The Lives She Left Behind (20 page)

‘Yes. Oh, I’m sorry.’

‘Come off it. There are daughters everywhere. I teach people’s daughters every day – or at least I did. I’m quite used to the idea of daughters.’

‘So, are you going to tell me?’

‘Tell you what?’

‘What this thing is you’ve been keeping to yourself, which I guess is the same thing Luke says you can tell me.’

There was a silence lasting a mile or two.

‘Well?’ she said in the end. “Now I know it exists, you really must tell me what it is.’

‘I don’t know how I can,’ he said. ‘It will make no sense to you and it will take more time than we’ve got.’

‘Just try. It’s obviously central to all this, so I’m not going to be much good to you otherwise.’

‘Couldn’t your husband take Lulie to school?’

‘That’s a very bad attempt to change the subject, and of course he could if I rang him, but as he now lives in Vancouver, I suspect he might not get here in time.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I don’t know what for. Now stop testing my patience and tell me.’

‘Even if that was a good idea, you wouldn’t believe me.’

‘Try me. You haven’t got much choice. I know there’s something to tell and I’m a good lawyer. I don’t let go.’

She turned off into the lane to Pen Selwood and stopped the car.

‘If you don’t mind walking home from here, we’ve got five minutes. I’m going to sit here and if you make Lulie late for school, then on your own conscience be
it.’

There was a tantalising sense of liberation in telling her what could not be told.

‘This is strictly between you and me, right?’

‘I’m your lawyer. That does mean I keep your secrets.’ She looked at the clock again. ‘Lulie’s waiting.’

‘Okay. I’ll do my best.’ He glanced out of the car window and took a deep breath. ‘When we first came here, Gally and I, we met an old man at the cottage. We got to know
him well. He was called Ferney. He died on the day Rosie was born.’

‘Yes?’

‘It wasn’t always easy with Ferney. Not for me. He got on very well with Gally. He persuaded her to believe something quite odd.’

He knew suddenly that he didn’t want to go on, that he shouldn’t have even started, but she looked at him and tapped her watch. ‘Which was?’

‘Which was that they had known each other for an extremely long time.’

‘What do you mean? They’d met somewhere else?’

‘No, here in Pen Selwood.’

‘How come?’

‘That’s the thing. He told her they had known each other many times over.’

‘I don’t know what that means.’

‘Through many lifetimes.’

‘Oh, what? And she believed that?’

‘In the end.’

‘That’s crazy stuff.’ She shook her head, ‘That affected her? It must have been very hard for you. How could she fall for that?’

He looked at her as calmly as he could. ‘I came to believe it too.’

‘My God. Really? Well, I suppose you can get caught up in all that sort of thing if you—’

‘No. He proved it to both of us.’

‘Proved it?’ Her voice changed as if she had stepped back from him. ‘Anyway, what’s this got to do with Luke?’

‘Well, that’s the whole point. You’re not really going along with any of this, are you?’

‘That’s just my standard listening face. Try at least to tell me what the whole point is before I have to go.’

‘Luke says his name isn’t really Luke.’ She looked at him and he could see the implication dawning on her. ‘He says he’s Ferney.’

‘Oh, come on. You’re not saying you believe him?’

‘He had no way of knowing about the old man, Rachel. He’s told me a great deal of stuff about last time round that he could not possibly know. Yes, I believe him.’

She stayed silent, staring at him, and in the end he had to fill the silence. ‘I know it’s true. I don’t have any choice.’

‘Out,’ she said. ‘Jump out now, please, or Lulie will never forgive me.’

He had intended to tell her the rest but the tone of her voice stopped him. He opened the door and hesitated. ‘You think I’m mad.’

‘All I can think about right now is how I’m meant to keep my mind on the road while I drive to Wincanton. I’ll get back to you on the madness. Go home. Get some
sleep.’

Ferney woke soon after dawn, curled on the sofa where he had gone back to sleep after the police took Mike away. He lay quite still, in sole possession of Bagstone as was his
right. The wind was rustling the trees and he knew from the precise sound of the creak in the upstairs window that it was coming from a little south of west. He listened, delighted, until it
dropped to no more than a breeze, ticking off all the tiny sounds that the old house, relaxing, twisted out of silence.

