Lives She Left Behind

Ferney had watched the three girls enter the village from behind a garden hedge, then from the shelter of the churchyard wall, scurrying, bent low, from one vantage point to the next. Now he had eyes only for the revealed Gally and was astonished that he could ever have thought the blonde girl might have been her.

He could have stepped out and declared himself to her but he knew that moment should be just between the two of them. Nothing and nobody else should get in the way.

He watched her walk into the church porch, heard her voice say ‘Hello’ with a surge of pleasure and knew who she was greeting. He saw her walk out of the porch towards the newer graves, expecting her to look round at all the places where all their bones had been laid in calm acceptance. Instead she seemed to buckle as if someone he could not see had punched her in the stomach and then, as he watched in consternation, she was violently sick on the grass.

It would pass, he told himself. She would surely go on to do what each of them had always done. She would walk in a wide, sampling circle through the village, getting back the measure of it, then she would sense the pull from the high ground at the centre of their territory. She would make excuses to her friends and climb up to the stone bench on the hilltop and he would be there before her. When they left the churchyard, he trailed them to the place where the shop used to be, watched from the field as they sat drinking tea, feeling her in his head, but then they all walked away, the wrong way. He saw her begin to hold herself and to walk in an entirely unfamiliar way. She felt no longer his. He stopped then and saw them dwindle down the lane and was considering racing after her, shouting, making her come back when he heard an old instinct speak reassuringly inside his head. Don’t, it said. Let it come to her by herself. Just trust.

He walked back to the churchyard, stopping where she had doubled over, so close to her latest grave, but graves held no great fear for either of them. He studied the stone again, considered the mystery of Rosie and, to his surprise, began to feel some deep disquiet stirring inside him. Gally must have had a daughter – a daughter with the teacher, this man Martin whose surname was on her stone – and both of them had died, mother and daughter.

Children had never been part of their way of doing things, not since the twins such a very long time ago. He looked at the grave and it moved. The stone faded away and the earth pushed up into a long mound half a pace to the right and he was all the way back there. There was a wooden cross, two pieces of adzed oak pegged together, and she was standing next to him, looking down – Gally with her hand in his, cloaking him in love and sorrow.

‘This is where I put you,’ she said. ‘You and him. You are back and I am back but our two sons are not. At least we have Sebbi here within our care, but Edgar is so far away and I don’t know if I can bear that. What was it like, the place where you buried him? Tell me again. Tell me exactly.’

‘It was by the landing of a bridge over a narrow northland river, whose name I never knew. The river had a muddy bottom with weed growing at the edges and there were small black fishes hanging in the stream when the fighting stopped, flicking their tails. They told me that when there was a cold, dry wind you could see high ground to the north, but I didn’t see it. My eyes were never clear enough.’

They were standing outside the churchyard hedge where she had buried them in the dark of the night, beyond the boundaries of the church. It was twenty years on and the Norman grip was tight, the troubles over. He let the wooden cross fade away and the churchyard grew out to take him back inside it. The marker stone they put there later to replace the rotted wooden cross had itself been frost-flaked to blankness and vanished in a year when neither of them had been old enough to save it. The mound had sunk away but he thought he could still trace its outline, even now.

There was a puzzle here. What had the power to hurt her so much now? Was it the new grave or the old? This modern daughter or their ancient son? Rosie still meant nothing to him that he could clearly identify. All he could find in himself was a slight sense of alarm, too fragile to inspect. Ferney walked away from the graveyard knowing only one thing for sure. He could not leave the village. She had stepped straight into some sort of trouble and he had to be the beacon to bring her back safely. She might be coming back even now.

