Ferney (30 page)

Sound went away, fading to hissing silence. Sight narrowed, bleached out so nothing was left to be seen save a narrowing circle of his face then just his eyes, burning into hers. There was a
last sense of his arms round her, slackening in death then seemingly growing stronger again to hold her and shake her gently.

‘Enough now, stop there,’ he said and she wondered how she could understand the Saxon words. ‘Don’t go further, Gally,’ he said.

The shocking intrusion of the fierce spear inside her was worse than its direct pain. It had spawned a point of bright light in her head that was growing, cutting off the feeling of the spear,
stilling all the restless questions so that she started to quieten, to be content inside the light, feeling it grow. A shouting voice wouldn’t let her. It grew irritatingly louder and with
every shouted syllable the light pulsed, weakened again. The voice kept hammering her name at her and she was forced reluctantly to let go of the last of the glow of it, the wonderful, loving glow,
surrendering to the long, elastic tug of the far future.

‘Oh, do shut up,’ she said wearily and opened her eyes to an unknown place and an unknown man holding her. The spear-thrust tunnel through her had filled, the beautiful light had all
gone and this old, worried stranger in his impossible, tidy construction of cloth slowly re-formed into Ferney and his tweeds with his arms round her.

‘Oh, my dear,’ he said. ‘Don’t do that to me. I thought you’d gone.’

She shook her head mutely, pushed him away from her. A dull drone pulled her eyes skywards, fearing what might be above the leaf canopy, but twentieth-century information, pouring back in,
labelled it as mere machinery before the incipient panic had a chance to take hold.

‘That was awful,’ she said uncertainly.

‘I’ve seen it once before – when you were going back over it. It was easier to stop you that time. You mustn’t ever get into that when I’m not here. Will you
remember that?’

‘What would happen?’

‘I haven’t a clue.’

‘Was that . . . death?’

‘I expect so,’ he said in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘Was it very white?’

‘Yes, bright and growing.’

‘That was death then.’

She had to know more. ‘What happens next? After that, I mean?’

‘I don’t know what would have happened this time. I mean I don’t think you were
dying
, you were just remembering it, but I think it would have been extremely upsetting
going through the next bit.’

‘Tell me how it is.’ She saw he looked doubtful. ‘I won’t be able to stop thinking about it. I’d rather know. Is it always the same?’

‘Just about. You’re a passenger. The light takes you – makes you feel safe. You’re very happy. Then the next thing, I suppose, is you get this strong feeling that
you’re going somewhere and there’s something marvellous waiting for you at the other end.’

‘That’s just the way people describe near-death experiences.’

‘I’ve read all about that. It’s pretty much the same until there, but from then on it’s different for us. From that first time, the stone had us. It gives us a great tug
off to one side. We never get there.’

‘Just us? Other people do get there?’

Ferney looked suddenly wary. ‘How would we know?’

She was fascinated. ‘But for other people there might be something, Heaven, whatever?’

‘Don’t let’s start on that.’

She recognized the missing word ‘again’ in his tone of voice. ‘Have I said that before?’

He laughed. ‘Before and before and before. It’s the thing we never agree on.’

‘Why?’

‘No, that means me telling you what you think and that always annoys you.’

She snorted. ‘Don’t tell me what always . . .’ and tailed off.

‘You see?’

‘So I have to work it out for myself? Well, I suppose what I feel is that if we weren’t pulled sideways like that, we’d get somewhere else and perhaps it would be somewhere
nice, so perhaps all those people who believe in God and Heaven aren’t wrong.’

He nodded. ‘That’s your view,’ and she wondered how many times he had heard it. ‘I always say there’s no point in wondering. We can’t ever get there, so who
knows? Some of these new books say it’s just a trick your mind plays on you, the tunnel and the light, to make dying a bit easier.’

‘Ferney,’ she said gently. ‘If I hadn’t come back this time? If we hadn’t put the stream back as it was – and the stone – you would have finally found
out. Wouldn’t that have been better, maybe?’

A car, the first since they’d started talking, drove past on the road and he waited for it to pass before he answered.

