The Lives She Left Behind (17 page)

‘So would other teachers confirm that you didn’t know him well before that?’

‘It’s a big school,’ said Mike vaguely. ‘I don’t suppose they’d know one way or the other.’

‘His parents allege that they witnessed Luke in a highly emotional state in your car.’

‘That’s true.’

‘And they also say they found him here in this house yesterday.’

‘Yes, he was here.’

Now Mike was facing this keen-eyed woman across the kitchen table, he knew it could not really be explained, not to someone who lived in the realm of logic. The kettle had boiled so, taking a
moment to gather himself, he got up to make the tea. Rachel watched him as he filled one mug, put the kettle back down, and only then seemed to remember there were two of them.

‘So can you tell me more about that?’

‘He was shocked the first time. He’d fallen down a bank at the dig. I was taking him home.’

‘Right,’ she said doubtfully. ‘So why did he come back here?’

‘I don’t know. He’s an unusual boy. He does what he wants.’

‘But his parents were worried enough by him disappearing to find out where you lived and come here to find him?’

‘His mother and her current partner.’

‘Whatever. Why do you suppose they did that?’

‘They jumped to the wrong conclusions. He turned up out of the blue. I couldn’t stop him.’

‘But you let him in the house. Didn’t you think that was unwise, having him here? You being a single man?’

‘I’m not a . . . I don’t think of myself like that. Anyway, it wasn’t really my choice. Like I said, he just showed up.’

‘Why?’

‘You’ll have to ask him.’

‘I may not get the chance.’ She had been waiting for the moment and though this wasn’t quite it, there might not be a better one, ‘Listen . . . I’m sorry, but I do
have to put this to you as a formal question. Has there been any sexual impropriety between the two of you?’

His eyes changed as he closed down on her. He looked as if he had trusted her and been proved wrong.

‘I do have to ask,’ she said again. ‘I’m not accusing you.’

‘For God’s sake. Of course there hasn’t. Have they talked to him?’

‘I’m sure they will, but in these things, a vulnerable boy might not be expected to tell the truth.’

‘You do believe me?’

‘It’s not just me who needs to believe you.’ She judged that he was near the limit for a first meeting, looked at her watch and saw a chance to get back on schedule. She
drained her tea in one long swallow. ‘I’ll come back tomorrow, if I may. What’s better for you, morning or afternoon?’

‘It doesn’t make much difference.’

‘Nine o’clock?’

‘If you like.’

‘We’ll need to talk more about your wife’s death, I’m afraid.’

He nodded.

‘Are you going to be all right?’ she asked, a little to her own surprise. She had a strong sense that she had opened up something that had been sealed for years. All she got was
another curt nod.

A little worried, she pushed it further. ‘Do you have people to support you? Friends in the village?’

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Now, I must get on.’

He saw her out and watched as she drove away then he went back in, sat down at the kitchen table and steeled himself to remember, to put it all in place, feeling he could do it now that death
was no longer quite so final – that he must do it to be ready for her return.

Once upon a time, Mike had led what he thought of as a normal life. He had followed his father’s dusty footsteps into academia. He believed in his father’s version
of that world, where the people were safely removed from the story, like rocky headlands seen only on a sailor’s chart. Alone, Mike had not known he was lonely until a girl had slipped into
one of his lectures and come up to him at the end, admitting she was not a student and challenging him on the desiccated, impersonal way he saw history. He had stepped off a cliff into her wide
smile and she had mistaken what she needed from him enough to marry him.

Mike’s marriage had ended on a Monday.

He had come back home to Bagstone to surprise her. He knew just how the smile would spread across her face when she saw him and a fine, fierce anticipation hummed in him.

This return had been quite unlike him, the clockwork man committed to his four-day working week. In term-time he left the cottage every Sunday evening and came back every Thursday night, but on
that Sunday he had been loath to leave her. His doubts had assailed him all the way to London. Stuck in the Chiswick traffic, he had dared to imagine asking for compassionate leave. The following
morning it had proved much easier than he expected. The Dean was sympathetic and ten minutes was all it took. Two lectures were cancelled, his tutorials were postponed, and the rest of the week was
suddenly his to go straight back home and help Gally care for their child.

