Ferney

by James Long

  ‘We’ll get you an ambulance. Don’t worry. Where are you?’

  Gally told him.

  ‘Are you alone?’

  ‘Well that’s the other thing. There was someone else here but he’s just died. That’s what started the baby.’

  ‘Mrs Martin, if this doesn’t count as an emergency, I don’t know what does.’

  She went back up to the bedroom to wait with Ferney and sat, nursing the contractions for a timeless space. She saw the white envelope open on the bedside table and knowing what it must be, picked it up, sitting irresolute, holding it. It was the police sergeant’s letter about Billy Bunter. She knew it had mattered a great deal to Ferney and felt glad that it had arrived in time. She considered reading it, but tyres on the gravel stopped her before she could reach a decision.

  The police beat the ambulance by a minute or two and took over. Gally was in hospital within half an hour, beyond concentrating on anything by this time but the coming birth, making sure all the time that her bag was beside her. Between shuddering, gasping contractions, she prayed that Mike would not arrive in time – the whole thing would be simpler that way, and she found herself able to block out all thought of his reaction. The immediate process involving her, her body and this special life which was now locked and limited inside her, commanded all the imagination she could spare.

  It was a rapid, forceful business. A midwife encouraged her, doctors came and went, a nurse held her hand, smiling sincere wishes that she was sure her hubby would be here at any minute. The huge impossible pain set new boundaries with each contraction until she felt she must tear apart, but there was no stopping this immensely powerful pumping that her body had never told her it knew how to do.

  ‘I can see it,’ said the midwife. ‘I can see the head. Nearly there.’

  I want the bottle, Gally just had time to think. I must have it as soon as he’s born. Another screaming heave blotted out the thought. Can I reach it, she wondered in the short gap when thought was again possible. Better not to linger on the baby. Or maybe I should take it as soon as I can rest, then they won’t think it’s odd if I sleep. This was it. This had to be it or she would die of pain. Die of pain. Come with me. Pain. Come with me.

  ‘It’s here,’ said the midwife and Gally knew she needed no bottle, that now at this moment of physical chaos she had the power to simply cease to live and that was what she would now do. The baby slipped wetly from her in the midwife’s hands and she felt her speeding heart accelerate to burst.

  The midwife changed all that with four absurd words just as Mike rushed into the room.

  ‘You have a daughter.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  On the morning of 7 February, Rose’s second birthday, Gally got up early and walked to the church to put fresh flowers on Ferney’s grave, because this was also the second anniversary of his death and she owed it to her beautiful daughter to put the sadness out of her mind for the rest of the day.

  She squatted in front of the grave staring at the headstone as if it might hold the clue to what had happened. It was easiest to go along with Mike’s view that they had both fallen under some temporary persuasive madness, though she guessed he only used the word ‘both’ to avoid it sounding like an accusation. She knew that wasn’t what had happened and she didn’t need any of the pieces of solid evidence, the ring, the Glastonbury cross, or the drum now shrouded in their attic, to confirm that when her guard was down, fresh insights into her long past would come creeping in, although she rarely sought them out deliberately, and that was all the proof she needed.

  The great fear that ambushed her if she woke in the early hours was that Ferney’s worries about the modern world had been borne out, that he had been torn away at that critical moment, hijacked perhaps by some passing ambulance carrying another imminent mother towards delivery and was, even now, adrift out there in a foreign world, aching dimly for comfort he could not find. She sometimes considered going round the hospitals, or sorting through the public registers to find out who else had been born around that same time and one day soon she might even be driven to do that.

  There was a practical and moral problem driving her in that direction. A week after Ferney’s death they had been asked to come to the offices of a Wincanton solicitor who had told them that Ferney had left the bungalow to Gally to be disposed of as she thought fit. The solicitor was clearly puzzled by the rest of his instructions. Ferney had left the rest of his estate including ‘his possessions wherever they might be’ to Gally’s first-born. Rosie was now therefore the owner of Ferney’s furniture and books, the contents of his cupboards and some £80,000 in various investments. She was also the owner, Gally realized, of a vast hoard of tins and boxes, buried who knows where, in which Ferney had concealed his caches of treasure and to which perhaps, one day, a young unknown Ferney might return. Knowing that, as things had turned out, this was a mistake, Gally felt a powerful responsibility to make sure it was set right if it were possible to do so. This was not something she could ever discuss with Mike.

