Ferney (6 page)

The spirit of the village is on the prow of the ridge. To feel a full sense of it, it is necessary to ignore roads and walk up through the tiny, intricate fields, Clover Ground, Sadlers Mead or
Three Cornered Ground, to the pinnacle in the centre of a triangle of lanes that provides the best viewpoint. Behind and to the south, the flat land is the sea on which the ridge sails. Looking
north, the low church tower marks the start of the woodland that covers the narrowing ridge, while the ground falls in scooped combes to the River Stour in the east. The roofs of houses show up
here and there in little huddles along the lanes, too individual to want any closer association. Even the new houses have followed that rule and failed to shift the diffuse centre of gravity in any
one particular direction. No planner has dared to impose modernity on the village on the ridge.

Ferney had gone too fast and his hip was hurting again as he sat down, heart hammering after the long climb, but none of it mattered, not one bit. The sun came bursting out
from behind a cloud, painting the hill bright green, a mirror of the exultant joy roaring and bubbling up through his chest. Everything had changed, years of loneliness – the longest years he
could ever remember – swept away. There was no longer any question of wishful thinking. Hope had been restored. There was work ahead, it was true, and it might not be easy, but the house was
going to live again and so was he. It wasn’t as if there was any choice. There’d been an agreement made.

He sat on his stone right at the top of the hill, a stone worn smooth by countless bottoms over countless years. He looked out over a familiar landscape, south to Milton and the roofs of
Gillingham with the old fortress loom of high Shaftesbury rising in the far distance, miles beyond. A trace of the steamy mist of late spring rose from the fields, thickest along the course of the
River Stour, winding down to Marnhull. From the main road, half a mile down the slope, invisible below its curve, modern noise intruded in a steady drone of cars, backed by the basso profundo of
the lorries and the occasional ascending tenor of a hard-driven motorcycle.

In 1927 the horse chestnut tree had fallen in a summer gale, the great tree that had stood fifty yards below and to the right. He pictured it, lying there in a sprawl of green summer foliage,
then let the image of its leaves turn brown and watched them fall; 1928, the tree dried out, grey branches still attached; then 1929, after the men with the saws had been, just a trunk. In another
world the main road still threw hot noise, but Ferney had a firm hold now and it couldn’t reach him. He lifted his head from the ghost of the wrecked tree and let his gaze wander across the
landscape, changing, tuning. The pylons in the valley flicked out, the cluster of new houses beyond them melted like butter, the woods writhed, grew ragged and stretched their boundaries, the
fields divided themselves with old, forgotten walls, and a hard, brash metal barn shrivelled back into a thing of sagging tile and stone.

He conjured a girl’s voice into his mind, hearing her singing a scrap of a favourite song, holding it there, using it to bleach out the upstart stains of the present and paint in the true
colours of the past. He slowly turned his head and there she was next to him on the bench, leaning weightless against him, her blonde hair cascading over his neck, both arms round his shoulders.
They were shaken soft by love. Sixty years slipped from him and he heard her voice properly, talking, not singing.

‘We
can
do it,’ she said. ‘We can if we set our minds to it. No more of this hit and miss.’

He’d needed no persuading. ‘It will be so much better,’ he said. ‘There’s never been joy with anyone else. It’s only worth it when you’re
here.’

‘Are we agreed, then?’ She’d lifted her head as her ghost, her memory, now did again, staring at him with a great, wide, joyful smile. ‘Shall we swear to it, swear
we’ll always, always do it whatever?’

‘Yes.’ Then the problem struck him. ‘What if one of us forgets?’

‘Then the other one has some reminding to do, that’s all.’ She’d laughed as though that were the easiest thing in the world, laughed and tousled his hair.

‘And if both of us forget?’

She stopped laughing then. ‘Well, maybe that will just have to be that if both of us forget.’ Then with renewed vigour, ‘But we won’t, we mustn’t. Other folks have
God. We’ve only got us.’

He shook his head, amused at the old argument. ‘You don’t know they’ve got God. You can’t be sure. Could be we’re luckier than them. They just stop,
maybe.’

