Ferney (36 page)

‘Gally’s bones?’ Mike jackknifed forward.

There was a sudden profound silence. ‘I didn’t tell Mike that bit,’ said Gally quietly to Ferney and the old man shook his head at Mike. ‘What else did you
think?’

‘You’re saying it was
Gally
who was murdered?’

‘Well of course it was. Do you think I would have married anyone else?’

‘You’d better tell me all about it,’ said Mike grimly.

‘It was a long time before
you
were born,’ said Ferney. ‘She just disappeared one day. We’d been very happy, never apart, then one day she just vanished.’
He looked down and sighed. ‘I think I knew straightaway what had happened. There was a blacksmith, you see, a man called Cochrane. He was a violent man and he always had his eye on her from
when he first arrived here. He was wrong in the head when he drank and he thought for a long time that he could get her to come away with him.’ He looked at Gally. ‘She would never have
done that. She was never interested in anyone but me.’ To Gally, tension flickered between them then, but Mike seemed unaware.

‘He killed her, I’m sure. That place where they’ve dug the hole, that was where his forge was. He just tipped her into the pit. The police say they accept that’s what
happened. Anyway there’s no proving it now. They asked me all about Cochrane, but he’s long dead, I told them.’

He looked round the room. ‘You can see her if you like.’ He went to a shelf. There was a small framed photograph on it and he picked it up and looked at it for a long moment in
silence then, seeming to reach a decision, he turned round and thrust it out to Mike.

‘This isn’t evidence but it’s what it’s all about. That’s us. That’s Gally and me last time we were together.’

It hadn’t occurred to Gally that there might be a photograph. More than that, it seemed inconceivable. She had accepted the significance of the painting immediately, but the photograph
seemed entirely foreign. It was almost an affront that there sbould be this small, square, precise witness to the memories she couldn’t find. As Mike took it and stared at it, Ferney seemed
to read her thoughts.

‘First one,’ he said. ‘Only one. We didn’t run to cameras.’

She longed to take it from Mike, but he just stood there, looking at it and shaking his head. ‘It’s not in the least bit like Gally,’ he said, completely missing the point.

‘Not to look at,’ said Ferney patiently. ‘That’s all you can tell from a photograph. It’s not like children. There’s no genes carrying on. But it is Gally. A
month or two after our wedding, that one was.’

Mike put it down on the table and Gally stared towards it with hunger.

‘Can I see it?’

‘What?’ he said absently. ‘Oh, if you must.’

He held it out reluctantly. ‘I’m sorry about your wife,’ he said, ‘I can see it must be very odd for you – but I’m quite sure it’s just a coincidence
that she had the same nickname as Gally.’

Ferney was looking at Gally and Gally was looking at the photo. The sepia-tinted, plain-faced girl in the photo was a disappointment. Where Mike had failed to find a genetic trace, she could
find no echo of the consciousness. I can’t see myself there, she thought. It is after all just silver salts and paper. The girl was short, fair-haired, dressed simply in a skirt and blouse.
The background was a wall, but what wall she could not tell. Then she looked at the man next to the woman and saw Ferney in the fresh morning of his adulthood and warmth flooded from the centre of
her soul’s gravity to every extremity of her body. This was so entirely familiar. This was the way, she knew, that she felt Ferney’s shape in her mind when he wasn’t there. She
stared hard and long at the picture and teased out a wisp of memory, a faint trace of a day, far away, with a scent of lily-of-the-valley in the air. The memory took boisterous and unexpected form
round a cheerful, fat photographer with brilliantined hair and she frowned, trying to hold on to that and to fill it out but raised voices blew it away.

‘I want to know,’ Mike was repeating. ‘I have a right to know. How did Cochrane die?’

‘If you don’t believe all this, what does it matter?’

‘You can’t just say that.’ Mike was flushing red again. ‘This is something that happened in this lifetime. I don’t have to believe the rest of it. You come
careering through our lives saying stupid things like that and . . .’

Ferney’s voice was rising too. ‘It’s not stupid. It’s the way it was. Always just the two of us. Who did you think it was? Like I said, I wouldn’t have married
someone else.’

‘Well
she
did. She married me, so why should I believe you? What right have you got to screw us around? I’ve heard quite enough of this. Stay out of our life from now on,
right?’