He was waiting for her, he and their house together.

He looked around this room that Gally had made. There was a silver-framed photograph and he picked it up and gazed at her – the Gally who had arrived with this unexpected attachment, the
Gally who had married this teacher, this temporary man, the two of them smiling together at their incomprehensible wedding.

Could it still be a problem?

He went into a dream, imagining that the police might keep the teacher, might lock him up so there would be nobody to fight for possession of the house, of Gally even, but then he came back to
the pressing question: what if she didn’t come? He knew he needed to sniff her out, track her down, bring her home in case she wandered uncertainly by.

He made for the door but was stopped abruptly by unfamiliar guilt. Michael Martin had been kind to him, Michael Martin had been arrested because of him – surely he was no real rival? The
telephone was on the kitchen table. He could call the police, tell them it was all untrue. Would that help? They might not believe him. There was a card right by the phone and he saw the word on
it, ‘solicitor’, and he dialled the number. It felt the least he could do.

With the sun still low in the east, he climbed the slope to Pen Point and the old stone bench. At the stubby trig point next to it he turned right round twice, sniffing the high, clear air, and
vaulted up on to the top of the concrete pillar, balancing on the narrow bronze plate where the surveyors set their instruments. He looked all around him again, searching the landscape for three
girls walking, fearing they might be just beyond his vision, missing their target, walking past, dwindling.

He tried to send out a fierce signal, a homing beam, but could not find the power. Inching his eyes round the horizon, open and expectant, he swung back to the north as if his head were on the
end of some compass needle of instinct. The north commanded all his attention. A tiny frisson, like a stream of bubbles in a pond, rose from his stomach into his chest and he concentrated his gaze
that way towards King Alfred’s Tower and slipping left to the plain beyond, past Witham Friary, Nunney and Mells, across all the fields to the high ground in the far, far distance. There was
nothing clear, nothing but the prickling inside him, dying away as he drowned it in too much attention. North worried him. They should be coming from the south-west. North meant they might be
passing by.

He balanced on the concrete pedestal and had a sense of a recent time when he’d tried to climb up here and failed, of knees that had stiffened too much. He frowned, unable to pull that one
out into daylight. The brief sense of age gave him a fresh awareness of the vigour of this young body of his. Jumping down to the grass, he bounced up on spring heels then thrust his arms to heaven
and leaned back as far as he could to exult in his flexibility. He saw a small aircraft droning over his head in a clear blue sky, a single-engined light plane with a high wing – a Cessna he
thought, but as he looked at it the plane dropped sharply towards him, flying much lower, much faster. Its wings shivered, spread out into an ellipse, and the tone of the engine deepened into the
howling growl of a Rolls-Royce Merlin. The Spitfire rocketed over his head just below the overcast which filled this older sky. He had a brief glimpse of 118 Squadron markings and bent to do his
duty, reaching down to crank the handle of the field telephone, a handle that disappeared back into the past again the moment his hand touched the Bakelite knob.

He looked up again into a disconcertingly blue sky in which the little Cessna had droned another quarter mile eastward. A voice in his head told him calmly, This happens. Expect this more and
more. Get used to it. Use it.

Royal Observer Corps. The words came into his head with a brief scrape of a serge uniform against his wrists. RAF but not RAF. Unfit for active service. A bit too old and still a little lame in
one leg from – from what? A memory of pain came back to him, a flash of a tractor tipping down a hill.

He turned to the north again, drawn back there, wide open to that war, and was shocked by a hard vision. It came and went in a microsecond – flame in fog, ripped metal and death, an air
machine meeting the violent ground. He sat down, winded, with his back against the concrete pedestal. The present world and the swelling buzz of traffic from below wallpapered over the past and in
this present world, the dull awareness came to him that he could not go back to the vile bungalow, that he had nowhere to live now that didn’t spell trouble, nowhere but Bagstone. He
remembered the phone call he had just made and the words he had said to the lawyer out of pity for the teacher – the words he should not have said. He had opened the way for Mike to tell the
lawyer and he knew you shouldn’t tell. You never tell people. He punched his right fist into the palm of his other hand. The schoolteacher was old enough to get himself out of his own mess.
He answered himself back that the schoolteacher had helped him, had acted like his friend – that he owed him something.