  In other ways she had done all she could to rebuild her old life with Mike, avoiding the danger areas as much as she could. They had a life, centred around Rosie, that worked better than she could reasonably have expected. She respected and at the very least liked Mike enormously and that was as much as most people had, wasn’t it? As she looked at the headstone, it was clear to her that it wasn’t and she heard again Ferney’s voice, deep and powerful now.

  ‘Come with me.’

  She shook her head, blinked back tears and turned away.

  On the way back she tried to remember the words of Ferney’s poem as she had tried many times in the past two years. It always seemed blocked by fear. Two lines came back,

  Our halves are nothing on their own but half and half make one,

  And halves, divided, stand alone when the adding’s done.

  Now that she finally understood the fear and the guilt, now that even the last variant of her nightmare had been wiped away by knowledge, it seemed possible that she could retrieve the rest of his poem, which was precious to her beyond belief. In the background to that poem there had always been this familiar, unfamiliar word – the skimmington. A few weeks earlier she had discovered what it meant. They had gone to Montacute House, because Mike wanted to. Rose was in her pushchair and they had wandered past the portraits and the fine Elizabethan panelling. In the Great Hall they paused in front of a high-mounted plasterwork panel and a guide, with a group behind them, began to intone an explanation.

  ‘This panel is a lively depiction of an old country tradition known as a Skimmington ride,’ he had said and Gally, about to move on, had frozen to the spot. ‘You’ll notice the man riding backwards on the donkey, facing the tail, while the others heap ridicule upon him. This was a custom used to force henpecked or cuckolded husbands to stand up for themselves for fear they would be paraded round in this manner if they allowed it to continue. The skimming ladle, normally used for skimming milk in cheesemaking, was used to beat the man and the Skimmington ride was also used to punish other offences against sexual standards of the times.’

  Gally had stood there transported to a cold, violent night when she and Ferney had been dragged from the house – brother and sister living as man and wife, beaten round the village, lashed to a horse. Beaten although no one knew the real truth and if they had, they would have beaten them twice as hard. How could they ever ask for understanding outside their universe of two? Ferney had failed to warn her that it could be so hazardous, she thought, but knew that was hardly a failure. Ferney had had neither the time nor the opportunity to go through all the rarer problems they had occasionally faced.

  The solace in her life was Rosie and she loved Rosie so deeply that it hurt. As soon as she had heard those words in the delivery room, it had freed her to stay alive, to bond with this familiar, completely unexpected stranger, but that decision carried its own burden of guilt. She looked out from the road across the flatla
nds below and felt guilty that she could love anyone else while Ferney was marooned somewhere out there, building strength for the day when his legs were big enough to carry him back in search of her and Penselwood. She needed to know what he was going through. Would he even know? Had he been carried too far away into madness? The great gap in her own last life threatened and taunted her with its message of oblivion. Was he suffering the same?

  She thought again about the price the world could exact on them, about the savage beating of the Skimmington ride, and the thought of that beating carried a faint harmonic, some other memory resonating with it. It was whisper-faint, but it immediately touched her deeply. She tried to grasp it, failed, felt it slip away then deliberately blanked her mind and when all was quiet she let herself go further back into the Skimmington, the sharp-edged pain as cudgels broke her arm, the terrible fear as the metal ladle slashed sideways into Ferney’s unprotected neck.

  The blows hit her in the face, in the stomach, inside now, not in the open air. She grunted, fell sideways off the bench in a hell that was dimly perceived and a boot caught her hard between the legs.

