Ferney

by James Long

  ‘It is just a preliminary,’ he said. ‘Only the starting-point for a work I shall make later.’

  Ferney looked at it with interest. ‘I see nothing there to infuriate,’ he said in the end, turning to the man who stood watching him with a frowning face.

  The artist pointed into the distance. ‘Look, sir.’

  ‘Where?’ asked Ferney, puzzled.

  ‘To the south. Do you not see the blot?’

  In the distance a thin wreath of smoke wound into the blue.

  ‘You mean the chimney?’

  ‘That is just what I mean. It is a foul encroachment.’

  ‘You misunderstand perhaps. That smoke is from the new Boulton engine at the Gillingham brewery. Are you saying that steam power is an abomination?’

  ‘In this pure landscape? Yes! And that is not all. I have lately been sketching near that smoke at Parham’s Mill. Do you know it?’

  ‘This side of Gillingham?’

  ‘Indeed. Do you know they plan to tear it down? That beautiful place. They will erect some monstrous modern factory there instead!’

  Ferney turned back to the rough painting and studied it. For a man who appeared to demand great constancy from nature, the artist had taken some considerable licence with the view. Two trees had been conjured from their deep-rooted homes and brought fully a hundred yards closer together to frame the view down to the plain. The border of the woodland stretched far further in the picture than it did in the view before him. That caused him a moment of wonder. The foreground trees apart, the view was just as it had once been before the shrinking of the forest.

  He turned back to his companion. ‘You seem able to set right the damages of time quite well enough with your mind and your brushes. Surely one small speck of smoke cannot hurt?’

  He was surprised by the strength of the despair in the man’s reaction.

  ‘It is not just the smoke! Do you not see? The whole of our land is changing. We are eating it up with our roadways and our vulgar new houses. Now the steam chimneys will stick their intrusions across all our horizontals.’ He began to dance in agitation. ‘Verticals. Precious verticals. On a day like this my painting is full of verticals. I know that God is in his heaven when I go all vertical. I DON’T WANT my verticals to be belching smoke. Do you understand me, sir?’

  Ferney looked at the cloudscape in the picture and then at the landscape before him, and with the benefit of compressed time, he knew that the land writhed for him as much as the clouds did for his companion. ‘No, I do not. You are unduly concerned. I believe you inflict unnecessary unhappiness on yourself.’

  ‘Unduly concerned!’ said the other in an affronted tone.

  ‘Try to let go of your fears. There is nothing fixed. The land does not stay still. Once maybe, but not at any time in the last ten hundred years at the least.’ He stretched out an arm and pointed down the hill. ‘The wood you painted, down there, stretching across the first part of the plain, that was nibbled away. They started eating at it about . . . oh, shall we say, 1500? A hundred years it took. It went for fuel, for ships, for building, and into the void they poured their sheep and cattle. After that King James gave the rest to his benighted friends to hack down for their private purses. You see those fields? They came as the trees went, quickset hedges, hawthorns you would say if you’re a townsman, grown and laid and knotted to divide them, but not all as you see them now, oh no. Over there,’ he pointed south-east with a flourish, ‘there were two fields fifty times the size. You see your green squares now. You might have found more variation for your palette then. They weren’t like that. Ragged strips and open pasture. All the colours of all the different crops. Not for long though. Bang!’ He turned on the startled artist. ‘The commissioners had them. Enclosure. A crime against the countryside and against the common interests of the countrymen. They threw off the little men, gave the wealth to those who already had the money, divided up their fields. Built their roads. You see down there?’ he pointed.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Where it is straight. That’s the commissioners’ road. Drawn on a map. Clapped across the land like a sword-cut through the brotherhood of man. Then after that it was houses. New farmhouses in the new fields. They all went mad about houses. About halfway through Elizabeth’s time, it was. Let’s see, when was that?’

  ‘Elizabeth? Halfway?’ said the other man. ‘My goodness, sir, you seem to be cracking along.’

