Ferney (41 page)

He understood. ‘We know what’s good for us, you and me – vegetables, milk and fruit. We know all the other things to steer clear of. What do you make of
supermarkets?’

The question felt rather fierce.

‘They . . . they worry me.’

‘Why?’

‘All that distance things have to travel, I think. From halfway round the world, most of them, just so we can find we’ve let the fresh mangoes go rotten in February.’

‘I’m glad you realize. We’ve always been in touch with the seasons. Our bodies’ needs change with the seasons. You shouldn’t live the same right through the year.
Spring and summer, that’s when you need the quick sugar. Winter’s for the slow-burning foods. Now it’s all muddled up – it’s not surprising people don’t know
whether they’re coming or going. I think all this youth crime has something to do with that, though I must say, I suppose it’s been worse in the past.’

‘Is there anything you want?’

‘I was serious about the marjoram. Next time you come, can you bring me some and maybe a bit of lavender and either onions or some garlic. It’s good for this.’ He rubbed his
heart. ‘If I’ve got to go on a bit longer, I’d rather do it with my own stuff than their chemicals.’

‘Speaking of going,’ she said, ‘I must get back. Mike needs the car. He’s going to be taking it with him, so I may not be able to get here except at weekends.’

Mention of Mike made his eyes cloud. ‘You stay away from cars,’ he said, looking at her stomach meaningfully. ‘Tell him thank you from me.’

‘One last thing. We’ve got the drum. What happened to the swords and the armour?’

‘Funny you should ask. I was thinking about that. I don’t know.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’ve never quite worked it out. It’s all to do with a lad called Billy Bunter. I’ll tell you the story some other time.’

He watched her stand up. ‘And Gally?’

‘Yes.’

‘What I said in the letter? Try to remember it yourself. Please?’

The delivery van driver, due Wednesday morning, precipitated another small crisis when he arrived late on Wednesday afternoon. Gally had finished the last of the small stock of
fresh fruit and vegetables in the caravan’s cupboard and as Penselwood had no shop she had been planning a long walk to Bourton and perhaps even a bus ride further on to Mere to stock up.
Waiting for the driver knocked that one on the head. The builders were all off on another job. The plasterer had gone for fresh supplies and showed no immediate sign of returning, the plumber and
electrician weren’t due again until the next day and she had nothing obvious to do to occupy the time except some more gardening while she waited. What the driver, a balding rural chauvinist
to whom she seemed almost invisible, eventually brought with him was the next problem. She had been expecting a fridge. She got a fridge and a freezer.

‘This can’t be for us,’ she said doubtfully.

The driver looked at his clipboard. ‘Says it is here.’

‘Where?’

‘Whirlpool fridge and freezer. See? Matching pair. All paid for.’

Mike’s carbon signature, faint but undeniable, was on the delivery copy.

She sighed. ‘All right.’

‘Nice surprise from your old man, was it? If I’d have known I’d have put a ribbon round it.’

‘Not exactly.’

He trolleyed both machines into the kitchen. ‘Where do you want them?’

‘You can leave them there. I’ll sort it out.’

‘Better wait ’til he gets here before you try and move them.’

He went, blessedly, leaving her in the silence to walk warily round the intrusive white boxes in the middle of the floor. The sketched layout they had made of the way the kitchen would be was
pinned to a window frame. She took it down to look at it. The fridge was clearly marked but that was all. They had never talked about a freezer and it annoyed her that Mike had gone out and bought
one without even mentioning it to her.

She’d never liked frozen food.

That thought came from nowhere and startled her with its truth and made her look again at the feelings the delivery had stirred up. In London she bought fresh food as a matter of course, but
that required little conscious choice with open shops always close by. Ferney had said ignore the supermarkets, live naturally, stay in tune with what the seasons offered. She identified the seeds
of her dislike of the freezer in those words, but the thought had opened a tiny, exciting window on last time round. When did frozen food first appear? she wondered. She recognized the tingle of
distant familiarity that marked an idea from before. So far they all seemed to feel like that, in that brief first stage before recognition brought them ballooning out. The life just past, the
missing life between Cochrane’s brutal act and this present time, must be the source of her feelings on freezers and she found that she very much wanted to be able to fill in that blank.
Sitting on a stool, trying to quieten her mind and open it to memory’s tendrils, she cast a mental hook baited with images of frozen food but nothing rose to take it.