They’d finished with talking then. He’d held her at arm’s length, loving her, admiring her, drinking in the garland on her head set in the old hoop, feasting on the rich
emotion of six decades earlier, a time when cowslips were plentiful, his dry old soul soaking it up like a parched plant under the watering can. He held the garland in the centre of his attention,
thinking of it today, of Gally now, who if she knew nothing else for sure, knew this, knew it for what it was and wove her garland without a questioning word. He saw it on her head, crowning dark
hair where this forerunner wearer had been fair.

The scene fluttered, shifted. Ignored, the ghost of his companion shredded and blew away in the breeze. Unthinking until it was too late, he had kept the image of the garland on a dark head. The
dark head was still there, a dark, loved head but not the same one. The features were blurred, awaiting his attention as clay waits for the potter to set it into shape, but the landscape behind had
writhed to a new, sharper form.

Did he look at it? That was the way it felt but the eye he used was in his mind, and it was the evidence there that he now inspected. It was the first time he’d given the garland hoop, the
very first time, after he’d dug it from the pits. Just for confirmation he looked hard at the edge of the woodland, the straight, neatly trimmed edge – then swung his gaze around a
landscape assaulted by geometry. From below the round of the hill, old shouts crawled back across four long lifetimes. In his memory he walked, weightless, down to them and saw a red, sweating
zealot in a stained smock, Parson Mowbray, egging on his axemen with crazed shouts as he peered down the line of his sighting sticks, glorying in the crash of timber.

‘Not that one, damn you! Foil me with imperfections, would you? Hurry up down there. This is a race that we are running, Jonah, and unless you swing your axe the trees will beat us.
They’re growing faster than you can cut. That branch there, man, that and the one above it. They’re spoiling my line. This is God’s work, Jonah. The turmoil of nature is an insult
to him. We neglect the great gift he has given us if we let nature sprawl rampant across our inheritance.’

All around, the landscape had taken on the geometric shapes that marked the silly fad of that temporary landscape. Queen Anne was dead and the foul-tempered German George had come from Hanover
with his two mistresses. Every country conversation about him started with ‘He doesn’t even speak English’ and ended with ‘Well at least he’s no Catholic.’ Some
great daftness seized the country and raw nature became a threat to man’s God-given right to dominate. The flailing Church, confusing nature with debauchery, saw threatening sexuality in
every burgeoning hedge and went to work with sharpened steel to hack it back. Straight lines cut the countryside wherever you looked – fields, hedges, orchards, woods, all penned back to
fantastic regularity in pursuit of some ideal of human domination, buttoned up into safe chastity.

Ferney smiled at the memory as he let mad Mowbray fade away, smiling for the time it had all wasted as subversive nature ran its hopeless watchmen ragged. He let the vision drift away, the trees
planted in intersecting rows, the squares, triangles and diamonds of woodland, a giant, hopeless, frightened child’s picture of the way the world should be. In the end he was left as he
wanted to be in the deep loving circle of this girl, whose face he could not quite bring back, a love which, even when diluted by memory, still had the power to shake him. He held on to the
illusion as long as he could as her image sat there fooling him with fragments of comfort, wearing the garland ring with a pleasure shining from her that was not to last.

Unaccustomed exhilaration poured through Gally the second she awoke. For once there was no sour-headed legacy of disturbed sleep. No footprints of dreams disturbed the washed
beach of the new day. The scents and sounds of a fresh spring morning infused the caravan – beaming in, barely diminished by its thin walls and loose windows, to where she lay on old foam and
hardboard, curled against Mike’s back in their zipped-together sleeping bags. She raised her head, but even that small movement sent a shiver through the caravan’s flimsy joints.
Hearing the change in Mike’s breathing, she froze, unsure for a moment whether she was ready to share the pure experience of the first morning. He grunted, questioningly. She kissed the back
of his neck.

‘Morning, Micky. Stay there. I’ll make the coffee.’

A tee-shirt and shorts were enough and her bare feet met fresh dew as she stepped down from the cold ridged edge of the caravan doorway. The house faced her, low and blurred by its green wrap of
vegetation. Hers. Theirs. The edge of the sun was just crawling up over its roof and a magpie burst out of a dark top window with a clatter. One for sorrow, she thought, not believing it, but its
mate followed. Two for joy. There was certainly joy to be found here. Now she did believe.