‘Oh, now that’s the big one. That’s the question. You know when I flushed Effie out of the house with the water, it just crossed my mind that if I moved the stream away from
the stone that might change it. It wasn’t much of an idea, just the tiniest suspicion, but even if I’d really felt it strongly, I might just have done it anyway, you know. We were so
happy, you and me. It was the most perfect of times. If that had been our last time, if we’d gone on and died together and not come back, I thought I wouldn’t mind, that it
couldn’t ever be any better.’

‘Did you ask me?’

He looked slightly ashamed. ‘No, I kept it to myself. Like I say, as thoughts go, it didn’t add up to much.’

‘Even so, that wasn’t very fair.’

‘Maybe not. Anyway, I was wrong, wasn’t I?’ He shifted his position, sat up a bit straighter. ‘Maybe I wasn’t entirely wrong. I think the stone’s stronger up
than down, and stronger with the water than without it, but it’s never powerless. It’s worked fine lying flat for the last hundred-odd years, but it belongs upright and there’s no
harm in being sure. Anyway when Effie moved out, that made everything feel different. I got better and we were so happy then and I didn’t think about it again until after you’d . . .
gone . . . and I couldn’t find you anywhere.’ Then he smiled at her with the smile of a younger man, a sweet, sad smile that stirred an emotion so deep it dwarfed everything else she
could ever remember feeling.

‘I shouldn’t have to explain this,’ he said, ‘but when it’s gone badly that’s because we haven’t had each other for one reason or another and then
I’ve wanted to find you so much I sometimes haven’t been able to wait to start it all over again. All the times we’ve been together, well . . . we’d never want that to end.
When you’re old, like me, it’s quite exciting thinking you’ll be young and strong again.’

That wasn’t the half of it, he thought, looking at her and trying to hide the sudden hunger. That wasn’t the half of it, but just as well to hide it. If she had an inkling of what
was in his mind it would scare her. He remembered keenly what she had forgotten – the depth of satisfaction in being together, each in the full glory of their memory, knowing how far back
they went and how deeply they ran together, but then something much more. When age had brought its slow taming of physical love, there was that other fierce excitement – the excitement of the
knowledge that soon they would again be young, and if they could just contrive it they would be young together. All that old love to fuel the fierce delights of their renewed, perfect, powerful
virgin flesh.

He remembered a time so perfect that every detail except the date was etched into his mind. It was long, long ago in the time soon after the French came, when the seeds of abortive revolt were
in the air and the castles were going up. They’d been inseparable youngsters until he was four and she was six, then she’d gone away with her aunt and no one told him where. It was only
a middling walk, really, to a smallholding at the back of Gasper, but it might as well have been the moon. Certainly it had been far enough to put her out of the range of his immediate knowledge
and it was only ten years later when he’d been sent to bring back a pig from that way that he had chanced to see her, climbing out of the stream where she’d been washing, her thin
clothes wet and partly sticking to her like the wisps of bark on a peeled willow twig.

His heart turned over and in his certainty, he cried out ‘Gally’ and she, to his great joy, looked up, shading her eyes, called ‘Ferney’ on a rising note of ecstasy and
ran, alive, young and perfect into his arms.

The present Gally, watching him, knew he was away somewhere and, guessing that some previous Gally was there with him, gave him some time then gently asked, ‘Why didn’t I know this
time? Why does it go wrong?’

He shook his head. ‘Now you’re really asking. Death’s a pretty rough ride. It’s not like you can sit there hanging on to every detail, you know. It’s more like
being sucked down the plughole. You don’t wind up as a baby thinking, “Now what was I saying?” It’s more like you slowly, slowly come out from under the anaesthetic, but all
you get to start with is little scraps of feeling and your brain’s not used to straightening it all out and your voice doesn’t work so there’s nothing you could do with the words
anyway. Whatever, sometimes I think you just miss the chance to hang on to it all. Sometimes it’s simpler to give up on who you were and just take the easy way and then it all gets covered up
with what happens next.’

‘Being away makes it different, too, doesn’t it?’

‘If you’re born away from here it’s always much harder to remember. I’m sure that’s the way it was for you and the one before you.’ He thought of saying the
rest, that madness could lie that way, but he thought better of it.

They were both silent, both thinking of the missing Gally, the Gally of the 1930s, the one they knew nothing at all about.

