Ferney

by James Long

  ‘No, I don’t,’ he said firmly. ‘You tell me.’

  ‘Well, Mike thinks it’s silly. He says it would be a bit twee.’

  ‘What does he mean by that?’ Ferney sounded younger, stronger, irritated.

  ‘He means it’s a bit self-conscious to put it up again. He says nobody even knows how it was exactly, so he thinks we should just let it lie there.’

  Ferney sat back and digested this in silence then he came to a decision. ‘You tell him I know exactly how it was. I told you. There’s a picture.’

  ‘Yes, you said. Is it a photo?’

  ‘Course it’s not. That stone fell down long before photos came along. There’s a painting.’

  ‘Can I see it?’

  ‘Oh yes, of course you can. That’s what I said.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  He started to get out of his chair.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Stay there. Tell me and I’ll find it.’

  ‘The room right at the back. Go and see.’

  She went out into the hall. The bungalow was L-shaped and beyond the kitchen two doors opened off a short passage. She tried the nearest. It took her into what had probably been intended as a garage, but it was full of shelves from floor to ceiling, some with their contents hidden under dustsheets, some crammed with boxes and objects of all sorts. She looked round for a painting but only had time to take in what looked like a row of clocks shrouded in clear plastic bags when his voice came from the front room.

  ‘The door at the end. Not the other one!’

  She closed the door quietly and opened the other. It was a study or perhaps a tiny library, one wall lined with full bookshelves, the other dominated by a great painting about four feet wide. The frame was battered, intricate gilt and the picture itself was opaque dark brown, parts of it nearly black. It looked heavy and indecipherable at first glance. She put the light on and it made little difference. She peered closely at the surface, but that only made it harder to see the tiny variations in darkness that gave away the shape. Standing back again, she could make out the outline of a house surrounded by trees. A lighter, oblique patch indicated something tall and grey poking through the vegetation. She felt a thrill of recognition. Their house, undoubtedly. Their stone, the Bag Stone as it had once been. When? Oh, to see through the years of encrusted grime, but after looking for a while, letting her eyes stray where they would, she began to feel it was starting to reveal itself. Putting together her image of the house now with the faint, dark suggestions of the picture, she could make sense of the outlines, give it proportion, place the stone properly. Mike had to see this. Could he? Would she be able to bring him into Ferney’s house? It puzzled her that such a problem could exist.

  There was a gate at the front of the house and another lighter patch above it. She leaned closer then stood back, squinted, looked closely again, moving her eyes around to make sense of the dirty blurs of lighter paint. There was a figure standing by the gate. Something else. Two figures.

  The pleasure of her company was intense, but in a perverse way he could enjoy it more in his memory now that she’d gone and the strain of possibly making a mistake had eased. Ferney could see the marks of the pain in her and he had to walk such a careful tightrope, watching the way her mind was working, telling her just enough and no more. That meant there was constant tension as well as enormous joy in having her there. Now that she’d gone he could relax and let the pleasure and the rest of it take over.

  She’d wanted to know all about the picture. It came as a shock to find she couldn’t see it quite the way he could. He knew its vivid colours well enough to see through the masking dirt of the years. She wanted to know how he had got it. He was vague. He’d had it for years was all he would say, but yes, it was the cottage and yes, it did show the stone standing – well, leaning anyway. Not all that accurately, there had been a lot of artist’s licence taken with that picture, but the man who’d painted it had insisted on his right to take liberties with the landscape. Who were the figures? He just smiled. People that lived there long ago.

  When was it painted, she’d asked, and he’d almost told her the date. Not just the year but the month as well, before he saw that would open up far too many questions. He could have told her 1823, that was the year, but all he’d said was, ‘Early last century some time, I expect.’

  If he’d been well he would have gone out when he was alone again and the house was quiet. He would have climbed the hill, revisited the very spot, sat in the grassy hollow for a while, refreshing the memories he wanted to keep, flushing out the rest, discarding the dross to make space. The tight pain in his chest wouldn’t let him go, so instead he dragged his armchair round to the other big window in the end wall and sat back to gaze up the hill beyond the garden where the field had barely changed.

