by James Long
It was a form of residual cowardice, however, that steered her away from the hilltop. She dressed it up to herself as something else, a simple precaution against manipulation that this should happen in the place of her choice, not Ferney’s. She walked northwards through the straggling cottages looking for a quiet place to sit until she came to the church and found herself, without any awareness that it had always been her destination, walking up the pathway towards it. The two old heads, facing each other across the corners of the inner porch, welcomed her. Just as on that earlier visit, she was struck by a sense of disappointment that the inside of the church was not as she expected, but now at least she had some ideas why. She took a blue leaflet from a pile on the table. ‘St Michael’s Pen Selwood,’ it said, ‘Church History’. The pew ends were carved in 1927. A gallery across the west end of the nave was removed in recent times. That, she thought, was what felt wrong. Going back into the porch with the leaflet in her hand, she looked at the ancient carving of the Virgin over the outer door. It felt old but unimportant. Cross-checking herself, she looked through the leaflet. It was old, nearly six hundred years old, but it had been brought back from Italy around 1850. The two crowned heads were another thing altogether – deeply familiar. ‘As yet unidentified’ said the leaflet. ‘Believed by some to be King Alfred and King Guthrum.’ Guthrum? The Viking leader beaten and converted by Alfred’s scratch army? She gave a derisory laugh. This was a woman, anyone could see that, though the head was certainly more weather-beaten than she expected.
Somewhere at the back of her mind there was a suspicion that if she could just hold on to it she could draw out a fleeting tag of memory with names on it – a name for the king and for the queen. She tried, failed and was saddened for a long moment, then Ferney’s letter asserted itself in her pocket and now she decided was the time to face it. She stepped back into the nave, where her light steps echoed softly from cool stone edges and went unknowingly to the same pew in the far aisle where Ferney had sat to conjure up the sad life of James Cumberlidge. Holding the letter in the quiet, high light, she read the words deliberately to herself, with a measure of foreboding. ‘We can if we set our minds to it. No more of this hit and miss.’ They ran through her mind even after she had stopped consciously reading them, but it was her own modern voice that spoke them and nothing came.
How long had she got? She looked at her watch and could make little sense of it. What time had Mike gone? What time had he said he’d be back? Mike had worked it all out – the journey time to Yeovil, the visiting hours, and she had retained none of it.
She closed her eyes then and tried to quieten her breathing, to smother the present with a blanket of silence. Irrelevant thoughts kept pushing their way in. Had they got any mustard? Should she take Ferney flowers? Every time she wrestled to blank her mind again, saying a mantra to herself: ‘No more of this hit and miss, no more of this hit and miss, no more of this hit and miss.’ The pew, the church and the sense of here and now left her and her heartbeat became very loud in her ears. An eager, young face turned to her and she loved it with a bubbling, physical rush which took her breath away. Ferney, maybe thirty, beautiful Ferney, listening as she told him her terrible, wonderful idea. At the start, there was just the face, inside the church with her, then a sense of the walls opening up and the vast sky around them.
How much time did she still have? In the present world, up in its tower above her head, the church clock clicked around and with an admonitory whirr sent its powerful message of the hour clanging out across the village on the ridge. The first bronze stroke sent a flicker through the forming features of his face, bringing her sharp anticipation of loss. The second stroke changed them and by the third they were re-forming. This face was broader, middle-aged, darker-skinned, the nose broken and the chin larger, but the eyes were still Ferney’s eyes and the love was still there though it was older and calmer.
The fourth stroke of the bell sounded and they were both looking up, hand in hand in the crowd. Gally’s legs were tired from climbing Shaftesbury’s hill and she was thirsty. It was the first warm day in a foul, wet year and the coarse kersey cloth chafed her shoulder under the strap of the leather bag. They’d buy ale when they could, but the first thing was to see the machine, the reason they’d come all this way. The word had reached them yesterday, spreading fast through the countryside, that a machine to count the hours had come to Shaftesbury to be put in the church and anyone could go to see it. Most of the village had been straggling out along the muddy road as they left, but Ferney and Gally, preferring to walk alone, had outpaced the rest of them. It took them half the morning to get there and for the last quarter of the journey they could hear a bell, growing steadily stronger, ringing first once, then after they had gone perhaps another mile twice more, then three times as they approached.
