by James Long
‘Go on then, tell me.’
‘Only if you agree to something.’
‘What?’
‘That all you’ll do is listen. For now at any rate. Just listen to me so it has a chance to sink in. Another time, when you’re a bit more used to it, we’ll talk it over.’
She nodded and sitting there in full darkness he began, gently, obliquely.
‘Supposing there was somebody, living in a place like this, a long time ago, and he comes to a pretty unfortunate end, you see. Violent times. Anyway, he dies and that ought to be the end of it. It’s not, though, not the end of it. A bit later on, there’s a young lad, oh maybe two years old, no more than that, and the lad starts remembering things here and there. He knows more than anyone his age ought to. Doesn’t know exactly how he knows, but he does. So of course, he attracts a bit of attention, the way you’d expect, cos he’s such a quick learner, better than all the rest of his age. He’s talking before they’ve stopped crawling and as he grows up, he’s better with tools, better at skinning meat, better at all the things that have to be learnt. Doesn’t always pay, being better like that. Puts people against you and as I say it was violent times, so before he got much beyond his twenties maybe he said a bit too much and he got someone’s knife between his ribs one night.’
Ferney looked sideways at Gally, gave her a small, almost apologetic smile. ‘Next time round, see, he wouldn’t make that mistake again.’
His voice was tiny, stirring the cold atoms of air just enough to reach her next to him at the centre of a vast dome of night.
‘Next time round?’ she said and the thought that came to her in the silence, grew and grew until it burst out in speech. ‘How many next times were there?’
‘All the ones from then to now,’ he said. ‘A lot too many to count.’
‘Oh God.’
‘They weren’t all lives you’d remember,’ he added. ‘No medicines. All that sickness. Plagues and that. Sometimes you’d barely get born then you’d be starting all over again.’
‘And that’s you?’ she said. ‘All of them?’
He didn’t need to answer and nothing in her prompted her to challenge it.
‘And what about me? You’re saying I come into this?’
He drew a breath. ‘Can you imagine it?’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose you can. You get a bit demanding after a few lives. Too many people, down the years, all pretty much the same. No one else can understand, you see. They wouldn’t believe you, anyway, not unless they’d been through it too and of course they haven’t. Just all that long line of noisy, foolish people. You couldn’t love them. They’d keep dying on you and you’d still have the memory next time round, still have to find another one to love – another one who wouldn’t understand.’ He took her hand and his touch felt like the first electric touch of a suitor. ‘That would be impossible to bear, you know it would – but there was one thing that saved the day, saved all the days. There was one person who did understand.’
‘One person? The same one, all the time?’ She couldn’t help the sudden edge in her voice.
He didn’t answer directly. ‘Suppose he was lucky enough, this man, right at the start there, not to be alone, so it wasn’t just him who died but the two of them. That’s how it chanced to be. It was never easy, though. Their timing didn’t always work out. Some lives, they might not meet up at all, might be the wrong ages, but some lives they would, because it was always in the same place, you see? It was the place that held them.’
She was shaking her head not out of denial but out of an unwillingness to hear it. ‘No, Ferney.’
‘Yes,’ he said and his voice was suddenly very firm. ‘Yes, Ferney and Gally, always. Right down through the years. And always here. You’ve come home, Gally.’
‘Home? No, you can’t say that.’
‘It is your home, our home.’
If she just moved towards him the slightest fraction, she knew his arms would open and part of her longed to know what that felt like. She recoiled from that thought, became abruptly aware of the time, of the darkness, of the pale shadow of Mike. She jumped up, calmness gone. ‘I must go. I’m sorry. This is too much.’
‘Gally,’ he called as she was walking quickly away. ‘I’m doing nothing we haven’t both agreed to. You’ll know that soon.’
