Ferney

by James Long

  All the time she was aware of the disturbing new tool at her disposal, the tool which should allow her to uncover whatever she wanted to know about her long partnership with the house, but she had all the anxiety of a new skipper taking a yacht out for the first time into a sea which felt full of shoals just below the surface, waiting to tear off her keel and capsize her. Once again something inside her objected that Ferney had been unfair to introduce her so roughly to this unexpected world, leaving her standing in front of a crumbling dam of memory, fearing that a wrong move could cause a collapse that would sweep her completely away. As long as she was vigilant it was possible to avoid stirring up the memories, and most of the time she was happy to resist the temptation. There were no more nightmares, though when, in safe daylight, she tested herself with the burning car, the same old cold tendril of accusation clutched at her.

  The following week, as signs of autumn started to stiffen the leaves, the hospital rang to say they would be performing an exploratory operation now that Ferney was well enough to stand it. On the Friday afternoon, when the clock told her the operation was under way, she sat in an armchair on the bare boards of the upstairs room that would soon be their bedroom. It was painted a soft yellow and she knew it had long been a favourite place, but she did not wish, for the moment, to dwell on that in case it transported her to unexpected times. As she sat there she felt an unfamiliar physical sensation, a convulsion inside her of tiny, intricate power – a deliberate tickle from the wrong side of her skin. Until logic came to her rescue she was startled, then she recognized the movement as her baby’s first kick and delight calmed her. Putting both hands on her swelling stomach, she waited, wanting to feel another kick with a strong sense that suddenly this was somebody inside her, but in the next breath that thought brought apprehension. Ferney was on the operating table. Did life’s waxing here mean it was waning there?

  The hospital were bland on the phone. They were running a bit behind with the operation schedule. Yes, Mr Miller was perfectly all right. He was being prepared for surgery. Had anyone checked him recently? Yes of course they had. There was an unspoken ‘for heaven’s sake’ in the nurse’s reply.

  Gally couldn’t stay in the house after that and the place she most and least wanted to be was the hilltop. Present fear defeated past peace. The hilltop carried Ferney’s question with it and sufficient unto tomorrow was the evil thereof. Mike wasn’t due home until after seven o’clock. Instead, she walked north-east, past the sloping field called Kingsbury Bars, then where the road swung round left she went straight on into the almost hidden mouth of the narrow muddy path, Long Lane, which had been left alone when the age of cars selected a handful of the tracks for tarmac promotion. The lane teemed with old experience, but to suppress its ghosts she thought resolutely of modern plans, of moving into the house. Mike saw no reason to wait, though the builders had another three or four weeks’ work downstairs, but she didn’t want to share the house with anybody else, preferring to stay in the caravan until the night when it was really all theirs. For an appalling moment the thought crept in that she didn’t even want to share it with Mike, but she pounced on that one, declared it alien, dismissed it as a bad joke from some dark recess and refused to think about it any further. Past Kite’s Nest Farm, she reached the field path north to Pen Mill and turned on to it. The land fell to the wooded bottom where the Egbert Stone stood in the swampy spread of the river and teased her with changes and dislocations in its fence-lines and borders that niggled at her without making themselves quite plain.

  It came to her out of the landscape that it would not be possible to go on suppressing any of the events that made her what she was. Doing so gave her the constant feeling that someone else owned her values, someone else decided her attitudes, some locked-off past person had already made up her mind for her on right and wrong. She stood there quite still, looking round this border corner of her country, feeling it trying its best to speak to her, knowing she had to learn to listen to it all or else be constantly ambushed by it. To reclaim ownership of herself, she could see no other way but to learn to navigate through all the stacked-up varieties that preceded this Gally, not just the direct and pressing causes of distress but all the rest of it too. My life is an iceberg, she thought. Far more than two-thirds of it is below the water and in the end I have no choice but to dive down to see what is there and if that is the case, then I suppose I had better begin now.