  ‘History does not take long. Say 1570? Close enough. Houses went out sideways and they went up. Privacy. All at once privacy was the thing. Wealth and privacy. More rooms to hide away in. Cleaner inside, too, so chimneys everywhere. Never mind your brewery chimney now, that was the time when the chimneys sprouted. Then there was the glass and how that changed things.’

  ‘Glass?’ said the artist faintly, mesmerized. ‘Why?’

  ‘The glitter of it. On a bright day. Something never seen before. No glass down here until they started to make it cheap, then suddenly a thousand mirrors flashing back the sunshine.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Now there’s the gas coming. You see that house?’ He pointed towards Milton.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Beyond the copse, by the line of willows.’

  ‘I think I do.’

  ‘The first gas you can see from here. They set the pipes last year. I come up in the evenings sometimes and look out at that light. I imagine it as it will be when all the houses have those bright squares for their night-time windows. Heaven on earth. The sparkling firmament arrayed across our dark land.’

  The artist shuddered.

  Ferney looked at him. ‘You do not like the possibility?’

  ‘It is not MY England, and whether they like it or not, I must paint MY England. You threaten my picture, sir. How can you know? Are you an historian?’ His tone sounded doubtful.

  ‘You might say that.’

  ‘Well. I shall not argue then. In any case, you are an interesting man. I would like to talk more with you, but my gig will soon be waiting.’

  ‘Will you come back?’

  ‘If circumstances allow. I feel almost as though we are friends, you and I. Do you know what I am saying?’ He clasped Ferney’s hand and looked at him anxiously.

  ‘You feel yourself alone and that others understand less well?’ Ferney hazarded.

  ‘YES.’

  ‘Then I do know.’

  ‘I am not valued,’ said the other man quietly. ‘I lived from the generosity of my father until his death. He milled corn, he owned barges, he put the sweat of his brow into the canals and the locks they passed through. He wanted me to work them for him and he never understood that instead I had to paint them. Now I live off the stipend he left. I paint because I must, I absolutely must.’ His voice rose again, ‘There is nothing so grand as standing before a six-footer, stabbing and sweeping away to conjure nature out of the colours on your palette. But I must live and that is getting harder.’

  An idea came into Ferney’s mind.

  ‘There is a view near here that I like very much,’ he said, ‘and I think it might appeal to you, too. I should be pleased if you would come down to see it with me on your way.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  The alarm on the Teasmaid woke Ferney from a dream of horses. He rolled over in bed to lift the steaming cup from the machine before the irritation in his lungs and chest got him and he slopped tea on the duvet as he fought to control the coughing.

  It wasn’t so bad now that he knew why he was ill. It was just the price to pay, that was all, but it told him that he had to take control. He was fully awake now, alert, thinking about priorities. The best way would be the slow and gentle way if he could afford the time, but he knew he couldn’t, knew from the feeling deep in his gut that slow and gentle wasn’t an option – knew, too, that he couldn’t count on another opportunity to kick it off when the man Mike would be away. What to pick on? That was the question. He turned to the bedside table and the pile of books there.

  Boo
ks were a boon. Learning to read and the mushroom growth of the paperback were two of the greatest blessings of the twentieth century as far as he was concerned. They ranked right up there with central heating and compact disc recordings of J. S. Bach and far above the motorcar for someone who had so much to lose by leaving home. It was history books almost always for him, history books and travel books. Novels mostly skated over the top of life, though he’d dip in and out of them, looking for signs that they might repay his interest. Just sometimes one would hit the mark, showing a wider understanding.

  On rarer occasions, when a novel really made him think, he would get excited by what he found, detecting a degree of special wisdom in the writer. Once or twice a book had even made him wonder if the author could really have gained such insight in just one lifetime or if perhaps there were other people out there going through the same cycle as himself. Such writers were indeed worth reading, but you wasted so much time on the dross trying to find them. Not that history books were that much more reliable, but at least they helped fill in the gaps and string things out in the right order.

