The Lives She Left Behind

by James Long

  ‘All part of the job,’ she said, sounding far away. ‘It’s what I get paid for. What was all that stuff about the painting?’

  They got back to the cottage to find the others cooking supper from a motley collection of ingredients. He took Rachel to his study.

  ‘Ignore the mess,’ he said. He pointed to the picture hanging on the far wall. ‘It’s a bit dark. I’ll switch the light on.’

  It was an oil painting of a cottage and the light showed her it was Bagstone. The stone itself poked out through the bushes on the right. The house was surrounded by trees. There were two figures standing by the gate. Mike carefully unhooked it from the wall and turned it round. ‘She had it cleaned,’ he said. The back was dark brown but for a small amber rectangle slanting slightly.

  They fetched the little label she had found and she held it against the paler space. It fitted perfectly.

  ‘Oh Gally,’ he said, ‘You meant to stick it back, didn’t you?’ He propped the painting against a chair and stared at it.

  ‘It’s a good picture,’ Rachel said. ‘Let me guess. Ferney left it to Gally in his will.’

  ‘Yes, he did. He met the painter nearby. They got on very well. I’m trying to remember the story. The painter was in some kind of money trouble. Ferney suggested he paint the house for them.’

  ‘So, that’s them? That’s really Ferney and Gally at the gate?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She went close and stared at the two little figures.

  ‘That’s utterly extraordinary. I wish they were larger. You can’t really see their faces.’

  ‘That’s what Gally said.’

  ‘So who was this itinerant artist?’

  ‘He called himself John Poorman, according to Gally.’

  ‘John Poorman is JP, not JO.’

  ‘That’s right. It wasn’t his real name. He was a bitter man, I think.’

  She was still staring at the picture. ‘But . . . doesn’t it remind you of something?’

  ‘It’s definitely this house.’

  ‘I meant the style.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘A million prints? Birthday cards? Biscuit tins? The Hay Wain?’

  He pursed his lips and looked at her, reluctant to say it for fear of sounding foolish. ‘Surely not.’

  ‘Give me that label again. It might not be an ‘O’. It could easily be a ‘C’. J for John, C for . . . now, what do you suppose C might stand for?’

  ‘Stop it. You’re meant to be the sensible one. How could that be?’

  ‘You should do what Gally said and ask an expert.’

  ‘I can just ask the two of them, can’t I? But perhaps some things are best not known. I’m not sure it’s mine to sell. I’m their custodian really. What would my lawyer say about it?’

  ‘Your lawyer would say there is no part of English law which applies to this.’

  Ferney and Gally came quietly into the room. ‘The painting doesn’t matter,’ Gally said.

  ‘But it’s the two of you,’ Mike pointed out. ‘You don’t have photos. It must be the only image from all those years. Of course it matters.’

  ‘Yes, it’s us, but it could be anybody. Two tiny figures and he was no good at faces.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Ferney, ‘we have other ways to remember. We have a song or two and a poem. They take us back. We don’t need the picture.’

  Ali called that supper was ready. Rachel looked at her watch. ‘Oh my goodness,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to go.’

  CHAPTER 33

  Mike woke abruptly from deep sleep, cradled all night in the forgotten comfort of a full house. That fled in a moment. Adrenalin had him gasping upright, staring at the window, dawn-dim with the first of the pale sun. Another hard knock on the door joined the echoes of the first in the shreds of dream.

  ‘Who is it?’ he called.

  ‘Can I come in?’ demanded Fleur.

  ‘Wait.’ He scrabbled for a dressing gown under the clothes on the chair, pulled it on and opened the door with some vague and startled idea in his head that she might want to join him in bed. Instead she glared at him, fully dressed and wild-eyed, pushed past him into the room, tipped his clothes in a heap on the floor and sat down on the chair.

  ‘I have to talk to you,’ she said. ‘I haven’t slept.’