  For need of a predictable starting-point, which seemed the best of reasons, she went on walking until she arrived at the same spot by the hedge across the shallow valley from the castle mound where she had waited for Mike and met Ferney and where she already knew she had met the Breton Ferney, newly arrived from his epic Channel crossing. She even knew the words he had said again to her so recently. She failed to remember the tiny warning that had come unbidden earlier that same day just before Mike saw Ferney at work in the pit. Then, she had looked down at the open grassland valley below the old Norman castle where the water meadows had once been and where the Frenchmen had . . . Had what? She hadn’t known the end of it then and she forgot the start of it now. The hermit crab trace of memory had withdrawn into its shell, pushed back by the events of the rest of that day and now she failed to remember that half-formed fear.

  Sitting down on the grass by the hedge there seemed to be no hurry at all. She looked out across the combe, dotted with sheep grazing the short grass. A line of bushes marked the course of the stream that ran along its bottom down to the Stour at its end, and on the far side the roof of the house just below the castle mound showed neat and grey, two small upper windows peering over its thick hedge under eyebrows of thatch. The trees were clustered around the castle. There was an undeniable excitement in her at the idea that she could conjure up a world in which she would see for the first time, recognize and immediately love a younger Ferney. She would find out what it had been about the Breton boy that had identified him to her so quickly and what it felt like to be of an age with him when all life and all love lay ahead in delightful certainty. It felt almost as if she was about to launch on an affair.

  Bien sûr, c’est moi, she said and nothing came. That was what he had said. Bien sûr. Bien sûr. Bien sûr, c’est moi. The litany felt thin and pointless. Perhaps I’m thinking about it in the wrong way, she thought. Cumulus clouds drifted to the north-east on the warm autumn wind and she stayed in French in her head, remembering a line from a poem: ‘J’aime les nuages, les nuages qui passent. Là-bas, là-bas, les merveilleux nuages.’

  There came an immediate harsh echo: ‘Là-bas, là-bas’, and she looked down into a valley where the sheep had gone and the grass was long and though she knew it was memory she was completely and wholly there in it. The bushes were thicker along the stream and out of them came a running man. The top of the hill across the combe was bare, piled with fallen tree-trunks. On its very end the rising walls of the keep, already over a man’s height, glistened with fresh-cut facets of stone. Fallen tree-trunks were piled by the saw-pit and the hammering of the masons had stopped. The only movement up on the hill was the slow heaving of an ox team dragging a litter along its summit with more rough stone lashed to it for the masons to cut. Everyone up there was looking towards her, down into the valley.

  Stone used like this spread terror. Cut stone was only familiar to her as the everlasting material of the worshippers of God, something to be slowly assembled into walls with painstaking care in a time measured in years not days. What they were heaving into being up ahead of her with forced, brutal speed was something new – military stone – a stone promise that the tyranny of these Normans was no passing evil. These Frenchmen were not like the invaders they’d known many times. They were no Danish raiding party fading away to the roar of burning roofs and the sobbing reek of blood: they were putting up their stonewall weapons as a sign that they were here to stay and all others were now subject people.

  All this passed through her head as a chemical curl of fea
r and the man, gasping with effort, toiled up the gentle slope towards her as his pursuers burst from the bushes behind him. It was Ferney, gaunt and shock-headed, his useless arm dangling at his side while the other swung with his body, urging him on. Three Normans shouting their jabber at each other were racing up behind him and she could see they would reach him long before he got to her. She stood up out of her concealment, desperate for a way to alter the inevitable slow intersection below.

  Ferney saw her. ‘Run,’ he shouted, but then the first Norman reached him, swung a sword across the back of his legs and he went down with a scream. Fear froze her and she despised this body which let her down so often with its flooding, involuntary, paralysing timidity. She’d been overpoweringly afraid in the morning when they had discussed Ferney’s intention, sitting outside the house, looking at the Bag Stone as spiders’ webs glistened white across it in the early sun.

