Ferney by James Long Read Free Book Online Page B

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.

CHAPTER THREE
    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