Ferney (2 page)

When they first went to bed together, she had stopped him with a hand on his chest. He thought she was having second thoughts but all she said was, ‘I have bad dreams. You mustn’t
mind.’

Seeing her in perfect nakedness for the first time, her words had passed him by until he was shocked awake by the thrashing, screaming figure at his side in the early hours of the morning.

She had sobbed something that sounded like ‘the burn man’ as he held her and tried to calm her, but in the end she went back to sleep and in the morning she had been so embarrassed
that he hadn’t asked any more.

If that was the bad side, the good side was so good that, when his mind sprang back into the private world of organized intellectual thought from which she so often dragged him, it made him feel
desiccated, dull and only half real. She was illogical, unpredictable and overloaded with intuition, but people all around her seemed to shine brighter when she came near.

He thought back two years to the moment when he had first noticed her – only two years; a monsoon that had ended his drought, a man who feared he had missed his prime altogether, then
found bestowed on him the most unexpected gift. They were both tall, but where he stilted along, stiff legs in uncertain conflict with the ground, she had flowed as she walked off the London
streets into his lecture, her dark chestnut hair in liquid motion round a wide, smiling face. Most of the students arrived as they always did in little knots, buzzing with lightweight conversation
until the moment when he could compel their silence and unroll a thick layer of medieval history, like sound insulation, across the lecture theatre. A few who lived only in the cerebral world came
in by themselves, moving quickly, with down-turned eyes, to their isolated places where they would perform fussy rituals with pens, impatient for him to start.

She also came in alone, not furtively but with total assurance, looking round at all the people, who were clearly strangers to her, with an open, interested air that said she knew exactly who
she was and why she chose to be there. He was quite sure she’d never come before, because he would certainly have noticed. Though it was the very stuff of his professional life, something in
him still rebelled against giving lectures, making his voice the conduit of destruction by which his perfect notes were shredded and distorted into amateur, imperfect ears. Very nice, he’d
thought momentarily. Very, very nice. But then she had to take second place to the strain of keeping track of what he wanted to say.

At the end, perfectly, she had chosen to approach him and she had shaken his beliefs. ‘Hierarchies and social order: The evidence of the Domesday Book’ had been the subject of the
lecture. She had stood nearby, waiting her turn as a handful of students, more eager to make an impression than to gain knowledge, advanced ill-thought-out ideas and misunderstood his answers. When
they had all gone, she finally spoke.

‘Would you mind if I said that people aren’t quite like that?’ she had said.

‘What?’

‘It was very good. I enjoyed it, but I think you were describing lists, not people.’

He had frowned and wished immediately it had been a smile. ‘We have to rely on our sources. Domesday is the best record we could hope to . . .’

‘No, I know, and I really liked listening, but I just feel it’s a mistake to make it sound like the people stepped out of its pages, all fitting in columns. It’s like someone
in a thousand years’ time trying to describe us now, when all they’ve got to go by is a train timetable.’

His surprise at this unaccustomed temerity was kept in bounds by the fascination of staring into her huge eyes. He tried to hold his ground.

‘That’s a pretty big subject. You have to remember that society was a whole lot more rigid then. There wasn’t room for much divergence.’

She just smiled and shook her head and said, with total certainty, ‘People don’t change. There are all sorts now and there always have been.’

‘They didn’t have much cultural elbow-room to be different. Not until the fifteenth century or so.’

‘How do you know it changed then?’

‘We’ve got material; the Paston letters – correspondence from then on.’

‘Ah. It’s the letters then, isn’t it? That’s what changed. The evidence, not the people.’

‘I’ve never seen you before. Are you a student here?’

She had put her hand to her mouth in sudden alarm. ‘Oh no, I hope you don’t mind. I sometimes just pop into lectures if I’m passing. I love history, you see. Isn’t that
allowed?’