  ‘I must go and see,’ he had said.

  ‘They might do something to you.’

  ‘They’ll do something to Edgar otherwise.’

  The ox driver had arrived early at the house, stooping under the low doorway and rubbing his eyes in the cooking smoke inside. He’d told them that their son was ill and working slowly and that the Normans, who had pressed every able-bodied man and boy in the village into their service to haul the stone, would show no pity on him if he could not keep up the pace this morning. Ferney had sat there mulling it over.

  ‘It’s clear,’ he’d said in the end. ‘I have to go. I’ll offer myself in his place until he feels well.’

  She touched his withered arm. ‘They won’t take you. They’ve already said as much.’

  ‘Which would they rather have, a sick boy or a crippled man?’

  ‘You’re not allowed on to the hill. They said so. Only the workers.’

  The ridge in Selwood Forest was yet again paying the price for its geography. Five years earlier the news that the Normans had landed had taken several weeks to solidify from rumour into fact in the south-west, but it soon became very clear that this was not at all like previous invasions. These men believed that as a dominant minority, force should be used right from the start. Harold’s military system had been broken on the Sussex Downs and there was no organized resistance at first as the Frenchmen moved through the land, but three times in the intervening four years the west had exploded into revolt. It was never strong enough nor organized enough to stand a chance of success against William’s forces, for its commanders had no way of knowing what other men the French had in reserve within two or three days’ march. Gally was frightened all that time, so frightened that the strong guiding self within her simply could not contain the flooding panic of her betraying glands.

  So Ferney had gone and she had wanted to say, ‘You are so much more important to me than our son,’ but she knew what he would have replied as if he had spoken the words: ‘This son is worthy of our best efforts. You and I have much more time together. This is a boy above most boys.’

  Now she stood for once, refusing to fly as two of the soldiers held Ferney down and one raised a sword that caught the sun, red and silver, and hacked it down on his back and his neck once, twice, three times. For the first time in this life anger overtook the fear and she found astonished feet carrying her down the hill towards them as fast as she could run while an unfamiliar voice screamed hysterical threats at the soldiers. They looked at her approaching. The leader laughed, kicked Ferney’s body, wiped his sword on the grass and led his men back towards the growing castle. The look on his face said he knew it was crueller to keep her alive than to kill her too.

  Gally knelt by Ferney’s head and saw his eyelids flickering. She forced herself to look at his back and from the pumping blood, oozing, bubbling out of the sword’s deep slashes in his tunic she knew there was no help she could bring to him except final comfort. A sense came to her of all the other widows she had been, lined up to help her through this. She crooned over Ferney, stroking his forehead, talking to him as she had to her babies, then she saw from the lips that were moving, trickling more blood, that he was trying to speak. She had to lie down next to him in the soaking red grass to get her ear close enough because she could not hurt him more by trying to move him.

  ‘Edgar . . . dead,’ he said in a wet whisper. ‘Laugh . . . at me.’ His eyes closed and reopened with a jerk. ‘I hit the man,’ he said in a stronger voice. ‘No good.’ A gush of blood came from his mouth and stopped him speaking, but his eyes were still fluttering. She had her forehead against his so that he would know she was there. ‘Next time,’ she said, ‘next time we’ll not let anyone else concern us,’ but next time seemed a very long way away to her. She sang a song to him, the old song Alfred’s men had sung around the stone, a song of strength and liberation: ‘We shall meet when the fighting is past, we shall sing when the battle is done, we shall drink when we’ve broken our fast, we shall sleep when our freedom is won.’

  He lay very still, the breath bubbling faintly and his eyelids which were all she could see because she was so close, slowed their movement until the instant when the last tremor of life sagged out of him in a slow exhalation and then she still lay there, as if she could delay recognition of the fact so long as she did not move. Her reaction to all that fear was deep sandbagging fatigue and she subsided into a dull trance on the wet, red earth. Unknown time passed and she convulsed into wakefulness to find blood stiffening in crusts on her skin and her tunic and his terrible, cold body staring at her with set, dead eyes.

