Ferney

by James Long

  Now she sat upright at the table, cramped into a constriction of right angles by the severe geometry of foam rubber and plywood. The table was a wobbly wooden sheet, clipped under the end window, which served equally inadequately as the centre section of the bed. She was drawing plans, sheets of paper spread around with ideas for the house, lists of priorities. The main picture was the front of the house as she saw it in her mind’s eye, the ghosts of former beauty restored, windows back in place. She kept trying to draw it to her satisfaction but the front door, and with it the symmetry of the house, stayed obstinately wrong.

  She glanced over to where Mike was jammed on to the small seat next to the sink, deep in a book. It wasn’t that they hadn’t talked. Outside, they had batted their discoveries and their thoughts back and forth, with lots of ‘Look over heres’ and ‘How abouts’. That had been male conversation, words used to exchange information, a meeting-point of sorts – but she had a feeling that each fresh discovery brought excitement first to her, followed by assessment, whereas for Mike it was somehow the other way round. Now, inside, she wanted a female exchange, her hopes and fears traded for his. It was what she needed to tidy up the debris of the day, especially on this day when, for once in her life, her hopes had a chance of outnumbering her fears.

  Gally hated her own neuroses, the phobias that she had never been able to confront. She had a deep, abiding gratitude to Mike that he had patiently taken them on, that when nothing else worked, in the terrors of the night, the terrors of Boilman and Burnman, he would sit there holding her until she was calm again, never breathing a word of reproach, never showing except in his tired face the cost to himself of her nightmares. He had even found a side way into the village which he always took, never mentioning it, so they wouldn’t have to pass the roadworks in case they retained the power to terrify her. It was in Mike’s nature to do what he could in silence. Unless she introduced the subject of her fears he would rarely press her about any part of it. This place was what she needed, she knew that, and she hoped she would be able to bring him more pleasure than she had ever done in London.

  She looked at him for longer now, seeing that she was unobserved, fond and grateful but wishing suddenly that her connection to him was deeper and broader and feeling guilty as soon as she recognized the thought. When they married she had believed that fullness would come in time. Here perhaps it would, but even as the thought came she was no longer sure. He was deep in his reading, his own sort of mental balm, and she knew he would be just slightly irritated if she forced him out of it. She studied him in silence. He was folded round the book like a collapsed music stand, all legs and elbows, frowning in concentration. A funny man for her – long, angular, direct, sharp as a knife, not at all the sort with whom she had ever thought she would be trying to build a life. She had thought he might be a key to the great locked room she could feel inside her. He could sometimes help her put the experience of now into the context of then, feeding fuel to the fire of her wish to know how the world had ticked its way to the present. Sometimes, but not always.

  In the middle of her thoughts he looked up at her, sensing her gaze, and gave a little faraway smile. His hands, holding the book, moved slightly and she saw the word ‘Saxon’ in the title. In the brief moment before he looked down again, she wrested his attention to her in the way most likely to succeed.

  ‘Cenwalch,’ she said. ‘I want to know more about him. Do you know anything else?’

  Mike smiled, yawned and stretched. ‘That’s what I’ve been reading,’ he admitted. ‘I wasn’t quite sure of my facts.’ He put the book down. ‘Actually I’ve just found something else as well. It was probably here that Alfred rallied his supporters before he defeated the Danes.’

  That delighted her. ‘Aha. You mean folk memories might just have something?’

  ‘Folk memories? Balls,’ he retorted. ‘Contemporary documented sources. Alfred’s chum Bishop Asser wrote it down at the time. In the seventh week after Easter, Alfred gathered the surviving fighting men from the area at the Egbert Stone. Asser says it was somewhere he calls Brixton in the eastern part of Selwood Forest. There’s a stone right here that they claim is the one.’

  She was delighted. ‘I see, Pen Selwood. What does Pen mean?’

  ‘A clearing.’

  ‘So Mrs Wotsit was right about her seven hundred dead?’