I’m still too young, he thought miserably and that brought the same comforting phrase straight back to him, ‘We’re never quite old and we’re never quite young.’
Turning it in his head, he found it deeply familiar, a perfect fit with this hilltop where they had found each other so many times.

He looked to the south again, then the west and all around, searching. This time he found nothing but he knew for certain that there was someone there to find. Gally was getting nearer, he was
sure of that, and they couldn’t both be groping in the dark. One of them had to know the way.

At the bottom of the hill he gave in to a sudden whim and rode his bike to Zeals, to the fields where the wartime aerodrome had once filled up the wide land. The control tower had softened into
a house, the busy runways had gone, but the old perimeter track still wound through growing crops. Ferney sat on that track astride his bicycle, opening his mind, searching for the flames in the
mist. All that came was a pale echo of hangars and classrooms, of aircraft models and silhouettes. Training.

He went back to the village because he felt that tug again, plucking him northward, definitely northward. Before, it had all the uncertainty of a fish nibbling at the bait. This time it was a
trout striking, a hard pull. It was as clear as someone ringing a bell, as thrilling as a trumpet call. Knowing with growing delight that the time had come, he cycled the old ridge road through the
fortress ramparts which had been there long before the Normans. He left that road where it tilted down to Gasper, bumping on to the path through the trees, hammering down the old track towards the
tower – Alfred’s Tower.

The immediate future excited him, the prospect of who he might find there, but the past just wouldn’t leave him alone and with every step the last war came closer to him whether he liked
it or not – the second great war. He felt a rooted hunger in the pit of his stomach, the chafe of battledress on his thighs and under his arms. This old him was alert, his ear always cocked
for the wrong engines in the sky, the gravelly Daimler-Benz roar of a machine-gunning Messerschmitt or the bomb-laden throb of a Junkers 88.

He came out of the woods, saw the high tower ahead of him in the clearing, and knew exactly where and exactly when he had seen those flames in the mist. 1944, soon after the D-Day invasion.
There were no more fleets of German bombers to speak of, just the odd lone raider, but the Observer Corps still had much to do. The invasion was a month old, an uncertain toehold on the very edge
of France, fiercely resisted, and the aerial armada was streaming south to keep the bridgehead fed. The skies were full of chaos and lost aircraft and on this July day, with low cloud covering the
ridge, they had a message from a poacher that something terrible had happened at the tower.

The whole unit knew the breadth of Ferney’s local knowledge so he was sent straight there with a driver in the Morris Utility. Mist covered the top half of the tower and the part he could
see looked undamaged, but as the truck pulled up they both gasped at the sight of great lumps embedded in the grass. The cupola from the very top had thundered down from the clouded summit, tons of
masonry half-buried in the earth. No sign of a plane.

Ferney smelt burning fuel where fierce firelight flickered below the western slope. Plunging down through the trees, the driver after him, guided by the choking smoke blowing straight up into
his face, he came to the edge of the fields and the funeral pyre spread across the grass around the torn hulk of an aeroplane. Olive drab paint and a white star said it was American. He ran towards
the cabin, hidden under a cock-eyed stub of wing, but whatever his heart told his body to do, his head would not let him go into that furnace and cold logic told him there could not possibly be any
point.

Derek the driver came up to him and pulled his arm. ‘Back a bit,’ he said. ‘You don’t know what’s in there waiting to cook up. Could be bombs on board.’

Ferney nodded at the broken tail lying clear of the flames. ‘It’s a Norseman,’ he said. ‘Ferrying stuff. People, parts. No bombs. If there was ammo, it would have gone up
by now.’

‘Poor sods,’ said Derek. ‘Nothing we can do.’

‘Go back to the truck,’ Ferney told him. ‘Get on the radio. Tell them what’s happening. Tell them to come to the farm then up the track.’ He pointed through the
mist. ‘It’s just off the Hardway.’ He checked himself for using the old, old name. ‘Off the South Brewham road. The Captain will know.’