Ferney

by James Long

  Mike drained his tea, thinking, then put the cup down. ‘So you’re saying the horses were better than the oxen?’ He was sounding interested despite himself.

  ‘Course they were. Your horse could go much further to the fields, see? That meant the farmers could move together into villages to live and still get there and back without taking all day over it.’

  Mike was shaking his head. ‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with tenth-century creativity?’

  Ferney hooted with laughter. ‘Sex,’ he said. ‘What else? Out there in the little hamlets, they might not see anyone all year except their sister or their first cousin if they were lucky. The old what’s it called, the old gene pool didn’t get much of a stir. Half daft, most of them, except the ones that were completely daft. Then oats came along, so they all moved into villages and they had a much wider choice, see? It was one hell of a social life after what they’d been used to. Those genes started whizzing around all over the place. That’s your tenth century for you. They probably needed the beans to keep their pecker up, but it’s the horse you’ve got to thank.’

  Mike looked stunned. ‘Where did you read this?’ he said, seeing an unsuspected gulf opening up in his carefully plotted path to publication.

  ‘I’m not sure I did. It’s just something I know,’ said Ferney, and Gally knew that wouldn’t do for Mike.

  He got up and went to the bookshelves again, scanning through them as though searching for an alien book, a title he didn’t recognize that might contain in it the bibliography and pedigree of Ferney’s theory of horses. Ferney watched him.

  ‘Of course, I might be wrong,’ he said with an unhelpful attempt at diplomacy.

  Mike wouldn’t leave it at that. ‘It’s not the sort of thing you just dream up out of the blue,’ he insisted. ‘If that’s in one of these books, I’d really like to know about it.’

  ‘No, it’s definitely not in the books. Folk memory, you could call it. Common sense, I’d call it.’ He watched Mike, who was still scanning the shelves, with a touch of amusement. ‘You’re on a bit of a hiding to nothing, aren’t you? If it’s already in a book, there’s no mileage in you writing it. If it’s not, you won’t believe it. Go on, call it my free gift to you – a countryman’s gift.’

  Mike looked at his watch. ‘Come on, Gally, time to get back if we’re going to get anything else done today.’

  ‘Before we go,’ she said. ‘Can I just show you the picture – if that’s all right?’ she added, turning to Ferney who nodded assent.

  It seemed to mean little to Mike. He was unable to see behind the layer of dark, dirty varnish and accepted her explanation of the dim outlines of the cottage and the stone with a doubtful expression. He was impressed by the frame, though. ‘This must have cost someone a bit,’ was all he said.

  They went back and thanked Ferney for the tea.

  ‘I’m glad you’re feeling better,’ Gally said.

  ‘I’ll pop down and see you tomorrow maybe.’ He looked at Mike. ‘You think about what I said, now.’

  In the car Mike surprised her. ‘I’ll give him his due. Assuming he’s gone through all that stuff on his shelves, he’s incredibly well-read for an amateur.’

  ‘So you think he knows what he’s talking about?’

  ‘That’s what worries me. I still think he must have read all that horse business somewhere. I’d better find out about it. If not, then I suppose he must have made it up – like Kenny Wilkins and his red hair.’

  ‘Kenny Wilkins did have red hair,’ she said, stung, and immediately regretted it.

  ‘Oh, ha ha,’ he said and the moment passed.

  She believes him more than me, he thought. I’m the one who’s studied. He’s just read this and that in books and half-remembered old stories. Why does she believe him? On the other hand, at least he has read the books. Mike had found it easier to deal with the reality of Ferney than the idea. Somehow the idea, the frightening idea that sat in his head when he started to worry, was of an ageless, powerful Ferney, a true threat. The physical reality was an old man, fresh from hospital, and all Mike’s upbringing said you had to be polite and caring towards people like that.

  ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘you were pretty good with that horse, too. I didn’t know you knew about horses. Where did all that prut prut stuff come from?’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The next day was the clearest of days. From the top of the hill Glastonbury Tor stood out pin sharp, almost within reach, the way it used to look so much more often. It was reassuring for Ferney, who had wondered in recent years if his eyes were getting weaker because such days of crystal air seemed to have gone. Some rare trick of the Atlantic wind had swept man’s burnt fuel fog away and on this day he felt that if the earth didn’t curve away under him he could see clear across the kingdom.

  When his eyes were sated with the view, Ferney sat brooding on the recent past. This last lifetime held more mystery than any he could remember. He wondered how old Gally was. Somewhere in her late twenties certainly, which meant there was a gap of thirty years unaccounted for. That gap mattered to Ferney because it held the clue to the stone and the stream, to exactly how the whole thing worked, to what had gone wrong before and might well go wrong again. He had to accept that Gally’s return meant he might have made some wrong assumptions. It no longer all seemed quite so certain. His mind going round in circles, he fell to thinking of how it had been before, of the roadworks, of Cochrane’s smithy and of the search that now seemed so much less urgent.

  That train of thought brought him to Billy and the overwhelming mystery of that poor young man’s actions. Billy Bunter, they’d called him when he first came into the village. Got himself taken on as a farmhand in about 1952 or ’53, was it? He was a big, simple lad who could hardly get a single word out without it tripping over his tongue. There was a touch of what they used to call the Mongol look in his flat face, but the village people were mostly kind to him in a limited way. He’d liked to be with people. He’d just come and knock at the door, make his noise and point at one of the empty chairs as his way of asking. A lot of people drew the line at having him inside their house like that, but Ferney didn’t mind and they’d spent hours sitting across the fireplace from each other in mutual peace.

  It was one of the great regrets of Ferney’s life that he hadn’t seen it all coming. It was common knowledge that Cochrane, too old and drunk now to pick fights with capable men, had turned his spite on the big, slow farmhand. He bullied him, ridiculed him, tripped him and tormented him. Ferney knew Billy hated and feared Cochrane but he also knew there were times when Billy, perversely, sought Cochrane out, becoming so tongue-tied by emotion in his presence that he would stand there gibbering and spitting at him until Cochrane drove him away by force. Ferney was never there at the right time to do anything about it because Cochrane stayed clear of him in those days, fearing his wrath. The smith would turn a different way if he saw Ferney coming in time. It was 1959 when Cochrane pushed Billy once too often and met his death, to his complete surprise, face down in a cattle trough at the hands of the simple lad who could wield such strength if he chose to. They took Billy away and Ferney never saw him again. Sometimes, if the wind played tricks, he would still start up at a noise at the door, hoping Billy Bunter had come back, wondering what it was that finally goaded the poor boy into so extreme an action.

  He brought himself back from that diversion to think about the Bag Stone again, knowing he had to reach a conclusion before he went down to the house. It would do no harm to play it safe, to put things back as they should be, if only the man would listen to him.

  When he reached the house, finding them hard at work, Ferney found that Mike’s attitude to him had gone through a subtle and positive change. After a few hours spent thinking about it, Ferney’s horse theory had altered him in Mike’s eyes, made him suddenly much more real, a man who was dealing in a currency he understood – the weighing of historical argument. Until Mike could e
stablish its parentage and intellectual viability to his own satisfaction, Ferney’s theory would ensure its owner a position inside the circle of Mike’s mental limelight.

  It showed in the way Mike greeted him when he first appeared at the gate. Gally knew perfectly well that previously he would have pretended not to see the old man, let Gally do the greeting and acknowledged him in his own time in a way that made it clear he was busy. Now, though, Mike hailed him, cleared garden tools off the bench outside the caravan to give him somewhere to sit and lit the gas under the kettle. Gally, putting down her spade and walking towards them from the far corner of the yard, had a momentary profound sense of their different tidal pull on her – Ferney as the sun, far off, massive and central, the core of her system, Mike as the moon, nearer, affecting her daily tides. Seeing them talking politely made it so much easier – the two forces in temporary conjunction.