He left the church and took the field paths to the hilltop, his senses stretching out to see her, smell her, find her. The bench was empty and he lifted himself to sit on the edge of the concrete bollard of the trig point to gain that little extra height. He knew they would need a safe place when she came back. He thought of going to Bagstone, of banging on the door and demanding that Mike let them stay, but he could not take her there with that man occupying their house and so much of recent history unresolved. He set his mind roaming to try to solve the problem and found himself standing on the grass where the trig point would one day be, staring north to where she was walking up the slope towards him. She was there and she was not, fading and shredding, refusing to stick with any one physical shape. The trees were wrong. The willows were modern, out of place, keeping her out – so he felled them with a sweep of his eyes and saw five great elms thud upward in their place. The hedgerow wriggled and thickened and hooves clattered in the lane down below. He was trimming the middle elm, removing a bough which fell to the ground, and then he was standing right by it on the edge of the field, sawing the fallen limb into a pile of logs, smelling the sapwood. The handle of his saw was elm, the same wood as the logs it cut. The iron of the blade was soft but it was the best they had though the teeth needed filing and resetting four times in a working day. He turned, the saw still in his hand, and there she was. A young girl in pale green with a mop of golden hair, walking down the hill on tussocks of grass, a sacking bag slung over her shoulder. She paused, shading her eyes to stare, then dropped the bag, gathered her skirts and ran towards him, a complete stranger who was no stranger at all. He stared back, straining to make out the newest face of this old, old love. She ran straight into his arms and though he had never before held this body, he had always held the girl who looked at him from behind those bright eyes.

They folded to the grass and kissed, filling the gaps of taste and touch and smell with a devouring hunger. They held each other as hard and as close as two people can, feeling each other’s faces, drinking each other in and learning the freshness of their new skins for enough time for the sun to move a handspan before either of them tested their new voices on the other, then Ferney said, ‘How far?’

‘Two months walking,’ she said and he had trouble understanding because the two was a ‘twae’.

‘Scotland,’ she said, and he drew in his breath because Scotland was dangerous. The Pretender had brought his troops down almost to the gates of London in the winter, driven off only when German George pulled England’s army back from France.

‘I’m nae fool,’ she said. ‘It comes back. I’ve kept silent. Ha’ ye got the hoose?’

That brought him back to the world of modern concrete. He eased his cramped legs down from his seat on the bollard, knowing now she would not be here today and needing to sort out a shelter for them. That reminded him of Cucklington and the family that no longer felt anything like his own, so in the early evening he cycled there, found the house empty and, to keep them at bay, wrote a note to say he had left home, that he would contact them soon and his mother should not worry.

He raced back to Pen, remembering an old refuge for times like this. He could see it in his mind – a stone barn in a narrow field out of sight of the farm. Which farm? The farm towards the wood, towards the pits. He cycled up the lane, worried suddenly that the barn might have fallen into ruin, even more worried as he came near that it might now be a house, like others he passed, absurdly domesticated like a pig in a party frock. He climbed the field gate and looked along inside the thick hedgerow and his heart jumped to see it was still there, magnificently unchanged from when he had last used it. When was that? he wondered. Eighty years ago? More? It had stood there in one form or another for half a millennium before that. He pulled one swaying door open enough to slip in, climbed a ladder through the trapdoor to the hayloft and found it still half-full of last year’s hay. Pulling bales together into a bed on the old elm boards, he spread the remains of a horse blanket over it and lay down to think, to cast his memory back like a fly on a line, upstream on time’s river, right through into the deep yellow evening, remembering the girl from Scotland and all the other girls who were all the same girl. He was filled with the saturation of the memory of love and the deep desire for things to be put right again.

In the early morning, as bars of sunrise slipped between loose tiles above, he woke and looked for her and remembered with a soul-scouring pang that a quarter of a thousand years had passed since the Scots Gally, but before the sorrow could take hold he knew that mattered not at all because she was close by once more.

He wondered just how she would be this time. ‘I have to take care,’ that one had said, the Scottish one, in the first flush of talking when she had slipped halfway back to being pure Gally again and the way she spoke had already begun to change. ‘I take fire quickly. Anger clutches me. It is the way this body chose to work.’ Of course he knew that. There was that steady, central core that made them who they were but there were also the different glands, different brains, different fingertips or nerve endings or retinas or eardrums that could change the way their spirit met the world – hurdles they would always learn to leap. The Scottish girl was slender, snub-nosed, wide-eyed. They were not always so lucky in their bodies and that first moment of meeting had taken many forms.

He knew he was lucky this time. That dark hair and the soft brown eyes were all he wanted, but what had met her here? Why had she found horror when their world of Pen should have wrapped its warmth around her? The tombstone was the reason and he did not fully understand and somehow he had to understand to see her through.