He didn’t care whether it was allowed – he only cared that it removed the ethical barrier to asking her to lunch with him, and he’d been warming himself in her flame ever
since. There had never been any doubt on his part. A photograph might not have made her look pretty in frozen cross-section, but life showed her to be lovely, always moving, often smiling, exhaling
happiness and unstinting interest, leaving behind her a warm trail of returned smiles from all those on whom she had turned that illuminating face. When her unpredictable darkness claimed her, she
would battle to keep it to herself or, failing, search out a corner to hide it.

Mike wondered almost constantly what she saw in him. Neither had any conscious recognition that there was a faint echo of her face in his. The spacing of his eyes, the geometry of his cheeks,
was such that if age made her gaunt, then in thirty or forty more years she might look just a little like he did now. That and something in their scent was enough for the chemical spark. History
did the rest. He responded to her passionate need to discuss what came before, understood it and could stoke the fire with facts. History was soothing to her, indeed sometimes the only way she
could be calmed when her unexpected, terrible sadness would strike. At her hospital bed after the miscarriage, she had wanted him to tell her old tales of kings and queens.

The offer from Georgetown University had been in the wind for three or four months, but he hadn’t mentioned a word until he knew it was firm. Washington seemed to offer a new start. He
tried to prepare the way, shifting his tales to American history, but those stories failed to hold her interest. When he told her outright that he had been offered the teaching job he had always
dreamed of, she tried to fake it, tried to pretend there was nothing she would like more than to go to America with him, but the nightmares redoubled and her anxiety during her waking hours was so
terrible to see that, in the end, he asked her outright if the thought of moving scared her. After a long silence she told him that, yes, it did.

He turned the job down for her without saying another word, but a small, bitter, irrepressible voice kept telling him that he had just given up the best chance his career would ever be offered.
It was a heavy, heavy blow to him, but he tried not to add to her suffering by letting her see it, tried not to mind when it became clear, as she recovered, that moving was exactly what she did
want, as long as it wasn’t away from England. He didn’t understand the sense of that, but he went along with it because he had never expected to be offered the delight of love and this
was nearer than he could have hoped of getting to it, despite the price he had to pay.

So, when her physical recovery allowed, they had started on a quest in which he felt largely a passenger. They always went west. He tried to show her the Suffolk coast but she was merely polite
about it. She amassed a box of Ordnance Surveys covering the whole of Wiltshire, Dorset and Somerset. He offered her Devon but it was beyond the range of her passion. She did not just want a house
– she wanted a story. The villages they visited in search of the haven she needed were judged by their part in history, and usually found wanting. Only old cottages would do and the ones that
came nearest were the ones where the owners could tell a tale or two of their past.

They came to a junction of lanes. ‘I think we ought to go home,’ Mike said. ‘It’s going to take ages to get back to London.’ He was thinking of the work he had to
do, dusting down his lecture notes on early maritime trading links.

‘Just this one, I promise. Penselwood’s down there, it says. I want to see Penselwood. This is much more the sort of place.’

So close to the road that caused you pain, he wondered. Perhaps it wasn’t the road, perhaps it was some chance arrangement of the cones or the colour of the digger.

‘If you’d said that before we wouldn’t have wasted all day round Castle Cary,’ he grumbled. Then it struck him: ‘Penselwood? I’m sure I know that
name.’

‘A battle?’

‘Maybe.’

She smiled happily, knowing she’d won as he turned the car down the lane.

They did a slow tour of scattered houses without ever being sure they had found the centre of the village. There was one ‘For Sale’ sign, but the tiny cottage behind it had fake
carriage lanterns and fake bottle glass in plastic window frames and they didn’t even stop. Eventually, they turned and came back to where the road forked.

‘Nothing there,’ said Mike, relieved that she hadn’t decided to knock on anyone’s door.

‘Try down here,’ she said, pointing down the fork the other way. ‘It probably goes back to the main road anyway.’

He could see no reason to suppose that was true, but he did as she asked and they had only gone a short way down the narrow, curving lane when she said, ‘Stop a minute.’

‘What for?’

‘I just want to look.’

He didn’t argue because he could see that she was back – that higher Gally who always eventually came out from behind her clouds.

