Ferney

by James Long

  Gally was watching them both, letting Mike go on, aware that she’d started something that had to run its course. Mike looked hard at Ferney. ‘How far back are you saying you go?’

  ‘A fair old bit.’

  ‘More than five hundred years?’

  Ferney shrugged a vague nod.

  ‘More than a thousand?’

  ‘Maybe a bit more.’

  Mike looked around the room. ‘I’m a logical person,’ he said, ‘I have to test things. Do you understand that?’

  ‘If that’s your way,’ said Ferney.

  ‘I’m a historian. You say you’re, well, history itself, I suppose. Maybe I could ask you some questions.’

  ‘You could, but it wouldn’t help.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Everything you know came from a book, right?’

  ‘That’s putting it a bit too simply.’

  ‘It came from someone else’s knowledge. Doesn’t really matter if they wrote it down or they told you. You didn’t invent it.’

  ‘Your point is?’

  ‘You could ask me a question and if I give you the answer you want then you’d just think I’d read it too. Chances are, though, I wouldn’t give you the answer you want. I’ve pretty much always been a countryman, mostly round here. A few times history came marching right through here, through the forest tracks. A lot of blood got spilt here. Sometimes it was mine. Mostly, though, we only saw the small stuff of history. No one told us much. We heard rumours. People told tales. Maybe they were right, maybe they were wrong. When they were right maybe that’s not the way history wrote it down, because we both know that depends on who’s telling the story. But that’s not the main point. Even if you asked me a hundred questions and I gave you all the right answers it wouldn’t make any difference.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because you can’t believe. You don’t want to believe. It’s not in your interests to believe.’

  ‘You’re right, I don’t believe this, I really don’t. You believe it if you want, but I need evidence.’

  ‘Mike,’ said Gally, ‘calm down.’

  ‘No, leave him be,’ said Ferney. ‘I can see how it must feel.’ He pondered. ‘You don’t want evidence. You’d just want more and more and if you ever did believe it would be worse for you.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Mike said, ‘I know you’re by yourself. I’m sure all this makes you feel better, but it’s not all right by me, not at all. It’s messing us around and you’ve got no right to do that.’

  ‘I’m not messing anyone around,’ said Ferney firmly. ‘I’m just saying what’s got to be said. You came here because she brought you here and you can’t turn the clock back so it’s best you understand it. Anyway, she needs it. You must want her to be happy.’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘Was she happy before she came here?’

  ‘That’s . . . that’s our business.’

  Ferney snorted. ‘I know about nightmares. I know what lies at their roots. Now, come with me, I’ve got something to show you.’

  ‘What?’ said Mike, but Ferney just walked past him out of the room. Gally beckoned. ‘Come on,’ she said.

  Mike turned on her. ‘Why do you do that? You’re just encouraging it.’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ she said, startled. ‘But surely you’re not going to stay here?’

  ‘Whatever he’s going to show us now,’ said Mike emphatically, ‘it won’t prove a damned thing.’

  Ferney went in front of them down the corridor to the room of books at the end where the painting hung and pointed at it. ‘Have another look at that for a minute,’ he said. ‘Painted by a good painter, that was.’

  He left them standing in front of it, Mike peering again at the dark, grimy surface.

  ‘Stand back,’ suggested Gally. ‘It’s easier.’ She could see that this time he was picking up the shapes and knew at least there would be no more argument about the stone now that he’d seen a historical source of the sort he could understand. The picture’s importance came to her, direct and personal. It was the first proper image, the first time there had been something to pass on down the years, the first window on their past that was more than memory. She tried to stare through the dirt at the dim outline of the couple by the door. It was too hard for her in Mike’s presence and she could feel nothing. She thought perhaps that was all Ferney had brought them to see, but it was only meant to serve as a waiting-room. He came back in through the door clutching a large cylindrical object shrouded in a piece of sheet and laid it carefully on the table.