That made her run, stumbling in the gloom, anxious to be alone, hating going away from him, until suddenly she was down at the hedge, going through the gate as if it spelt safety. When she walked distraught into the yard she simply failed to register the car standing there, so that when Mike opened the door of the caravan, looking anxious and saying, ‘There you are at last,’ she looked back at him as if she’d never seen him before in her life.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Mike’s anger nipped their best hope in the bud. If he hadn’t been so upset she might have been able to lift the veil straightaway, to tell him a little bit about the huge truth that was flapping round inside her head – nothing like the whole of it because it was too close and too raw, but perhaps enough to have earthed some of the unsettling charge that had built up inside her. She spent a few moments searching for the right way to start, but the words weren’t in her to do that lightly and then, after casting around, she realized that it just wasn’t possible. The cramped caravan was beating with the anger smelted out of his alarm at her absence. She knew it was born out of love and only aimed at her for lack of an alternative target. She also knew that if she gave him half a chance he would immediately swing the full force of that anger on to Ferney, so she told something that was only half a truth short of a lie.
‘I was sitting on top of the hill. I lost track of time. I’m so sorry.’
‘I was doing my nut,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t think what had become of you. I was about to get a search party out.’
‘What sort of trip have you had?’
‘Bloody tiring – then I get back to a cold, empty caravan and you’re nowhere in sight and I’m bloody starving.’
For a moment she couldn’t push away the thought that he was smaller in spirit than she had realized, but then guilt overcame her. She saw that he couldn’t bring himself to admit he was worried for her safety for fear it would sound demeaning. She poured him a whisky, suppressed the subversive clamour within her and talked to him of student numbers, faculty appointments, budget restrictions and traffic jams until he felt sufficiently loved.
‘Have you been lonely?’ he asked her in the end.
‘No, not for a moment,’ she said, before it occurred to her that he wanted to hear the opposite.
‘You can’t have had anyone to talk to,’ he said. ‘Well, not unless you count the builders.’
‘I’ve hardly talked to them at all.’
‘Did you sleep well? No bad dreams?’
‘I was fine.’
He looked at her with an expression that said she was holding something back and from then on, through the remains of an unsatisfactory evening, there was a tiny unnatural edge to their conversation which disturbed them both.
In the morning, unusually, Gally woke after Mike and found him sitting on the caravan step in the sunshine holding her sketch in his hands and looking at the front of the house. It was Saturday, so they had the place to themselves.
‘What’s this all about?’ he said.
‘It’s the way the house used to be. I found out that the front door’s definitely been moved. Don’t you think it would all work much better if we put it back in the middle again?’
He pursed his lips and squinted at her. ‘You found out? How did you find out? Did the old man tell you?’
‘He’s got a picture of the house. He let me go and see it. Then I looked at the stonework and it was really obvious. You can see the edges of the old doorway. The builders say it would hardly cost any extra to put it back there and . . .’
‘You went to see the old man, wotsisname, Franny.’
‘Ferney. Yes I did.’ Why did it feel to both of th
em like a confession?
‘You didn’t tell me.’
He looked extraordinarily hurt, as if he had some idea of the scale of the problem that Ferney claimed to pose. He couldn’t know. She shrugged, tried to get him off the subject. ‘We’d need planning, but that wouldn’t be difficult because we could easily show the planners there used to be a door . . .’
‘You went to his house?’
‘Well, yes. Just to see the picture. You don’t mind that, surely.’
Silence now from Mike and the tiny dislocation between them grew wider as three or four tense seconds crawled away.
‘I don’t like the idea of you rushing off to see him as soon as my back’s turned,’ he said in the end.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said, nettled. ‘You make it sound like I’m having an affair. The poor old man’s over eighty.’
That made Mike seem absurd even to himself.
‘It’s nothing like that. I just find him rather rude. I think he’s trying to get you on his side.’
‘What side? Why should there be sides?’
‘I don’t know, but there are and he’s definitely playing on the other team,’ said Mike. He couldn’t say what he really meant, that she was fragile, that he worried constantly about her, feared that she might easily be derailed, to go crashing off the track of sanity into the unrelenting swamp of madness.
Because he couldn’t find the words they left it there and led a separate morning clearing weeds and saplings from opposite ends of the site. At lunchtime he put up the white flag, went down beyond the house to the valley where she was emptying the barrow and called to her.
