Ferney (5 page)

Gally glanced at him and perhaps read something of his doubt. ‘Am I rushing you?’ she asked gently.

‘No more than usual.’

‘You’ll see I’m right,’ she said. ‘It’s going to be just perfect.’

‘I don’t know what we’re getting into,’ he replied slowly. ‘Maybe we won’t like the people. We haven’t really looked at the village at all.’

‘We can soon fix that,’ she said briskly. ‘That’s just a treat to come. I’m sure you’ll like it.’ Then she looked at him more gently. ‘I wish you
could feel it like I do. It’s like home already.’

‘I’m sure I will,’ he said, not totally truthfully.

The processes of conveyancing had brought with them, unasked and surprisingly unexpected, a name for their new house – Bagstone Farm. Mike had only thought of it in the abstract and the
name had disconcerted him, with all its implications that the house carried with it a history, a known niche within a working community that its camouflaged dereliction had allowed him to ignore.
Easier to think of it as just ‘the cottage’, a hidden, forgotten place in which they could start again, a clean slate. Gally didn’t see it that way. She’d felt the name was
the final perfect touch, repeating it over and over again as she shuffled through all the photographs they’d taken, drawing pictures, planning the slow healing of the injured building.

They were at the village by ten-thirty and, following an instinct that all Mike needed to put him right was something with a touch of age about it, she persuaded him to drive straight to the
church, certain it would work some magic on him. It was small and stout, just a nave, a chancel and a low, square tower.

They walked up the path to the porch, Mike slightly ahead as Gally lingered over the gravestones.

‘Look at the carving,’ he said as she joined him outside the door.

‘The lamb and the lions,’ she said without thinking as she looked up.

He laughed. ‘Not from where I’m standing. Why do you say that?’

She blinked and the stone panel swam into her view like an intruder, a Virgin and two kneeling figures. Abrupt dislocation assaulted her. Mike went into the porch.

‘Here’s your lamb,’ he said. ‘What a doorway! Look at these.’

The columns at each side of the door had Norman zigzags flanking them. Capping the top corners of the door were two fine stone heads, a king and a queen, staring inwards towards each other.

‘Til Christmas falls on Candlemas, the King shall never kiss his lass.’ The words came into her head from nowhere in particular and she couldn’t place them. She said them out
loud, a hook for Mike to bite on, hoping he would know and explain but he just looked at her.

‘You’ve been reading up about this place, haven’t you?’ he said. ‘I wish you’d told me.’

There was a tiny note of peevishness in his voice. He’d never accused her of secrecy before.

‘No,’ she said, stung by it but confused by that same dislocating sense of déjà vu that was somehow a little out of register. Then it crossed her mind for the first
time that she
had
perhaps come here before, as a child, on one of her parents’ trips south from the home they’d once had in Bath.

She paused and played a deliberate game with herself as she followed Mike into the church, setting an image of the interior in her head before they opened the door, just to see if there was a
reliable memory lurking from her childhood subconscious, but it was disappointing. The dark oak pews in her mind’s eye were lower, paler and more intricately carved in real life. The walls
were plastered where they should have been whitewashed stone. She’d expected a gallery to her left and there was none. The whole interior of the nave seemed too high, too wide. She sighed,
then took Mike’s hand to lead him over to admire the Norman font, a square fluted bowl on a round pedestal, knowing he’d like it, seeking to repair the tiny gap between them.

Ferney saw them go inside the church as he came through the churchyard gate. His right hip and ankle were both giving him some pain that morning, a last legacy of his encounter with the truck.
Down the lane beyond the gate he saw Barbara Nicholls walking back to her house, artificial hip joints swinging away. He shook his head at the thought, looked round at the graveyard in front of him
and a bizarre picture came into his head of the inhabitants of future graves, lying there, all those lengths of grim bone screwed together with plastic joints. The Day of Judgement wouldn’t
be quite so dreadful if the skeletons came crawling up through the mouldering earth to the squeak of pivoting nylon.