Perhaps it’s because I’m rooted here, she thought. This place fed and fuelled my other lives so I can find them again but not this last one. One day maybe I’ll wander down the
right road and the lock will open and I’ll suddenly know. That held frightening suggestions that there were black holes dotted around the country with the power to pull her in and maroon her
if travel took her in the wrong direction. The freezer went hand in hand with the idea of driving, two unpleasant and dangerous developments. Ferney manages, she thought, remembering his rooms with
the videos and the tea-making machine – but he does it by being very selective about what he takes from the devices on offer. It’s not that we’re stuck in the mud – more
that we’ve learnt enough to know what’s good for us. We’ve had long enough to find out, after all.

Mike came back on Friday evening expecting praise for his thoughtfulness and generosity in ordering the freezer and, feeling it was unfair to do otherwise, she gave it to him. She made him a cup
of tea and took him into the house where he was suitably amazed by the progress.

‘Not long now,’ he said. ‘Won’t it be nice to move in?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘It’s your birthday next week.’

‘We won’t be moving in time for that.’

‘That wasn’t what I was going to say. I’ve had this idea for a present, but I think it’s something I’d better talk about with you first.’

‘All right, if you think so.’

‘I’ve just had a look at something I thought you’d really like.’

His eyes were sparkling with suppressed excitement. She would have preferred the surprise and thought perhaps it was more that he couldn’t keep it to himself than that he really needed her
opinion.

‘It’s a little Citroën – a 2CV. It’s a very nice one, red and white, hardly used at all. It would be brilliant round here.’

She was instantly glad that he hadn’t surprised her with it.

‘Oh, Mike. I . . . I don’t need a car.’ She tried to say it kindly, but his eyes showed hurt. ‘It’s a lovely idea but I really enjoy
not
having
one.’

‘It hardly counts as a car, you know. They don’t use up much petrol. I just thought you could be so stuck up here by yourself. I mean, winter’s coming up and if I’m away
all week . . .’

‘I’ll manage fine,’ she said. A car meant risk. Could she have it and just drive it locally? No, there’d always be the temptation to go further afield. ‘I tell you
what. Why don’t you buy me a bike instead? I want something traditional, you know, shiny dark green with three gears and a basket on the front with handlebars that bend round at the end and
one of those metal cases round the chain to stop my skirt getting dirty.’

‘You don’t wear skirts,’ he said glumly. ‘I’m sure you’d find a car would make a difference. I mean look at this week, you could have gone to see the old man
whenever you wanted.’

‘I’ll go tomorrow in your car.’

He stopped arguing and went very quiet, showing her just a corner of his sulk without displaying enough to prompt an accusation. She was left thinking about the triangular trap of cars, freezers
and a village with no shops. It wasn’t a question of convenience. There was no argument on that score and Ferney, she knew, would have been all in favour of cars if it just came down to that.
It was the danger – that was the point – the danger of being out of range of this magnet of theirs when the time came. She had a wild vision of taking the Bag Stone with her, strapped
on the roof of a little Citroën and almost giggled, but that would have made it worse with Mike and she managed to stop herself in time.

The next morning she drove carefully to Yeovil, shopped for Ferney’s mixed bag of herbs and vegetables. Ironically she could only find fresh marjoram in the local supermarket after trying
everywhere else, but she took the cellophane wrapping with its bar code off before she took it with her to the hospital.

Ferney was not alone. Mr and Mrs Carson, a dour elderly pair from Lancashire who were his neighbours, were there before her, paying a duty visit. Mrs Carson had a face of astonishing narrowness
under a frothy hair-do. She looked perfectly normal in profile but as soon as she turned to give Gally a fleeting acknowledgement, her face shrank to an axe-blade.

‘They don’t give you much space for your things, Mr Miller,’ she said with a sniff. ‘Mr Carson wouldn’t like that.’

‘Yes,’ said her husband.

‘That’s not what I call a pillow. We brought you a newspaper. Mr Carson started the crossword for you.’

