Ferney

by James Long

  ‘There’s no need for that,’ she said stiffly. ‘You may treat your wife like that, Mr Cotton, but I can promise you I speak for both of us.’ She saw Rick grin behind his boss’s back. ‘I’ve told you right from the start that I don’t want the house looking like some horrible modern conversion.’

  ‘Well, you’re obviously the one calling the shots,’ he said irritatingly and looked round at the house. ‘Though I must say I don’t know what you see in all the old stuff that makes it so worth keeping.’

  Far too much, thought Gally wearily, as a heavy ball of inaccessible information rolled around her skull.

  She immersed herself in the garden for a few hours, working away on the far side of the house to clear the old borders and free the flowerbeds from the obscuring, harsh-stemmed invasion of weeds. I do this well, she thought. I don’t ever have to wonder which the weeds are. Is that because I’ve done it so many, many times? Logic and intellect couldn’t help her, but the calm, repetitive work gradually pushed out deliberate thought and she had time to be nothing but herself. In this meditative state the question still forced itself on her, but on a level that seemed to dwell slowly in her soul, not quickly in her intellect. She pulled up a weed with hands that had always been hers and yet all at once seemed not to be hers. Dropping the fractured stalk, she gazed for a long time at her fingers and thought they had become less real, less intrinsically part of her, nothing more than a soft, convenient, temporary machine – the latest in a long line. She liked her hands. They were graceful hands and the receptive, sensitive skin of her fingertips gave touch a high ranking in the order of her senses.

  It came to her abruptly that they would not always have been like this. What if they had been malformed, damaged? What if chance genes had thickened the skin, dulled her ability to sense the world? Would that not have tilted the balance that made her what she was? It would certainly have changed her perception. The conviction grew in her then that she was not what she thought. If there was an enduring Gally, and now she was back at the house there was no longer anything inside her arguing against that with any conviction, then it would have had to sit inside a shell that had at least some temporary say in what that composite creature was.

  She rocked back on her heels as the implication spread slowly through her, trying to imagine how different it would be if she were shorter, fatter, lame. She found herself feeling the shape of her own head with hands coated with parching earth-dust. If her brain were smaller, physically different, what then? Would she be a different mongrel Gally? If a different body held different glands would she be faster to anger, less able to reason?

  For just a second she had a clear idea of the way past the blockage in her head – that if she let go of trying to find this modern version of herself in the past and could focus instead on the bit that was always there, she would have much more chance of breaking through. Trying to pursue that idea before it fled, a voice broke in to interrupt and sabotage her attempt, an old female voice rich with indignant affront.

  ‘My goodness me, you’ve really let my garden go, haven’t you?’ and she looked up in shock to see Mrs Mullard standing, bent acutely over a walking stick, at the corner of the house.

  ‘I didn’t hear a car,’ she said, groping for meaning in the words.

  ‘That’s because I didn’t come by car,’ said the old woman a bit more cheerfully. She prodded the earth with her stick. ‘You have to keep at it, you see, or the weeds get in. You young people think you can just sit back and say I’ll do it next week. Still I daresay you’ll know better next time.’

  Gally nearly protested but she bit her lip and nodded instead.

  ‘How long is it since you were here last?’ she asked gently.

  Mrs Mullard peered round her for a minute before answering. ‘Oh, not very long,’ she said. ‘We had to stop coming because of the petrol rationing.’

  Gally took her round to the front of the house and introduced her to Rick and the builders. Mrs Mullard wasn’t inclined to let them off lightly either.

  ‘You young men should be more careful,’ she said severely, pointing at the end wall. ‘There’s no call to go bashing things around like that.’

  Gally sat her down in the caravan and made her a cup of tea.

  ‘How did you get here?’ she said as she arranged biscuits on a plate.

  The old woman put four spoonfuls of sugar in her tea, stirred it with one hand and took a biscuit with the other. As she could not have weighed much more than six stone, it spoke of an extraordinary metabolism. Perhaps she stocks up when she can, Gally thought, remembering the bleak sparsity of her own home.

