Ferney (42 page)

It came to her out of the landscape that it would not be possible to go on suppressing any of the events that made her what she was. Doing so gave her the constant feeling that someone else
owned her values, someone else decided her attitudes, some locked-off past person had already made up her mind for her on right and wrong. She stood there quite still, looking round this border
corner of her country, feeling it trying its best to speak to her, knowing she had to learn to listen to it all or else be constantly ambushed by it. To reclaim ownership of herself, she could see
no other way but to learn to navigate through all the stacked-up varieties that preceded
this
Gally, not just the direct and pressing causes of distress but all the rest of it too. My life
is an iceberg, she thought. Far more than two-thirds of it is below the water and in the end I have no choice but to dive down to see what is there and if that is the case, then I suppose I had
better begin now.

For need of a predictable starting-point, which seemed the best of reasons, she went on walking until she arrived at the same spot by the hedge across the shallow valley from the castle mound
where she had waited for Mike and met Ferney and where she already knew she had met the Breton Ferney, newly arrived from his epic Channel crossing. She even knew the words he had said again to her
so recently. She failed to remember the tiny warning that had come unbidden earlier that same day just before Mike saw Ferney at work in the pit. Then, she had looked down at the open grassland
valley below the old Norman castle where the water meadows had once been and where the Frenchmen had . . . Had what? She hadn’t known the end of it then and she forgot the start of it now.
The hermit crab trace of memory had withdrawn into its shell, pushed back by the events of the rest of that day and now she failed to remember that half-formed fear.

Sitting down on the grass by the hedge there seemed to be no hurry at all. She looked out across the combe, dotted with sheep grazing the short grass. A line of bushes marked the course of the
stream that ran along its bottom down to the Stour at its end, and on the far side the roof of the house just below the castle mound showed neat and grey, two small upper windows peering over its
thick hedge under eyebrows of thatch. The trees were clustered around the castle. There was an undeniable excitement in her at the idea that she could conjure up a world in which she would see for
the first time, recognize and immediately love a younger Ferney. She would find out what it had been about the Breton boy that had identified him to her so quickly and what it felt like to be of an
age with him when all life and all love lay ahead in delightful certainty. It felt almost as if she was about to launch on an affair.

Bien sûr, c’est moi
, she said and nothing came. That
was
what he had said.
Bien sûr. Bien sûr. Bien sûr, c’est moi
. The litany felt
thin and pointless. Perhaps I’m thinking about it in the wrong way, she thought. Cumulus clouds drifted to the north-east on the warm autumn wind and she stayed in French in her head,
remembering a line from a poem: ‘
J’aime les nuages, les nuages qui passent. Là-bas, là-bas, les merveilleux nuages
.’

There came an immediate harsh echo: ‘
Là-bas, là-bas
’, and she looked down into a valley where the sheep had gone and the grass was long and though she knew it
was memory she was completely and wholly there in it. The bushes were thicker along the stream and out of them came a running man. The top of the hill across the combe was bare, piled with fallen
tree-trunks. On its very end the rising walls of the keep, already over a man’s height, glistened with fresh-cut facets of stone. Fallen tree-trunks were piled by the saw-pit and the
hammering of the masons had stopped. The only movement up on the hill was the slow heaving of an ox team dragging a litter along its summit with more rough stone lashed to it for the masons to cut.
Everyone up there was looking towards her, down into the valley.

Stone used like this spread terror. Cut stone was only familiar to her as the everlasting material of the worshippers of God, something to be slowly assembled into walls with painstaking care in
a time measured in years not days. What they were heaving into being up ahead of her with forced, brutal speed was something new – military stone – a stone promise that the tyranny of
these Normans was no passing evil. These Frenchmen were not like the invaders they’d known many times. They were no Danish raiding party fading away to the roar of burning roofs and the
sobbing reek of blood: they were putting up their stonewall weapons as a sign that they were here to stay and all others were now subject people.