The idea of Judgement Day had always made him laugh, to the fury of endless teachers and parsons. Religion in that form held no sway over Ferney, hadn’t for goodness knows how long. His
purpose today had nothing to do with God. He was after information and the churchyard was one of his records, though parsons would keep thinning out the gravestones as if their brief authority gave
them rights to abolish the dead’s enduring reminder. He walked carefully across the grass, found the stone he was after, knelt painfully to it and began to rub at the lichen in the
indentations to make the date he sought stand out more clearly.

It was in that position a few minutes later, lost in far-off thought, that he was brought back to himself by a man’s voice. Him, the husband, out of the church now, standing by the tree,
giving his opinions at the top of his voice to her, to Gally. Ferney levered himself up on the old gravestone, feeling it wobble under his hand like a loose tooth. Another one that would soon be
uprooted to add to the parson’s new wall, he thought, another link gone.

‘Well, that too,’ the man was saying, looking up into the branches of the great tree, ‘but yews were always holy trees. Early Christians worshipped under them. They were
thought to give immortality. People used to think the yews drew off the harmful vapours that came out of graves.’

Ferney snorted to himself, louder than he meant, and the man turned, startled.

‘What’s all that, then?’ Ferney said, ‘What you were saying.’

‘Oh, hello,’ the man said stiffly. ‘I didn’t see you. I was just telling Gally why yew trees were usually grown in churchyards.’

‘I heard,’ said Ferney. ‘But it’s not right, though, what you said, not the main reason anyway.’

The man let a smile slip out before he could catch it. ‘Oh no?’ he said in a tone that irritated Ferney. ‘Why not?’

‘They had to grow yews,’ Ferney said. ‘Needed the wood to make bows. But yew berries, see, they’re poisonous. Couldn’t grow them just anywhere or the cows would
die. Churchyard was the safest place. No cows in a churchyard.’

‘I’ve never heard that one before,’ said the man.

‘You’ve heard it now,’ said Ferney, turning his head abruptly to Gally and fixing his eyes on her without saying anything, his face softening.

‘We’re moving in today,’ she said. ‘Come round and see us.’

He nodded. ‘I’ve got something for you. House-warming.’

The caravan was an hour late, hauled by a tractor that sent most of its diesel fuel straight up to spatter the sky with a part-burnt black cloud. The van’s best travelling days were
clearly over. Fifteen miles an hour and a mile at a time were now the limits of its aged ambitions. The roof moved more than the chassis as it heaved slowly over the bumps, swaying with a freedom
that spoke of dereliction and leaky joints, but Gally thrilled to the sight of it, the guarantee that this night would really be their first within the boundaries of the space that was now theirs.
The farmer took Mike’s money with the air of one who’d lost an eyesore and gained an unexpected bonus and looked around with an expression that spoke volumes about the unfathomable ways
of town folk in the country.

‘You’ll have your work cut out here, then,’ he said.

‘We don’t mind,’ said Gally.

‘I’ve got diggers and all that if you need them,’ he said, thinking of the wad of Mike’s notes in his pocket.

‘We might well,’ said Mike. ‘There’s some drainage to sort out.’

‘You know where to find me. I can send someone down,’ he said, and soon the tractor’s hubbub was fading down the lane.

They weren’t left alone for long. Gally was pulling the musty cushions out of the caravan to air them in the sun when a white pick-up bounced in through the gate and rocked to a halt.

‘Mr and Mrs Martin? Don Cotton. You phoned me, right?’

The builder. Standing there, summing up the evidence to feed into the quote. Mike could see him trying to put it together, glancing casually as though the game wasn’t obvious at the
car’s number-plate – four years old, therefore an uncertain indicator, the caravan – no help there, their clothes – ditto, they were dressed for hard labour. Mike opened his
mouth to speak in a deliberately roughened and slurred accent. It wouldn’t have fooled the builder for a second, but in any case Gally’s educated vowels cut the air before him and he
swore to himself.

‘Great,’ she said. ‘I’m so glad you’re here. When can you start?’

He was a short man who addressed everything sideways, his body never facing the way he spoke. He had a big jaw and a flattened nose, the face of a man who would fight over imagined insults in
his cups.

‘In a hurry, are you?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Gally.

‘No, not really,’ said Mike.