Although it was so very early, he saw movement in the farm’s kitchen as he passed so he knocked and asked for a slice of bread and a drink of water as wanderers always used to do, and the woman there looked a little stunned but fetched what he needed. Then he walked rapidly up to the hilltop, feeling a sense of urgency, certain she was coming. As he walked, he sang the song which was haunting him – the song he didn’t really know he knew until he sang it out loud, the song with a hundred variations in it, adjusted by the different habits of speech at each of its rebirths.

She’s a girl on a hill-top who waits in the dawn

To see if he’ll come from the east

From behind the bright hills where the new sun is born

Just when she’s expecting him least

Just when she’s expecting him least.

The boy on the ridge at the end of the day

Is watching the way from the west

From behind the dark hills, light is fading away

And the sun is dying to rest

And the sun is dying to rest.

For they’re never quite young and they’re never quite old

And their song is a secret that’s best left untold

For they’re never quite old and they’re never quite young

And lifetimes have passed since their song was first sung.

He came to the bench on the hilltop and saw it through many different eyes. Most recently it sat heavily, a place for one man sitting as years passed, waiting in loneliness. It should be a place for two, a place of meeting, packed with love.

The morning birds were carving sharp curls of song out of a high and empty sky. He stared north to where the stubby church anchored the village and saw someone there, far off, running between trees then dipping out of sight into the lower ground between them, and then he knew that she was coming to him and all he had to do was wait. The sun was behind him and she came into the field that curved up to where he was with her eyes screwed up and her hand out in front of her face as if to shade them.

He stood stock-still next to the concrete pillar and she halted twenty yards from him, holding up her hand again as if to stop him approaching and give herself time. He understood perfectly. She looked all around her, breathing in the air of this place of theirs. He could see her inhaling the history to fill the vacancies inside her. She closed her eyes and he knew a storm of memory was flooding her head.

She opened them again to see him waiting patiently, still little more than a dark shape against the sun. Filled with happiness, she came forward and the two of them met afresh where they had met so many, many times before. They stood a foot apart and both of them were bubbling with delighted laughter as they searched every surprising detail of each other’s face. There was no surprise when they finally let their eyes meet and see what they had always seen. Those old eyes fed starved souls. New hands searched new skin and new mouths met.

After a long while, she stepped back from him. ‘Let me hear you,’ she said. ‘I want to know your voice.’

‘That’s easily done,’ he replied. ‘This is how I sound. Do you like it?’

She stayed out of sight while Ferney retrieved her backpack from the hedge near Bagstone, then he took her hand and led her through the fields to the stone barn. He made her wait below while he climbed the ladder, taking her backpack with him. She heard him moving up above, tracking him by the groan of the planks and the fine fall of dust through the gaps between them.

‘You can come up now,’ he called and she climbed the wooden ladder to see the hay bed he had made under the rafters with her old sleeping bag, spread out, unzipped, as a covering.

‘Last night,’ he said. ‘I was here last night. I didn’t know for sure that you would be with me here today. I am so glad you are.’

It seemed at first that there was no hurry at all. Nobody else would come to this private space. The tick of time had stopped and left a deep silence. They sat on the edge of the bales and stared at each other with their whole long history in their eyes, and she put her hand up to trace the shape of his face with her fingertips, feeling the tiny shock of a spark just before they touched his skin. Then they were both overtaken by an intense curiosity and began to explore the hidden shape of each other inside their clothes. A cavalcade of Ferneys came to her mind’s eye as they did. Dark and fair, tall and short, handsome and less clearly so, though always pleasing to her. She saw his eyes look at her with the same look that had been in all their eyes.

There was no reticence because they knew each other far, far too well for that. There was no trepidation because they were both seasoned in the art of loving each other. Instead, there was a rising peak of sheer delight that they had once again been given young and perfect instruments on which to play their old and expert music. When there was nothing left to take off and they had discovered every unmapped inch of each other, it seemed that there was a hurry after all, as the years of separation ended.

Afterwards, they lay staring into each other’s eyes as if they resented the time lost even in blinking. He kissed the tip of her nose.