‘It’s not just your life.’

‘It bloody well is and I don’t trust you.’

‘I’ve done nothing to deserve mistrust.’

‘Oh no? How did this man Cochrane die, then? Why were the police interested? You had a hand in it, didn’t you?’

He could not have chosen a more painful accusation.

‘No I did not. It was a lad, a simple lad. Billy. You don’t understand, you don’t . . . you . . .’ Ferney’s voice tailed off and he stood there, reaching a hand out
for support to the table, missing it and sliding down on to it on buckling knees as his eyes rolled up in his head. His arm swept the drum to the floor with a crash and then he followed it to slump
down on to the carpet.

There was a second when neither of them did anything, then another second when they both tried to get through the same gap at the corner of the table at the same time, and each
of those seconds felt like minutes to Gally. Ferney lay twisted on the red carpet and some abstracted, irrelevant part of her brain registered the slight pattern in its weave. Then she was on the
floor, kneeling by his head, searching for signs in his face and finding nothing but slack absence.

Mike was crouched next to her, his head on Ferney’s chest.

‘He’s stopped breathing,’ he said, his voice fast and high. ‘I’m not sure there’s a heartbeat.’

‘Oh God. What do we do?’

‘We don’t panic. We . . . er . . .’

Sketchy diagrams of mouth to mouth and heart massage offered themselves in imperfect images to Gally, half-remembered posters she had glanced at in doctors’ waiting-rooms and had never
needed to remember before.

‘Help me straighten him out,’ said Mike and they untwisted him. He was surprisingly heavy. Gally put her hands together on his chest and pressed down abruptly. It felt horribly
dangerous, as though she might crack his ribcage.

‘That’s right,’ said Mike encouragingly. ‘It’s got to be hard. It’s three times, isn’t it? Then you do the mouth to mouth.’

She bent her head to his face, held his nose, put her mouth over his and blew into him. Mike watched for a moment then stood up. ‘I’ll phone for an ambulance. I’ll be back in a
minute, love. Keep going.’

It took him more than a minute. She heard him talking urgently on the phone, trying to describe the way to the bungalow and realized he didn’t know the address. She kept going
rhythmically, breathing her air into the still body, then pumping his chest, then breathing again and suddenly had a shocking sense that instead of forcing life into him, she was drawing it out.
Every time she put her mouth over his, she began to feel a stronger and stronger sensation that something electric was trying to find its way towards her from him. He is dying, she thought. I am
not helping him live, I am helping him die and this is too soon. She sat up in distress, but he was still not breathing and death lay that way too. She bent to him again, trapped, and in the
distance she heard Mike sorting out the problem, putting the phone down and crossing the hall. She guessed he was looking for an envelope from the morning’s post.

‘Twelve, Castle Orchard Close,’ he said when he got back to the phone. ‘How long will you be? . . . Okay.’

He came back in quickly and she looked up in relief. ‘Mike, please, will you do this? I think I’m doing it all wrong.’

‘Me? No, it’s okay, you’re doing fine.’

‘I’m not. You’ve got to do it. If he dies . . .’

Was she going to say ‘. . . it will be your fault’? He looked at her face and didn’t argue any more. There was a moment of hesitation when he bent to Ferney’s mouth, but
then he steeled himself and blew in the first breath.

She stood and watched, horrified, and she had a sense that she was still too close.

‘I’ll find a blanket,’ she said and ran down the corridor in search of Ferney’s bedroom, feeling with each step she took that she was leaving the threat behind. The first
door she tried was the bathroom. The second was indeed his bedroom, but there was only a duvet on the bed and she rejected that as too bulky. Against one wall was a heavy chest of drawers and she
pulled the drawers open in turn. The bottom one yielded a green tartan rug and as she bent to take it out, her line of sight crossed the piles of books and magazines on top of the chest and lighted
on a white envelope, propped up against a table lamp. She saw her name on it.

She hurried back and spread the soft, heavy rug over Ferney, working round Mike, but again she found herself inside the old man’s tidal pull and knew she was reversing Mike’s
gains.

‘Are you all right?’ she said to Mike and as he stopped the mouth to mouth and started to pump Ferney’s chest once more, he nodded.