  ‘On the bus,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t know there was a bus.’

  ‘It wasn’t the usual driver,’ said the old woman. ‘I think they’ve changed the route. He went a bit wrong so I walked the last stretch.’

  ‘Where from?’

  ‘Oh down the way somewhere,’ she said vaguely and Gally suddenly wondered how many miles she had walked to get to this once familiar place.

  ‘I’m being very careful about what they do to the house,’ Gally said. ‘It had suffered a bit since you left, you know.’

  ‘Nothing lasts, does it? But I suppose you’ve got lots of time to get it the way you want it.’

  Gally suddenly felt a need to confide, to share her secret with someone else, and by taking the risk, cement the certainty of it.

  ‘Not that long, really. I’m going to have a baby so we’ll want to get everything done in time for that.’

  Mrs Mullard showed what seemed to be disbelief as she looked at Gally’s slim body. ‘When are you due?’

  Gally immediately wished she had never raised the subject. She could hardly say eight and a half months.

  ‘Not for quite a while,’ she said lamely. ‘After the New Year.’

  Mrs Mullard looked at her calculatingly. ‘You might not want to tell him that,’ she said.

  ‘You mean Ferney?’

  The old woman nodded. ‘He won’t like it. He doesn’t like children being born here.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Who knows? Who knows the half of what he does with his ways and his spade?’ She looked hard at Gally. ‘It’s why I came really – I thought it was only right to warn you.’

  ‘To warn me about Ferney?’

  ‘Well, not so much Ferney, except for the baby. More about the tramp.’

  Gally poured her some more tea. The tramp? One thing at a time.

  ‘What happened to you here?’ she said quietly.

  Mrs Mullard dropped her voice. ‘I had to leave the house, you know. He made me. I was having a baby and he didn’t like that. I was a bit younger than I am now.’

  ‘How did he make you leave?’

  ‘He’s a strange one, he is. He had a wife then. I got on well with her. She was . . .’ Mrs Mullard’s voice trailed off and she looked momentarily confused. ‘Well, silly me. I was going to say she was called Gally but that’s your name, isn’t it, my dear?’

  Gally’s heart stepped sideways. ‘Where did they live?’ she said.

  ‘Down in the village. A nice cottage. Happy as clams they were.’

  ‘Lamberts Lea?’

  ‘That was it. Peacocks.’

  ‘They had peacocks?’

  ‘No of course not. Whatever gave you that idea? Anyway then I started with the baby.’

  ‘And that was a problem? Why did it matter?’

  ‘You ask him. I don’t know. He was always up round here. He’d behave like this was his house half the time, but I didn’t mind because he used to do the drains and things like that for me, any odd jobs. He was good with the house. Until the baby.’

  ‘I don’t understand what happened.’

  ‘He didn’t want me to have the baby here, you see. He said it would be bad for it. Too damp or some nonsense like that. I had the other house from my aunt.’

  ‘The one you’re in now?’

  ‘Yes, that
’s it. I’m just there for a bit, you know.’ Then her eyes clouded over as she looked out of the caravan window at the builders and gave a little shrug. Gally waited until she started again.

  ‘He packed me off down there with some excuse – said the drains were blocking, though I hadn’t noticed. Then I came back a bit later and you should have seen it. Water everywhere and the whole wall coming down. ’Course there wasn’t any choice then. I had to go off to the other house and what with one thing and another . . .’

  ‘Didn’t Mr Mullard have anything to say about it?’ said Gally, greatly daring.

  ‘Mr Mullard, poor darling. My Johnny? He never came back from the war. His name’s on a big stone at Vimy Ridge,’ she said with quiet pride. ‘He fought with the Canadians – all through Ypres and the Somme and then they got him.’

  Gally tried to work it out. That was the First World War, so the baby couldn’t have been Johnny’s. It was much later.

  Mrs Mullard helped her out. ‘I was married at sixteen, widowed at eighteen,’ she said. ‘Bessy, my girl, she wasn’t Johnny’s. It was the tramp.’