  ‘I’m sorry to—’

  ‘I don’t know who’s behind all this, but I think it has to be you and that boy together, and you’ve stumbled on a girl who’s not all that well, who isn’t strong in her head, and you’ve twisted her thinking and you’ve even got that lawyer believing in your crap and I just want you to know this, my friend – I’m not fooled and I’m not having it and as soon as I’ve finished here I’m going to call up that thick policeman who seems to have taken all this hidden message bullshit hook, line and sinker and I’m going to tell him what’s really going on here.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ said Mike, ‘and what is really going on here?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Fleur said, her voice sliding into a wail, and she burst into tears.

  He sat down on the end of the bed, watching her, waiting for her to stop, but she didn’t. Tears streamed down her face from eyes which swelled redder and redder, while the pale blue blouse she was wearing developed a growing arc of darkness, spreading downwards like the tide coming into a bay.

  ‘If it’s any comfort,’ he started hesitantly, and she looked at him with just enough hope in her eyes for him to carry on, ‘I think this happens a lot. I know Gally never got on with her mother. I mean, my Gally, last time round. The two of them were never like mother and daughter at all. I just don’t think the parent and child thing works for them. How could it?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘There’s meant to be part of them that’s yours right away, but not with those two.’

  ‘She was never mine. When I first held her, she glared at me.’

  ‘All babies do that, don’t they?’ said Mike doubtfully, remembering Rosie.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Nor do I.’

  ‘Toby was dead, you see? They had just told me, and there she was, and if it hadn’t been for her he would have been alive.’ She stared at him as if willing him to understand. ‘I needed him to make it all work. He helped me be nicer, and he would have lived if it hadn’t been for . . .’ She stopped.

  ‘What happened?’

  And so she told him, stiffly and briefly, then going back over it, going deeper as she relived those last moments of Toby’s life and the first moments of Jo.

  ‘He would have lived if it hadn’t been for me,’ she said.

  ‘Come on, there’s no point in that blame stuff. Believe me, I’m an expert.’ He meant to go on, to tell her how old Ferney had died in this very house, how Gally had gone into labour, fully expecting to give birth to a son, knowing it would be Ferney renewed. He wanted to tell her what he had known for certain – that she was ready to follow him through death as soon as the baby was safely delivered, how only the startling news that the baby was a girl had made her think again. At this moment he thought she would understand, but he had come just that last inch too close to a nervous animal and she snapped back, ‘That’s not the point. It’s still bullshit.’

  ‘Ferney proved it’s not. You can’t get away from that.’

  ‘That wasn’t proof.’

  ‘It was. You believed him yesterday even if you’ve forgotten that today. How could he possibly have known the date?’

  ‘He found out somehow.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘He asked Jo.’

  ‘How would she have known?’

  There was a silence, then she said, ‘It goes against everything I believe. She’s not safe here. She’s not normal.’

  ‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘Those two have no idea what it’s like to be a normal child – no idea at all. From the moment they take their first breath there’s already this vast thing inside them trying to get out, and they may not hav
e words to say it but you see it in their eyes. It’s hopeless. They should be left to themselves.’

  ‘I wanted to love her.’

  ‘You can. That’s entirely up to you, but I think you mean you wanted her to love you.’

  ‘Both.’ She spat the word out and he could detect nothing like love in her voice. ‘But what’s it got to do with you? That policeman should never have let you off the hook.’

  ‘There is something you should remember,’ he said. ‘She cared enough to explain it to you.’

  ‘She had to.’

  ‘No she didn’t. She felt a responsibility to you. That’s rare. I was only the second person they ever told in all this time. You’re the third. Don’t you see that’s special? If you let her, she’ll love you.’

  She jumped to her feet, stared at him with an intensity that made him turn his face away. ‘We’ll see about that,’ she said, then turned abruptly and left the room. He heard her feet pounding down the stairs, the slam of the front door and the revving of her engine as she turned the car and raced away up the lane.

  There was no point in trying to sleep again. He dressed sadly and slowly, his mind filled with images of her arriving at Yeovil, forcing them to summon Meehan and listing all the madness she had witnessed, persuading him her daughter was in danger, in need of medication. He could only measure how much the pressure had lifted the previous evening by the thudding weight of its return.