  ‘Not that time. Alfred’s battle happened in the early summer of 878 and it wasn’t here. They marched off once he’d got his army together. The battle itself was nearly twenty miles away, somewhere round Warminster.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, disappointed, ‘no seven hundred then,’ but he was in a generous mood.

  ‘Well yes,’ he said smiling. ‘There were two battles a bit later on. The Danes came back in 1001 and apparently burnt the place to the ground, then fifteen years later Edmund Ironside thrashed them and that was definitely here. That one’s the seven hundred dead.’

  ‘Old Ferney was right, then?’

  ‘It’s no great secret. Everyone agrees about it. It was a crucial battle – one of the steps on the way to uniting England.’ He was animated now, warming to it. ‘It’s no accident, you see. This place was in one hell of a spot – a real bottleneck of key routes, one of the gateways to Wessex. Selwood Forest was one huge barricade right across the neck of the west and the tracks through it met here. You just imagine, miles and miles of it, all fallen trees and roots and brambles. Completely impenetrable unless you had loads of time and a sharp axe. If you wanted to take the quick route to get through it, you had to come this way and all these ridges and dips round here made it a great place to plan an ambush.’

  ‘What about Kenny Wilkins?’

  ‘Umm,’ he said. ‘Well, I don’t know. His name is usually given as Cenwalh, but sometimes there’s a “ch” on the end. You’ve got to see it all in context.’

  That was code for ‘Don’t interrupt, this may take some time.’

  ‘Tell me,’ she said, because this was when she felt closest.

  ‘Okay. The Romans had gone and what they’d left behind was pretty chaotic. Fat cats, merchants and bureaucrats still trying to live like nothing had changed. Now, I’m sure I’ve told you, the Romans had always hired German mercenaries to look after their turf round here and the British chieftains thought they’d do the same.’

  She knew it, but she let him talk.

  ‘Anyway, come the early sixth century the Scots and the Picts up north started threatening the south so the British chieftains hired a load more Saxons to help out. The trouble was the British didn’t get round to feeding and paying them properly, which is not very sensible when you’ve got a well-armed cuckoo polishing its armour in the middle of your nest. The Saxons’ homelands were getting very overcrowded, but the whole of Britain had less than a million inhabitants. It must have seemed like heaven, so they moved in and grabbed the south. Their mates the Angles came in and took over a bit further up-country and after that the poor old Britons were easy meat. There was only one thing that stopped the Saxons spreading west. Do you know what that was?’

  She thought she did, but she shook her head.

  ‘Selwood Forest,’ he said. ‘Coit Maur, the Britons called it, the Great Wood.’

  The name rang in her head, wild and thrilling.

  ‘The bit of Somerset to the north wasn’t much good,’ he went on, ‘the levels were flooded most of the year. They only dried out in midsummer, the rest of the time the settlers had to live on the higher ground. That’s how it got to be called Somerset. Anyway the Great Wood stopped the Saxons heading further west. They settled in the lush river valleys round Salisbury and got a bit soft. The Britons from the Great Wood started fighting back and gave them a bit of a pasting, so the Mercians, who had moved into the Midlands, came down to help sort it out.’

  He saw the flush on her face and wondered, as ever, that the dry dust of history had such direct, warm impact on her. ‘This is where your Kenny Wilkins comes in. The Mercian
king was called Penda and he did a deal with your Kenny. Cenwalch was king of Wessex, you see, and he married Penda’s sister to glue it all together. Anyway, something went wrong. Kenny didn’t fancy her, maybe, and he gave her the push, so Penda exiled him to East Anglia. Then Penda screwed up. He took a huge army up north and got himself killed by a tiny bunch of Oswy’s Bernicians – Northumbrians, if you like. He must have been pretty incompetent.’

  ‘So Kenny was back on top?’