  ‘In the balls,’ she heard the Gorilla’s voice. ‘Whack ’em in. I’ll have no more lip from this one.’ She doubled up as the boots slammed into her, in her face, in her side. She felt a rib go and clutched her hands into the fiery agony of her groin. Why didn’t the warders come?

  ‘That’ll learn him not to cheek me,’ said the Gorilla.

  She had no idea. All she’d said was his name. The men called him that when he wasn’t there. Wasn’t that his name then, Gorilla? Why was he doing this?

  ‘One more for luck, Billy sodding Bunter, and don’t ever call me that again.’

  The last boot brought blackness with it and in the half-life, caught between that claustrophobic prison cell and the cold February graveyard, the words of the police sergeant’s letter came back to her.

  ‘Dear Mr Miller, this is all there was. I hope it helps.’

  A photocopy of a torn sheet of paper.

  ‘My friend Ivan is writing this for me because I do not know how. I did what I did because the man Cockran deserved it. He killed a woman. He killed me.’

  There were brackets with a note from Ivan: ‘(This is what he wants me to write. He is very muddled here.)’

  It ended with one line: ‘They call me Billy Bunter. They never call me my proper name. My proper name is Gary.’

  She opened her eyes on grey stones and a dusting of frost as the church bell called the hour. Ivan had written Gary, but she knew that wasn’t what poor, damaged Billy had said. Gally was what he’d said. It was awful and immense and she had to push its meaning away until Rosie’s special day was done.

  The cottage welcomed her in and she stood in the hall listening for any sounds from upstairs. None came. She went into the sitting-room to fetch Rosie’s presents, meaning to pile them on the breakfast table, smiling as she imagined her excitement. She stood in front of the picture and, as she often did when no one else was there, stared at it for a long time, needing something familiar to comfort her.

  The picture was another issue that Mike felt they had to resolve and she preferred not to. The restorers in Salisbury had phoned her the week after they had delivered it for cleaning.

  ‘Mrs Martin, this is John Colman.’

  ‘Good morning, Mr Colman.’

  ‘I’ve just started work on your picture.’

  ‘Oh good. How’s it going?’ She thought he was probably going to announce bad news, revise the estimate upwards. If so she had already decided she would pay without asking Mike, pay out of the proceeds from Ferney’s bungalow. His words were very clear to her still: ‘Pictures should be bright. Clean it so you can always see us there,’ and, like a faint echo, ‘Come with me.’

  ‘It’s going very well. It’s mostly the effects of smoke, you know, open fires and candles. There’s no technical problem at all. It’s not that. I’m just not sure I should be doing it.’

  ‘Why on earth not? We can hardly see it at all the way it is now.’

  ‘No, no. Look, we’re very good at cleaning. I’m not saying we’re not, but we’re perhaps not the most famous firm in the business and I wonder if you shouldn’t take it to London, just to be on the safe side.’

  ‘Why should we do that? You’re not going to ruin it, surely?’

  ‘No, of course not. Look, this may come as a bit of a surprise to you, but now that I’ve got it partly clean, I’m pretty certain it’s something quite remarkable.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I know it sounds absurd and I may be making a fool of myself, but it looks to me very much as though you have a Constable here. It’s nowhere in the catalogues, but if it’s not Constable it’s the best copy of his style I’ve ever seen.’

  Gally laughed. ‘No, I’m sure it’s not. John Poorman, that was what my . . . my family always called him.’

  ‘It’s been in your family? It has a provenance?’

  ‘Oh no, not exactly. No, only, er, rumours I suppose you’d say.’

  ‘It’s not mentioned in any of the books or any of his letters, I’ve checked, but of course he painted a great deal around Salisbury and Gillingham.’

  Gally saw the pitfalls of notoriety looming up. ‘Mr Colman, if it’s not mentioned, I’m sure it’s just someone who followed his style. Let’s not get too worried. You finish the cleaning and maybe later on we’ll take it for someone to have a look at. I appreciate your thoughtfulness.’