  He found what he wanted and began to read. It was the seventeenth century seen through twentieth-century eyes so it wasn’t quite right, but then how could it be? He’d seen this before in modern historians, so used to the telephone, the radio and rapid travel that the isolated, meandering mistakes of a peasant army trudging through rain and mud to total defeat in the wrong place at the wrong time seemed specially tragic, as if it could have been so easily avoided. It couldn’t, of course. That was the way life had been for almost all of history, blundering in a limited compass inside an opaque outer ring where time and distance were so much less adjustable. He read quietly for an hour, then put the book down and began to think.

  Ferney’s memories, because there were so many, came in different bands of quality. At the lowest end, there were the fleeting shreds that would come back to him as little more than the gut feeling that something he knew was right. His dreams were full of bits and pieces like that and often he would lie in bed on waking trying to hang on to some tiny, slippery, wriggling end of an image so that he could drag it into the daylight.

  If he succeeded that might take him to the second level, where he could use the visual tricks, go to the right spot and see what happened when he tuned the landscape.

  Next up were the familiar big events, the ones he’d been over a thousand times, and they were like a painting to him, but a painting that was covered in layer after layer of old varnish, so that he had to take great care that what he could still see was the original and not the retouching of memory because every time he took them out to look he added another layer.

  Right at the heart of him were the clear, core delights and catastrophes and they were more like flies in amber, every detail preserved by the power of emotion vested in them. The thread of his long love story ran through them and it was one of these that he had chosen for the day’s work. He feared what was to come, but he knew it had to be done and hoped that she would, in the end, forgive him for it.

  Mike really hadn’t been at all happy at the idea of leaving Gally for another two nights in the caravan by herself.

  ‘Why don’t you come to London?’ he’d asked before they got up. ‘We might as well both use the flat if we’re going to keep it on.’

  It was in his mind that she seemed a little better, but he didn’t trust the reasons. He was sure that the only long-term answer was for her to continue to confront the horrors of her childhood with the help of caring experts. Finding solace in a house, a place and an old man’s disquieting ways could be a dangerously wrong turning. Whatever route she took, he wanted them to take it together.

  ‘London?’ she’d said incredulously. ‘When I can be down here?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said unhappily. ‘The door doesn’t even lock properly and it’s in the middle of nowhere.’

  ‘No, no, it’s really not. It’s right in the middle of . . . somewhere.’

  It had sounded funny at the time and he had laughed, giving up the argument until later, but she’d meant it. Even waking once, by herself in the night as a pair of owls shrieked at each other, there were no imagined horrors lurking in the dark trees beyond the window. In her childhood, and often since then, she had been to places that seemed to reject her – where, when dark fell, she had to keep her mind free of imaginings in case the shreds of them should catch and cling together and start to form into something frightful. Here at the house she knew there would be no such fears, though down on the road and out along the ridge she knew there were less comfortable places. The house and its surroundings gave her a complex sense of security, a guard dog that had once been fierce before it knew her.

  The morning was luxurious. She drank her coffee slowly, sitting on the doorstep in the sun. By the time the builders arrived to start underpinning the gable end, she had everything ready for them, an area – already desecrated by the digger – marked off for their mixers and their supplies. She had cut back those plants which might be in the way and lifted some of the smaller ones wholesale, bedding them carefully in out of harm’s reach and hoping they would survive.

  Don Cotton’s young foreman, Rick, was quite unlike his pugnacious boss, cheerful, straightforward and prepared to listen to her precise requirements about what should be touched and what should not.

  Soon she had nothing to do but watch and think – and Ferney’s painting was all she could think about. She wanted to see it again and talk to him some more. It was easier without Mike there and she wished there wasn’t that unnecessary tension when the two men were together. Ferney seemed, in some way she couldn’t yet pin down, completely integral with the house and Mike somehow wasn’t. She suppressed the thought. Since finding the house there seemed an increasing number of thoughts she had to suppress.