‘Let’s go down to the Hunter’s Lodge and get something to eat.’
‘Yes, all right.’
He went to take the handles of the wheelbarrow from her and started in surprise at her hand.
‘You’re wearing your wedding ring.’
She looked down at her hand as though she hadn’t known. ‘Oh yes.’
‘I thought you didn’t like the feeling . . .’
‘It’s okay here.’
‘Oh good.’ He smiled broadly and she gave him a hug.
It was fifteen minutes’ walk down the lanes, talking mostly of plumbing, bathroom designs and central heating. They squeezed into a corner of a bar that was crowded with travellers breaking the trek to the west. At the end of the meal Mike picked up their folded jackets from the window seat next to them and the other ring, the old ring, rolled treacherously out of Gally’s pocket and bounced on to the table.
Gally had forgotten it was there, tucked it away into a corner of her mind with all the other challenges of the previous day – too difficult to handle with Mike around – so that she froze as they both looked at it.
‘Where did that come from?’ he said in surprise.
‘Oh, it’s just something I found at the house,’ said Gally. ‘It’s nothing much.’ She took it, too quickly, and made to put it back in her pocket.
‘Hang on a second. Can I see it?’ he said and she gave it to him reluctantly.
They went outside and he stood in front of the pub turning it over in his fingers.
‘Nothing much?’ he said. ‘You must be joking.’ He rubbed hard at it. ‘That’s gold and there’s a stone in it. It might even be a diamond.’
‘No, surely not. Do you really think so?’ she said brightly. ‘I expect it’s just glass. I was planning to clean it up and see.’
She held out a hand, but he didn’t want to give it back.
‘It’s got a bit of age to it,’ he said. ‘I think we should take it to a museum. It’s incredible. Where was it?’
She could bear neither to lie nor to tell the truth. ‘Near the front door,’ she said, ‘in the earth.’
He was sharper than she expected. ‘Which front door?’
‘The one in the middle – where it used to be.’
He stared at her. ‘I wish I knew what was going on here.’
Back at the house he insisted that she should show him and it was obvious straightaway that she’d been digging through the earth.
‘I wanted to see where the step used to be,’ she said lamely, hating the way circumstances were pushing her ever further from the path of pure truth, but Mike had his mind on other things.
‘We should go deeper,’ he said. ‘There might be something else.’
‘It’s difficult. The ivy roots are in the way.’
‘We can cut through them, pull it all up.’
‘But that’ll kill the ivy.’
‘If you want the front door here, that ivy root’s got to go anyway.’
‘So you agree we should have the door here?’
‘Well, yes, maybe. We’ll see.’
It was the first moment at which Gally fully accepted the whole truth about the ring, that she had told the story herself, had been prompted but not manipulated by Ferney into saying what had been buried and where it could be found. Until then she’d kept that aspect of the story wrapped up in her mind as a dangerous curiosity – something it was more comfortable to ignore, to stay agnostic. Now, looking at the earth and the ivy root, she knew with complete certainty that she had known the ring was buried there and she now knew equally that there should be nothing else there. Recognizing that knowledge, she also knew for certain that life was never going to be quite the same again.
There was no convincing way that she could tell Mike he was wasting his time, and what she had just learnt was claiming space in her mind, so, preoccupied, she helped with the harmless game.
It was doubly bewildering therefore when she discovered she was wrong. Mike had been working away with a trowel on the undisturbed surface just to the other side of the root for no more than two or three minutes when they heard a pronounced ‘chink’.
‘There’s something else,’ he said excitedly. ‘It sounds like glass.’
He scratched around with the point of the trowel, then used his fingers to shovel out the loosened earth.
‘It’s a bottle.’ He sounded triumphant.
It must be modern, she thought, but when he’d exposed two inches of stubby neck, sealed with a hard earthy mass which seemed to cover a decayed cork, he destroyed that thought.