  ‘You’ve got the ring still,’ he said to Gally, and she nodded. ‘I want you to have this, to look after it. Keep it to yourselves or there’ll be never-ending questions. I’ve got nowhere for it to go for safety after I die.’ He looked at Mike. ‘Do you promise?’ Mike shrugged. ‘Do you?’ insisted Ferney and Mike nodded curtly.

  Ferney looked at Gally. ‘You described the drum, Monmouth’s drum. Do you remember?’

  ‘I think so.’ She shivered.

  ‘Don’t worry. I think I know what the rest of your fear is now. I can help you. Describe it again, just the way you see it in your head.’

  ‘Blue, dirty and damaged, with a gold lion and a unicorn.’

  He pulled the sheet off and what was revealed had age encrusted on it in undeniable witness. It was a drum, once dark blue or black perhaps, with a red, yellow and gold crest, cut across, grimy and partly worn away on one side. The skin on top was cracked and flaking and the hoops and clamps were tarnished silver, but the gold was recognizably royal – a rearing lion, a shield surmounted by a crown and most of a unicorn, reduced by time’s damage to a mere horse, a dark, rubbed dent across where its horn had been.

  It scared the hell out of Gally.

  ‘It’s Monmouth’s drum,’ Ferney said and Mike, instead of scoffing, gently put out a hand to it, recognizing a pedigree which would not allow disbelief.

  ‘How did you find it?’ he said.

  ‘I hid it in the first place. Gally and I. We put it up under the thatch.’

  ‘What thatch?’

  ‘The thatch that used to be on your house. Two hundred years ago. His Dutchman, the gun man, had been carrying it. They left it.’

  ‘The museum told us it was found there. They said there was armour too.’

  ‘The thatcher came when I wasn’t expecting him. I’d meant to move it first but he found it and I had to make out I hadn’t known it was there. I got it back in the end.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘I don’t know quite. Gladstone had just quit being prime minister.’

  ‘Eighteen ninety-four,’ said Mike.

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘A hundred and six years ago?’

  Ferney nodded. Mike sighed. ‘Just explain, will you? You must have . . . well . . . died after that?’

  ‘In 1907. I was halfway through a book, Kipps it was, by H. G. Wells. I’ve never got round to finishing it.’

  ‘So what did you do with the drum?’

  ‘Put it back in my roof again.’

  ‘It was your house then?’

  ‘We’ve usually contrived to have it one way or another.’

  ‘So why isn’t it still yours?’

  ‘Lawyers. It all went a bit wrong. Next time round someone else was in it.’

  ‘How did you get the drum back?’

  ‘I got it out when I heard Effie Mullard was having it all slated. I went in when she wasn’t there.’

  ‘And now you want us to look after it and keep it quiet?’

  Ferney’s look said it was Gally he’d had in mind but he just nodded.

  ‘Historians should be able to see this,’ said Mike forcefully. ‘I’m sure it’s unique. I don’t think it should be tucked away.’

  ‘One thing I’ve learnt,’ said Ferney. ‘You say too much and people start asking so many questions. There’s no end to them. If there’s something big at stake, money or w
hatever, they’ll never leave it until they’ve unravelled you. Best to keep quiet. Mind you, I don’t listen to my own advice. If I’d kept quiet down at the road when they found Gally’s bones, you wouldn’t . . .’

  ‘Gally’s bones?’ Mike jackknifed forward.

  There was a sudden profound silence. ‘I didn’t tell Mike that bit,’ said Gally quietly to Ferney and the old man shook his head at Mike. ‘What else did you think?’

  ‘You’re saying it was Gally who was murdered?’

  ‘Well of course it was. Do you think I would have married anyone else?’

  ‘You’d better tell me all about it,’ said Mike grimly.

  ‘It was a long time before you were born,’ said Ferney. ‘She just disappeared one day. We’d been very happy, never apart, then one day she just vanished.’ He looked down and sighed. ‘I think I knew straightaway what had happened. There was a blacksmith, you see, a man called Cochrane. He was a violent man and he always had his eye on her from when he first arrived here. He was wrong in the head when he drank and he thought for a long time that he could get her to come away with him.’ He looked at Gally. ‘She would never have done that. She was never interested in anyone but me.’ To Gally, tension flickered between them then, but Mike seemed unaware.