All this passed through her head as a chemical curl of fear and the man, gasping with effort, toiled up the gentle slope towards her as his pursuers burst from the bushes behind him. It was
Ferney, gaunt and shock-headed, his useless arm dangling at his side while the other swung with his body, urging him on. Three Normans shouting their jabber at each other were racing up behind him
and she could see they would reach him long before he got to her. She stood up out of her concealment, desperate for a way to alter the inevitable slow intersection below.

Ferney saw her. ‘Run,’ he shouted, but then the first Norman reached him, swung a sword across the back of his legs and he went down with a scream. Fear froze her and she despised
this body which let her down so often with its flooding, involuntary, paralysing timidity. She’d been overpoweringly afraid in the morning when they had discussed Ferney’s intention,
sitting outside the house, looking at the Bag Stone as spiders’ webs glistened white across it in the early sun.

‘I must go and see,’ he had said.

‘They might do something to you.’

‘They’ll do something to Edgar otherwise.’

The ox driver had arrived early at the house, stooping under the low doorway and rubbing his eyes in the cooking smoke inside. He’d told them that their son was ill and working slowly and
that the Normans, who had pressed every able-bodied man and boy in the village into their service to haul the stone, would show no pity on him if he could not keep up the pace this morning. Ferney
had sat there mulling it over.

‘It’s clear,’ he’d said in the end. ‘I have to go. I’ll offer myself in his place until he feels well.’

She touched his withered arm. ‘They won’t take you. They’ve already said as much.’

‘Which would they rather have, a sick boy or a crippled man?’

‘You’re not allowed on to the hill. They said so. Only the workers.’

The ridge in Selwood Forest was yet again paying the price for its geography. Five years earlier the news that the Normans had landed had taken several weeks to solidify from rumour into fact in
the south-west, but it soon became very clear that this was not at all like previous invasions. These men believed that as a dominant minority, force should be used right from the start.
Harold’s military system had been broken on the Sussex Downs and there was no organized resistance at first as the Frenchmen moved through the land, but three times in the intervening four
years the west had exploded into revolt. It was never strong enough nor organized enough to stand a chance of success against William’s forces, for its commanders had no way of knowing what
other men the French had in reserve within two or three days’ march. Gally was frightened all that time, so frightened that the strong guiding self within her simply could not contain the
flooding panic of her betraying glands.

So Ferney had gone and she had wanted to say, ‘You are so much more important to me than our son,’ but she knew what he would have replied as if he had spoken the words: ‘This
son is worthy of our best efforts. You and I have much more time together. This is a boy above most boys.’

Now she stood for once, refusing to fly as two of the soldiers held Ferney down and one raised a sword that caught the sun, red and silver, and hacked it down on his back and his neck once,
twice, three times. For the first time in this life anger overtook the fear and she found astonished feet carrying her down the hill towards them as fast as she could run while an unfamiliar voice
screamed hysterical threats at the soldiers. They looked at her approaching. The leader laughed, kicked Ferney’s body, wiped his sword on the grass and led his men back towards the growing
castle. The look on his face said he knew it was crueller to keep her alive than to kill her too.

Gally knelt by Ferney’s head and saw his eyelids flickering. She forced herself to look at his back and from the pumping blood, oozing, bubbling out of the sword’s deep slashes in
his tunic she knew there was no help she could bring to him except final comfort. A sense came to her of all the other widows she had been, lined up to help her through this. She crooned over
Ferney, stroking his forehead, talking to him as she had to her babies, then she saw from the lips that were moving, trickling more blood, that he was trying to speak. She had to lie down next to
him in the soaking red grass to get her ear close enough because she could not hurt him more by trying to move him.