She stood there, gazing at it while the sun climbed fully into view. Keeping the greenness, that was what mattered. She wouldn’t let it be raped, cleared away by builders who would only
think of coercing the old walls into a dispirited forgery of a brand-new house. It had to be done, but it had to be done with care and love. She wanted it to stay just as it was now with only the
grosser abuses of age set right. Almost just as it was, anyway. As she looked, straining to picture the perfect outcome, one detail kept imposing itself, something that was skewing it off-centre,
not quite right.

Mike was shifting around as she boiled the kettle, but he didn’t fully awake until she sat down carefully on the end of the bed and tried to find a place for his coffee mug among the
ill-fitting foam cushions that filled the end of the caravan.

For a moment he thought of complaining at the early hour and the inadequacy of the mattress, but the joy radiating out of her snuffed out the negatives before they had a chance to form. There
was a languorous ease in his limbs despite the bed, which brought home the fact that the night had been unbroken by the customary cycle of startled fright and calming words.

‘You slept through,’ he said.

She nodded, smiling. ‘Oh Mike,’ she said, ‘it’s so wonderful. Come on. I want to show you. Let’s walk round the village before anyone else is up. We’ll have
breakfast when we come back. Everything’s perfect. It’s just what I’ve always wanted. We mustn’t let the builders cut the creepers down. Oh, and the front door’s all
wrong.’

He put his hands over his ears and dived completely inside the sleeping bag. She smiled happily, threw his clothes at the lump where his head was and went back outside.

There were two ways to the village from the junction at the top of their lane. They took the long way round, up to the right, the narrow road climbing between trees which opened out to small
fields. Mike, infected by Gally’s delight, felt the stirrings of his professional interest as they walked on and on past scattered knots of houses and came eventually to the church again.

‘It’s really extraordinary,’ he said. ‘There’s no centre to the village at all. We must have come at least a mile and there’s still more of it. All these
footpaths and little lanes and look at the field boundaries too. It’s still completely medieval.’

‘I love it,’ she said, leaning on the churchyard wall. ‘Can’t you just feel it all? There’s so little modern clutter to get in the way.’

Mike looked at her, scraping the toe of his shoe in the road uncertainly. ‘The old man,’ he said suddenly. ‘Yesterday. What on earth was all that about?’

At that moment she didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to speculate on something that had left her wondering herself.

‘It was just a present. I thought it was sweet of him.’

‘You don’t usually like wearing . . .’ the word escaped him. Hats? Headbands? ‘. . . that sort of thing.’

‘Oh nonsense, I’m always buying them.’

Buying them, not wearing them, he wanted to say, but was reluctant to spoil the mood.

‘When you put the flowers in it, he was crying.’

She was silent, frowning a little, looking past him into the middle of nowhere.

‘I don’t know exactly why. I think he was just happy.’

‘Well I think he’s a bit round the twist. I’m not sure we should encourage him.’

For an illogical second, a passionate denial flared up inside Gally. The garland ring had touched her. She almost felt it had brought her the good luck of a good night’s sleep and a
perfect awakening.

‘Mike,’ she said, keeping her tone to mild reproach. ‘There’s no harm in him. Maybe I reminded him of someone. Don’t be horrid about him.’ She looked around,
feeling a need to deflect the conversation. On the corner by the church was a wooden post topped by the village name in wooden letters, framed like an inn sign.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘The sign spells it as two words, Pen Selwood.’

‘I noticed that when we drove in. The signs when we came into the village are the same,’ said Mike, ‘but it’s joined up into one word on all our maps,
Penselwood.’

The church clock struck seven. From round the corner came an old woman, as wide as she was high. Although the morning promised nothing but sunshine, she wore a pink plastic hood knotted under
her chin. White curls spilled out around it, framing a face so startlingly flat that it looked like a plate. Her cheeks seemed to stick out further than her tiny nose and the mouth below, though
outlined by generous lips, made little use of the acres of space available to it. Even from fifty feet she was twinkling at them and the twinkling grew with each step nearer. They stopped talking,
frozen by the appearance of this force of nature.