  ‘Cenwalch came back from exile and took charge, but he had all these young bloods who were demanding land of their own and the best bet was to the west. Every other direction had seasoned armies blocking the way, but the west, beyond the Great Wood, was anyone’s guess. So in 658, Kenny Wilkins and his men took on the Britons at Peonnum and that was pretty much that for the Britons – next stop Cornwall and I hope you like large lumps of granite in your farmland.’

  ‘Poor Britons,’ she said, and she really felt it, turning his words into a mental landscape of burning huts and people fleeing terror-struck into unfamiliar lands.

  ‘I don’t know. They’ve done quite well down in Cornwall. They’ve been ripping off the tourists ever since.’

  ‘So, it could easily have been here, couldn’t it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The battle. Peonnum?’

  ‘There’s no direct evidence.’

  ‘Just a long tradition?’

  ‘Just a long tradition.’

  She looked at him, transported, warm and open and they both stood up. She nestled into his arms. ‘I love listening to you like that,’ she said.

  ‘I know, but I still don’t know why.’

  She kissed the side of his neck. ‘It all makes more sense. I feel . . . fuller maybe, as if there’s more of me alive.’

  ‘Medieval history as an erogenous zone?’ he said in tones of mock wonder.

  ‘Do you have that effect on all your students?’

  ‘I wish I did,’ he said and kissed her hard.

  They swayed together towards the seat cushions, but the gap was too narrow and the folding table jammed in Mike’s back.

  ‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘The caravan as contraceptive.’

  There were a few seconds of silent hurried work as they collapsed the table into the gap and tried to remember the brain-teasing arrangement of the cushions that more or less added up to a mattress, then their clothes were on the floor and the caravan was creaking and complaining, semaphoring their lovemaking to the darkening world outside.

  Gally swayed over Mike, leaning down to kiss him as she moved, seeing unbidden in her head a kaleidoscope of faces that would keep superimposing themselves over his, strangers’ faces that seemed far from strange. At the moment when she should have been centred on the small compass of their own unity, she was seized instead by an overpowering, bewildering and wonderful feeling that the whole of her surroundings had reached in and drawn the envelope of her body outward so that she encompassed the trees, the stream, the walls and all the diffuse green life that made up the old farm. It was a wild, pagan moment and as she felt the accelerating stirrings of their movement she looked up and seemed to see straight through the caravan wall to the house front beyond where a phalanx of unknown friends were silently cheering. In the climax that immediately followed, the old plywood sagged under them, sliding them sideways against the base of the seat and she knew for absolutely certain in that same second that she was now with child.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  It was only when he heard the racket of an unsilenced exhaust approaching down the lane that Mike remembered to tell Gally.

  He poked his head in through the door. ‘Hey! Here’s the guy who’s coming to do the digging. I never thought he’d arrive so early.’ He said it as if she should know about it.

  Gally put down her coffee mug and went outside. ‘Digging?’ she said.

  ‘You know, to find where the water’s coming from.’

  ‘No, I don’t know. Who is he?’

  He heard the storm warning in her voice, cursed himself for carelessness and sought refuge in evasion.

  ‘He works for that farmer. Surely I told you.’

  A yellow JCB swayed in through the gate in a series of jerks accompanied by blasts of noise punched upwards in gouts of black smoke from its exhaust pipe.

  ‘Hold on, Mike,’ Gally called after him as he went to meet it. ‘We haven’t talked about this. Oh hell,’ she said and went after him.

  The driver was young, with a thin, indoors face. He switched off, ignoring them completely, and began to fiddle with a newspaper and a sandwich box, shielded by the glass walls of his cab. Gally was appalled by the size and the brutality of the machine. The rusting, bent spikes along the front of its battered shovel spelt violent ruin. This wasn’t the right tool for their first overture to the house, of that she was sure. This was a tank, a battering ram, a diesel rapist.

  ‘Mike, we can’t do it like this,’ she said. ‘It’s going to make a terrible mess.’

  He looked harassed. ‘What did you expect, love? We can hardly do it with a trowel.’

  ‘You should have asked me. There must be another way. I can use a spade.’

