by James Long
Three in the morning and the house’s bones creaked as the first frost of winter crisped on its roof and tested its newly strengthened joints in slow contraction. Gally’s calmer dreams had often in the past been searching dreams where she would be misled by places that at first seemed familiar, pushing through crowds, trying to catch up with people who always disappointed when they turned. Now, for the first time, her dreams were entirely delightful, putting her in the very centre of where she wanted to be, in a cocoon of comfort. In her sleep the lover who was the other half of her turned to her and put his warm arms around her and she flooded with acceptance so that her spirit and her body welcomed him into her, and where their minds melted together she wrapped her legs around him to crush them into matching physical unity. It was no dream, but she experienced every soft swollen movement of it through a filter of sleep and the end of it was a soaring harmony of spiritual perfection and physical ecstasy that she knew went as far as it was possible to go in complete sharing. But then abrupt movement chased it away and dragged her to a waking reality that was wrong and unexpected. A man was getting out of bed with harsh, angry movements and for that first moment of awareness the man was a stranger. In the second moment, he was revealed as Mike.
‘What . . . what’s the matter?’ she said in a thick voice.
‘You’re the matter,’ he said bitterly.
‘Why? What did I do?’
‘You called out. Didn’t you know?’
‘No, I was asleep, I think.’
‘You called out “Ferney”.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
As the world turned towards a cold dawn, curled miserably alone in the big bed, Gally could not drive away a relentless voice that seemed intent on stripping away all the layers of pretence with which she tried to protect herself. If Mike had been there she could have calmed him down, forced him to listen to her apologies, kept him there and kept this voice away, but Mike was not there. Mike had driven off into the night, the engine reaching a crescendo in each gear until distance claimed all evidence of it, and in his absence the voice had started and it told her that she was running out of time for compromise. It was inside her, a grim questioner with no comfort in it that obliged her to sit in judgement on herself and would allow no inaccuracy in the statements it demanded.
‘Is there space for Mike in your life?’
‘Of course there is. There has to be. I married him. He wasn’t happy before. I made him happy. I can’t take that away.’
‘Is there space for Mike?’
‘There has to be. I just can’t find the right way to fit them both in.’
‘Is there space?’
‘No. There has to be. No. There’s not.’
‘What must you do?’
‘Avoid hurting anyone.’
‘What must you do?’
‘Talk to them both.’
‘Who do you love?’
‘Both of them.’
‘Who do you love?’
‘It’s different.’
‘Who do you love?’
‘Ferney, but I . . .’
‘What must you do?’
‘Be true to myself.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Be me. Get back in touch with all the other bits I can’t reach.’
‘Can’t reach?’
‘Choose not to reach.’
That won her a short reprieve of silence. She went to the bathroom wrapped up in a long sweater and a dressing-gown to try to keep the voice away and sat there in the armchair for a long time, fearing sleep and worrying about Mike. He would have gone to the flat. He would drive too fast in his anger. He would be utterly miserable. At five in the morning, when he should have got there and the sky outside was still as black as it could be, she phoned, but the line was engaged and that must mean he had taken the phone off the hook. At least it meant he was there. She went back to bed with a cup of tea, propped pillows up behind her and unexpectedly found herself waking in that position, four hours later, with the tea cold next to her.
She had so looked forward to that first morning, had even planned ahead that she would bring Mike a tray of croissants and coffee and they would eat it in bed, taking shared pleasure in the unusual comfort of it all, but it seemed there was no pleasure to be had, just the faint echo of the unremitting voice. She phoned the flat again and even before it connected, she knew she would hear the engaged signal. Dressed, she went downstairs and suddenly wondered how many times she had been down those stairs. The woodwork of these treads might be new, but that made no difference. She had a pressing sense of all the streams of days that had begun this way, with that diagonal passage down from rest to action and before that, going back on this spot before there were stairs, when it was just one storey, then one flimsy room where rest and work were divided only by the action of standing up. She was still here. All the other bit players in their life flared briefly and whirled away and there was nothing enduring except her and Ferney and the house and the stone and of those four only the stone kept its outward form unchanged. It was disturbing to think of Ferney, a mile away, dislocated in his temporary house.
I seem to be making so many mistakes, she said to herself sitting on a stool in the kitchen and a more friendly voice answered her.
‘You have forgotten too much.’
‘Remembering doesn’t seem to help.’
‘How could it not help? You know so much if you let yourself remember it.’
She had to go to Ferney. Mechanical duties called her, duties discussed with Mike before the night’s involuntary cry of betrayal. They had agreed she would check the old man had managed to get himself breakfast. Prompted by the house or by the voice, for she could not tell whether they were the same thing, she was filled with resolution and, before she left, she went down the slope to the hollow tree where the plastic bag, ignored these last weeks, now showed clearly in its hole in the bare trunk to anyone who might look. With it in her pocket she walked along the lane, jacketed against the breath-fogging cold, and when she came to the gate up to the hilltop she turned off with no further conscious decision and didn’t slow down until the top of the rise opened all the land below to her gaze. Frost pockets showed white streaks through the misty exhalations of the ditch-drained fields and the colours of that winter landscape were grey and a metal green that was mainly blue. The seat was damp and cold and she sat on a scarf that had been in her pocket, folded back and forth across the stone. She found she was shivering and the cold gave her an excuse, but making excuses was not part of her plan for the morning so she admitted that she was frightened. She got out the letter and read it again, then despite the cold she imagined herself in the pale blue cotton dress he described, pink rosebuds in the pattern and her long blonde hair hanging over her shoulders, and as she did the coldness left her. Summer warmth struggled to superimpose itself and the leaves came back, ghostly green on the bare branches.
