Ferney by James Long

Author:James Long [Long, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781471143144
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Though religion was a locked door to Ferney, the church was the one building whose doors were never locked – indeed, the only familiar building in Penselwood where, as the years passed, a sudden change of ownership would never bar his entry. It was only as an empty building that he liked it. Caught up in a long conflict with those who had used it to preach unattainable heaven and meaningless hell, he had fallen foul of some of them across the years – the narrow churchmen of the authoritarian times who had used their pulpit power to fetter the community with fierce, unloving ideas. There had been dangerous times when it simply didn’t pay to let them mark you as a nonconformist, when the tides of puritan rebellion had turned every pew into a political hot seat. During those years Ferney had been content to play a defensive role, compelled to take his Sunday place and think his own thoughts under a show of attention, garnering some pleasure from the stones around him and the sound of the music, but none at all from the words of the service.

He nodded to the stone heads above the door as he pushed it open and walked in, knowing just exactly how his footsteps on the flagstones would sound, echoing like drips in a well. Few sounds had stayed constant, but this was one. Birdsong was another, he thought, but even the cows and the sheep had changed their voices as centuries of breeding layered meat on their widening frames. True, he had leather on his soles now, not wood, but he favoured hard leather, valuing materials around him that did not quickly erode, and the sound it made was pretty much the same as the old sound of the wood. In here, above all, it was possible to get away from the constant recent background noise of petrol being burnt in a hundred ways which upset him not so much for the noise itself as for the squandering shortsightedness of it.

An enthusiast for most modern conveniences, Ferney generally excluded the car from that. Walking through your surrounding landscape strengthened your responsibility towards it. Enclosed speed, he had soon decided as the postwar years brought cars doubling and redoubling, steel algae infesting the world, removed that responsibility and provided the illusion that like a malignant comet, you could always travel away from the debris in your wake.

The sounds barely touched him in the church. Here it was easier for him to abandon the structure of laborious, ordered, maintained memory and slip instead between the times in a reverie of peace. It had changed, of course. They’d mucked around with the proportions and the details a fair bit with their restorations and their rebuildings, but it still consisted of most of the same old stones and it still sat squarely on the same patch of ground, and through all the changes it still preserved the same quality of cool, high silence inside that made your thoughts louder.

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