  In the middle of the afternoon there was nothing to do but watch the builders at work and she had already done enough of that. She wanted exercise and the hill beyond the road beckoned, exciting uplands from which to fix the surroundings in her head. She walked along the lane to the field gate, swinging the garland ring in her hand, looking for fresh flowers in the hedgerow to bring it to life again. The field had been grazed and she climbed the slope easily, turning from time to time to look back over her shoulder at the diminishing house. Shielded by a conspiracy of contours, it disappeared into the dip before she could get a really good view, but beyond it the flat land to the south was opening up in compensation. As she neared the top of the hill she could see the squat, straight-edged shape of an Ordnance Survey trig point. She came nearer. Just beyond it was a flat stone, a natural bench, and sitting on the stone, looking round at her with an intent expression on his face, was Ferney.

  The only surprise was that there was no surprise. She had the sense for a moment of the man as a magnet, his field spreading down the hill to show some part of her where he was and perhaps draw her to his presence.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘You must be feeling better.’

  ‘I’ll last the year out,’ he said. ‘I was coming down to see you, but I should have known you’d come up here.’

  ‘It’s the first time I’ve been,’ she said, then, ‘Why do you laugh?’

  ‘I’ve got a few things to tell you,’ he said. ‘Have you the time?’

  ‘Mike’s away. All the time in the world. There’s some things I want to ask you, too.’

  ‘Go on then, sit down. You first.’

  Gally’s way was the direct way. ‘You don’t like Mike, do you? Why? I don’t want you to dislike him. It makes things . . . harder.’

  Ferney seemed to withdraw a little into himself, looking away then back at her.

  ‘I don’t mind him. Just haven’t got the time for folk, I suppose.’

  How could he explain it? Ordinary people could come and go but they only ever brushed past his life. It took a profoundly unusual character to pierce the barriers that time and experience had set around him.
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  ‘All folk or just him? You’ve got time for me.’

  ‘Most people you meet when you’re . . . my age, you’ve heard it all before. There’s nothing new in them. You’re not like that.’

  ‘You hardly know me, Ferney.’

  ‘I hardly know you? Do you feel that?’

  ‘Well no, I don’t really,’ she said, groping for words, ‘but it sounds silly to say so.’

  ‘You are married to him, are you?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Why do you ask?’

  ‘You don’t wear a ring.’

  ‘Oh. I don’t like rings.’

  He nodded. ‘Do you know why?’

  ‘No . . . well, they make me feel funny.’

  ‘What sort of funny?’

  ‘Claustrophobia of the finger, Mike calls it. A bit panicky, I suppose. Why do you ask?’

  ‘I know you,’ he said. ‘I know more about you than you think.’

  That nettled her a little and she looked at him defiantly.

  ‘I know you’re expecting,’ he said.

  Time stopped. She stared. No one knew. Mike didn’t know. She barely knew herself. It was just an odd little certainty scarcely two days old.

  ‘That’s more than I do,’ she said, but the words hung in the air, transparently false, and she wished she could take them back. She couldn’t catch the sob that came.

  ‘What is it?’ he said, concerned.

  ‘Nothing. I had a . . .’

  He waited a long time, but she was staring into the ground, unable to find the words.

  ‘You lost a baby?’ he suggested gently.

  She just nodded.

  ‘You’ll be all right this time,’ he said, and she looked at him as if he were mad but her eyes slowly dried.

  He papered it over for them. ‘Do you like your house?’ he said.

  ‘I love it.’

  ‘Just as it is?’

  ‘Just as it is. More or less.’

  ‘There’s nothing fixed about old houses. Bits and pieces change.’

  ‘We’ve got to fix it one way or another. I think I’d like to fix it just the way it was in your picture. I wish I could see that a bit more clearly.’