Ferney (53 page)

‘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.’

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,

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 flatlands 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.