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.’
Left to himself, he kept vigil for the men in the plane as the wood and fabric slowly burnt away to leave the metal frame and nothing else that was recognisable. He thought about the waste of life, he thought about the hard and hopeless wars he had known, and most of all he thought suddenly and unexpectedly about his sons, his once and only sons. Like an image bouncing to infinity in two mirrors, the modern boy remembered the wartime man remembering poignant lines from long ago. Old men who stay behind, do not inflame the young with words of war. The ruin that you risk should be your own, not theirs. The words brought the taste of tears.
He came back to the present, shocked by the remembered deaths and by the scale of his second-hand grief. Sitting down, he leant back against a tree and stared at the tower, trying to pull more of that out into clear sight. Sons? When? They had sons? He sat stock-still and stopped thinking completely, hoping it would all come back, and in that state the tower itself disappeared and the trees grew back, thick, all over the avenue cleared to make the vista, and he lost himself in the dense woodland for two, three, four hours without any awareness of the time passing.
He came back to himself with a jerk as if someone had shaken him by the shoulder. The tower stood before him, a hundred yards away across the open ground. He could see the entrance, could see a family milling noisily around it, apparently arguing. An overpowering sense came to him that he had just missed something, that he had come back to the present a moment too late. It pulled him towards the tower, filled him with the image of climbing up it so that he could feel his legs taking him up the long spiral stairs. He got up stiffly and, leaning on his bicycle, began to push it across the short grass, the front brake rubbing with a twig trapped between brake block and rim. He bent down to pull the twig free, then straightened as a shiver like a waterfall ran right through his soul.
This time it was no random wartime ghost. Something delightful was boiling up inside him, filling him to bursting. He knew it was Gally. He knew she was right here, close by, so he laid the bike down and once again he turned right round to find where this feeling was coming from. He felt it everywhere and nowhere that he could precisely locate. Then he looked up.
The top of the tower hung over him, bending back from the passing clouds. A head appeared, craning over the battlements right up there, then two others close together, too distant and too dark against the bright sky to discern separately. As he saw them the electric joy compressed in him burst out and met its pair, connecting and clutching and pulling them together, and he heard a girl scream.