Ferney by James Long Read Free Book Online Page A

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