by James Long
That wasn’t the half of it, he thought, looking at her and trying to hide the sudden hunger. That wasn’t the half of it, but just as well to hide it. If she had an inkling of what was in his mind it would scare her. He remembered keenly what she had forgotten – the depth of satisfaction in being together, each in the full glory of their memory, knowing how far back they went and how deeply they ran together, but then something much more. When age had brought its slow taming of physical love, there was that other fierce excitement – the excitement of the knowledge that soon they would again be young, and if they could just contrive it they would be young together. All that old love to fuel the fierce delights of their renewed, perfect, powerful virgin flesh.
He remembered a time so perfect that every detail except the date was etched into his mind. It was long, long ago in the time soon after the French came, when the seeds of abortive revolt were in the air and the castles were going up. They’d been inseparable youngsters until he was four and she was six, then she’d gone away with her aunt and no one told him where. It was only a middling walk, really, to a smallholding at the back of Gasper, but it might as well have been the moon. Certainly it had been far enough to put her out of the range of his immediate knowledge and it was only ten years later when he’d been sent to bring back a pig from that way that he had chanced to see her, climbing out of the stream where she’d been washing, her thin clothes wet and partly sticking to her like the wisps of bark on a peeled willow twig.
His heart turned over and in his certainty, he cried out ‘Gally’ and she, to his great joy, looked up, shading her eyes, called ‘Ferney’ on a rising note of ecstasy and ran, alive, young and perfect into his arms.
The present Gally, watching him, knew he was away somewhere and, guessing that some previous Gally was there with him, gave him some time then gently asked, ‘Why didn’t I know this time? Why does it go wrong?’
He shook his head. ‘Now you’re really asking. Death’s a pretty rough ride. It’s not like you can sit there hanging on to every detail, you know. It’s more like being sucked down the plughole. You don’t wind up as a baby thinking, “Now what was I saying?” It’s more like you slowly, slowly come out from under the anaesthetic, but all you get to start with is little scraps of feeling and your brain’s not used to straightening it all out and your voice doesn’t work so there’s nothing you could do with the words anyway. Whatever, sometimes I think you just miss the chance to hang on to it all. Sometimes it’s simpler to give up on who you were and just take the easy way and then it all gets covered up with what happens next.’
‘Being away makes it different, too, doesn’t it?’
‘If you’re born away from here it’s always much harder to remember. I’m sure that’s the way it was for you and the one before you.’ He thought of saying the rest, that madness could lie that way, but he thought better of it.
They were both silent, both thinking of the missing Gally, the Gally of the 1930s, the one they knew nothing at all about.
‘It’s dangerous times for us, then,’ said Gally after a while.
‘Aeroplanes and cars. People rushing about. Anything could happen these days. It frightens me, like when you went to Greece. I kept listening to the radio in case they said there’d been a plane crash.’
‘How would I ever get back if that happened?’
‘I’ve done it once.’
‘Tell me?’
‘Not now. There’s been a lot too much for one day already. Let’s go back.’ Something nagged at her as they walked slowly back down the lane. It was an uncomfortable thought, so obvious that she let it hang there in her mind for a while, unable to put it into words, but Gally was, in the end, a direct person and the moment came when she could not avoid saying it.
‘Ferney. When you die do you come back right away?’
‘Get born again, you mean? Near enough. It’s not like there’s a fixed rule. Depends what’s around, I suppose. As far as we’ve ever been able to tell, sometimes it’s like it’s fairly instant, sometimes you maybe spend a month or two tucked up inside before the baby’s born.’
‘This time,’ she said, ‘when you die, you’re going to come back as a baby and I’ll be much older than you.’
‘That’s right,’ he agreed affably.
It was dawning on her that they had it easy right now. Apart from Mike’s feelings, who would find it odd that a young woman and an old man should be fond of each other?
‘It’s going to be dreadful then, isn’t it?’ she said uncertainly. ‘How can we be . . . close like that? I mean, no parents are going to want some strange woman making friends with their child, not these days. They’ll be suspicious as anything.’
‘That’s certainly a problem.’
‘Well, let’s hope it doesn’t happen for years,’ she said firmly.
‘Oh, but it’s going to,’ he said in a tone of slight surprise.
She stopped and faced him. ‘What do you mean? When?’
‘About six months,’ he said, as though it should be obvious.
‘Six months?’ She was horrified. ‘Why? Did they tell you something in the hospital? Why didn’t you say?’
‘No,’ he said puzzled. ‘It’s nothing to do with anything they said. They didn’t know anything, did they? Haven’t you understood? I thought you’d realized by now. I’m so sorry, I should have made it plainer.’
He was looking surprised.
‘What? What should you have made plainer?’
He seemed tongue-tied.
‘Tell me.’
‘It’s like Effie Mullard,’ he said softly, his eyes on her. ‘You know the story.’
