by James Long
A figure got out of the driver’s side and a man’s diffident voice said, ‘I’ve got someone in the back. We thought it might be your wife?’
Mike was at the door instantly, staring at the quietly sobbing figure curled up in the dim yellow of the interior light.
‘Gally? What’s wrong?’
She shook her head, didn’t answer.
The woman in the passenger seat was middle-aged, concerned. ‘We thought it was,’ she said. ‘She was in the road by the Mill, sort of collapsed.’
‘Has she been hurt?’
‘I don’t think so. We couldn’t see anything. She’s ever so upset. Colin thought we ought to come here first.’
‘Yes, thank you. I’ll get her inside.’
He reached in and tried to help Gally out. She seemed to have no knowledge of the geography of a car’s interior, thrusting wildly with her hands and looking around her uncomprehendingly. He had to pull her arm quite hard to get her moving in the right direction, murmuring encouragement which failed to reach her and feeling panic rising in him at the strangeness of her. Colin was standing by, embarrassed and awkward, and his wife stayed firmly in her seat. When Gally finally stood clear of the car, hunched over and swaying, Mike put an arm round her and guided her towards the caravan. Colin followed them to the door. Mike sat Gally down on the foam cushions.
‘I could call a doctor for you when we get home,’ Colin said.
‘Er, no . . . thanks. There’s a phone here if we need it.’ Mike felt an explanation was needed. ‘She’s pregnant,’ he said. It didn’t seem adequate, but Colin wasn’t going to argue. ‘Thank you very much for bringing her home.’
‘Well, let us know if we can do anything.’
‘I will. Thanks again.’
He didn’t even know where they lived, but they left him alone then and drove away. He bent over Gally. Her clothes were wet and muddy. The side of her face was covered in mud and lightly scratched. She was still crying.
‘What is it, love? What happened?’
‘It’s Ferney,’ she moaned. ‘He’s dead. He’s dead.’
‘No he’s not,’ he said gently. ‘I rang the hospital. He’s in the recovery room.’
She looked past him with blank eyes. ‘He is dead. I saw him. They cut him open. I left him there.’
‘Gally. He’s not dead, I promise. I’ve talked to them. They operated on him but he’s all right.’
‘NO.’ It was a loud cry and he flinched away from her. ‘They hacked at him, with swords, because of Edgar.’
‘Oh.’ The nature of the matter finally began to dawn on Mike and he looked at Gally in sudden understanding. ‘It’s one of those.’
She cried, silently now, wringing her hands.
‘Gally. Come on, leave it. Gally. This is Mike. You’re back in the caravan. Some people found you in the road. You’re okay now.’
It had no effect. He sat beside her and put an arm round her shoulders, trying not to mind as she shrank away. ‘You’re imagining this, Gally. It’s 1990. You’re in the caravan with me, Mike. Ferney’s in hospital. He’s all right.’
‘It’s his blood,’ she said, picking at her sleeves in a frantic gesture that spelt insanity to him. ‘All over me. All of his blood.’
‘There’s nothing on your clothes except mud, love. Come on now, it’s time to snap out of it. You’re in the caravan.’ He went on trying to reach her, using variations on the same phrases over and over again, sometimes supplicating, sometimes stern and once almost angry. It made no difference. In the end, when phoning a doctor seemed the only other resort, he acted on some instinct, reaching out to press the play button on the tape deck. James Taylor’s voice came on, halfway through ‘Fire and Rain’ which seemed an inappropriate choice with its lyrics of violent bereavement, but it seemed to get through to her where his own words could not. She became very still, then sagged back against the cushions breathing deeply, her eyes blinking and refocusing. She passed a hand over her forehead. ‘Jesus,’ she said, then after a long silence,‘I’m sorry.’ He hugged her.
Haltingly she tried to tell him what had happened to her, but she couldn’t put enough words together to make sense and as soon as he was able to shed his fear that she had been physically harmed it was muscled aside by growing anxiety at the state of her mind. She became very tired and the gaps between her words got longer so he lifted her legs up on the foam mattress, put a pillow under her head then sprawled, fully dressed, on the cushion opposite her for a long time in sleepless, silent alarm. Some time after midnight an owl hooted close by and the next thing he knew was the smell of coffee, a hand stroking his cheek and Gally’s smiling face looking down at him.
‘Are you all right?’ she said.
‘I am, yes.’ He was groggy. ‘What about you, though?’ She grimaced. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that to happen. I got locked into it.’
‘What was it?’
‘A memory.’
‘Of what?’
‘Something pretty horrid.’
‘You kept saying Ferney was dead. About men with swords.’
She shook her head.‘I don’t want to go back over it.’
‘All right.’ He tried for a safe approach. ‘It’s not very good for you, is it?’
She didn’t answer.
‘You got yourself in a real state yesterday. Those people were really shocked.’
‘What people?’ She looked at him in surprise.
‘I don’t know. The couple with the car. The couple who found you.’
She had her hand over her mouth, looking at him. ‘I don’t remember. I thought you . . .’
‘Gally. This is getting a bit scary. I just wonder whether we ought not to get some help, maybe.’