‘We can do it,’ she read from the letter. ‘We can if we set our minds to it. No more of this hit and miss.’ Nothing came and she made the dress as vivid as she could, the pattern developing in her mind’s eye then shifting and disappearing when she lost concentration. She ran her hand over the denim of her jeans, feeling only thin cotton print, and the pattern came back. In this other time she was standing by the stone seat, looking down at her leg, feeling the rent in the dress, looking up again in horror at Cochrane who was holding her wrist tightly.
‘Let me go,’ she shouted. ‘You’ve torn it.’ She wrenched her wrist free, turned and ran down the hill towards the lane, knowing he was coming after her, praying Ferney would appear, shouting for help when she could spare the breath. Then the ground lurched up to meet her as she stumbled in a hole, knocking the wind out of her as she crashed down, but when she rolled over, hands up ready to fight him, it was cold winter and she was in her padded jacket and jeans and the year was 1990 again and she was alone on the hill.
As soon as she could breathe nor
mally, she hurried down to the lane trying to compose herself and by the time she reached Ferney’s house and saw through the window, to her relief, that he was moving around his sitting-room, she was in shaky control. He opened the door to her and then opened his arms when he saw the look on her face and she stood there in the hall, suddenly finding peace, with his arms tightly around her and his cheek against hers. After some time he led her into the sitting-room and they sat down side by side on the sofa.
‘I tried to do it,’ she said, pacing her words carefully to avoid the fear. ‘I went up to the hill and I said the words and I imagined the dress the way you told me, but that man came, Cochrane. He was there on the top of the hill and he tore my dress. I ran away and I fell . . .’
‘You really fell,’ he said, looking at the mud on her jeans.
‘Yes, I did, but I knew I was falling in . . . in the memory and I knew he was going to catch me and do something terrible to me.’
‘Cochrane grabbed you, up on our hill?’ He sounded incredulous, catching up with what she had said.
‘Yes, he did. He was beside himself, bright red. His eyes were bulging.’ She shuddered.
‘He got you there. I had no idea.’ Ferney’s voice was grim. ‘All I knew was you disappeared. That must have been the day. Was it summer?’
‘It was, yes.’
‘July the tenth, 1933. I’m so very sorry.’
‘It’s not your fault.’
‘It is though, isn’t it? I got you to walk back straight into it. I didn’t remember that was the same dress you were wearing. I should have. It got driven out of my head, I suppose. It’s not only that though, is it? There’s more worrying you.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Gally, love. Listen to me. We’ve got extra sight, you might say, you and me. We’ve had thirteen hundred years to get to know human nature. There’s only a certain number of things that happen, of ways that people feel, and we’ve seen all of them a thousand times, you and me. We’re good at people, have been for ages and ages. We can see what they really mean in every little twitch of them. We always know it when the words go only halfway. It keeps us out of trouble and ahead of the game.’ He smiled. ‘You may be a bit cut off from it at the moment, but it goes without saying we’re best of all at reading each other. You used to say you could tell my thoughts. I don’t know about that but I can certainly read your face.’
‘Last night. I seemed to be talking to myself, giving myself a bit of a going-over.’
‘Why?’
‘I upset Mike.’
‘Oh dear. Have you made up?’
‘I couldn’t. He left. He drove off to London in the middle of the night.’
Ferney sighed. ‘That was quite an upset, then. What happened?’
‘We were . . . in bed and I called out your name.’
‘Oh no.’ He looked down. It sounded as if it hurt him and she thought it was the idea that she and Mike had been making love. He shook his head as if irritated with himself. ‘Then you say you started talking to yourself?’
‘I don’t know what it was. It was just this voice in my head that wouldn’t let me off the hook. It kept forcing me to say what I really thought about everything.’
‘It was you. It was all your wisdom, I expect. You’ve got it there, all locked away, and it knows when it’s needed and I would say it sounds like it’s definitely needed now.’
She nodded. ‘I think I need all the help I can get. How can I get at it?’
He turned and gazed out of the window. ‘You mustn’t think I’m saying this for my own ends.’
‘I won’t.’
‘I think you’ve got to go back and try again, up the hill. I think you’ve got something big blocking you off there. Just do that and you’ll know how to play it, I’m sure.’
‘But I’ll see Cochrane again.’ It was almost a wail.
He turned back to her. ‘No, listen,’ he said. ‘This time you’ve got to take me along.’
‘Ferney, you can’t possibly go up the hill today. You’re fresh out of hospital.’
