Ferney (38 page)

It was a form of residual cowardice, however, that steered her away from the hilltop. She dressed it up to herself as something else, a simple precaution against manipulation that this should
happen in the place of
her
choice, not Ferney’s. She walked northwards through the straggling cottages looking for a quiet place to sit until she came to the church and found
herself, without any awareness that it had always been her destination, walking up the pathway towards it. The two old heads, facing each other across the corners of the inner porch, welcomed her.
Just as on that earlier visit, she was struck by a sense of disappointment that the inside of the church was not as she expected, but now at least she had some ideas why. She took a blue leaflet
from a pile on the table. ‘St Michael’s Pen Selwood,’ it said, ‘Church History’. The pew ends were carved in 1927. A gallery across the west end of the nave was
removed in recent times. That, she thought, was what felt wrong. Going back into the porch with the leaflet in her hand, she looked at the ancient carving of the Virgin over the outer door. It felt
old but unimportant. Cross-checking herself, she looked through the leaflet. It
was
old, nearly six hundred years old, but it had been brought back from Italy around 1850. The two crowned
heads were another thing altogether – deeply familiar. ‘As yet unidentified’ said the leaflet. ‘Believed by some to be King Alfred and King Guthrum.’ Guthrum? The
Viking leader beaten and converted by Alfred’s scratch army? She gave a derisory laugh. This was a woman, anyone could see that, though the head was certainly more weather-beaten than she
expected.

Somewhere at the back of her mind there was a suspicion that if she could just hold on to it she could draw out a fleeting tag of memory with names on it – a name for the king and for the
queen. She tried, failed and was saddened for a long moment, then Ferney’s letter asserted itself in her pocket and now she decided was the time to face it. She stepped back into the nave,
where her light steps echoed softly from cool stone edges and went unknowingly to the same pew in the far aisle where Ferney had sat to conjure up the sad life of James Cumberlidge. Holding the
letter in the quiet, high light, she read the words deliberately to herself, with a measure of foreboding. ‘We can if we set our minds to it. No more of this hit and miss.’ They ran
through her mind even after she had stopped consciously reading them, but it was her own modern voice that spoke them and nothing came.

How long had she got? She looked at her watch and could make little sense of it. What time had Mike gone? What time had he said he’d be back? Mike had worked it all out – the journey
time to Yeovil, the visiting hours, and she had retained none of it.

She closed her eyes then and tried to quieten her breathing, to smother the present with a blanket of silence. Irrelevant thoughts kept pushing their way in. Had they got any mustard? Should she
take Ferney flowers? Every time she wrestled to blank her mind again, saying a mantra to herself: ‘No more of this hit and miss, no more of this hit and miss, no more of this hit and
miss.’ The pew, the church and the sense of here and now left her and her heartbeat became very loud in her ears. An eager, young face turned to her and she loved it with a bubbling, physical
rush which took her breath away. Ferney, maybe thirty, beautiful Ferney, listening as she told him her terrible, wonderful idea. At the start, there was just the face, inside the church with her,
then a sense of the walls opening up and the vast sky around them.

How much time did she still have? In the present world, up in its tower above her head, the church clock clicked around and with an admonitory whirr sent its powerful message of the hour
clanging out across the village on the ridge. The first bronze stroke sent a flicker through the forming features of his face, bringing her sharp anticipation of loss. The second stroke changed
them and by the third they were re-forming. This face was broader, middle-aged, darker-skinned, the nose broken and the chin larger, but the eyes were still Ferney’s eyes and the love was
still there though it was older and calmer.

The fourth stroke of the bell sounded and they were both looking up, hand in hand in the crowd. Gally’s legs were tired from climbing Shaftesbury’s hill and she was thirsty. It was
the first warm day in a foul, wet year and the coarse kersey cloth chafed her shoulder under the strap of the leather bag. They’d buy ale when they could, but the first thing was to see the
machine, the reason they’d come all this way. The word had reached them yesterday, spreading fast through the countryside, that a machine to count the hours had come to Shaftesbury to be put
in the church and anyone could go to see it. Most of the village had been straggling out along the muddy road as they left, but Ferney and Gally, preferring to walk alone, had outpaced the rest of
them. It took them half the morning to get there and for the last quarter of the journey they could hear a bell, growing steadily stronger, ringing first once, then after they had gone perhaps
another mile twice more, then three times as they approached.