‘Mrs Martin is repairing Bagstone Farm,’ said Ferney as Gally stood awkwardly at the end of the bed.

‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs Carson, showing no interest whatsoever. She was a picture-window person.

‘It was kind of you to come to see me,’ Ferney said to them with a glance at Gally. ‘I don’t want to keep you.’

‘You’re not,’ said Mrs Carson. ‘We bought a two-hour car park ticket. Mr Carson only had a pound coin.’

It was clear they had no intention of leaving before they’d used it up so Gally, marginalized at the end of the bed throughout a conversation of stilted awkwardness, didn’t stay long
despite the desperation in Ferney’s eyes. In fact she was quite glad to have that excuse because she knew that, left alone, he would only have asked her the central question again and she had
as yet no answer.

She spent the following week at the cottage, rooted as much in the present as was possible, making sure the radio was on during every waking minute, listening closely to every word spoken on
Radio 4, even the repeats, as she moved along in the plasterer’s wake, painting each room before it was really dry enough, glad that the hot weather was continuing.

All the time she was aware of the disturbing new tool at her disposal, the tool which should allow her to uncover whatever she wanted to know about her long partnership with the house, but she
had all the anxiety of a new skipper taking a yacht out for the first time into a sea which felt full of shoals just below the surface, waiting to tear off her keel and capsize her. Once again
something inside her objected that Ferney had been unfair to introduce her so roughly to this unexpected world, leaving her standing in front of a crumbling dam of memory, fearing that a wrong move
could cause a collapse that would sweep her completely away. As long as she was vigilant it
was
possible to avoid stirring up the memories, and most of the time she was happy to resist the
temptation. There were no more nightmares, though when, in safe daylight, she tested herself with the burning car, the same old cold tendril of accusation clutched at her.

The following week, as signs of autumn started to stiffen the leaves, the hospital rang to say they would be performing an exploratory operation now that Ferney was well enough to stand it. On
the Friday afternoon, when the clock told her the operation was under way, she sat in an armchair on the bare boards of the upstairs room that would soon be their bedroom. It was painted a soft
yellow and she knew it had long been a favourite place, but she did not wish, for the moment, to dwell on that in case it transported her to unexpected times. As she sat there she felt an
unfamiliar physical sensation, a convulsion inside her of tiny, intricate power – a deliberate tickle from the wrong side of her skin. Until logic came to her rescue she was startled, then
she recognized the movement as her baby’s first kick and delight calmed her. Putting both hands on her swelling stomach, she waited, wanting to feel another kick with a strong sense that
suddenly this was somebody inside her, but in the next breath that thought brought apprehension. Ferney was on the operating table. Did life’s waxing here mean it was waning there?

The hospital were bland on the phone. They were running a bit behind with the operation schedule. Yes, Mr Miller was perfectly all right. He was being prepared for surgery. Had anyone checked
him recently? Yes of course they had. There was an unspoken ‘for heaven’s sake’ in the nurse’s reply.

Gally couldn’t stay in the house after that and the place she most and least wanted to be was the hilltop. Present fear defeated past peace. The hilltop carried Ferney’s question
with it and sufficient unto tomorrow was the evil thereof. Mike wasn’t due home until after seven o’clock. Instead, she walked north-east, past the sloping field called Kingsbury Bars,
then where the road swung round left she went straight on into the almost hidden mouth of the narrow muddy path, Long Lane, which had been left alone when the age of cars selected a handful of the
tracks for tarmac promotion. The lane teemed with old experience, but to suppress its ghosts she thought resolutely of modern plans, of moving into the house. Mike saw no reason to wait, though the
builders had another three or four weeks’ work downstairs, but she didn’t want to share the house with anybody else, preferring to stay in the caravan until the night when it was really
all theirs. For an appalling moment the thought crept in that she didn’t even want to share it with Mike, but she pounced on that one, declared it alien, dismissed it as a bad joke from some
dark recess and refused to think about it any further. Past Kite’s Nest Farm, she reached the field path north to Pen Mill and turned on to it. The land fell to the wooded bottom where the
Egbert Stone stood in the swampy spread of the river and teased her with changes and dislocations in its fence-lines and borders that niggled at her without making themselves quite plain.