  It was no comfort at all to think of next time. There was just loneliness to face, loneliness and the uncertainty of when or how they would find each other. She wanted death and knew that she was too afraid to find it deliberately for herself. She wished the soldiers had killed her too. Then horror took her and she stood up on shaky, numbed legs, gave one last look at him and ran in the twilight away from the castle.

  The path took her south to the buildings around Pen Mill which were too large in the deepening darkness and shone bewildering yellow light into the evening as if on fire within. She found it harder and harder to go on running and was amazed at her weakness, she who for all her timidity had the body of a hunting dog and could run for miles if she had to. She stumbled into the lane, slumped down on an earth bank and huge eyes rushed at her out of the darkness.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Mike, sitting miserably in the caravan, could find nothing to make the time pass faster or to calm his agitation. Water was cooling in the kettle next to a cup still containing an unused teabag which he seemed to lack the concentration or the will to bring together. He would have paced up and down had there been space. It was a bad end to a horrible week. Giving lectures, he had been flying by remote control. In tutorials he had been too distracted and uninterested to detect and pounce on the evasions, generalizations and misunderstandings of his students and in the weekly business meeting of department heads he had completely missed the psychological moment to make a firm defence of his next year’s budget. He kept thinking back to Gally’s rejection of the car he had offered her. It was to have been the biggest present he had ever given her and from the moment he had conceived it he had been expecting delight and pleasure. Her response felt like a final rejection of everything he had once assumed about their new way of life. A cottage in the country, he had thought then, would bring variety into their life – a choice of places to be. Mobility had been an essential part of that, based on the idea that they could never be bored if they had the freedom to alternate between the city and the country.

  It seemed to him that Gally, egged on no doubt by the old man, had changed the rules by taking to this place so totally that she saw no need for the means to get out of it. A car would have given her the freedom to surprise him. He had already started to fantasize, returning to their cold, dark flat with a takeaway on a mid-week London evening, that she might have decided magically to travel up and the place would be full of the life she would bring with her. T
urning down the car cut him deeply. She seemed to be narrowing and simplifying herself and her range of interests as she followed Ferney up some mad garden path. Mike felt helpless, hamstrung by the knowledge that he didn’t understand the fragile processes going on before his eyes and held back from further confrontation by the dreadful consequences of the last one. Ferney’s illness and his own part in it had put the old man temporarily out of bounds in Mike’s inherited value system.

  Gally not being there when he returned twisted the knife further. He always told her when he’d be back, always rang if he was going to be late, relying on her welcome to dump the week’s baggage from his mind. There was no sign of her in the house or around the land and he’d been to the gate several times to look up and down the lane. It took a full hour for irritation and unease to turn to straightforward worry and in the next thirty minutes Mike started imagining an enormous range of terrible things that might have happened to his wife. He could see plainly her blood-soaked body lying in a ditch. He could have no idea that her own picture of herself coincided with his in almost every detail.

  Ages ticked by in the next ten minutes as he tried to pick on a course of action – a trip round the lanes in the car seemed the best first step, but then the phone might ring and they had no answering machine. He would have blamed Ferney if he could, but for the fact that he was in hospital. A logical solution struck him. The hospital might have called her to Ferney’s bedside. She might have got a lift, or a taxi maybe. It might have been a sufficient emergency to make her forget to leave him a note. He rang Yeovil. Mr Miller was still under the anaesthetic, they said, in the recovery room. Mike had forgotten all about the operation and that was a relief because that surely explained where Gally must be. Was his wife there? he asked. This was going beyond the accepted scope of his call, but they looked because he sounded so strained and reported that she was not and that Mr Miller was to have no visitors until at least the following day. More agitated than ever, he put the phone down and headlights swept the caravan as a car came slowly into the yard. He went outside, facing their dazzle, nervous of what bad news might come stalking from beyond the lights.