‘Like her?’ said Gally. ‘You mean I’m like her? She was having a baby by the stone, you said, and it was going to be . . .’
‘Me,’ he said for her.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Though religion was a locked door to Ferney, the church was the one building whose doors were never locked – indeed, the only familiar building in Penselwood where, as the years passed, a sudden change of ownership would never bar his entry. It was only as an empty building that he liked it. Caught up in a long conflict with those who had used it to preach unattainable heaven and meaningless hell, he had fallen foul of some of them across the years – the narrow churchmen of the authoritarian times who had used their pulpit power to fetter the community with fierce, unloving ideas. There had been dangerous times when it simply didn’t pay to let them mark you as a nonconformist, when the tides of puritan rebellion had turned every pew into a political hot seat. During those years Ferney had been content to play a defensive role, compelled to take his Sunday place and think his own thoughts under a show of attention, garnering some pleasure from the stones around him and the sound of the music, but none at all from the words of the service.
He nodded to the stone heads above the door as he pushed it open and walked in, knowing just exactly how his footsteps on the flagstones would sound, echoing like drips in a well. Few sounds had stayed constant, but this was one. Birdsong was another, he thought, but even the cows and the sheep had changed their voices as centuries of breeding layered meat on their widening frames. True, he had leather on his soles now, not wood, but he favoured hard leather, valuing materials around him that did not quickly erode, and the sound it made was pretty much the same as the old sound of the wood. In here, above all, it was possible to get away from the constant recent background noise of petrol being burnt in a hundred ways which upset him not so much for the noise itself as for the squandering shortsightedness of it.
An enthusiast for most modern conveniences, Ferney generally excluded the car from that. Walking through your surrounding landscape strengthened your responsibility towards it. Enclosed speed, he had soon decided as the postwar years brought cars doubling and redoubling, steel algae infesting the world, removed that responsibility and provided the illusion that like a malignant comet, you could always travel away from the debris in your wake.
He was on a mission of mercy. Ferney would never have admitted it, but he was shocked by the state Gally was in. Knowing her as she usually was, he could see how deeply she was currently undermined by being out of touch with her past. Whatever different aspects were dictated in different lives by time, circumstance and body chemistry, those were just overlays to the strong serenity that always marked her out. The Gally he knew so well was a smiling haven of calm, a wise and loving beacon. In this life he still had a sense of that, but in front, obscuring the real woman, was a damaged façade of fright and phobia. There was, he thought, only one option and that was to carry carefully on, locating the pain and filling in the gaps for her, but he needed to know her pain more closely.
Once before and only once he had felt the same pain and had come close to losing Gally for ever. The life that started with the glory of his singing had led to a lethal exile. In the recent aching years, believing this time he was truly alone, he had found it too painful to consider what had followed then. Now, still slightly aghast at the proposal he would soon have to make, he knew it had the power to stiffen his resolve. It was not easy. In this joint heartland of theirs, the constant ridge of Penselwood, there was always an echo to call up the memories, but this one was rooted in a foreign landscape, a disconcerting world where there had been nothing the slightest bit familiar to serve as a crutch to a young, struggling mind – a world in which that mind had been bent to madness by the discord of unfamiliarity.
He had to get there the long way round, via the death that came before the birth, because the suppression of all that was Ferney in the young man who died had, he was sure, made the youth who came after him all the more vulnerable to alien insanity.
‘James Cumberlidge. Born the first day of October 1777,’ said the small marble tablet set low in the wall. ‘First Lieutenant in the Royal Navy of his Britannic Majesty, King George the Third. Gave his life most gloriously in the service of his country at Quiberon, France, in the fight against the enemies of our sovereign, the twentieth day of July in the year of our lord 1795.’
He sat sideways in the nearest pew and stared down at the inscription. It must have cost William Cumberlidge a great deal, he thought. William Cumberlidge, just one from the long line of his fathers, the men whose genes had dictated the varied bodies his constant mind would enter. He could pull individuals out of the muddled ranks – the brutes and the friends, the kind men and the autocrats – but William Cumberlidge was as distant as the arctic, a pompous bully who had passed on the family’s recognizable barrel-chested build but had never for a moment come to understand his son’s mind. He read the words again, thinking it so typical of that man to exaggerate the rank, deriving more satisfaction from the boast of his son’s death than he ever had from his life. That father had lost patience with his only son at a very early stage.
‘You’re James,’ he would say when he came back to the big house on the edge of Bourton from his merchant’s office in Mere. ‘Stop this Ferney nonsense. I named you James after the apostle and James you will stay,’ then he would turn away and stride into the house as the boy who knew as yet only that he was Ferney watched the grooms unharness the fine chestnut horses from the landau.