  She got up, leaning on her stick, awkward in the cramped aisle of the caravan and slowly climbed down using its shaky step. Gally thought that was it, but the old lady turned and jerked her head to show she should follow. Gally walked next to her, matching her speed, wondering. Mrs Mullard pushed gingerly through the still overgrown edges of the yard to the crumbling stub wall of a collapsed shed, now no more than two feet high, the remains of its tin roof lying aslant in the brambles.

  ‘It’s a good place for wood, this one,’ she said. ‘Nice and dry.’ She stopped and gazed at it, nodding, and when she started to speak again her voice had a rasp in it. ‘It was here.’ The pace of her words changed as if she were now speaking to herself. ‘I came to get the wood in and he was in here, you see, staying in out of the rain. A big man. I knew I’d seen him around once or twice up and down the road. He grabbed me tight so I didn’t have a chance.’

  Gally, suddenly understanding where Bessy had sprung from, murmured sympathy, but Mrs Mullard waved a hand. ‘He weren’t a bad-looking man. I could tell he was an old soldier.’

  ‘Did he hurt you?’

  ‘Hurt me? No, I hurt him. Kicked him as hard as I could you know where.’

  ‘Didn’t that stop him?’

  ‘Stop him? No, that was afterwards. That was because he hadn’t been polite. I taught him. He was quite well trained by the time he left. I’d had three weeks to straighten him out by that time.’ She gave the remains of the shed another hard look. ‘Don’t stack the wood right against the back wall. There’s a bit of rain comes in there if the wind blows and if he’s around don’t come out here by yourself, because he might not be your sort.’ Fifty years had passed unnoticed in her mind.

  ‘I won’t,’ Gally promised.

  ‘If I were you, I wouldn’t tell Ferney about the baby. There’s no telling what he might do.’

  ‘Do you know why?’

  ‘It’s a mystery to me.’

  ‘What happened to Ferney’s wife?’

  ‘Don’t you know? I thought everybody knew.’

  Gally shook her head.

  ‘She just went one day. No one knew where. Ferney wanted the whole hue and cry. Said someone had done away with her. There was no end of searching, but they never found anything. ’Course, I’d gone by that time, but that’s the way I heard it. Never stopped searching for her, they say. Him and that spade of his.’

  The next day Gally got the message from the postman, not the usual way with a stamp, but in an envelope he’d found propped against Ferney’s door with handwritten delivery instructions on it.

  ‘He’s never quite seen the point of the system,’ said the postman ruefully. ‘I don’t know how many letters I’ve delivered for him over the years, all round the village. He gets ever so cross when I’m on holiday and the others won’t do it. I dread to think what will happen if he’s still around when I retire. I’ll just have to buy him a big stock of stamps, I suppose.’

  The postman looked set for a good few years, but the note made Gally wonder if he’d ever have to buy the stamps. It was short.

  Gally, the doctor says my chest is too bad and I am going into hospital for a few days. Don’t fuss about it. Don’t think of coming to see me. It’s better you don’t. I will be back home soon.

  His handwriting was so familiar and she felt a strong pang of loneliness that he should be miles away and barred from her.

  Mike came back from his conference at lunchtime that day. He got out of the car with an expression that told Gally and the world that there was a triumph somewhere in the recent past. Gally would usually have to drag communication unwillingly out of him when he came home after a long drive, while she, being the opposite, would assault him with information he didn’t want as soon as the wheels stopped turning. This time, she couldn’t have held him back if she’d tried.

  ‘My paper went down fantastically well,’ he said. ‘They loved it. Masses of questions. It went on and on.’

  ‘Great. That’s brilliant. The builders have . . .’

  ‘There was a man from Wagners, the publishers? He came up afterwards and said he thought there was a book in it.’

  ‘A book? Oh that’s . . .’

  ‘He took me out to dinner to talk about it. He’s so keen. He’s hoping to make an offer next week.’

  Gally knew she should be able to remember what the paper had been about, but it hadn’t seemed like anything real when he’d told her. She also knew that Mike, though an academic to the core, had a secret dream of popular acclaim, of being catapulted on to the chat-show circuit by the force of his own ideas.