It was set up on a wooden frame outside the Abbey, on display, waiting to be lifted up to the platform now being built inside the tower. They were patient, using the slow rearrangements of the growing crowd to work their way ever nearer to the machine until they could see the sun and the moon, the weights on their chains and the shining wheels with their pegs and teeth turning the ornate iron hands. They each stood staring up at it, both fascinated by the precise, organized look of the thing. Delicate metal was unfamiliar except as jewellery or church ornaments. Delicate metal that turned and shone and fitted, part by part, into other turning, shining pieces was unsuspected, entirely new.
There was a man up on the gantry, fussing around it, a man in a gown that marked him out as leading an easy, looked-after life. He was watching the mechanism intently and all at once he turned to the crowd and held up both hands as if to make an announcement. The buzz of speculation rose sharply then stopped, so that all there was to hear was the hushing spreading out to noisy latecomers, the whisper of the turning wheels and the clatter of jackdaws around the tower above. Then came a click, a whirr and a great clang from the bell hanging from its wooden scaffold beside the machine. A gasp and a murmur went up from the crowd, but the man with the cloak held up his hands again with an impatient frown. Another clang and another and another rolled out from the hilltop across a land which had only heard the ringing of bells as summons, celebration, warning or mourning, never before as measurement.
‘It is ten hours in the morning,’ shouted the man, ‘by the precise authority of the clock,’ and a burst of cheering went up. Ferney suddenly turned away.
‘Let’s leave,’ he said, ‘I’m thirsty.’ He sounded unhappy.
They bought mugs of ale at the street corner. Gally wished it were water but Ferney never trusted water away from their own spring. She wondered at his sudden downcast mood and regretted it. She would have liked to spend the morning in the town. They very rarely gave up a day to come this far, but he clearly had no wish to stay.
‘What is it?’ she said as they left.
The bell behind them gave one single clang.
‘It’s that,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘I’ll show you,’ he said and turned down the steep slope of the lane towards the flatlands and the way north.
They walked on in silence at a steady pace on the sticky, puddled track. In places, where there were banks, there was no choice but to wade through the mud. In others, travellers had beaten new paths, widening the track in their search for firmer ground, but mostly just spreading out the mud so that it ran to forty paces wide or more. Gally, taking her mind off her wet feet, thought of all the wheels with their tiny teeth and wondered what tools were used to forge them. Shaping metal, she knew, was hard and that was not the sort of work done with a furnace and a hammer. After a fair while, there came a distant double clang behind them and Ferney stopped and wheeled round.
‘So tell me what’s bothering you,’ she said.
‘How far have we come?’ he said. She measured the distance back to the ridge with her eye. ‘Six furlongs,’ she said, ‘maybe seven. Why?’
‘When we
came this morning,’ he said, ‘we moved in eternity at our own best pace and we arrived when we arrived. Do you see how it’s changed?’
‘I don’t think I do.’
‘They’ll have those everywhere soon. That won’t be the only one. Can you really not see what the difference is? We’re going back and we are no longer moving in eternity. Now we are moving in measured time. The machine is measuring us. While we walked it rattled and it turned and it spat out one fourth part of the hour.’
‘That doesn’t hurt,’ she said cheerfully.
He gave her a tight smile. ‘It sounds four times every hour. Can’t you feel it drawing us into its cogs? People never measure without a price coming into it. A pint of ale, a pound of corn, a yard of cloth.’
‘How can time have a price on it?’
‘They’ll find a way,’ he said. ‘They’ll not pay working men by the year, not with this thing about in the world. They’ll measure off the hours they work and they’ll measure off the hours they don’t work. This machine we’ve seen . . . this will serve to fuel the preying dreams of merchants and rich men.’ He looked back down the road. ‘Do you think we’ve walked fast enough?’