  He blanked out the present and almost immediately heard the mental echo of a roar of exhaust, saw the ghost of a blue Fordson tractor, tearing diagonally down the hill, much too fast, felt his ghost feet running as it slowly, inevitably tipped outwards and tumbled. Horrible, vivid, recent. He pushed that one fiercely away, keeping his mind blank, scanning the ages.

  A musical note came back to him across two hundred years, a note, then a bar, then a refrain. ‘Fill up my loving cup, then you and me shall . . .’ No, not quite. ‘. . . so thou and I shall sup. When the summer’s come again . . .’ then what?

  To be dependent on the random dice-throw of the genes, that was the wild card, the delight and the horror of his lives. Once you’ve had the luck of a voice that could stop fights, silence politicians and make old ladies fall in love, it was hard to be saddled with a raven’s croak next time round.

  The last decade of the eighteenth century, just two and a half old men’s lives ago – everyone scared by the bloodbath going on across the Channel, hearing the tales brought by the escapees, afraid that the anarchy might soon lap British shores. There was a burst of new songs to cloak the fearful French with derisive humour and the singers who lapped them up and spread them were the centres of attention. That one would have been a lonely life indeed but for his voice. It was a life that started in poignant sadness – a life that threw him against his will across the seas, pining for the comfort he couldn’t have. Only his voice rescued him, gave him the solace of instant acceptance, instant friendship as soon as he had started to sing. Then he would be welcomed everywhere he went, loved momentarily by all who heard him, in the narrow circles permitted to him by that family. He was asked to sing whenever he stood still for long enough, smiled at, embraced, toasted and encored every time.

  His voice made living easier in a hard time for living, but won him no deep friendships. What was important was the feeling he had inside him as he sang and that made up for everything. It could transport him up a pathway of soaring, perfect notes to a state of bliss, to a level of enhanced experience which others might have called religious ecstasy. Religion was a closed book to him, a path he saw others take. Song and only song made this life thrilling and it didn’t matter what the songs were so long as they climbed into the clear upper registers where his voice could unfold its wings and fly.

  His unsympathetic father forced his enlistment in the voracious navy so that death got him at the height of his powers and what a death – what a dreadful, confusing struggle back he faced in his next boyhood, born in the wrong place, cut off from all the familiar things that would have grounded him, led him gently to awareness. It was too much to expect anyone to go through that without madness twisting their path. He knew about nightmares. He knew the full horror that dislocation could bring and the overwhelming relief of finding the way back.

  The first powerful memory that had crossed the bridge from dead man to live boy was the pure delight of soaring song which filled his head from the earliest conscious moment of that next time. But cruelly, it was only a memory.

  That next time round he was a toddler as the nineteenth century dawned, adrift in a foreign land, adrift in mind as we
ll as in body. He gurgled and ululated every second of the day but nature had failed to hand out the same rare bounty twice. There was nothing tuneful in this Ferney. From the start, his voice was harsh and wavered unreliably as he tried to hold his notes, but the power of all that glorious, pressing, recent memory kept him trying, hoping right through the travails of his boyhood that he might all at once remember how, as if it was a question of the force of the will, not the physical form of the throat, hoping he would suddenly break through to recapture that lost rapture now only present in his inadequate recollections.

  He’d come back to Penselwood from far away in a suspicious time, come back alone to sanity with no story to tell except that of a wanderer. The girl saved him from despair, as he stepped from nowhere back into their life one day in his teens. She was barely fifteen, short and plain but beautiful to him from the second he saw her by Castle Orchard, and neither needing to know anything much of the other to be sure of what they’d found again. That straightened out the twists in him, but still from time to time he would open his throat and howl a semblance of a song, always to be disappointed. She would forgive him anything but that, so when he felt the need to give voice, he’d go alone up the hill.