‘When did we last do that?’ she asked and saw his eyes focus far beyond her as he felt back for the answer.

‘Years and years ago,’ he said. ‘Before the war. Seventy years, maybe eighty. You went missing. I never found you. Where did you go?’

‘I don’t know yet. I will soon. I know who I am now and that’s a start,’ she said. ‘I finally know. I was there all the time but I was trapped. I didn’t know why I felt so lonely until today.’ She smiled and nuzzled against his cheek and then without any warning at all, she burst into violent sobs.

‘Listen, my lovely Gally, I know this much,’ he said. ‘It’s not easy being me and you. There’s a lot of waiting and hoping and loneliness in between. We only just get by at times like that. It’s easy to forget that when we’re together.’ He could see that just below the surface she was still on the very edge of a crisis, so he took it head on. ‘What happened to you in the churchyard yesterday, when you first arrived? I was watching.’

‘Don’t rush,’ he said gently, smoothing the tears away from her cheeks with his fingers.

‘I walked in there and I felt so happy,’ she said slowly. ‘I knew I had come home. I took off a coat named Jo and there was me, Gally, underneath all the time. I found that somewhere in my head I had the answer to all kinds of things if I just looked, but something was pulling me and I went to the graves and the next moment I was drowning in sadness.’

‘We did,’ she said. ‘We had a son, didn’t we? It should have been his grave. I knew where I buried him.’

‘It doesn’t do to dwell on all the deaths,’ he said. ‘You have to balance them against all the life. There’s been just as much of that,’ but he could see it wasn’t working. Something stronger had taken root.

She took her arms from round him and rolled away, curling up. ‘I think I might have done something terrible,’ she said in not much above a whisper.

‘Our child died,’ she said. ‘I let someone kill our child,’ and she began to weep.

‘There’s an old story you need to hear,’ he said. ‘Wait.’ He put his hands over his ears and she understood that he was clawing his way back there for her.

He put himself in the churchyard when it was much smaller. One old stone stood upright like a rough-cut finger, but the other graves were only mounds with here and there a simple wooden cross. He sensed a crowd around them but they weren’t there for a burial or a christening or a wedding. They had been summoned for the feudal needs of war.

He opened his eyes, put his hands down and turned to her. She was watching him intently, her eyes red and wet. ‘I think I know what this is,’ he said. ‘I can tell you part of the story but it would be easier if we went back there to do it.’

She shook her head. ‘No. I can’t. I went to the cottage first this morning and someone followed me to the church.’

‘Yes. He said things I don’t understand. What did he mean?’ She began to cry again.

He held her, hushing her with kisses and stroking her head. ‘I won’t let him hurt you,’ he said when she was quiet again.

‘No. No, he won’t hurt me. That’s not it. I think I hurt him. Did I? Do you know what I did?’

‘I should have seen you first,’ Gally said, her arms tight around him. ‘I made the wrong choice. Why does everything have to be so complicated?’

‘The world’s changed,’ he answered slowly. ‘We’ve always been a universe of two, haven’t we?’ But everything is mapped out now. Even our hilltop. You saw what’s up there, didn’t you? Our everlasting, unchanging hilltop, and now there’s that concrete lump on top of it.’ He saw her puzzled look. ‘It wasn’t there last time you and I were properly together. Do you know why they put it there? To measure the whole country, to pin everything down to the nearest inch. The Ordnance Survey. “Ordnance” as in artillery. “Survey” as in maps to tell them where to aim their guns, how to destroy people. Everything’s mapped. People are mapped. We’re used to being left alone, aren’t we? The world doesn’t leave people alone any more. There are systems for everything, systems that ring bells if you’re not normal – and we’re not normal, are we?’

‘So now this man is in the house that should be ours and these days houses are worth a king’s ransom and people don’t let them fall down any more. So many times we’ve just wandered back into the ruins and set it right again. Not this time. He thinks it’s his but it’s our house and it’s our village.’ He sat up and reached for his shirt. ‘First things first. Let’s get you right. Let’s make sure you understand the things that hurt, then they won’t hurt any more. I know where we should go. It’s quiet and safe and nobody will find us if we don’t want them to.’

CHAPTER 19