He was back at the cottage by midday. The gate had been shut and he left the car outside in the lane to make his arrival more of a surprise. It was February and Gally had been preparing the yard
for spring. The signs of her deep care were everywhere in the harmony of stone, brick and the kind channelling of nature. Rosie’s toy shears were on the bench in the porch next to
Gally’s real ones.

He picked up a postcard from the mat, saw a sunny harbour scene, flicked it over and recognised his aunt’s impossible scrawl. Hanging his jacket on the brass hooks, he noticed the
answering machine was switched on and went into the kitchen expecting to see the remnants of their breakfast but the table was clear and the oak draining board was empty, pale and dry. The kettle
was cold. He filled it half-full, switched it on to boil for the tea they would drink together when he found her. Upstairs, he saw their bedroom was tidy, the bed made up, Rosie’s room too.
The spare room door was closed. He turned the knob, feeling it wobble on the shaft because of the broken grub screw – one of the jobs for Jason the handyman on Wednesday.

The house bulged with silence. The door caught on the loose carpet behind it as he pushed it open and he saw the corner of the window through the narrow gap. That window looked out at the back
of the house and he thought he might see them further down the valley. They might even now be walking back towards the house, Rosie swinging and tugging on Gally’s hand. They would be so
surprised to see him at the window. Gally would lift Rosie into her arms and run with her.

Edging his foot through the gap to flatten out the rucked carpet, he pushed the door right open and it came to him even before he saw what lay on the bed that they were no longer anywhere
near.

It was late summer when they finally let him bury her. The churchyard was crowded with the people of the village and a handful of Gally’s older friends. She had no close
family and Mike stood by himself at the graveside separated from the rest by a gap which felt like quarantine. The mourners wondered at his blank face but inside the boarded-up man, mad despair was
clawing at the walls.

He watched the disconcerting, unfamiliar coffin as they lowered it into the underworld of earth and they watched him for a flicker of expression, then they all turned their heads for the second
coffin, the tiny coffin, so they missed the agony that creased his face.

There was polite tea offered afterwards in the old school hall by the churchyard gate but he found he could not go in and thought perhaps the rest of them might prefer it that way. On his way
home in the unfitting sunshine, he had branched uphill without any conscious decision, climbing to the top of the ridge, their place, where, alone under the high sky, there had been space to let
his anger out.

‘It’s your fault,’ he had said inside his head, staring at the stone bench on the hilltop. He said it again out loud but the words seemed no louder than the thought and were
swallowed by the ocean of air. He stood over the bench, looking down as if the old man was still there to hear his accusation. ‘It’s your fault,’ he said, and he sat down on the
end of the bench, staring at the gap beside him, wishing Ferney had left enough atoms behind him to allow revenge. The three of them – the old man, the girl who had briefly been his wife and
their daughter – swirled in the air, two, then three, then two.

‘You got what you wanted,’ he said to them. ‘Well, now you’re both bloody well dead and I hate you for it.’

A skylark had sung far above his head and taken the razor edge off his anger with its song. ‘I fell for it too,’ he had whispered to the shade of her. ‘People die and
they’re buried and they rot and that’s it. That’s all there is.’

Death had dulled his life again and for all those years he had tried not to think but now, as he lifted his head from his hands and looked across at the empty chair where the lawyer had sat,
thoughts filled him, rough and jostling thoughts. The boy Luke, for whom he could feel sympathy – the boy who was turning into the man Ferney. How could he feel sympathy for that man who had
taken everything from him? He could feel for the child but not for the man. Why should he? What now? Was Ferney the only way back to Gally renewed? Did he have the strength for the battle
ahead?

He needed air and clarity, so he walked out of the house and took the so-familiar path, worn to the bare earth these past years by just his feet and no one else’s. As he climbed the gentle
dome of hill on grass cropped close by sheep, he saw the squat pillar of the surveyor’s triangulation point rise into view. He saw the old stone bench beyond it and to his surprise, which was
really no surprise at all, he saw against the bright sky the hunched shoulders of someone sitting on it and knew exactly who it would be.