  ‘He killed her, I’m sure. That place where they’ve dug the hole, that was where his forge was. He just tipped her into the pit. The police say they accept that’s what happened. Anyway there’s no proving it now. They asked me all about Cochrane, but he’s long dead, I told them.’

  He looked round the room. ‘You can see her if you like.’ He went to a shelf. There was a small framed photograph on it and he picked it up and looked at it for a long moment in silence then, seeming to reach a decision, he turned round and thrust it out to Mike.

  ‘This isn’t evidence but it’s what it’s all about. That’s us. That’s Gally and me last time we were together.’

  It hadn’t occurred to Gally that there might be a photograph. More than that, it seemed inconceivable. She had accepted the significance of the painting immediately, but the photograph seemed entirely foreign. It was almost an affront that there sbould be this small, square, precise witness to the memories she couldn’t find. As Mike took it and stared at it, Ferney seemed to read her thoughts.

  ‘First one,’ he said. ‘Only one. We didn’t run to cameras.’

  She longed to take it from Mike, but he just stood there, looking at it and shaking his head. ‘It’s not in the least bit like Gally,’ he said, completely missing the point.

  ‘Not to look at,’ said Ferney patiently. ‘That’s all you can tell from a photograph. It’s not like children. There’s no genes carrying on. But it is Gally. A month or two after our wedding, that one was.’

  Mike put it down on the table and Gally stared towards it with hunger.

  ‘Can I see it?’

  ‘What?’ he said absently. ‘Oh, if you must.’

  He held it out reluctantly. ‘I’m sorry about your wife,’ he said, ‘I can see it must be very odd for you – but I’m quite sure it’s just a coincidence that she had the same nickname as Gally.’

  Ferney was looking at Gally and Gally was looking at the photo. The sepia-tinted, plain-faced girl in the photo was a disappointment. Where Mike had failed to find a genetic trace, she could find no echo of the consciousness. I can’t see myself there, she thought. It is after all just silver salts and paper. The girl was short, fair-haired, dressed simply in a skirt and blouse. The background was a wall, but what wall she could not tell. Then she looked at the man next to the woman and saw Ferney in the fresh morning of his adulthood and warmth flooded from the centre of her soul’s gravity to every extremity of her body. This was so entirely familiar. This was the way, she knew, that she felt Ferney’s shape in her mind when he wasn’t there. She stared hard and long at the picture and teased out a wisp of memory, a faint trace of a day, far away, with a scent of lily-of-the-valley in the air. The memory took boisterous and unexpected form round a cheerful, fat photographer with brilliantined hair and she frowned, trying to hold on to that and to fill it out but raised voices blew it away.

  ‘I want to know,’ Mike was repeating. ‘I have a right to know. How did Cochrane die?’

  ‘If you don’t believe all this, what does it matter?’

  ‘You can’t just say that.’ Mike was flushing red again. ‘This is something that happened in this lifetime. I don’t have to believe the rest of it. You come careering through our lives saying stupid things like that and . . .’

  Ferney’s voice was rising too. ‘It’s not stupid. It’s the way it was. Always just the two of us. Who did you think it was? Like I said, I wouldn’t have married someone else.’

  ‘Well she did. She married me, so why should I believe you? What right have you got to screw us around? I’ve heard quite enough of this. Stay out of our life from now on, right?’

  ‘It’s not just your life.’

  ‘It bloody well is and I don’t trust you.’

  ‘I’ve done nothing to deserve mistrust.’

  ‘Oh no? How did this man Cochrane die, then? Why were the police interested? You had a hand in it, didn’t you?’

  He could not have chosen a more painful accusation.

