Ferney (15 page)

It wasn’t a question. She put her hand in the deep side pocket of her jacket and, with enormous reluctance, brought out a plastic bag. In the fading light he took it, looked at it
thoughtfully, then reached in and pulled out the twisted, earth-caked lump. As he forced it open, parts of it flaked and broke away and out of the middle he took an intricate round object. The thin
band of the ring was obscured by dirt, but set in the top of it was a stone and when he rubbed it carefully back and forth against his sleeve, it caught the last of the evening light and hurled it
back at their eyes in a white flash.

‘Put it away,’ Gally said urgently, looking around the hill’s dark margins in horror, then caught herself doing it and wondered why. Ferney put his hand out and patted her
arm.

‘No need for that now,’ he said. ‘That’s what I want you to understand. Last time this saw the sun, it stood to kill those that hid it, just as the axeman killed the man
who gave it to them. Not now. They’ve given up looking for
his
friends a long time back. You’re free of that now, Gally. You must understand that. There’s no need for
fear.’

A sudden gust of colder evening air made him cough. A bat wove dancing darkness round their heads. He held the ring out to her and she made no move to take it, but his hand stayed there,
offering it across the air and in the end, with a great effort of will, she reached out, hesitated and then almost snatched it. As she felt the weight of it and all it had seen, she knew it was
exactly what he said it was and in accepting that, the fear prompted by it stepped out of its blind box in her mind and came into the open to be recognized and weighed. She let out a deep sigh,
looking at the ring, turning it over and over. For now, she felt no need to know more about it so she put it back in the glove again. Other questions were more pressing.

‘Who do you think I am?’ she said.

‘You’re Gally.’

He said it as though that obvious answer spoke volumes. Gally had a sense that she had but to lean towards him, let him draw her into it and all that she now was would melt from her. She thought
suddenly of Mike, stepped back from that abyss, held on to the picture of her husband and of her beside him.

‘That’s no more than a name,’ she said. ‘I’ve only just met you and you’re not being fair. Either tell me what you mean or stop it.’

‘Just a name?’ he said and laughed softly. ‘It’s a name, but it’s not
just
a name. Ferney and Gally, they’re a bit more than just names. You want me
to tell you directly? Yes, I could tell you,’ he was speaking calmly and kindly, ‘but that would be just words and words like that fight their own meaning. You’ve got to tell
yourself, really. Tell yourself how you found that ring for a start.’

‘Maybe you put it there in my mind,’ she said. ‘The way you were questioning me. Maybe you were forcing me to think what you wanted.’

He shook his head. ‘Don’t be so daft. That’s just nonsense, whatever you call it, witchcraft, telepathy, whatever. I can’t do that. Never met anyone who could. It’s
much simpler than that. It was you. You remembered it.’

‘No.’

‘You did, didn’t you, and that’s not all, is it? You dug it up, so you remembered where the door used to be.’

She jumped to her feet, feeling the good being undone, knotting her hands together.

‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Stop it. How can you say things like that? How can you say I
remembered
it? Something that happened three hundred years ago?’

‘Only four lifetimes.’

Now she felt uncomfortable towering over the old man, and in sitting down again the sudden belligerence went out of her.

‘Go on then, tell me.’

‘Only if you agree to something.’

‘What?’

‘That all you’ll do is listen. For now at any rate. Just listen to me so it has a chance to sink in. Another time, when you’re a bit more used to it, we’ll talk it
over.’

She nodded and sitting there in full darkness he began, gently, obliquely.

‘Supposing there was somebody, living in a place like this, a long time ago, and he comes to a pretty unfortunate end, you see. Violent times. Anyway, he dies and that ought to be the end
of it. It’s not, though, not the end of it. A bit later on, there’s a young lad, oh maybe two years old, no more than that, and the lad starts remembering things here and there. He
knows more than anyone his age ought to. Doesn’t know exactly how he knows, but he does. So of course, he attracts a bit of attention, the way you’d expect, cos he’s such a quick
learner, better than all the rest of his age. He’s talking before they’ve stopped crawling and as he grows up, he’s better with tools, better at skinning meat, better at all the
things that have to be learnt. Doesn’t always pay, being better like that. Puts people against you and as I say it was violent times, so before he got much beyond his twenties maybe he said a
bit too much and he got someone’s knife between his ribs one night.’