‘I . . . can’t stay in here,’ she said. ‘I’ll go and make sure the ambulance knows where to come.’

‘It won’t get here for a while yet,’ he said in a voice that wanted her to stay, but then he bent to blow again and she backed out of the room. Ferney doesn’t want me to
leave, she thought. This is the moment of passage for him. He wants my baby close to him. Somewhere deep inside her she knew he was wrong in this. It’s too early, she thought. This tiny thing
growing in me is nowhere near ready for invasion. It couldn’t take it.

She went to the front door, heard an engine, but it turned into a blue and yellow truck that passed the end of the entrance to the close and went on its way. It was hard to stay there, leaving
it all to Mike, wondering what was happening on that carpet battlefield inside, fearing he would be feeling deserted. A stronger instinct kept her outside – an instinct that said she had to
protect both Ferney and her baby.

Her heart jumped when another approaching engine note slowed and a white vehicle crawled round the corner into the close, but it was just a van. It stopped almost opposite and a man in a white
coat climbed out with a plastic basket of bread. She had a sudden urge to tell him. Surely he should know that there was a man dying in here? Surely he shouldn’t just go on his baker’s
way not knowing? He left his bread on the doorstep of the bungalow next door, nodded to her and left. No one else was about in the neighbouring houses. Time crawled fretfully by and then across the
distance there was a far-off two-tone siren, blowing like the wonderful bugles of a rescuing force rushing to lift her siege. She hurried inside to the study doorway. ‘They’re
coming,’ she said. Mike waved an acknowledging hand in the air and kept at it.

The ambulance swung into the close and drove straight to where she stood waving. A man and a woman jumped out, capable-looking. The woman came straight inside with her and the man brought a
large pack of equipment in behind them. Mike, drained and pale, surrendered his place to them.

They bent to examine Ferney in silence. ‘You’ve done well,’ said the woman. ‘Go and have a sit-down.’

Gally hugged Mike and started to lead him away but Mike turned back, picked the drum up off the table and brought it with him. She fought down an urge to shy away from it.

‘We’d better not leave it there,’ he whispered and she took that for a sign that he believed at least one small part of Ferney’s story.

‘Bring it through here,’ she said, and led the way to the bedroom. He tucked it out of sight behind a chair and she closed the door firmly on it. They went into the front room, away
from Ferney’s danger zone, where they looked at each other and she knew that the last ten minutes of desperate activity had given Mike a shared interest in Ferney’s survival.

‘What have I done?’ he said miserably.

‘You’ve saved him.’

‘I caused it. I brought it on.’

‘You couldn’t have known and you’ve kept him alive. Thank you,’ she said.

She could feel the change in him. All the pain he’d felt, all the raw anger and all the sense of betrayal was buried under a mountain of concern and responsibility. They sat together on
the sofa, holding hands in silent tension, listening to the activity down the corridor. The man went to the ambulance and brought back a stretcher. Mike jumped to his feet.

‘Can I help?’

‘It’s okay. We’ve got him stabilized for now. He’s breathing.’

Mike did help, for all that, moving furniture out of the way while they carried Ferney on his stretcher out through the hall. An oxygen mask was over his face and a monitor was strapped to
him.

‘You go with him in the ambulance,’ suggested Mike.

‘No . . . I don’t want to. Would you mind going to get the car? I’ll lock up here.’

‘It’ll take me five minutes,’ he said, puzzled.

She just nodded.

The ambulance went on its urgent way and now there were people in the close. Mike told them briefly what was going on as he passed and Gally looked up to see the broad figure of Mary Sparrow
stumping down the path.

‘Hello, my muffety,’ she said. ‘Here’s a business, then.’

‘He just fell down,’ said Gally.

‘He’s still kicking, though. It’s a blessing you were here.’

It wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t been, thought Gally miserably. ‘I was just going to close the house up,’ she said.

‘He won’t want anyone in here,’ said Mary, looking round the hall. ‘There’s the key, see? Why don’t you take it and look after it for him?’

Gally nodded and picked up the key. ‘I’d better just make sure everything’s switched off,’ she said and walked quickly down the corridor, checking each room. She came to
the bedroom, crossed the room to the chest of drawers, picked up the envelope and put it in her pocket. She longed to know what was in it, but this was not the time to look.