  He went down to the front door and sat on the bench in the porch, staring towards the gateway and the road beyond like a sentry expecting an overwhelming enemy. With Fleur gone and the rest of the house asleep he thought he was alone, but when he tired of watching the gate and let his eyes drift round to the far end of the yard he saw two figures standing quite still by the trees watching him – Ferney and Gally, hand in hand. When she saw him look at her Gally beckoned him and led Ferney across to the grey finger of the old stone, still partly swathed in briars. He walked to her, stopped in front of her an arm’s length away, and she stared at him with calm compassion. ‘Where did Fleur go?’ she asked.

  ‘To the police. She changed her mind in the night. She woke me up to tell me.’

  ‘Oh.’ It came out like a gasp and Gally shot a look at Ferney, who closed his eyes and nodded as if he had expected this.

  ‘It’s not your problem,’ said Mike.

  ‘Of course it is,’ said the boy. ‘Like it or not, we’re all in this. I won’t let her take Gally away.’

  ‘Perhaps you should go before they come back.’

  ‘You think they wouldn’t find us? We could give them the slip for a day or two but what chance have we got against dogs and helicopters and all the stuff they’ve made for tracking people down? No, we’ll be very plain.’ Ferney looked towards the gate as if rehearsing his words. ‘We’ll tell them Gally is just fine and we’re old enough to be together whatever that woman thinks.’

  ‘And what about Mike?’ Gally said.

  ‘What can she say that they’ll believe?’ It sounded hollow to all three of them.

  ‘Let’s wait for them together,’ said Gally gently. ‘We’ve been remembering our own children, our two sons, but there was something else as well – something we need to bring back. It will pass the time. You don’t mind?’

  Ferney shrugged.

  She turned back to Mike, ‘Yesterday I nearly got it,’ she said. ‘Our second life. I saw it for a moment and then I lost it. I think I might be able to find it again.’

  ‘Go on,’ he said.

  She crouched by the stone, just as she had the day before, staring at it intently. ‘My mother built a hut,’ she said. ‘This was the life stone and she needed healing. She was heavy with me. I can’t quite call it back but it wasn’t just her. There was the old couple and yesterday, I saw their hut.’ She stood up and turned to the house, pointing. ‘I could see through to the tree behind. That was where they built it from skins and branches and whatever Cenwalch’s men had left behind. Come on. It will be easier.’

  They pushed through the undergrowth beside the house to the terrace where the remains of the tree were scattered. She stood for a long time in silence, then walked to the edge of the terrace where the old path had led down to the valley beyond and drew lines in the air with her hands to conjure up the hut. ‘They built it here,’ she said.

  ‘Who were they?’ Ferney asked.

  ‘The old ones.’ She thought again and shook her head. ‘No names come back. They were left under all the bodies and the Saxons took them for dead. My mother had slipped away into the bushes when the men had done with her and the army moved on. She came down here because the stone meant life and there was death everywhere else, bodies and burnt houses. The old ones helped her. She told me they did what they could. They dragged all those dead people one by one into the pond and in the end, there was no more pond, just a slough of heaving mud which slowly settled until the sun blessed it with a lid of clay. That was their work and they did it and used themselves up doing it. My mother’s time was near and she thought she would die too, but a man came from the west – a runaway. He took to my mother and put his work into saving her and so I was born.’

  ‘And me?’ asked Ferney. ‘What of me?’

  ‘Let’s go back to the stone,’ she said, and when they got there she turned all around, drinking it in. ‘It was just me,’ she said. ‘Until I was big enough to fetch logs. But I think I can make you remember. A morning when the leaves were turning and the fog was thick as milk.’

  There was a long silence and Mike looked from one to the other of them, seeing them as they really were, so immeasurably ancient, so utterly rooted in this place, and finally fully understood in his heart as well as his head that this was their home and not really his at all.

  In the end, Ferney shook his head. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Think of a line of tired children, walking with each step hurting.’