  Ferney understood perfectly well what had brought about the change in Mike’s approach. He even had some sympathy for it. He knew all about the feeling that there were too many people who were too ordinary to bother about, the same simple types repeating again and again and again, though he felt Mike had less excuse in his short life to feel that need to be selective. Time was when everyone you were likely to come across mattered to you somehow; either you depended on them or they depended on you. Their skill or their strength or their hunger made a direct difference to whether your belly stayed full. Their anger or their madness decided your safety. Now they had Tesco’s instead of fields and flocks, Match of the Day instead of the doubtful justice of one-on-one combat. You never saw the whites of anyone’s eyes any more. He only bothered with the tiny handful who were special these days, who stood above the grey ranks. Who was he to argue if Mike chose to do the same?

  He decided to press home the advantage and Mike himself provided the opening.

  ‘I keep thinking about that horse,’ he said to Ferney. ‘You calmed it so well.’

  ‘I’ve always had a bit of a way with horses,’ the old man said. ‘People mistake them, think they’re stupid, but they’re not. They don’t have much knowledge like a pig does and they’re not calculating like a cat, but they’d like to make sense of it all if they could. They take in so much, see? A horse is just a great big machine for asking questions without knowing what the answers mean, so it gets frightened very easily.’ He could read the slight wandering in Mike’s expression, knew there wasn’t enough bait on the hook. ‘Course, you go back a while and people said horses didn’t have brains at all.’

  ‘What, literally?’

  Gally joined them and sat down on the grass, apex to their triangle.

  ‘Back in the 1600s there were men who said they’d cut open horses’ skulls and when they looked inside they found nothing. Suited their book, didn’t it? If you said animals like that were just machines of some sort, then it didn’t matter how you treated them.’

  It rang bells for Mike. He nodded and Ferney, encouraged, went on.

  ‘It was all about religion, wasn’t it? It’s always had a lot to answer for. They seemed to forget everything they’d ever known in those days. Priests said you shouldn’t dress up like animals. No hobby-horse dances or anything like that. Anything bestial was evil. You shouldn’t have pets, shouldn’t even have them living under the same roof. That’s when farmers started moving them out into barns so they’d be separate, you see?’

  Mike, who would think to his dying day, despite all the evidence, that the universe ran to the laws of logic, spotted a flaw. ‘How could they say animals had no brains and say they were evil at the same time?’

  ‘They’d say what suited them, wouldn’t they? Always been the same problem with religion – priests making up God’s rules to suit the system.’

  ‘Where did you learn all this?’

  ‘Here and there.’

  ‘What you were saying about oats and horses, yesterday – you haven’t remembered where you read that yet, have you?’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ said Ferney and decided the moment to strike had come. ‘But I had something I wanted to ask you.’

  It was entirely between him and Mike. Gally just listened.

  ‘You saw my old picture?’

  ‘I did. I thought it would be very nice to have it cleaned.’

  Ferney gestured as if to say it would make no difference. ‘I wondered whether you’d thought of putting the stone back up, now you’ve seen it.’

  ‘I couldn’t really see it that well.’

  ‘It shows it clear enough. I can tell you just how it would be, the end of it’s still lying in the right place. Stones like that one, they don’t go far.’

  ‘Well . . . I don’t see why not.’ There was a warm silence in which Ferney and Gally smiled in unison.

  Ferney offered a reward. ‘When you write your book,’ he said, ‘don’t forget the difference between the chalk and the cheese.’

  Mike’s eyebrows rose involuntarily.

  ‘You see them both from here,’ said Ferney. ‘Both sorts of people.’ He waved a hand southwards. ‘Down there where the soil’s heavier, they’ve always had cows. All that milk they drink takes its toll of a man. They used to say it cooled the brain too much, turns them into a slower, paler, puffy sort of people.’ He turned his head and looked east towards Whitesheet Hill and the edges of Salisbury Plain. ‘Chalk’s always been different. The sheep country on the uplands, that’s where you get the lighter-spirited folk. Everything’s different up there, the water, the work, the wind, the food. You’ll never understand the history of the country people unless you know the difference between chalk and cheese.’