It was set up on a wooden frame outside the Abbey, on display, waiting to be lifted up to the platform now being built inside the tower. They were patient, using the slow rearrangements of the
growing crowd to work their way ever nearer to the machine until they could see the sun and the moon, the weights on their chains and the shining wheels with their pegs and teeth turning the ornate
iron hands. They each stood staring up at it, both fascinated by the precise, organized look of the thing. Delicate metal was unfamiliar except as jewellery or church ornaments. Delicate metal that
turned and shone and fitted, part by part, into other turning, shining pieces was unsuspected, entirely new.

There was a man up on the gantry, fussing around it, a man in a gown that marked him out as leading an easy, looked-after life. He was watching the mechanism intently and all at once he turned
to the crowd and held up both hands as if to make an announcement. The buzz of speculation rose sharply then stopped, so that all there was to hear was the hushing spreading out to noisy
latecomers, the whisper of the turning wheels and the clatter of jackdaws around the tower above. Then came a click, a whirr and a great clang from the bell hanging from its wooden scaffold beside
the machine. A gasp and a murmur went up from the crowd, but the man with the cloak held up his hands again with an impatient frown. Another clang and another and another rolled out from the
hilltop across a land which had only heard the ringing of bells as summons, celebration, warning or mourning, never before as measurement.

‘It is ten hours in the morning,’ shouted the man, ‘by the precise authority of the clock,’ and a burst of cheering went up. Ferney suddenly turned away.

‘Let’s leave,’ he said, ‘I’m thirsty.’ He sounded unhappy.

They bought mugs of ale at the street corner. Gally wished it were water but Ferney never trusted water away from their own spring. She wondered at his sudden downcast mood and regretted it. She
would have liked to spend the morning in the town. They very rarely gave up a day to come this far, but he clearly had no wish to stay.

‘What is it?’ she said as they left.

The bell behind them gave one single clang.

‘It’s that,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘I’ll show you,’ he said and turned down the steep slope of the lane towards the flatlands and the way north.

They walked on in silence at a steady pace on the sticky, puddled track. In places, where there were banks, there was no choice but to wade through the mud. In others, travellers had beaten new
paths, widening the track in their search for firmer ground, but mostly just spreading out the mud so that it ran to forty paces wide or more. Gally, taking her mind off her wet feet, thought of
all the wheels with their tiny teeth and wondered what tools were used to forge them. Shaping metal, she knew, was hard and that was not the sort of work done with a furnace and a hammer. After a
fair while, there came a distant double clang behind them and Ferney stopped and wheeled round.

‘So tell me what’s bothering you,’ she said.

‘How far have we come?’ he said. She measured the distance back to the ridge with her eye. ‘Six furlongs,’ she said, ‘maybe seven. Why?’

‘When we came this morning,’ he said, ‘we moved in eternity at our own best pace and we arrived when we arrived. Do you see how it’s changed?’

‘I don’t think I do.’

‘They’ll have those everywhere soon. That won’t be the only one. Can you really not see what the difference is? We’re going back and we are no longer moving in eternity.
Now we are moving in measured time. The machine is measuring us. While we walked it rattled and it turned and it spat out one fourth part of the hour.’

‘That doesn’t hurt,’ she said cheerfully.

He gave her a tight smile. ‘It sounds four times every hour. Can’t you feel it drawing us into its cogs? People never measure without a price coming into it. A pint of ale, a pound
of corn, a yard of cloth.’

‘How can time have a price on it?’

‘They’ll find a way,’ he said. ‘They’ll not pay working men by the year, not with this thing about in the world. They’ll measure off the hours they work and
they’ll measure off the hours they don’t work. This machine we’ve seen . . . this will serve to fuel the preying dreams of merchants and rich men.’ He looked back down the
road. ‘Do you think we’ve walked fast enough?’

‘We’ve walked, that’s all – walked at our speed.’

‘But we’ve got time walking with us now and one day someone will say you’re not fast enough, you haven’t gone far enough or maybe they’ll say that job took too long
– the clock says so and it will no longer be enough that it was done well.’

