Ferney Read Free Page B

widening stream-bend, which gradually pushed the route southward for a hundred yards, or the fall of a huge elm,
forcing a kink in the track that stayed long after the last of the tree trunk had rotted into powder. In the eighteenth century, it became a turnpike built when the old ridgeway, with its
plummeting descent from the chalk downs, proved too difficult for carriage traffic. Even when the cars came and the track was ripped wider, pounded with crushed stone and cauterized with a band of
hot tarmac, the line of the route stayed the same.
    It bothered him greatly that he didn’t know exactly where to look. Highway engineers, trained to see the world from a seventy-miles-per-hour perspective, were blind to the beauty of roads
that wandered along their way. Braking distances and visibility angles vectored together to spell hazard where the smaller lane crossed the road. The hole was their solution, the rough vacuum into
which a coarse concrete underpass would be moulded to solve the problem. They had uprooted everything Ferney needed to find his way.
    The old man’s stock of memories had long ago overflowed into dungeons and his expeditions to retrieve them needed careful planning. They required a cue, often tiny but always precise. The
shape and colour of a freshly painted window might be enough, or perhaps the felling of a tree on the borders of the steadily shrinking woodland. From such a fixed point he could work carefully
backwards, using the details of that specific image until it blotted out the present and let him drag the memories up towards the daylight.
    His last resort was the sense of smell, always a powerful short cut, and in this case there was a very particular smell. He needed to find the smithy which had stood here, somewhere in the
digger’s devastation. Once a smithy, at any rate, then briefly a primitive petrol station with a skeleton pump and gaudy enamel advertisements, then a ruin from which the stone had been taken
piecemeal to serve again in local walls, then afterwards – nothing, barely a bump in the verge. It was the smithy that obsessed him. Sitting up on the bank across the road, he watched the end
of his poker grow red in the blowlamp’s noisy flame, then he tipped a paper bag of hoof-parings on to the grass, plunged the poker into it and breathed in deeply.
    The smoke was acrid with hot iron and singed horses’ hooves, stinging his nose and throat, but then the scent claimed precedence and, as he looked back at the road, the other sight took
over. The traffic shimmered into transparency. The road’s borders, hacked back for high-speed safety, filled again with untrimmed nature. The outline of the trees was still uncertain,
shifting, until he trapped the corner of a roof-line, pulled it into shape and the rest of the details obediently followed, filling in like a photograph developing in solution.
    In a haze, blotting out everything except the vision in his mind, he got to his feet, the poker dropping from his hand to scorch his shoe, unnoticed, as it fell. He hung on to the vision,
suddenly sure of his direction. Across the stony track ahead was the low, uneven roof of the smithy and the shed beyond it. He was young, strong, determined, full of anger, full of grief. The
smith, Cochrane, was in there, somewhere in his harsh darkness of iron, earth and anvils, on fire with rum or torpid in its wake. Whatever stage the tide of rum had reached, Ferney knew the fury in
him would smother Cochrane’s strength.
    Forgetting that all he had sought was the precise placing of the smithy’s walls, dragged along by the rage he had disturbed, old Ferney stumbled down to the verge to settle a score whose
issue had been in no doubt since 1933. Down the track, on the fringe of his vision, a horse and cart moved slowly closer. Two more steps, and where his eyes saw the old grass verge, his feet felt
anachronistic smooth road. Another two steps and a shrieking wedge of solid, violent