‘We’ve walked, that’s all – walked at our speed.’
‘But we’ve got time walking with us now and one day someone will say you’re not fast enough, you haven’t gone far enough or maybe they’ll say that job took too long – the clock says so and it will no longer be enough that it was done well.’
‘Ferney,’ she said, sad to find the joy of the day evaporating around them, ‘time’s not new. There’s been time always.’
‘Water clocks,’ he said, ‘candle clocks, sand glasses. You’ve never taken them seriously. Short hours in winter, long hours in summer. Guesswork – not authority.’ He nodded back up the road. ‘That thing back there isn’t going to be our slave, it’s going to be telling us what to do before we know it.’
‘Let’s break it, then,’ she said and a door opened noisily in the middle of this open countryside and blew her thoughts away.
She blinked, wondering why there were walls around her, and stared blankly at the figure bending apologetically in the bright light of the doorway, one hand on the door handle.
‘So sorry,’ said a man’s voice. ‘Did I disturb you?’
‘No,’ she said, rubbing her head and standing up. ‘I was miles away.’ He had, though, and she resented his arrival.
The man wore a dog-collar. ‘I do apologize,’ he said. ‘Were you at prayer?’
‘No, I was thinking.’
‘Comes to the same thing, sometimes.’ He was boyish, young, with curly fair hair and an embarrassed grin. ‘I’m just a stand-in, you know – for a few weeks.’ She didn’t say anything and he looked even more embarrassed. ‘That’s why I don’t know my flock yet, you see. I’m Roger Wigglesworth.’
‘Gally Martin,’ she said slowly. ‘But I’m not part of your flock, I’m afraid.’
‘Still,’ he said, ‘jolly good to see someone using the place.’ Then he thought. ‘Gally Martin. Are you down in a caravan somewhere?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Oh, in that case it was you and your husband who saved poor Mr Miller?’
‘My husband more than me.’
‘Jolly well done. How is he?’
‘Off the danger list, I gather.’
‘Jolly good show. He must be quite tough.’
‘Do you know Mr Miller?’ she said curiously.
‘Oh no, but I really think I must go and see him in hospital. He’s the first of my flock to fall, if you like.’
Ferney will want that like a hole in the head, thought Gally. ‘I’m fairly certain he’s not one of your flock either,’ she said carefully.
‘Well, any sheep in need,’ he said. ‘Who knows, I might be able to help in some way. Or perhaps he’s of some other church?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Oh well, do go on with your thinking or whatever, I’d hate to stop you.’
‘I must go, actually. I’ve done enough thinking, thank you all the same.’
He stayed in the church when she left and she stopped as soon as she was out of sight. The letter, unresolved, crouched in her pocket, a paper Judas waiting to give the kiss. Mike must not see it, yet she could not bring herself to throw it away.
That was a giant step in there, she thought. I can do it by myself without Ferney leading me. It is there. In the same breath she doubted it. The vicar had shattered the chain too abruptly, driven it all too far away, so that with every second it was harder to be sure what it had been, daydream or memory? It had felt real and detailed and she had to hang on to that, but now it was receding from her too fast to be sure.
She took a deep breath. Time to be practical, she thought and looked at her watch. Seven minutes to the hour. Mike had said he’d be back by eleven. Gally wondered if she could get home in seven minutes. She walked fast, but the clock struck the hour long before she came in sight of the cottage and she hated its tyranny. If time wasn’t measured, lateness wouldn’t hurt. She wanted more time to herself but there was a car pulling into the gateway as she arrived, and it wasn’t Mike.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
All the way to Yeovil, Gally was in the wrong century, driving as if the whole process were new to her, sawing at the steering-wheel, reacting too fiercely and too late in delayed recognition of what other cars were doing. She wasn’t in the right frame of mind to drive a car at all. The whole alien business of controlling this lump of intricate steel was for once almost beyond her, but Mike had found all kinds of reasons to stay behind.