  ‘No I did not. It was a lad, a simple lad. Billy. You don’t understand, you don’t . . . you . . .’ Ferney’s voice tailed off and he stood there, reaching a hand out for support to the table, missing it and sliding down on to it on buckling knees as his eyes rolled up in his head. His arm swept the drum to the floor with a crash and then he followed it to slump down on to the carpet.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  There was a second when neither of them did anything, then another second when they both tried to get through the same gap at the corner of the table at the same time, and each of those seconds felt like minutes to Gally. Ferney lay twisted on the red carpet and some abstracted, irrelevant part of her brain registered the slight pattern in its weave. Then she was on the floor, kneeling by his head, searching for signs in his face and finding nothing but slack absence.

  Mike was crouched next to her, his head on Ferney’s chest.

  ‘He’s stopped breathing,’ he said, his voice fast and high. ‘I’m not sure there’s a heartbeat.’

  ‘Oh God. What do we do?’

  ‘We don’t panic. We . . . er . . .’

  Sketchy diagrams of mouth to mouth and heart massage offered themselves in imperfect images to Gally, half-remembered posters she had glanced at in doctors’ waiting-rooms and had never needed to remember before.

  ‘Help me straighten him out,’ said Mike and they untwisted him. He was surprisingly heavy. Gally put her hands together on his chest and pressed down abruptly. It felt horribly dangerous, as though she might crack his ribcage.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mike encouragingly. ‘It’s got to be hard. It’s three times, isn’t it? Then you do the mouth to mouth.’

  She bent her head to his face, held his nose, put her mouth over his and blew into him. Mike watched for a moment then stood up. ‘I’ll phone for an ambulance. I’ll be back in a minute, love. Keep going.’

  It took him more than a minute. She heard him talking urgently on the phone, trying to describe the way to the bungalow and realized he didn’t know the address. She kept going rhythmically, breathing her air into the still body, then pumping his chest, then breathing again and suddenly had a shocking sense that instead of forcing life into him, she was drawing it out. Every time she put her mouth over his, she began to feel a stronger and stronger sensation that something electric was trying to find its way towards her from him. He is dying, she thought. I am not helping him live, I am helping him die and this is too soon. She sat up in distress, but he was still not breathing and death lay that way too. She bent to him again, trapped, and in the distance she heard Mike sorting out the problem, putting the phone down and crossing the hall. She guessed he was looking for an envelope from the morning’s po
st.

  ‘Twelve, Castle Orchard Close,’ he said when he got back to the phone. ‘How long will you be? . . . Okay.’

  He came back in quickly and she looked up in relief. ‘Mike, please, will you do this? I think I’m doing it all wrong.’

  ‘Me? No, it’s okay, you’re doing fine.’

  ‘I’m not. You’ve got to do it. If he dies . . .’

  Was she going to say ‘. . . it will be your fault’? He looked at her face and didn’t argue any more. There was a moment of hesitation when he bent to Ferney’s mouth, but then he steeled himself and blew in the first breath.

  She stood and watched, horrified, and she had a sense that she was still too close.

  ‘I’ll find a blanket,’ she said and ran down the corridor in search of Ferney’s bedroom, feeling with each step she took that she was leaving the threat behind. The first door she tried was the bathroom. The second was indeed his bedroom, but there was only a duvet on the bed and she rejected that as too bulky. Against one wall was a heavy chest of drawers and she pulled the drawers open in turn. The bottom one yielded a green tartan rug and as she bent to take it out, her line of sight crossed the piles of books and magazines on top of the chest and lighted on a white envelope, propped up against a table lamp. She saw her name on it.

  She hurried back and spread the soft, heavy rug over Ferney, working round Mike, but again she found herself inside the old man’s tidal pull and knew she was reversing Mike’s gains.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she said to Mike and as he stopped the mouth to mouth and started to pump Ferney’s chest once more, he nodded.

  ‘I . . . can’t stay in here,’ she said. ‘I’ll go and make sure the ambulance knows where to come.’

  ‘It won’t get here for a while yet,’ he said in a voice that wanted her to stay, but then he bent to blow again and she backed out of the room. Ferney doesn’t want me to leave, she thought. This is the moment of passage for him. He wants my baby close to him. Somewhere deep inside her she knew he was wrong in this. It’s too early, she thought. This tiny thing growing in me is nowhere near ready for invasion. It couldn’t take it.