to Mike in pain, and neither of them recognized her voice.

  The village of Penselwood defies all attempts to know it quickly. It sprawls on spidery lanes across the southern end of a steep ridge that runs north for three or four miles. To the south and west the land is much lower. To the east the chalk starts in waves and folds that lead, in three hours’ walking, to the edge of Salisbury Plain. Anyone relying on a map would look for the village centre at the church, from where six lanes radiate, but they would be disappointed by the open vacancy of that place. Much of the village lies along the lanes that run south and east from the church, but the houses are spread out so that they rarely form anything like a quorum.

  The spirit of the village is on the prow of the ridge. To feel a full sense of it, it is necessary to ignore roads and walk up through the tiny, intricate fields, Clover Ground, Sadlers Mead or Three Cornered Ground, to the pinnacle in the centre of a triangle of lanes that provides the best viewpoint. Behind and to the south, the flat land is the sea on which the ridge sails. Looking north, the low church tower marks the start of the woodland that covers the narrowing ridge, while the ground falls in scooped combes to the River Stour in the east. The roofs of houses show up here and there in little huddles along the lanes, too individual to want any closer association. Even the new houses have followed that rule and failed to shift the diffuse centre of gravity in any one particular direction. No planner has dared to impose modernity on the village on the ridge.

  Ferney had gone too fast and his hip was hurting again as he sat down, heart hammering after the long climb, but none of it mattered, not one bit. The sun came bursting out from behind a cloud, painting the hill bright green, a mirror of the exultant joy roaring and bubbling up through his chest. Everything had changed, years of loneliness – the longest years he could ever remember – swept away. There was no longer any question of wishful thinking. Hope had been restored. There was work ahead, it was true, and it might not be easy, but the house was going to live again and so was he. It wasn’t as if there was any choice. There’d been an agreement made.

  He sat on his stone right at the top of the hill, a stone worn smooth by countless bottoms over countless years. He looked out over a familiar landscape, south to Milton and the roofs of Gillingham with the old fortress loom of high Shaftesbury rising in the far distance, miles beyond. A trace of the steamy mist of late spring rose from the fields, thickest along the course of the River Stour, winding down to Marnhull. From the main road, half a mile down the slope, invisible below its curve, modern noise intruded in a steady drone of cars, backed by the basso profundo of the lorries and the occasional ascending tenor of a hard-driven motorcycle.

  In 1927 the horse chestnut tree had fallen in a summer gale, the great tree that had stood fifty yards below and to the right. He pictured it, lying there in a sprawl of green summer foliage, then let the image of its leaves turn brown and watched them fall; 1928, the tree dried out, grey branches still attached; then 1929, after the men with the saws had been, just a trunk. In another world the main road still threw hot noise, but Ferney had a firm hold now and it couldn’t reach him. He lifted his head from the ghost of the wrecked tree and let his gaze wander across the landscape, changing, tuning. The pylons in the valley flicked out, the cluster of new houses beyond them melted like butter, the woods writhed, grew ragged and stretched their boundaries, the fields divided themselves with old, forgotten walls, and a hard, brash metal barn shrivelled back into a thing of sagging tile and stone.

  He conjured a girl’s voice into his mind, hearing her singing a scrap of a favourite song, holding it there, using it to bleach out the upstart stains of the present and paint in the true colours of the past. He slowly turned his head and there she was next to him on the bench, leaning weightless against him, her blonde hair cascading over his neck, both arms round his shoulders. They were shaken soft by love. Sixty years slipped from him and he heard her voice pro
perly, talking, not singing.

  ‘We can do it,’ she said. ‘We can if we set our minds to it. No more of this hit and miss.’

  He’d needed no persuading. ‘It will be so much better,’ he said. ‘There’s never been joy with anyone else. It’s only worth it when you’re here.’

  ‘Are we agreed, then?’ She’d lifted her head as her ghost, her memory, now did again, staring at him with a great, wide, joyful smile. ‘Shall we swear to it, swear we’ll always, always do it whatever?’

  ‘Yes.’ Then the problem struck him. ‘What if one of us forgets?’

  ‘Then the other one has some reminding to do, that’s all.’ She’d laughed as though that were the easiest thing in the world, laughed and tousled his hair.

  ‘And if both of us forget?’

  She stopped laughing then. ‘Well, maybe that will just have to be that if both of us forget.’ Then with renewed vigour, ‘But we won’t, we mustn’t. Other folks have God. We’ve only got us.’

  He shook his head, amused at the old argument. ‘You don’t know they’ve got God. You can’t be sure. Could be we’re luckier than them. They just stop, maybe.’

  They’d finished with talking then. He’d held her at arm’s length, loving her, admiring her, drinking in the garland on her head set in the old hoop, feasting on the rich emotion of six decades earlier, a time when cowslips were plentiful, his dry old soul soaking it up like a parched plant under the watering can. He held the garland in the centre of his attention, thinking of it today, of Gally now, who if she knew nothing else for sure, knew this, knew it for what it was and wove her garland without a questioning word. He saw it on her head, crowning dark hair where this forerunner wearer had been fair.