  ‘What are you going to call it?’ she said, hoping for the best.

  ‘Maybe something like “The Saxon Farming Revolution and Social Change”. I don’t know, though, that could be a bit too long. It ought to be catchy, really.’

  ‘I want to hear all about it later on,’ she said then, fearing the builders might nobble him. ‘By the way, I’ve told Don Cotton to go easy on the roof. He wanted to strip it all off and start again. I said we wanted to keep all the sound bits.’

  Put that way, Mike saw it as a sensible money-saving argument.

  ‘Of course. Do you know what else he said?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The publisher . . . about my paper?’

  They spent the afternoon the way she had come to love best, clearing away the wreckage and the tangled undergrowth, filling the latest in a long line of skips and heaping brambles on to the bonfire. With every load the old delineations of the house and its surroundings showed through more clearly. Mike was happy to go along with it, relaxed and cheerful. When the builders left, the sudden descent of peace drew them into the house. The stairs had rotted long ago and the builders had put ladders up to get at the underside of the roof. They climbed up on the clattering, insubstantial stiffness of mortar-coated aluminium and stood precariously where the remains of the floor planking crossed the beams. The walls dividing the old rooms were skeleton frames of dusty laths with patches of plaster sagging off in strings.

  ‘It looks tiny,’ said Gally.

  ‘That’s only because you can look right through it from end to end,’ said Mike. ‘When they repair the walls you’ll see there’s plenty of room. Which one shall we have for our bedroom?’

  ‘Oh, that end,’ she said, surprised that he should be in any doubt, and almost added, ‘where it’s always been.’

  ‘Rick says they need to know where the bathroom’s going because they’ll be running the main pipes through the wall. I suppose next to the bedroom?’

  ‘Well, I thought we ought to have a little nursery next to the bedroom,’ she said, and felt a bubble of horror enclose her as Mike turned a startled face towards her and she realized it was the first he’d heard of it.

  She could hear the echo of her words, light-hearted, casual – not at all as though she was letting him in o
n a secret.

  ‘You mean . . . you feel you’re ready to try again? Are you really, love? We don’t have to rush, you know.’

  ‘I think we might have rushed already,’ she said slowly. ‘I’m not quite sure yet,’ though she was.

  ‘But when did you . . . how long . . .?’

  ‘It’s just a thought I have,’ she said. ‘I’d put a big bet on it actually, but it’s too early to know definitely.’

  My God, she was thinking. Two other people knew and Mike didn’t. What am I doing to us? I’ve got to stop this.

  It wasn’t a good place for it. The need to balance kept them awkwardly apart, so he couldn’t do all the things that absorbed culture told him to. He tried to put his arms round her, swaying alarmingly on the beam, and had to stop. They climbed down, with Mike taking exaggerated care that she shouldn’t slip, and hugged in the dusty chaos of the ground floor, but a crucial handful of time had inserted itself to push the natural quality out of the space between the news and the reaction to it. He told her how excited he was and stroked her belly which was completely flat. He was unsettled by it.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Yes, there is.’

  ‘Well, not much. I just wish we had the place all ready first.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘The house won’t take nearly as long as the baby.’

  ‘It’s not just that, though. We don’t know anyone here yet. Who’s going to be around to help?’

  ‘We didn’t know that many people in Turnham Green. Not unless you counted awful Aggy and slimy Steve next door. I’ll know people here, you’ll see.’

  ‘Have you seen the old man?’ he asked suddenly. It wasn’t an accusation, just an interested question, and she wondered if it was his gift to her to fit the moment.

  ‘He’s been taken to hospital.’

  ‘Oh dear. Anything serious?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you think we ought to ring up and find out?’

  ‘That would be a nice thought.’

  There was a phone in the caravan now. Gally hadn’t really wanted it, but Mike insisted he had to have one though it was really so he could reassure himself that she was all right in his absences. She couldn’t wait to ring, but for the sake of prolonging the truce over Ferney which Mike seemed to be offering she hung on until they went in for a cup of tea.