So James suppressed the dawning Ferney in him, to turn away from confrontation and trouble, and became for most of the time an outwardly cheerful little boy despite his father’s harsh formality. His mother made up for the shortage of love and though he was kept away from villagers who were deemed unsuitable playmates for a merchant’s son and denied the company of the local aristocracy through their similar view of him, he was superficially content with his limited world within the garden walls. On the day before his fifth birthday, at the very end of a warm September, he was taken in the landau with his mother and father to visit his grandmother at the old house in Penselwood where he had been born and that was where the dam of memory broke.
They had taken the long way round through Chaffeymoor because the track from the east past the jute factory was for horses only and the encroaching brambles might scratch the varnished bottle-green flanks of the new carriage. The horses had to trot up the hill towards the village, though the ruts and bumps made the ride uncomfortable. Mr Cumberlidge thought distance was a trick designed to cheat him of time and time was on an hourly rate that ticked in his head. James, allowed to stand on the floor of the carriage so long as he kept a good firm hold on the top of the door, looked out and saw a slender woman of perhaps twenty-five standing in a cottage garden, a woman in a brown smock, stacking firewood for the coming winter. A sharp dart of adult anguish flew into a corner of his heart and, leaning far out over the side so that his mother, fearful he would fall under the back wheels, made a grab for him, he called out, ‘Gally, Gally’ as they went by.
His mother chuckled. ‘Who’s Gally?’ she said. ‘You don’t know that woman. Who did you think she was?’
‘Don’t you try and talk to people like that,’ said his father more fiercely. ‘They’ll take it all wrong and think the less of you.’
He sat on his mother’s knee, silent, muddled and heartbroken that the woman, who must have seen him, had shown no response to his call and for the rest of that day he was disconsolate. His mother put it down to the greengages he had eaten at breakfast: she could hardly be expected to recognize the sickness of lost love in a five-year-old, just as he could hardly be expected to know that infection, in the brief years since he had last shared her life, had robbed his Gally of her hearing.
His grandmother died the next year, bringing an end to the expeditions that would always have him craning, intent on that cottage and on every woman they passed in the village. His voice, his peerless singing voice, developed during that time, but it was another six years before he was held to be old enough to leave the house by himself on occasional country rambles and though he haunted the lane into Penselwood with obsessive determination at every opportunity, she was gone – carried off, he came to think, by one of the illnesses which scythed through the unprotected poor and which would have his mother closing windows and stoking fires as if to beat them back by the sweltering heat.
Cut off from his background, in touch only with an acute but formless sorrow and scared to allow himself his proper identity, he diminished into a shadow world. Looking back, Ferney found even those memories so insubstantial that he seemed only half present in this unhappy boy. There had been other times when the part of him that carried the long memory of his identity had been forced to play second fiddle to an overwhelming physical presence. Over-active glands could occasionally produce a monstrous body for the uneasy soul to inhabit, where floods of manly aggression could swamp the rational messages of the quiet mind. In those lives he was only ever partly the true Ferney and the memories were always confusing, warped by the strength of the parasitic body, but such lives, thankfully, were few and far between. This hadn’t, he thought, been one of those occasions. From the wisps of feelings he could trawl back, this had been a boy so disabled by that tragic moment of recognition that he had recoiled from the other messengers from the past, pushing them away at the expense of the balance and strength of his character, so that only the singing was allowed to matt
er.
His father thought him mostly worthless, a dim-witted milksop whose one acceptable gift was his voice. It was James’s sole solace, that perfect heaven’s flute of a voice which survived puberty to re-emerge deeper but equally spell-binding. Singing was his true pleasure and even his father tolerated it so long as the songs he sang for him were manly and patriotic. He was twelve when the Bastille fell and word of the great terror that followed came winging to England brought by those of the ruling classes who escaped across the Channel. He was much in demand to sing the patriotic songs that could chase away the fear of the ogre across the water. His father, safe in his own advanced years, was all for a family offering to be sent into the reek of blood and he lost patience with his son’s soft life. Believing he needed a tough regime and male company to put him to rights, and that patriotic duty called, old William enrolled young James into the navy. If James survived he would be a man. If James died then the family would have their very own hero. The old man kept those thoughts to himself as he defended his decision against a surprisingly bold attack from his wife.
Ferney found himself in a dream, still standing by the memorial tablet on tired legs, and turned to lower himself on to the end of a pew, pushing a heavy crocheted kneeler out of the way. There would have been little time for introspection in that regimented naval world and here again, reflection on this Cumberlidge mongrel character made him wonder how it must have been. It hadn’t taken many lifetimes for Ferney to learn a few unchanging rules for survival and happiness. The first golden rule was don’t work for others, or at least not for long. There was no freedom if you did. It always led to a choice, either to hide your light under a bushel and have to obey the commands of fools, or to let your ability show through and that was usually a bad idea. Don’t show your wisdom was, therefore, the second rule. Let others catch sight of the wide-ranging skills that came with such long experience of every human foible and they would elevate you, put you in charge to get the most out of you, milk you dry, contest your decisions, bring you down and finally grind you in the dust. That was the way of power and the usual reward for ability, in his experience.