The woman who had arrived in her elegant metallic grey Lancia just as Gally got back to the house had a delicacy about her that had made Gally feel clumpy and ill at ease as she showed her into what she suddenly saw to be an extremely shabby caravan. The woman was brittly polite with an on-off smile. Fortyish, bird-boned and perfectly made-up, she wore immaculate tight clothes that must have hung, amongst many others, in individual plastic protectors.
‘I’m so sorry just to drop in,’ said the woman, ‘I didn’t have a phone number. I hope I’m not interrupting you. My name is Victoria Melhuish and Geoffrey Pringle asked me to get in touch with you.’
‘Geoffrey Pringle?’
‘At the museum?’
Gally still looked blank.
‘Taunton Museum? You called on him recently.’
‘Oh yes . . . sorry.’
‘I’m the jewellery specialist, Stuart jewellery. Geoffrey asked me to take a look at the ring you showed him.’
Gally, raw through and through from abrasive history, found with irritation that she was too polite to refuse, though that was her strong inclination. She opened the plywood door with the one surviving hinge on the cupboard under the caravan seat and got out the leather box in which the ring now lived. Victoria Melhuish bent over, watching as she opened the box, drawn to it and she lost just a little of her poise as she saw the ring. She pounced on it, holding it up to the window, then produced from her bag a magnifier in a grey silk pouch and bent to study it.
‘Do sit down,’ said Gally, deriving a guilty shred of unworthy satisfaction from the difficulty the woman faced sliding into the narrow gap between the stained cushions and the splintery edge of the table without hazarding her clothes.
Victoria Melhuish turned the ring over and over, staring through the eyepiece, then spoke without looking up. ‘This is very interesting,’ she said. ‘Would you mind if I did a little more cleaning? Not too much, of course – just enough to see what we’re dealing with?’
‘Go ahead,’ said Gally. ‘I just need to go and see how the builders are getting on.’ She didn’t want to stand awkwardly by, marginalized, while her ring was put through this process.
Rick called to her from upstairs as she went into the house and she climbed the stairs in time to see him nailing the last sheet of plasterboard into place on the wooden framework of a wall. The ro
oms were delineated again, boxed off.
‘It looks a bit modern,’ she said, looking at the straight edges and the matt grey texture of the plasterboard.
‘It won’t when the plastering’s been done, I promise,’ he said. ‘Mark’s already at it down in the end room there. I’ve told him everything you said, don’t worry – wobbly edges and not too regular. I think it goes against the grain a bit. He’s not used to doing it badly on purpose.’
‘Thanks, Rick. I’d hate it to look like new.’
‘I’ll take my hammer to it then, shall I? A few holes here and there?’
‘No need to go that far.’
She went downstairs and sat on the doorstep. The builders’ radio was playing Radio 3, which meant old Andrew must have been the last one to get at the tuning dial. The next one past would have it back on a pop channel, she knew. Someone was sawing upstairs and the house was loud with their footsteps and their hammering. Through the window of the caravan, framed by dirty orange curtains, she could see the jewellery specialist’s head bent over the table, working away, groping indirectly nearer to a truth that she knew she could reach by a much straighter path. She imagined the ring as it would look when clean and the noises around her faded away as her mind went somewhere else, stepping straight into a deep puddle of memory for the second time that day. The caravan went and the trees shuffled around. Monmouth, long hair tied roughly back, was standing in the lane, far too proud for the smock they’d put him in. They wanted him gone, out of the way, now he was fed and changed. Madox, risking his neck to guide them, was waiting impatiently for Grey and Byser to follow and old, wasted Mother Mogg, the last person they wanted to see, the woman with the biggest mouth in Penselwood, hobbled into view around the corner with her eyes widening at the unexpected sight of strangers. Then the Duke, taking in the old woman’s scrofulous swollen neck, instead of turning his back and hurrying away, was advancing towards her like the Lord God with hands spread out to touch her on the neck and Mother Mogg was recoiling and staring at him in wonder as he blessed her in tones that belied the smock.