  ‘I did say someone was coming to look at the water.’

  ‘Oh come off it. That’s like saying Genghis Khan was doing voluntary service overseas.’

  Mike looked at her, seeing the extent of her distress and how much further it might go. He was about to reply when the driver finally opened his door and climbed down, silencing them both. He nodded to them and scratched his chin. There was a lot of it to scratch. Some twist in his DNA had given him far more chin than forehead, giving the impression, confirmed as soon as he began to talk, that his mouth rather than his brain led the way.

  ‘So what’s it all about then?’ he asked, looking around.

  ‘We need to dig a channel,’ said Mike.

  ‘We’re just discussing it,’ said Gally simultaneously.

  He looked at them and shrugged. Gally knew she hated him already.

  ‘You discuss it all you like,’ he said. ‘The meter’s running,’ then to her amazement and indignation he walked over to the corner of the house, unzipped his flies without a second’s hesitation and released a stream of steaming urine on to the corner of the stonework.

  ‘Where the HELL did you find HIM?’ Gally hissed.

  ‘I told you. The farmer, wotsisname, Durrell. He works for him.’

  ‘We can’t let him do it. He won’t do it right.’

  ‘Look, Gally,’ Mike hissed as the man was zipping himself up, ‘you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. There’s no easy way of draining it without making a mess. We’ve got to do it.’

  He addressed himself to the driver. ‘Sorry, I didn’t get your name.’

  ‘Slash.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Slash, you know, like Guns ’n’ Roses.’ He mimed playing an invisible guitar with a lot of unnecessary hip movement that went on for far longer than necessary. Gally looked at the corner of the house where steam was still rising. More likely to be from his personal habits, she thought.

  ‘Right. Slash. Er, it’s just that we need to be very careful not to do too much damage. We’ve got to find where the water’s coming from, okay? Then we want to dig a channel to steer it away from the house.’

  Slash looked around and whistled for a bit. ‘Going to be a mess,’ he said eventually. ‘Can’t help it, can you? I mean, water and earth, what you got? You got a mess, right?’

  ‘Well, surely, if we start at the house where it’s coming in and just follow it backwards?’ said Gally, fighting to be reasonable.

  Slash laughed. ‘You ever seen it done?’ he said. ‘Scoop it out, the water comes in, don’t it? Sodding hard to see where it’s coming from. I mean I’ll have a go but don’t expect miracles.’

  ‘There must be some way of telling,’ said Mike. ‘Suppose we dug holes here and there to see which ones fill up?’

 
‘Yeah,’ said Slash, ‘or get one of them meters the Water Board uses.’ They thought he was being helpful for a moment, but he soon dispelled that. ‘Only thing is, I’m here now, aren’t I, so there’s fifty quid on the clock for that and it’ll be ticking up while you’re messing about.’

  ‘What about a water diviner?’ Gally said and neither of them bothered to reply. She found her hands clenching at her sides. All the frustration she felt at the brutal arrogance of ignorant men was focused in her fists. Mike was wearing a hunted expression. She looked at him, then past him as a man walked slowly into view along the lane, a man who would help – Ferney.

  She ran to the gate and he stopped, his face lighting up with a degree of expectation that astonished her.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘How is it with you?’

  ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Well, no. Not fine at all. We’ve got a problem. I just thought you might have an idea.’

  ‘Go on then.’

  ‘This horrible man’s come to dig some drainage ditches and we don’t know where the water’s coming from and I’m absolutely certain he’s going to ruin the whole place if we leave him to it and I just can’t stand that happening and I thought, well, you knowing the place so well, you might . . . have some idea.’ She tailed off, thinking it sounded rather silly, but he smiled at her with an expression that stripped years from his age and brought a huge involuntary smile from her in exchange. She felt much better after that.

  ‘I think I might,’ he said, and she opened the gate for him.

  She followed him over to the other two. ‘Good morning, young Eric,’ said Ferney to the digger driver and the unmasked Slash looked a little sheepish.