  He shook his head again.

  ‘Think of you leading them, making them sing songs to keep them going.’

  ‘Songs,’ he said as if he saw the first pinpoint of a distant light.

  ‘I was snapping twigs for kindling,’ she went on, ‘and I thought it was birds. A shrill from up the slope, lifting then choked by the fog’s muffle and rising again, then coming clear in chanting like soldiers marching but so much higher.’

  ‘I had to make them sing,’ said Ferney suddenly. ‘They wanted to stop. We’d been a dozen days walking and our legs were short. They’d had enough of believing in me.’

  ‘You told them you were taking them home.’

  ‘Weren’t there women with us?’

  ‘Only two by the time you reached us.’

  ‘Four when we started. One died. One went in the night. Many children. A dozen?’

  ‘More.’

  He put his arm round her and they stood there silently remembering until Mike said, ‘Don’t stop talking. Tell me too.’

  ‘You brought them back, you see?’ Gally prompted. ‘Back from a Saxon camp. The girls from the village – the few left alive – and the orphans of those who died. When you felt the pull, you led them back here from the faraway west, back home. We settled them around the stone to learn to live and breathe again.’

  ‘How old were you?’ Mike asked.

  ‘What were we?’ Ferney looked at Gally, smiling. ‘Ten? Who knows. It’s not like being ten now. We never left each other after that, did we?’

  ‘You led them all back here at ten?’

  ‘Of course. Do you know the sorrow that is like a death sorrow?’ Ferney asked. ‘That sorrow you feel when a blade comes at you and you have time to know there is no escape. It came back clear to me, ten or not, and I knew my sorrow wasn’t just for me. It was for someone I had been with and if I could find her, I could change that sorrow to something better. I discovered that I knew where it was. I would look towards the sunrise and know it was there, where the sun came up. I knew where to go and I knew I should bring the others wi
th me.’ He looked at Gally. ‘I brought them back here but she put them back where they belonged. The village was ash and cinders, charred posts in the brambles, and Gally led each child back to its rightful house and helped the women look after them so that in time, as they grew up, they brought Pen back to life.’

  Gally reached out, took Mike’s hand and squeezed it. ‘All the future was contained in those children. That is how it went from then until now.’

  ‘There would be no village here otherwise,’ said Ferney, but he broke off. ‘There are cars coming,’ he said.

  ‘Already?’ Mike groaned. He had no sense of how much time had passed. They turned to face the road, all three tense, poised as if for flight with nowhere to go and their backs to the stone. The engines grew louder. Fleur’s car nosed into the yard. There was a large white van behind her but it went on by. Fleur got out and took two bags out of the back.

  ‘I hope you’re all hungry,’ she said.

  ‘What happened?’ Mike asked.

  ‘You happened. I drove off and before I got to the main road, I knew you were right. Now let’s go in and cook. You look like you haven’t had a decent breakfast in years. You two can help me. Mike, for God’s sake go and have a shower. You look truly horrible.’

  Mike came back downstairs to a smell of bacon and a buzz of conversation. He opened the door to a full table, overflowing with jugs of juice and milk, teapots, coffee and a large dish he had forgotten he owned, piled with sausages, mushrooms and crisp rashers. Ali and Lucy were buttering toast, Gally was pouring peppercorns into a grinder and Ferney was stirring a pan of baked beans.

  Ferney and Gally ate their breakfast with the assurance of people who were utterly familiar with this kitchen and its corners and the space between things. Lucy and Ali watched them as if they were exhibits in some exotic zoo. Mike and Fleur shared some quiet wonder and only spoke to ask for food or offer it.

  When they had all finished, Gally looked around at them. ‘I’ve got something to say and I know Ferney will agree. I know what I wrote in that letter.’ She picked up the torn half of the five pound note and waved it in the air. ‘Mike, I asked you to pass this house on if a different Ferney and a different Gally came back to find it, but now I see how hard that would be for you. With your blessing – I mean you, Mike, and you, Mum – we will try to find a different way for the time being.’