  When she put the phone down she had crossed to her desk and taken out the dry yellow slip of paper which had come unstuck from the back of the canvas before they had taken it in. It was itself heavily stained and the ink had faded. She held it to the light.

  ‘Nov. 1823. For F and G, with affection JC.’

  She had decided not to show that to Mike.

  Now she looked at the painting, wishing Constable had put more detail into the tiny faces, wishing also that the poor hard-pressed artist had found more fortune during his lifetime. She cherished this proof that the ancient ties could not be easily unbound.

  Rosie enjoyed her breakfast, spending as much time playing with the wrapping paper as she did with the toys. Mike watched with a benevolent smile. Her vocabulary was expanding in leaps and bounds, though it was often a struggle to work out what she meant. She unwrapped a giant rabbit from Mike’s sister and yelled with delight. ‘Connie, connie.’

  ‘It’s a rabbit,’ said Mike. ‘Bunny.’

  ‘No, connie. Like it. Coney, coney.’

  ‘It’s a bunny, you funny old thing.’

  ‘Funny, funny, funny,’ said Rosie insistently, turning to Gally for confirmation.

  ‘Very funny,’ said Mike, though Rosie wasn’t laughing.

  ‘You think everything’s funny, don’t you, Rosie?’ Gally exclaimed, as she turned towards her daughter, smiling. Her smile slipped.

  ‘Funny, furny, furny,’ her daughter maintained, waving her hand forcefully and it was quite clear she was pointing at herself.

  If you can't wait to find out what happens next, read on for the first chapter of The Lives She Left Behind, which continues the story of Ferney and Gally

  CHAPTER 1

  Joanna’s father Toby had wanted to call her Melissa but he played no part in the final decision because he died more or less in childbirth. Her mother Fleur dismissed the name out of hand and even Toby’s death did not change her mind.

  So it was that Joanna Mary Driscoll was born at 8.15 in the morning on the last Wednesday in May of 1994, breathing in the air of the York Hospital Maternity Unit with a puzzled and anxious look in her pale blue eyes. Toby would have picked her up and comforted her but he had been dead for over an hour by that time, driving straight into an oncoming petrol tanker as he left the hospital car park in an unreasoning panic. He was racing home to collect Fleur’s bag of vital accessories – left behind by him, as she pointed out, when her waters broke.

  They didn’t tell
Fleur about the accident until after Jo had been delivered, and something began to go wrong between mother and daughter as soon as they did. Fleur, the few remaining soft parts of her beginning to harden over, looked grimly at her baby with blame already hanging in the air between them.

  Fleur had been the main wage earner in the marriage and she went back to work as soon as she could, so Jo was cared for by a succession of nannies mostly too young to show her more than an inept sentimentality. Over the next few years, the ones who were old enough to understand rapidly fell foul of Fleur when they dared to imply she might do well to spend a bit more time with her daughter. It was just after one of these had left, fired abruptly the previous evening as soon as she had finished the ironing, that Fleur found she had no alternative but to take Jo with her on her day’s business.

  That was why Jo, as a toddler, quite baffled by the world, found herself in the village of Stamford Bridge, a few miles outside York, tagging along as her mother strode round a ramshackle Georgian mansion. Fleur was barking questions at the cowed girl from the estate agents, who was starting to understand why her more experienced colleagues had suddenly found pressing alternative duties.

  Jo started to cry when she looked out of the patio doors across the farmland behind the house. Irritated, Fleur asked her what was wrong, but she couldn’t explain because she didn’t know. At four years and two months old, how do you decode a tide of adult grief without any protecting drainage channel of words or concepts? All Jo knew was that the bit that she was just starting to understand as herself was shredded by a turmoil of utter sorrow bowling down at her from across that bleak field.

  Fleur tried to reason with her but reason had nothing to do with this. Crying turned to howling and then into such an utter loss of control that the young estate agent found herself propelled forward to bend down and clutch the tiny girl to stop her damaging herself while the mother’s mouth tightened in anger as she stood and watched.