‘It’s dangerous times for us, then,’ said Gally after a while.

‘Aeroplanes and cars. People rushing about. Anything could happen these days. It frightens me, like when you went to Greece. I kept listening to the radio in case they said there’d
been a plane crash.’

‘How would I ever get back if that happened?’

‘I’ve done it once.’

‘Tell me?’

‘Not now. There’s been a lot too much for one day already. Let’s go back.’ Something nagged at her as they walked slowly back down the lane. It was an uncomfortable
thought, so obvious that she let it hang there in her mind for a while, unable to put it into words, but Gally was, in the end, a direct person and the moment came when she could not avoid saying
it.

‘Ferney. When you die do you come back right away?’

‘Get born again, you mean? Near enough. It’s not like there’s a fixed rule. Depends what’s around, I suppose. As far as we’ve ever been able to tell, sometimes
it’s like it’s fairly instant, sometimes you maybe spend a month or two tucked up inside before the baby’s born.’

‘This time,’ she said, ‘when you die, you’re going to come back as a baby and I’ll be much older than you.’

‘That’s right,’ he agreed affably.

It was dawning on her that they had it easy right now. Apart from Mike’s feelings, who would find it odd that a young woman and an old man should be fond of each other?

‘It’s going to be dreadful then, isn’t it?’ she said uncertainly. ‘How can we be . . . close like that? I mean, no parents are going to want some strange woman
making friends with their child, not these days. They’ll be suspicious as anything.’

‘That’s certainly a problem.’

‘Well, let’s hope it doesn’t happen for years,’ she said firmly.

‘Oh, but it’s going to,’ he said in a tone of slight surprise.

She stopped and faced him. ‘What do you mean? When?’

‘About six months,’ he said, as though it should be obvious.

‘Six months?’ She was horrified. ‘Why? Did they tell you something in the hospital? Why didn’t you say?’

‘No,’ he said puzzled. ‘It’s nothing to do with anything they said. They didn’t know anything, did they? Haven’t you understood? I thought you’d
realized by now. I’m so sorry, I should have made it plainer.’

He was looking surprised.

‘What? What should you have made plainer?’

He seemed tongue-tied.

‘Tell me.’

‘It’s like Effie Mullard,’ he said softly, his eyes on her. ‘You know the story.’

‘Like her?’ said Gally. ‘You mean I’m like her? She was having a baby by the stone, you said, and it was going to be . . .’

‘Me,’ he said for her.

Though religion was a locked door to Ferney, the church was the one building whose doors were never locked – indeed, the only familiar building in Penselwood where, as
the years passed, a sudden change of ownership would never bar his entry. It was only as an empty building that he liked it. Caught up in a long conflict with those who had used it to preach
unattainable heaven and meaningless hell, he had fallen foul of some of them across the years – the narrow churchmen of the authoritarian times who had used their pulpit power to fetter the
community with fierce, unloving ideas. There had been dangerous times when it simply didn’t pay to let them mark you as a nonconformist, when the tides of puritan rebellion had turned every
pew into a political hot seat. During those years Ferney had been content to play a defensive role, compelled to take his Sunday place and think his own thoughts under a show of attention,
garnering some pleasure from the stones around him and the sound of the music, but none at all from the words of the service.

He nodded to the stone heads above the door as he pushed it open and walked in, knowing just exactly how his footsteps on the flagstones would sound, echoing like drips in a well. Few sounds had
stayed constant, but this was one. Birdsong was another, he thought, but even the cows and the sheep had changed their voices as centuries of breeding layered meat on their widening frames. True,
he had leather on his soles now, not wood, but he favoured hard leather, valuing materials around him that did not quickly erode, and the sound it made was pretty much the same as the old sound of
the wood. In here, above all, it was possible to get away from the constant recent background noise of petrol being burnt in a hundred ways which upset him not so much for the noise itself as for
the squandering shortsightedness of it.

An enthusiast for most modern conveniences, Ferney generally excluded the car from that. Walking through your surrounding landscape strengthened your responsibility towards it. Enclosed speed,
he had soon decided as the postwar years brought cars doubling and redoubling, steel algae infesting the world, removed that responsibility and provided the illusion that like a malignant comet,
you could always travel away from the debris in your wake.