‘What sort of help?’
‘A doctor. Something like that.’
‘You mean a psychiatrist, don’t you?’
‘Maybe,’ he said defiantly. ‘I’m worried about you.’
‘Mike,’ she said, patting his hand, ‘I’m not going off my rocker. I can . . . I can remember some things all by myself now, but – I don’t know – all the bad things seem to come back easiest. I’ll just have to be very careful.’
‘It’s not good for you.’
‘I think it is.’
‘How can it be?’
She gave him a look of pity which showed she knew how difficult it must be for him to understand. ‘It helps me navigate. It stops me bumping into some of the things that would trip me up if I didn’t know they were there. It really is helping.’
‘I thought it was. That’s why I haven’t really butted in, but I’ve never known you have so many nightmares.’
‘No, they’ve stopped, at least for the last few days. I think I know what they were now, where they came from.’
‘Can you tell me?’
‘Not now. Do you mind?’
‘Later. When you can.’ He was trying to give her some space, although he felt an urgent need to know everything.
‘Who was Edgar?’
‘Edgar? I don’t know any Edgars. What do you mean?’
‘Last night you said whatever happened to Ferney was because of Edgar.’
She thought but nothing came. ‘I don’t have any idea.’
He took a deep breath. ‘You can’t be sure about these . . . memories.’
‘I think I can.’
‘Do you know what a palimpsest is?’
‘No.’
‘It’s a document that’s been written over lots of times. A thousand years ago when parchment was pretty scarce, they’d wash the ink off a sheet of manuscript or rub at it with pumice stone and use it again. It all got a bit murky when they’d done that a few times.’
‘Umm, I assume there’s a reason why you’re telling me this?’
‘Sorry. A historian’s clumsy parallel. I did a bit of reading last week. About memory and things, and that’s more or less the way memory works.’
‘Why were you doing this? For a lectur
e?’
‘No, of course not. For us. I was wondering about Ferney and it struck me it would be pretty impossible to remember so much. Even if you believe him, the fact is the memory doesn’t work like that. It makes a palimpsest every time. When you remember something, what you remember next time isn’t that thing itself, it’s the memory of remembering it, so it’s always changing. You can’t trust memories.’
‘You’d have to be pretty rigorous then,’ said Gally, ‘making quite sure you remembered everything just right, wouldn’t you?’
‘You wouldn’t be able to. It would gradually change every time, wouldn’t it? It would pretty soon be pure fiction, don’t you think?’
‘Do you really want to talk about this now?’
‘Yes, I do. Look, you frightened me yesterday. You can’t expect me to believe all this stuff, Gally. Last night was something else.’
‘Mike, you’ve always believed everything I’ve said until now, haven’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘So either you believe me now or you have to think I’ve got a serious mental problem, right?’
Mike didn’t want to be hung on that hook. ‘No, it’s just I think Ferney’s got some way of influencing you.’
‘Ferney is in hospital. Yesterday I was by myself and I was able to remember every detail of something that happened hundreds of years ago.’
‘I wish you’d tell me.’
‘I . . . Can we leave that for now?’ It was out there waiting to pounce again and the worst part of it couldn’t be kept from her mind – the pain of losing Ferney from any of her lives, and for Mike’s sake she couldn’t let him tease that out of her. The pain of her cowardice, too.
‘How can you ask me to believe that?’
‘Well, perhaps all I’m asking is that you accept it for now, because as far as I’m concerned it is completely real.’
Mike looked distraught. ‘Gally. Don’t you see? If I accept it, then I have to accept that you’re much more Ferney’s than you are mine.’
It was out in the open and he had to press the point. Her silence forced him on.
‘It’s very hard. I know you’ve found comfort. I think maybe you’ve even found some sort of healing, but it’s cutting me out and I won’t be cut out. I just don’t understand what’s going on. You keep telling me he’s an old man, but sometimes when I see the look in your eyes I’m bloody glad he’s not younger and I’m not even sure that’s much comfort really. I can’t help thinking of him as . . . well, as a rival.’
This was such dangerous ground.
‘I wouldn’t choose to hurt you,’ Gally said gently. ‘I can’t lie, though. I know for absolutely certain that Ferney and I have . . .’ she couldn’t stab him with the word ‘love’ ‘. . . that we’ve been close for such a long time. I know I say this a lot, but Ferney’s a very old man, Mike. We haven’t even rung this morning to see how he is. They’re separate things, what’s in the past and you and me, now. They have to be. You don’t believe in all this. Well, just be patient then. If you’re right, he’ll soon be . . . gone and that will be an end to it.’
‘That’s a pretty roundabout reply,’ said Mike. ‘A simple no would have sufficed.’
He said it lightly as if it were a punch-line, but the lightness was to cover up the ache. His tone brought a slight involuntary smile to her face which his suffering mind twisted to a further suggestion of rejection and she just had time to take in the tightening of his expression before he got up abruptly and strode out through the caravan door. She let him go as her own mind spun. She couldn’t have given him that simple ‘no’ for anything and her intractable honesty was pulling her apart.