  It had been on such an occasion that he’d met the painter, a clear bright day with Napoleon two years safely buried at last and George the Fourth’s poor Queen Caroline dying just three months later. Not surprising, the way George had treated her too. In the countryside they’d talked about it for years afterwards. Nothing new, he thought, in royalty doing its best to drive a coach and horses through the sanctity of marriage.

  He looked again out through the window and past the bushes, up the slope. It wasn’t the same as being up there in person, but he could try to do it from here. Up by the skyline, right at the furthest point of his vision, was the hollow and the hedge. He relaxed, focusing on the song, trying to pull the rest out of it. ‘Fill up my loving cup . . .’ There wasn’t quite enough. He saw an easel but he couldn’t get it right. He tried too hard and the outline kept wriggling around. Easels came to him in a long parade of shapes and sizes, but none that went with the hollow on the hill. He tried for a face, but that was more elusive still, then he sighed and let his head drop on to his chest in defeat. Immediately, as soon as he stopped trying, an unexpected, unbidden image arrived in full force and he half-laughed, half-gasped at the shock of it. He was on to it like a terrier before it could slip away.

  Two legs, waving in the air – well-dressed gentleman’s legs, with shiny black buckled shoes and yellow hose, somewhat darned and now grass-stained. He’d stopped singing, hadn’t he? Yes. He’d been standing there talking to a horse. Horse-calming had always earned Ferney money when he needed it. There were many times, when he was by himself, when he preferred the company of horses to men. Men followed stupid fashions, blocking off their chances to know the world better. Horses didn’t change. They might not be very bright, but they had one abiding driving force, whether pony, Arab or shire horse, and that was a monstrous, all-consuming curiosity.

  All you had to do, however tricky the horse, was attract that curiosity and insist on playing the game your way. Stand there just talking quietly to yourself and gradually drop your voice as the animal came nearer. You could snare almost any horse that way, keep it inching towards you, and however often it would shy away it would come back because it just had to know, just had to get its head closer to hear what it was you were going on about. In the end, when you could barely hear yourself it would be right there next to you, bending its ears to pick up the faint whisper, standing there on your terms, so close it fooled itself into trusting you in its desperation to be in on the secret. Then you’d won. When it had been there, that close, that still, it forgot all about mistrust. Once you were there you had a firm base to build on so the worst of horses could be made useful again. For a man who had the knack, there was good money to be had from winning the trust of bad horses.

  This time he was almost there, doing it just for fun, the horse circling him, five paces off, when it was distracted by something even more interesting. It led him to the hedge, attracted by another oddity it couldn’t ignore. He looked over as it blew and stamped. There on the down-slope of the hill beyond lay an unidentifiable shape, a large white square flat in the grass. He climbed the gate to investigate, but before he reached it he could see it was a canvas, flanked by an artist’s easel tipped on its side, paints strewn from a fallen palette. A painter? Outside? You never saw painters outside. They belonged inside in their studios far away in the towns, not up here on the hill. Then he heard a sound to his right that could have been a cry of joy or of pain and there, sticking up from the ditch, were the legs.

  The man he helped up was perhaps twenty years older than him, in his late forties, tall and fine-looking, but with hair that had quite vanished from the top of his head, leaving only mutton-chop whiskers and patches of greying curls over both ears. A keen pair of dark eyes fixed on him with a wild expression.

  He remembered their conversation with unique clarity. It wasn’t long ago, after all, but more than that, it was rare in those days to talk to a man of education, a man whose ideas were worth dwelling on, who could share his own thoughts with understanding. He’d thought through that conversation many times to keep it fresh, and if in doing so he had edited some of the words, he knew he still had the meaning right.

  ‘Are you well, sir?’ he asked the stranger anxiously and got another odd sound in return, a sound which started with a yelp and turned into a giggle.

  ‘On a day like this? Why should I not be well? Look around you, man. Look at the beauties, the beauties all around you.’