  He glanced up at the sun and rose stiffly from the bench. ‘You’ve got things to do. I mustn’t take up your day.’

  ‘Do you want a ride back?’ said Mike.

  ‘A ride?’ said Ferney blankly. ‘Oh, in the car. No, no, I’ll be fine.’ He looked at Gally. ‘Unless you fancy strolling back with me? Be my companion today?’

  It sounded like a quotation, the deliberate way he said it, and Gally found ready words springing to complete it. ‘Thou art the end and the beginning. Thou carriest me. Thou art the way and the journey’s end. Even so, God, be my companion today.’ She spoke the words out loud, loving the sound of them.

  Mike’s face had tightened when Ferney asked Gally to come with him. He now frowned as if straining to understand the odd litany that had just bypassed him. ‘What is that?’ he said.

  Ferney looked at Gally for the answer, but she shook her head and he made a little face. ‘King Alfred’s prayer,’ he said.

  She looked quickly at Mike and he shrugged. ‘Go on if you want to,’ he said, but his face showed he wished she hadn’t asked and she knew part of the bridge Ferney had built to him had just wobbled.

  She and Ferney walked slowly along the lane. A rabbit bounded down the bank, froze, then kangarooed off into a field entrance.

  ‘Thank you for being nice to Mike.’

  ‘He was nice to me.’

  ‘Was that prayer really King Alfred’s?’

  ‘Tidied up a bit, but that’s what they’ve always called it.’ He gave her a now familiar look and she knew what he was on the verge of saying.

  ‘I know. You were going to say I didn’t really have to ask. I keep telling you, I do have to.’ She cast around for the words. ‘It’s not like getting rid of a blockage so everything suddenly flows freely. It’s more like every little bit has to be teased out.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ he said, but his eyes showed it wasn’t. ‘I have so many questions to ask you. You don’t know what it’s like. I have to go on behaving like everything’s . . . normal, so I don’t upset Mike, and all the time I’m going over and over it all in my mind and I feel like you’ve just let me glimpse a tiny corner of it all.’

  ‘We’ve got a bit of time before us.’

  She looked at him as though there was a dark meaning in his words. ‘Did the hospital decide what was wrong with you?�
��

  ‘No, ’course not. Hospitals aren’t any good unless you want something sliced off. You go to a hospital, it’s like going to a shop, isn’t it? Chances are you’ll come out with more than you went in with. They’ve got the lot there, haven’t they? Everything you don’t want, bugs of all sorts. If you want to get ill it’s a great place to go.’ He stopped by a stile. ‘Let’s take the old path,’ he said.

  ‘But you’re completely better?’

  ‘Some things are on the mend, but you can’t stop the days dwindling,’ he said without any hint of sadness. ‘Nor should you. That way there’s nothing but trouble.’

  A vague connection asserted itself. ‘Mrs Mullard came over the other day.’

  He looked at her sharply. ‘Did she?’

  ‘She said I shouldn’t tell you about the baby. But I didn’t. I mean I didn’t need to tell you, did I?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘She also said, more or less, that she had to leave the house because of you. I think she meant that you flooded it on purpose.’

  He looked away from her.

  ‘Well, someone did, didn’t they?’ she said. ‘We found that pipe.’

  ‘I had to get her out.’

  ‘Why? Because . . . because of me?’

  ‘Yes of course. Because of you. We were having the best time ever, you and me. Then she and that . . . man, right on top of the stone. It was killing me, her baby. I was going to die if she had it there. You must know.’ His voice was urgent, pleading.

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t remember. I’ve told you. You mean because she was pregnant, there, by the stone, it was killing you?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ she said in anger that seemed less directed at him than the blue dome of the sky and all the countless atoms of the ever-moving world. ‘It’s the stone. Is that it? That’s what keeps you coming back?’

  ‘Us.’

  Us. The running question behind everything about them. Was it one person’s fantasy or two people’s truth?