‘Edgar . . . dead,’ he said in a wet whisper. ‘Laugh . . . at me.’ His eyes closed and reopened with a jerk. ‘I hit the man,’ he said in a stronger voice.
‘No good.’ A gush of blood came from his mouth and stopped him speaking, but his eyes were still fluttering. She had her forehead against his so that he would know she was there.
‘Next time,’ she said, ‘next time we’ll not let anyone else concern us,’ but next time seemed a very long way away to her. She sang a song to him, the old song
Alfred’s men had sung around the stone, a song of strength and liberation: ‘We shall meet when the fighting is past, we shall sing when the battle is done, we shall drink when
we’ve broken our fast, we shall sleep when our freedom is won.’

He lay very still, the breath bubbling faintly and his eyelids which were all she could see because she was so close, slowed their movement until the instant when the last tremor of life sagged
out of him in a slow exhalation and then she still lay there, as if she could delay recognition of the fact so long as she did not move. Her reaction to all that fear was deep sandbagging fatigue
and she subsided into a dull trance on the wet, red earth. Unknown time passed and she convulsed into wakefulness to find blood stiffening in crusts on her skin and her tunic and his terrible, cold
body staring at her with set, dead eyes.

It was no comfort at all to think of next time. There was just loneliness to face, loneliness and the uncertainty of when or how they would find each other. She wanted death and knew that she
was too afraid to find it deliberately for herself. She wished the soldiers had killed her too. Then horror took her and she stood up on shaky, numbed legs, gave one last look at him and ran in the
twilight away from the castle.

The path took her south to the buildings around Pen Mill which were too large in the deepening darkness and shone bewildering yellow light into the evening as if on fire within. She found it
harder and harder to go on running and was amazed at her weakness, she who for all her timidity had the body of a hunting dog and could run for miles if she had to. She stumbled into the lane,
slumped down on an earth bank and huge eyes rushed at her out of the darkness.

Mike, sitting miserably in the caravan, could find nothing to make the time pass faster or to calm his agitation. Water was cooling in the kettle next to a cup still containing
an unused teabag which he seemed to lack the concentration or the will to bring together. He would have paced up and down had there been space. It was a bad end to a horrible week. Giving lectures,
he had been flying by remote control. In tutorials he had been too distracted and uninterested to detect and pounce on the evasions, generalizations and misunderstandings of his students and in the
weekly business meeting of department heads he had completely missed the psychological moment to make a firm defence of his next year’s budget. He kept thinking back to Gally’s
rejection of the car he had offered her. It was to have been the biggest present he had ever given her and from the moment he had conceived it he had been expecting delight and pleasure. Her
response felt like a final rejection of everything he had once assumed about their new way of life. A cottage in the country, he had thought then, would bring variety into their life – a
choice of places to be. Mobility had been an essential part of that, based on the idea that they could never be bored if they had the freedom to alternate between the city and the country.

It seemed to him that Gally, egged on no doubt by the old man, had changed the rules by taking to this place so totally that she saw no need for the means to get out of it. A car would have
given her the freedom to surprise him. He had already started to fantasize, returning to their cold, dark flat with a takeaway on a mid-week London evening, that she might have decided magically to
travel up and the place would be full of the life she would bring with her. Turning down the car cut him deeply. She seemed to be narrowing and simplifying herself and her range of interests as she
followed Ferney up some mad garden path. Mike felt helpless, hamstrung by the knowledge that he didn’t understand the fragile processes going on before his eyes and held back from further
confrontation by the dreadful consequences of the last one. Ferney’s illness and his own part in it had put the old man temporarily out of bounds in Mike’s inherited value system.

Gally not being there when he returned twisted the knife further. He always told her when he’d be back, always rang if he was going to be late, relying on her welcome to dump the
week’s baggage from his mind. There was no sign of her in the house or around the land and he’d been to the gate several times to look up and down the lane. It took a full hour for
irritation and unease to turn to straightforward worry and in the next thirty minutes Mike started imagining an enormous range of terrible things that might have happened to his wife. He could see
plainly her blood-soaked body lying in a ditch. He could have no idea that her own picture of herself coincided with his in almost every detail.