  Ferney did as he was told, but the scene was as familiar as it could be, less wild than of old, more signs of man’s incursions, but still a very fine view. ‘The sun’s out, for sure,’ he said. ‘Did your painting displease you?’

  ‘Painting is all my joy and all my sorrow,’ said the other, suddenly quieter. ‘It is the reason I laugh and the reason those around me weep.’

  He seemed suddenly to become properly aware of Ferney and looked at him with interest. Ferney knew this look, understood its roots in the effortless categorization of English class. He knew his accent was now an English countryman’s accent, but he also knew his clothes showed him in an ambiguous light. They were not gentleman’s outdoor clothes, not impracticably stylish. They were plainer though of good quality, the sort of thing for a quiet day in the garden. He had learned to appreciate good cut and stitching and he was not short of the means to buy it.

  The man’s damaged, distracted air had engaged Ferney’s interest and he introduced himself. There was a silence while the other man, breathing heavily, looked up at the sky and all around at the horizon.

  ‘I am called Ferney Tucker, sir.’ There was no response. ‘And you, if you don’t mind my asking?’ he pressed.

  ‘Me, sir? You would know my name? Why, I am John Nobody. You may call me that. It is easier to tell you who I am not. I am not Mr Landseer. Mr Landseer paints PAINTINGS. He sets nature in its proper place. He CONTROLS it.’ He invested the word with a curling sneer. ‘I am not Mr Turner. Mr Turner gets five hundred guineas for his . . . his yellow pea-soupers. The Academy likes them very much. The Academy does not like me. I am Mr Nobody. No, better, call me Mr Poorman, John Poorman, the bane of my poor parents’ life.’

  He stopped and looked at Ferney closely for a moment.

  ‘Do you know France, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘Most certainly I do,’ said Ferney.

  ‘From the recent hostilities?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking.’

  ‘Think what you will of them. It is only the French who have any time for me, sir. They understand something of me and yet they are not admirers a man would seek out, not with the war so recently past. They wish to buy my paintings, sir, while my fellow countrymen seek only to search out the fault in them.’ He stopped, grunted and swept an arm around the horizon. ‘J
ust look, sir. All around us is the best part of England. Its very bones, its LANDSCAPE. I would pass up all human company just to sit and contemplate a view like this if that were the choice.’

  Ferney, who often thought the same, nodded. The man shook his head fast, blowing out like a horse.

  ‘The men at the Academy would like it if I would only paint more of their BROWN TREES, their fevered twistings of good English greenness into the knotted, dried relics of Italy or Africa. I am too green for them, altogether too green, but I paint what I see and I can do nothing else. Now they are building their National Gallery to fill with their portraits and their historical farragos and their parched, foreign views. There will be no more worthwhile painting in England for thirty years, sir, mark my words. They hate colour. They wage war on colour. I must be drab to suit them and I will not be drab.’

  Ferney found himself almost unnecessary, an ear which barely needed a head attached to it, but he felt moved to say something.

  ‘Well, paint then,’ he said, ‘paint as you see it. Paint as the view dictates.’

  The other man sighed. ‘I have four children, sir. Four children, a wife in poor health and another child to come. The purse commands me.’

  Ferney looked again at the painter. A gentleman did not usually talk of such things.

  ‘Why were you in the ditch?’ he asked bluntly.

  ‘Ah. I was seized with a fury. I threw down my sketch and ran away from the foul thing. I did not see the damned ditch until it had me.’

  Ferney considered. ‘So what was it in your sketch that infuriated you?’

  ‘You are a fierce examiner, sir!’

  ‘You have told me something which interests me. Won’t you tell me all of it?’

  ‘I will show you.’

  The artist led him over to the wreckage of the easel, picked it up, jamming a broken leg in place with difficulty, and set the canvas straight upon it. It was rapid work, energetic and bold. A strong sky of writhing clouds drew the eye into the distance of the plain ahead.