I’ve never set out to do deliberate harm to anyone, she thought. How can I have got myself in this situation? A relentless inner voice insisted on giving her the reason: because until this year you were groping in the dark and now the light is shining through. The light that shows how much it hurts to lose Ferney.
Then she looked out of the window and saw Mike standing utterly dejected by the door of his car, unsure where to go, and the balance swung back the other way. Nothing justified making him so sad. Driven by duty and fondness, but not what she would now honestly describe as love, she went out and held him.
That afternoon they both drove to Yeovil Hospital.
‘You can come in if you want to,’ she said.
‘It’s better if I don’t. I’ll wait for you.’
‘I might be a while.’
‘I expect you will be.’
She got out of the car and he wound down the window.
‘Gally? Just remember who you are now. Just remember me.’
She gave him a sad smile and walked inside.
Ferney was not too weak to welcome her, though he was still surrounded by monitoring instruments. They looked at each other appraisingly.
‘So how did it go?’
‘Don’t ask me,’ he said. ‘I went to sleep feeling pretty good and I woke up sore. That’s about the sum of it.’
‘Are you still sore now?’
‘Nothing that won’t pass.’
‘What did they find?’
‘No. What’s wrong with you first?’
She raised an eyebrow at him. ‘Who says anything’s wrong with me?’
‘I do,’ he said, ‘and I should know.’ His face twitched in pain which he rapidly controlled. ‘I could even make a guess what it is.’
‘What then?’
‘Conflicting loyalties I’d say for sure, and why are they conflicting? Because something’s happened recently that’s made you think you have to choose.’
She could only nod for fear her voice would catch.
‘You’ve got that memory working more, haven’t you?’ he said. ‘And it took you somewhere painful.’
She nodded again.
‘Was it the promise? The promise you made on the hill?’ He was watching her closely.
‘No.’
‘I hoped it would be. Never mind what it was then. Probably something I wouldn’t enjoy.’
She found her voice though it was not as steady as she wanted. ‘I only seem to go back to the bad things.’
‘You’re a learner driver, Gally. They’re the easiest ones to hit. You’ve got a choice: either stop doing it or learn to do it better, and that’s no choice really.’
‘Mike’s outside waiting for me. I talked to him a lot this morning. Last night was dreadful, really dreadful, so I had to.’
Ferney nodded encouragement and she went on. ‘I know what you’ll say. You’ll say that Mike is only a very small part of our lives, but he’s been a very big part of this life and none of this is his fault. I have to think of him. What can I do?’
He stretched his neck, easing his head on the pillow, and considered. ‘I suppose you could say that these doctors are making it all a bit easier,’ he said. ‘They say this old carcass has just about had it.’ He was completely matter-of-fact. ‘A few months and that’s it.’
‘How many months?’ she said quietly.
‘Three or four. Maybe a bit more with a lot of extra cutting, but I said I didn’t want that.’
‘Oh Ferney, I’m too new to this not to be upset,’ she said and leaned forward in her chair so that her forehead rested against his chest.
‘No need,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back in a new set of clothes before you can say knife. Then just give me a few years to grow up.’ He stroked her forehead with lover’s fingers. ‘You do realize,’ he went on quietly. ‘When I’m eighteen, say, you’ll be in your forties.’
‘Stop it. I can add up.’ She sat up straight again. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
‘I do.’ His voice sounded younger and stronger. ‘The way he sees life, I’m not going to be a problem for very much longer. Tell him what the doctors said. You can even tell him you’ll stay away from me these next few weeks if you want to. If it helps him, it doesn’t hurt us, does it? I know I’ll be seeing you later, but he doesn’t believe
that, so that’s all he’ll care about. There’s just one thing I ask in return.’
‘I can guess what that is.’ Her voice was sombre.
‘Yes, you can. You’ve got to tell me you’ll just try remembering one more time. Up on the hill. You’ve got to hear yourself out, Gally. You’ve got to hear your promise. You told me to say that to you.’
‘I don’t know what will happen, Ferney. I couldn’t stop yesterday. I couldn’t get myself out of it.’
‘I can tell you why. Underneath you’re worrying about that promise all the time, aren’t you? You’re thinking about remembering and you’re fearing remembering and that’s what’s steering you straight into all the black bits. Don’t do it like that. Just do what you know you’ve got to. Listen to yourself and that won’t happen any more. Use the words I gave you. They won’t take you anywhere bad.’
‘But what happens after I listen to myself?’
‘That’s your choice, but at least you will have had your say.’ She nodded agreement. ‘What about you? Are you coming home?’
‘I plan to be out in a week or two.’
‘Who’s going to look after you?’
‘It’ll work out. I’m not fading away in here, that’s for sure. I’m going out on my terms, in my place. I’d be daft to stay here. Not right over a maternity ward with babies popping out ten times a day. You never know what might happen.’
She laughed and as if that showed she had a sufficient reserve of strength to handle it, he said, ‘So what was it you remembered this time?’
‘You. Being killed.’
‘There’s a few of those. When?’
‘By the Normans, down below the castle.’
‘Oh yes.’ He looked quite calm. ‘And?’
‘And? Well, I was such a coward. I could feel it, all the fear.’