Ferney Read Free

true, but he did as she asked and they had only gone a short way down the narrow, curving lane when she said, ‘Stop a minute.’
    ‘What for?’
    ‘I just want to look.’
    He didn’t argue because he could see that she was back – that higher Gally who always eventually came out from behind her clouds.
    From anywhere else but that precise spot they might not have noticed it, or so Mike supposed at the time, but as soon as Gally got out she pointed at the ivy-covered silhouette of the chimney
poking up behind the trees.
    ‘There’s a house in there,’ she exclaimed in delight. ‘Right where I wanted it to be.’
    ‘A house?’ he said as he got out to join her. ‘Where?’
    To the north, beyond a sparse screen of trees, pasture stretched uphill. The ground to the south of the lane fell gradually away to the flat farmland stretching past Gillingham to
Shaftesbury’s distant ridge. A trio of beeches on the edge of the road almost hid the house, the hint of a gable showing man’s intruding straight edges to those who looked hard enough.
She was already at the gate, a rotten, slimy thing held by bent wire and baler twine. There was a small clearing beyond, perhaps a farmyard once, and he followed her through, feeling like a
trespasser, envying her ease.
    It was not much more than a shell, and a green, wet-looking shell at that, though it still had a roof. Long and low, the jumbled lines of stonework told of changes over the busy years. The
roof-line took a curtsey towards the far end. Stone lintels topped glassless window frames filled with ivy, and from the middle of the house a buckled wooden-latticework porch jutted out, tilting
down on to its knees from the weight of the creeper that had massed on it. The door was a sheet of stained plywood, held in place by a diagonal plank that spelled closure and abandonment.
Everywhere there were creepers, wild bushes and saplings; nature’s demolition team inching apart the mortared joints of man’s temporary work. On the far side of the clearing, pines
burst up through the deep undergrowth that covered the lower slope of the hill. Beyond the house, in among the bushes, were angles of walls, buried stumps of old stone outhouses and a collapsing
corrugated-iron shed.
    Gally turned slowly right round with her arms outspread then hugged herself and jumped up and down. ‘It’s perfect,’ she said. ‘This is it.’
    Mike felt a cold shudder that started at his chequebook. ‘It’s a ruin.’
    ‘That just means no one’s had a chance to spoil it.’
    ‘It will cost a fortune to fix.’
    ‘How do you know?’
    ‘It’s not for sale.’
    ‘Well, you can’t have it both ways. If it’s not for sale, it won’t cost a fortune.’
    He smiled, turned and squeezed between the bushes and the end wall. The far side of the house was covered in cracked rendering. The ground fell away into a little valley, choked with the soapy
corpses of fallen trees, fused under a shroud of moss. Gally moved past him and went down on her knees in the leaf-mould and the brambles, delving with her fingers into the dense decay.
    ‘Look,’ she said. A line of flowers he didn’t recognize was pushing its way through. In front of them, a row of curved tiles edged what had once been a flowerbed.
    ‘Someone loved this once. Think what it would look like if we cleared the valley. We could plant daffodils all the way down.’ She got up. ‘Come on,’ she said, grabbing
his hand and pulling. ‘Let’s look inside.’
    The plywood sheet where the door had once been was no obstacle. It was nailed to a rotten frame that crumbled as she pushed it. ‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if we
should . . .’
    ‘It’s all right.’ She sounded excited. ‘No one’s going to mind.’
    It seemed to him suddenly that going inside would be a good idea. The desolation they would find would persuade her this was not the comfortable country haven she craved and for which they had
searched