Ferney looked sideways at Gally, gave her a small, almost apologetic smile. ‘Next time round, see, he wouldn’t make that mistake again.’

His voice was tiny, stirring the cold atoms of air just enough to reach her next to him at the centre of a vast dome of night.

‘Next time round?’ she said and the thought that came to her in the silence, grew and grew until it burst out in speech. ‘How many next times were there?’

‘All the ones from then to now,’ he said. ‘A lot too many to count.’

‘Oh God.’

‘They weren’t all lives you’d remember,’ he added. ‘No medicines. All that sickness. Plagues and that. Sometimes you’d barely get born then you’d be
starting all over again.’

‘And that’s you?’ she said. ‘All of them?’

He didn’t need to answer and nothing in her prompted her to challenge it.

‘And what about me? You’re saying I come into this?’

He drew a breath. ‘Can you imagine it?’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose you can. You get a bit demanding after a few lives. Too many people, down the years, all pretty much the
same. No one else can understand, you see. They wouldn’t believe you, anyway, not unless they’d been through it too and of course they haven’t. Just all that long line of noisy,
foolish people. You couldn’t love them. They’d keep dying on you and you’d still have the memory next time round, still have to find another one to love – another one who
wouldn’t understand.’ He took her hand and his touch felt like the first electric touch of a suitor. ‘That would be impossible to bear, you know it would – but there was one
thing that saved the day, saved
all
the days. There was
one
person who did understand.’

‘One person? The same one, all the time?’ She couldn’t help the sudden edge in her voice.

He didn’t answer directly. ‘Suppose he was lucky enough, this man, right at the start there, not to be alone, so it wasn’t just him who died but the two of them. That’s
how it chanced to be. It was never easy, though. Their timing didn’t always work out. Some lives, they might not meet up at all, might be the wrong ages, but some lives they would, because it
was always in the same place, you see? It was the place that held them.’

She was shaking her head not out of denial but out of an unwillingness to hear it. ‘No, Ferney.’

‘Yes,’ he said and his voice was suddenly very firm. ‘Yes, Ferney and Gally, always. Right down through the years. And always here. You’ve come home, Gally.’

‘Home? No, you can’t say that.’

‘It is your home, our home.’

If she just moved towards him the slightest fraction, she knew his arms would open and part of her longed to know what that felt like. She recoiled from that thought, became abruptly aware of
the time, of the darkness, of the pale shadow of Mike. She jumped up, calmness gone. ‘I must go. I’m sorry. This is too much.’

‘Gally,’ he called as she was walking quickly away. ‘I’m doing nothing we haven’t both agreed to. You’ll know that soon.’

That made her run, stumbling in the gloom, anxious to be alone, hating going away from him, until suddenly she was down at the hedge, going through the gate as if it spelt safety. When she
walked distraught into the yard she simply failed to register the car standing there, so that when Mike opened the door of the caravan, looking anxious and saying, ‘There you are at
last,’ she looked back at him as if she’d never seen him before in her life.

Mike’s anger nipped their best hope in the bud. If he hadn’t been so upset she might have been able to lift the veil straightaway, to tell him a little bit about
the huge truth that was flapping round inside her head – nothing like the whole of it because it was too close and too raw, but perhaps enough to have earthed some of the unsettling charge
that had built up inside her. She spent a few moments searching for the right way to start, but the words weren’t in her to do that lightly and then, after casting around, she realized that
it just wasn’t possible. The cramped caravan was beating with the anger smelted out of his alarm at her absence. She knew it was born out of love and only aimed at her for lack of an
alternative target. She also knew that if she gave him half a chance he would immediately swing the full force of that anger on to Ferney, so she told something that was only half a truth short of
a lie.

‘I was sitting on top of the hill. I lost track of time. I’m so sorry.’

‘I was doing my nut,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t think what had become of you. I was about to get a search party out.’