‘Ferney,’ she said, sad to find the joy of the day evaporating around them, ‘time’s not new. There’s been time always.’

‘Water clocks,’ he said, ‘candle clocks, sand glasses. You’ve never taken them seriously. Short hours in winter, long hours in summer. Guesswork – not
authority.’ He nodded back up the road. ‘That thing back there isn’t going to be our slave, it’s going to be telling us what to do before we know it.’

‘Let’s break it, then,’ she said and a door opened noisily in the middle of this open countryside and blew her thoughts away.

She blinked, wondering why there were walls around her, and stared blankly at the figure bending apologetically in the bright light of the doorway, one hand on the door handle.

‘So sorry,’ said a man’s voice. ‘Did I disturb you?’

‘No,’ she said, rubbing her head and standing up. ‘I was miles away.’ He had, though, and she resented his arrival.

The man wore a dog-collar. ‘I do apologize,’ he said. ‘Were you at prayer?’

‘No, I was thinking.’

‘Comes to the same thing, sometimes.’ He was boyish, young, with curly fair hair and an embarrassed grin. ‘I’m just a stand-in, you know – for a few weeks.’
She didn’t say anything and he looked even more embarrassed. ‘That’s why I don’t know my flock yet, you see. I’m Roger Wigglesworth.’

‘Gally Martin,’ she said slowly. ‘But I’m not part of your flock, I’m afraid.’

‘Still,’ he said, ‘jolly good to see someone using the place.’ Then he thought. ‘Gally Martin. Are you down in a caravan somewhere?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Oh, in that case it was you and your husband who saved poor Mr Miller?’

‘My husband more than me.’

‘Jolly well done. How is he?’

‘Off the danger list, I gather.’

‘Jolly good show. He must be quite tough.’

‘Do you know Mr Miller?’ she said curiously.

‘Oh no, but I really think I must go and see him in hospital. He’s the first of my flock to fall, if you like.’

Ferney will want that like a hole in the head, thought Gally. ‘I’m fairly certain he’s not one of your flock either,’ she said carefully.

‘Well, any sheep in need,’ he said. ‘Who knows, I might be able to help in some way. Or perhaps he’s of some other church?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘Oh well, do go on with your thinking or whatever, I’d hate to stop you.’

‘I must go, actually. I’ve done enough thinking, thank you all the same.’

He stayed in the church when she left and she stopped as soon as she was out of sight. The letter, unresolved, crouched in her pocket, a paper Judas waiting to give the kiss. Mike must not see
it, yet she could not bring herself to throw it away.

That was a giant step in there, she thought. I can do it by myself without Ferney leading me. It is there. In the same breath she doubted it. The vicar had shattered the chain too abruptly,
driven it all too far away, so that with every second it was harder to be sure what it had been, daydream or memory? It had felt real and detailed and she had to hang on to that, but now it was
receding from her too fast to be sure.

She took a deep breath. Time to be practical, she thought and looked at her watch. Seven minutes to the hour. Mike had said he’d be back by eleven. Gally wondered if she could get home in
seven minutes. She walked fast, but the clock struck the hour long before she came in sight of the cottage and she hated its tyranny. If time wasn’t measured, lateness wouldn’t hurt.
She wanted more time to herself but there was a car pulling into the gateway as she arrived, and it wasn’t Mike.

All the way to Yeovil, Gally was in the wrong century, driving as if the whole process were new to her, sawing at the steering-wheel, reacting too fiercely and too late in
delayed recognition of what other cars were doing. She wasn’t in the right frame of mind to drive a car at all. The whole alien business of controlling this lump of intricate steel was for
once almost beyond her, but Mike had found all kinds of reasons to stay behind.

The woman who had arrived in her elegant metallic grey Lancia just as Gally got back to the house had a delicacy about her that had made Gally feel clumpy and ill at ease as she showed her into
what she suddenly saw to be an extremely shabby caravan. The woman was brittly polite with an on-off smile. Fortyish, bird-boned and perfectly made-up, she wore immaculate tight clothes that must
have hung, amongst many others, in individual plastic protectors.