From anywhere else but that precise spot they might not have noticed it, or so Mike supposed at the time, but as soon as Gally got out she pointed at the ivy-covered silhouette of the chimney
poking up behind the trees.

‘There’s a house in there,’ she exclaimed in delight. ‘Right where I wanted it to be.’

‘A house?’ he said as he got out to join her. ‘Where?’

To the north, beyond a sparse screen of trees, pasture stretched uphill. The ground to the south of the lane fell gradually away to the flat farmland stretching past Gillingham to
Shaftesbury’s distant ridge. A trio of beeches on the edge of the road almost hid the house, the hint of a gable showing man’s intruding straight edges to those who looked hard enough.
She was already at the gate, a rotten, slimy thing held by bent wire and baler twine. There was a small clearing beyond, perhaps a farmyard once, and he followed her through, feeling like a
trespasser, envying her ease.

It was not much more than a shell, and a green, wet-looking shell at that, though it still had a roof. Long and low, the jumbled lines of stonework told of changes over the busy years. The
roof-line took a curtsey towards the far end. Stone lintels topped glassless window frames filled with ivy, and from the middle of the house a buckled wooden-latticework porch jutted out, tilting
down on to its knees from the weight of the creeper that had massed on it. The door was a sheet of stained plywood, held in place by a diagonal plank that spelled closure and abandonment.
Everywhere there were creepers, wild bushes and saplings; nature’s demolition team inching apart the mortared joints of man’s temporary work. On the far side of the clearing, pines
burst up through the deep undergrowth that covered the lower slope of the hill. Beyond the house, in among the bushes, were angles of walls, buried stumps of old stone outhouses and a collapsing
corrugated-iron shed.

Gally turned slowly right round with her arms outspread then hugged herself and jumped up and down. ‘It’s perfect,’ she said. ‘This is it.’

Mike felt a cold shudder that started at his chequebook. ‘It’s a ruin.’

‘That just means no one’s had a chance to spoil it.’

‘It will cost a fortune to fix.’

‘How do you know?’

‘It’s not for sale.’

‘Well, you can’t have it both ways. If it’s not for sale, it won’t cost a fortune.’

He smiled, turned and squeezed between the bushes and the end wall. The far side of the house was covered in cracked rendering. The ground fell away into a little valley, choked with the soapy
corpses of fallen trees, fused under a shroud of moss. Gally moved past him and went down on her knees in the leaf-mould and the brambles, delving with her fingers into the dense decay.

‘Look,’ she said. A line of flowers he didn’t recognize was pushing its way through. In front of them, a row of curved tiles edged what had once been a flowerbed.

‘Someone loved this once. Think what it would look like if we cleared the valley. We could plant daffodils all the way down.’ She got up. ‘Come on,’ she said, grabbing
his hand and pulling. ‘Let’s look inside.’

The plywood sheet where the door had once been was no obstacle. It was nailed to a rotten frame that crumbled as she pushed it. ‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if we
should . . .’

‘It’s all right.’ She sounded excited. ‘No one’s going to mind.’

It seemed to him suddenly that going inside would be a good idea. The desolation they would find would persuade her this was not the comfortable country haven she craved and for which they had
searched all these past weekends. That thought overcame his scruples about trespassing, but once indoors he soon found the house was not on his side in the matter. Under the vegetation, the roof
was obviously still good. It still felt like a house. She stopped in front of him, seemed about to speak, but then moved on. They were in a passage that ran the length of the building, filled with
green ivy half-light. Four large rooms opened off it in a line. There were stone flags on the floor in the first three, covered by decaying domestic jetsam – tiles, yellowing magazines and a
discarded boiler, red with rust. Below each window there was an arc of damp on the stones, very clearly defined, where the house had said, ‘Stop, that’s far enough.’ Apart from
that it was dry; damaged by intruders, not by weather. Horsehair plaster hung in long dusty strips from the walls and holes had been poked in the ceilings so that splintered laths dangled, rimming
the edge of the holes like exit wounds.