‘What sort of trip have you had?’

‘Bloody tiring – then I get back to a cold, empty caravan and you’re nowhere in sight and I’m bloody starving.’

For a moment she couldn’t push away the thought that he was smaller in spirit than she had realized, but then guilt overcame her. She saw that he couldn’t bring himself to admit he
was worried for her safety for fear it would sound demeaning. She poured him a whisky, suppressed the subversive clamour within her and talked to him of student numbers, faculty appointments,
budget restrictions and traffic jams until he felt sufficiently loved.

‘Have you been lonely?’ he asked her in the end.

‘No, not for a moment,’ she said, before it occurred to her that he wanted to hear the opposite.

‘You can’t have had anyone to talk to,’ he said. ‘Well, not unless you count the builders.’

‘I’ve hardly talked to them at all.’

‘Did you sleep well? No bad dreams?’

‘I was fine.’

He looked at her with an expression that said she was holding something back and from then on, through the remains of an unsatisfactory evening, there was a tiny unnatural edge to their
conversation which disturbed them both.

In the morning, unusually, Gally woke after Mike and found him sitting on the caravan step in the sunshine holding her sketch in his hands and looking at the front of the house. It was Saturday,
so they had the place to themselves.

‘What’s this all about?’ he said.

‘It’s the way the house used to be. I found out that the front door’s definitely been moved. Don’t you think it would all work much better if we put it back in the middle
again?’

He pursed his lips and squinted at her. ‘You found out? How did you find out? Did the old man tell you?’

‘He’s got a picture of the house. He let me go and see it. Then I looked at the stonework and it was really obvious. You can see the edges of the old doorway. The builders say it
would hardly cost any extra to put it back there and . . .’

‘You went to see the old man, wotsisname, Franny.’

‘Ferney. Yes I did.’ Why did it feel to both of them like a confession?

‘You didn’t tell me.’

He looked extraordinarily hurt, as if he had some idea of the scale of the problem that Ferney claimed to pose. He couldn’t know. She shrugged, tried to get him off the subject.
‘We’d need planning, but that wouldn’t be difficult because we could easily show the planners there used to be a door . . .’

‘You went to his house?’

‘Well, yes. Just to see the picture. You don’t mind that, surely.’

Silence now from Mike and the tiny dislocation between them grew wider as three or four tense seconds crawled away.

‘I don’t like the idea of you rushing off to see him as soon as my back’s turned,’ he said in the end.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said, nettled. ‘You make it sound like I’m having an affair. The poor old man’s over eighty.’

That made Mike seem absurd even to himself.

‘It’s nothing like that. I just find him rather rude. I think he’s trying to get you on his side.’

‘What side? Why should there be sides?’

‘I don’t know, but there are and he’s definitely playing on the other team,’ said Mike. He couldn’t say what he really meant, that she was fragile, that he worried
constantly about her, feared that she might easily be derailed, to go crashing off the track of sanity into the unrelenting swamp of madness.

Because he couldn’t find the words they left it there and led a separate morning clearing weeds and saplings from opposite ends of the site. At lunchtime he put up the white flag, went
down beyond the house to the valley where she was emptying the barrow and called to her.

‘Let’s go down to the Hunter’s Lodge and get something to eat.’

‘Yes, all right.’

He went to take the handles of the wheelbarrow from her and started in surprise at her hand.

‘You’re wearing your wedding ring.’

She looked down at her hand as though she hadn’t known. ‘Oh yes.’

‘I thought you didn’t like the feeling . . .’

‘It’s okay here.’

‘Oh good.’ He smiled broadly and she gave him a hug.

It was fifteen minutes’ walk down the lanes, talking mostly of plumbing, bathroom designs and central heating. They squeezed into a corner of a bar that was crowded with travellers
breaking the trek to the west. At the end of the meal Mike picked up their folded jackets from the window seat next to them and the other ring, the old ring, rolled treacherously out of
Gally’s pocket and bounced on to the table.

Gally had forgotten it was there, tucked it away into a corner of her mind with all the other challenges of the previous day – too difficult to handle with Mike around – so that she
froze as they both looked at it.