‘Brilliant,’ he said. ‘Look at this. Eighteenth century, I should say.’ He went on delving and the shape that emerged with difficulty from the packed earth had a conical neck, widening out into a squat globule of black-looking glass. He eased it out of the hole. ‘It’s an onion bottle,’ he said. ‘What a find.’
Gally stared at it, disconcerted. The ring had been the embodiment of the faint shreds of a dream, only really surprising in its solidity and weight. This thing in front of her was completely alien, unknown. It had no place there and that was wrong. Mike carried it to the builder’s stand-pipe, ran water over it carefully washing off the dirt. It shone iridescent, dark green. A lump of earth came away from the side of it and revealed a round glass seal, moulded on to the neck.
‘Onion?’ she said faintly. ‘What have onions got to do with it?’
‘Oh that’s just what they call this shape,’ said Mike. ‘It’s an old wine bottle. Look at this. It’s got initials on the seal and a date. RW 1680. I think there’s something inside it, too.’
He held it up to the sun. A thick layer of paste an inch deep covered the bottom and bulged under a jellied crust as he tilted it.
‘Why would it have been there under the step?’
‘I know why,’ he said suddenly. ‘It’s a witch bottle. That makes sense. They buried them under doorsteps to keep evil away.’
No, she thought, there were no witch bottles. We didn’t . . . Ferney didn’t believe in things like that.
‘What would be in it?’
‘A horrible mess, I should think. Blood and urine and bits of toenail. I seem to remember they used to burn their hair and put that in too. You wouldn’t want to open it.’
Gally hated the bottle and its uninvited intrusion into the fad
ed archive of her memory, but Mike was as pleased as punch. It was his find not hers and she knew it gave him back a proprietorial sense, put him back in the driving seat.
‘We could take it in next week,’ he said. ‘When I come home. Maybe we should try the Taunton Museum. I’m sure they’ve got people who would know. They could have a look at the ring, too. I shouldn’t be surprised if they’re worth quite a bit, those two.’
‘You’re not saying we should sell them, surely?’ she said.
‘Well no, not the bottle. It would be nice to keep that, but the ring might bring in a few bob.’
‘I found the ring,’ she said. ‘It’s nothing to do with you,’ and he just stared at her. ‘Anyway, what’s this “when I get back” business?’
‘Oh, I was going to tell you – haven’t had a chance. I’m afraid I’ve been lumbered with a conference because Tony Briggs can’t go. Stafford or somewhere. It’s only a couple of days or so.’
What seemed to her to be more alarming than anything else was that she wanted him to go and had to cover her disappointment when he said he didn’t have to leave until Monday afternoon. The ring had pulled her off balance, swung her violently towards another world that already felt more compelling. There were a score of questions she wanted to ask and that, she knew, was something she could only do in Mike’s absence.
Ferney wasn’t on the hilltop on Monday. She went straight there as soon as she was by herself, letting all the enormous implications of his words out into her conscious mind immediately Mike had gone. She sat on the stone in Ferney’s place, but everything was uncompromisingly twentieth century. Aircraft from Yeovilton and a tractor refolding the tired earth for the thousandth time dominated her sense of the scene before her. In any case she knew it was his hilltop, susceptible to his magic, not hers. Whatever was in her head seemed too big to think about, so that she kept bouncing off it into something approaching laughter. There was happiness there – a muddled hope that here at last lay the clues to the bits of her that fooled her, scared her, trapped her.
A more sensible voice questioned that. Where is all this going? she thought. Wouldn’t it be wiser to stop now? To stay away from the old man and just remember it as his joke? But that wasn’t possible. Something inside her was pushing at the closed doors, determined to find its way back to freedom, and there were so many things she needed to ask. She recognized and felt shocked by the sudden knowledge that Mike’s feelings were, for the moment, a side issue. That triggered a burst of guilt. Mike always put her first, she knew that. She owed him an immeasurable amount for the months he had spent beckoning her out from her tunnel, even if she had so far been unable to follow his coaxing. She owed him devotion and affection, but the rest, through nothing she could control, seemed in abeyance.