‘I heard what happened,’ the boy said as Mike walked up. He was staring at the ground. ‘It wasn’t anything I said. I just couldn’t stop them.’

‘You should be at school, shouldn’t you?’

‘I’ve finished my exams.’

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, suddenly tired by it all.

The boy looked at him with something like a polite version of contempt on his face and his expression said, Come off it, this was my place long before it was yours. ‘They say you’ve
been sacked.’

Mike flinched. ‘Is everybody talking about it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I haven’t been – not sacked, just suspended.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You should be,’ said Mike. ‘It’s all because of you. I’m not meant to be talking to you. In fact you’d better go.’

The boy looked around at the empty landscape and shrugged. ‘I’ll go if you want.’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘I need to ask you some things.’

‘That won’t help.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because questions have power and answers only drain their power away.’

‘I don’t know what that means. You know something about Gally, about where she is now. You have to tell me.’ Mike found himself looking around the edges of the hill as if she
might appear at any moment, dancing towards him with a smile that would melt away the time between.

‘I don’t,’ said Ferney, and Mike couldn’t decide if he meant he didn’t know or that he didn’t have to tell.

‘I’ve got a question for you,’ the boy said. ‘Does this tune sound familiar?’ He hummed something which, Mike thought, could have been any of half a hundred folk
songs.

‘No, it doesn’t, I—’

‘Well, what about these words? Have you heard them before?
We’re never quite old and we’re never quite young and we . . . we something . . .
’ His face was
screwed up in concentration.

‘Listen, Luke – Ferney – I don’t even know what I’m meant to call you. Why the hell should I be interested in a song?’

‘Call me by my real name. I only wanted to know if you ever heard her sing it.’

‘Her? Gally? My wife? You wanted to know if my wife ever sang me that? Oh, I think that would definitely be my business if she had, not yours.’

The boy shot him a startled look as if he had not expected such vehemence. He got to his feet and ran off down the hill and Mike shouted after him, ‘No, if you really want to know. No, she
never did.’

It was true and it wasn’t true. She had never sung Mike the song, but he had heard her sing it, just once, when she didn’t know he could hear.

There was a place hidden away at the back of Bagstone where a wide path with flower borders curled down through trees into the stream valley, a green tunnel into the sunlight of the meadow
beyond. When old Ferney died and Rosie was born, Mike saw a chance to start again. He craved peace for the three of them and he made Gally a private place to sit there in the shelter of the back
wall. He let in the morning sun by pruning the lower branches of an old hollow tree and he moved earth by the barrow load to flatten out a small circular terrace. He had surprised himself by making
two oak benches that did not wobble, and he found a cast-iron table at a local auction so that Gally could sit there with Rosie in the quiet time she liked at the start of every day.

He had kept the benches and the table hidden behind the sheds until it was all ready. One Saturday morning he put everything in place and came upstairs to where she lay in bed with Rosie in her
arms. He gave her the end of a piece of string with a green satin bow tied to it. She looked at it and smiled.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I needed some string.’

It wasn’t sarcasm. He knew that if his present had just been string, she would have still found delight in it. ‘Try following it,’ he suggested. ‘You might need to put
some clothes on.’

‘Do I get a cup of coffee first?’

‘Put your trust in the string.’

She bathed him in her huge eyes, laughed in delight and handed him their sleeping child, then in her usual way she was out of bed and into her jeans and woollen work shirt so quickly that it
looked like some trick film edit. Charged with Rosie’s safety, he was slower down the stairs but she waited for him at the front door, laughing more and more as she saw that the trail led
outside.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘That’s more string than I ever dreamed of. It must have cost a fortune.’

She walked slowly now, gathering it in careful loops as she went, around the far end of the house into the reclaimed wilderness beyond, to the terrace she had watched him build and to the table
and benches which were his present to her, the table laid with a new chequered cloth.