‘I don’t mean like that. I mean take me along in your head. It was both of us were there, you know. That last time when Cochrane caught you, I wasn’t there, was I? If you put me in your head too, you can’t go wrong. I’ll keep you safe from him. I only wish I could have done before.’
She thought about it and nodded. ‘Well . . . tell me about it. Give me a bit more to go on. How were we sitting?’
He moved a bit closer to her and put one arm loosely round her shoulders. ‘Like this, more or less. We were a bit out of breath.’
‘What were we doing?’
He looked at her and a slow smile spread across his face. ‘You might get a bit of a shock if I told you that.’
‘Ah . . .’ she leaned her head against his shoulder.
‘How does that make you feel?’ he said gently.
‘Like I did last night when I was more or less asleep and I thought it was you, like it was the best thing in the world.’
‘I’d like you to know how it should be. It’s a bit undignified being an old crock. When we’re both young together, it’s so good.’
‘I don’t see an old crock,’ she said. ‘I look into your eyes and that’s all I see, the inside, not the outside. You don’t need to feel ashamed of anything.’
‘You were wearing the garland ring. Remember that. Get the feel of that around your head.’
‘I didn’t have that on when Cochrane . . . No of course.’ She answered herself. ‘If I’d been wearing it then, you wouldn’t have still had it.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘That will keep you safe. There was nothing to worry about that day. Everything we said and did was about love.’ Then he sighed again.
‘Fifty-five years,’ he said calmly. ‘That’s too long between the two of us. It makes no sense like this. It would be so good to be young with you again. I want that so much.’
She got up. ‘I’m going back to the hill. Right now, while it’s fresh in my head.’
‘You’re a brave girl.’
‘I’ve got to do it. I know that now. There’s no other way.’
Up the slope she made sure she kept the image of Ferney beside her and, sitting down on top, she waited until she felt calm then thought of the slight pressure of the garland ring around her forehead, the smell of the flowers woven into it. She put Ferney beside her in her mind and she wrapped the floral print of the dress around her. A strong physical thrill passed through her so that she went no further for a while but was content to enjoy it with her breath coming longer and deeper. Then she tried the words and there seemed to be more of them.
‘We can do it,’ she said again. ‘We can if we set our minds to it. No more of this hit and miss.’ Ferney was beside her, his arm round her and his hand on her breast, the finger and thumb gently rolling her nipple between them. She was flatbellied and her slim body was still singing from the love they had just made there on the hilltop, sure that no one would interrupt them. She carried the immediate memory of hugging him face to face, straddling his lap as they moved in perfect, scorching unity under the dome of their sky.
He kissed her neck below her hair. ‘It seems a terrible thing.’
‘We’ve done it for illness.’
‘Some illnesses. The ones we know there’s no getting better from.’
‘Let’s do it for joy.’
‘I know you’re right. It will be so much better. There’s never been joy with anyone else. It’s only worth it when you’re here.’
‘Are we agreed, then?’ She had her face close to his with a wide, joyful smile. ‘Shall we swear to it, swear we’ll always, always do it whatever?’
‘Yes. What if one of us forgets?’
‘Then the other has some reminding to do, that’s all.’ She laughed and ran her fingers through his hair.
‘And if both of us forget?’
She stopped laughing. ‘Well, maybe that will just have to be t
hat if both of us forget. But we mustn’t, we mustn’t. Other folks have God. We’ve only got us.’
He shook his head, amused. ‘You don’t know they’ve got God. You can’t be sure. Could be we’re luckier than them. They just stop, maybe.’ He stopped talking then, holding her at arm’s length, looking at the woven hoop of flowers in her hair.
She let the silence spread for a while before she spoke again. ‘I think they might have. You know what it’s like when we die. The feeling that you’re going somewhere and there’s the light coming at the end only we never get to see it. I like to think the others do get there.’
‘Doesn’t mean it’s God.’
‘Doesn’t mean it’s not. It’s something. Maybe one day we’ll find out.’
‘So long as we find out together.’
He stood up suddenly, staring at bushes down the slope of the hill.
‘What is it?’
‘Someone there, maybe. I saw something move.’
‘A rabbit?’
He stared for a long time. ‘No, it was too big for a coney.’
‘What then?’
‘I don’t know.’
She got up, put her arm through his and they started to walk back down to the house. A lark was singing and as she turned her head to it she saw movement out of the corner of her eye. The smith, Cochrane, unmistakably. He was creeping away behind the hedge from the hiding-place where he must have watched them. Watched them as they made love? The thought sickened her. She opened her mouth to tell Ferney, but shut it again. Three times already Ferney had clashed with Cochrane, having it out with the smith after his drunken propositions to her. Three times he had taken damage at the smith’s brutal hands. The man was wrong in the head and she did not want Ferney to be hurt again, but she knew Ferney, for all his abhorrence of violence, would not shirk the issue if it came to it so she stayed silent, and the present Gally, knowing the tragedy to come, could do nothing to change that. She found herself able to separate herself a little from this remembered twin, and in doing so she was able to get a sudden sense of the depth of understanding she used to have at her command.