The builder looked first at the cracked and broken gable end of the house, making expensive sucking noises and shaking his head a lot, ignoring their questions. He picked an unnecessary amount
of loose stone and mortar out of the biggest crack, then turned and went inside.

‘You’ve got your own private river,’ he said when he’d looked below the floorboards.

‘What’s the best thing to do?’ said Mike.

‘Put a pump in. Get it dried out and we’ll see what we’ve got.’

‘Need more’n a pump,’ said a voice from the doorway. They looked up and Ferney, a brown felt hat in his hand, was standing there, stooped forward and bent to one side against
the door frame. His white hair was neatly brushed and there was a primrose in the buttonhole of his old tweed jacket.

‘Well, you do keep popping up,’ said Mike, a shade sourly, thinking Ferney should have knocked until he remembered there was no knocker.

‘Where else would I be?’ said Ferney with a note of surprise.

‘Now you’re here, can we help you?’

‘I can maybe help you,’ said Ferney, ‘if you want. I came with a present.’

Gally walked over to him. ‘That’s lovely,’ she said. ‘Come and sit outside with me. It was nice of you to take the trouble.’

Mike stayed with the builder for a little longer as the man went on scratching and fiddling his way through the decay, noting large figures in his book which could have been lengths but were
probably money, then curiosity got the better of him and he went to join them outside. As he walked into the dark hall, they were framed by the doorway, outside in the sun, warm and bright
together. He paused in the doorway as he realized they were unaware of him there. He felt individual, separate. Gally had sat Ferney on a folding chair on the grass beyond the door and he was
handing her a brown paper bag.

The object she drew from it was obscure, a mottled ring of horn perhaps or some sort of soapstone. Mike couldn’t tell. It seemed to have holes around its circumference and areas of
latticework. Ferney watched Gally closely from his position next to her. Mike watched them both from inside, excluded and puzzled. Gally held it in her hands and looked at it, very still, then
turned it slowly. She lifted her eyes and she and Ferney stared at each other. Then she rose slowly to her feet, walked a few steps to the rough grass inside the hedge and began to pick flowers,
threading them one at a time into the holes in the ring.

Ferney clasped his hands together then reached each arm right round and hugged himself as if holding something in. Gally picked faster and faster, laughing out loud, then twirled round and
lifting the ring, a garland now, sat it on her head where it nestled, perfectly accenting her hair like a flower fairy in a children’s book.

‘There,’ she said, ‘is that right?’

Ferney nodded silently. Mike felt an oddly bitter pang of annoyance. Gally was always buying hats and hair bands and scarves to wind through her hair but she’d wear them once and put them
aside in disappointment. He’d bought many of them himself and always somehow missed satisfying whatever itch drove her after them. Now someone else was basking in the reaction he had never
had. He stepped into the sunlight which seemed suddenly less radiantly yellow now that it was no longer rationed by the dark doorway and looked closely at the flowers for the first time.

‘Gally!’ he said. ‘They’re cowslips, for God’s sake. You’re not meant to pick cowslips. They’re threatened. You must have known that, surely?’

She stared at him, affronted, as if she didn’t recognize him, and put a hand slowly to her head. He wished he could open his mouth and draw the words and their sting back in from the
echoing air, then she looked at Ferney and Mike saw her eyes widen. With two quick steps, she crossed the space to where Ferney sat and Mike went forward too, struck by the alarm on her face.

Tears were rolling down Ferney’s cheeks.

‘You knew, you knew,’ he said in an old, cracked voice full of acutely painful joy, then before they could do anything he was up and away through the gate as if it was all too much
to bear.

‘You didn’t have to do that,’ Gally cried, turning to Mike in pain, and neither of them recognized her voice.

The village of Penselwood defies all attempts to know it quickly. It sprawls on spidery lanes across the southern end of a steep ridge that runs north for three or four miles.
To the south and west the land is much lower. To the east the chalk starts in waves and folds that lead, in three hours’ walking, to the edge of Salisbury Plain. Anyone relying on a map would
look for the village centre at the church, from where six lanes radiate, but they would be disappointed by the open vacancy of that place. Much of the village lies along the lanes that run south
and east from the church, but the houses are spread out so that they rarely form anything like a quorum.