The lavatory they brought her to was a big square room, half a dozen basins, half a dozen cubicles. Seats and doors with the varnish worn from the wood; old heavy ceramics with cracks and chips in the glaze; taps that almost needed two hands to turn them, then hissed and gurgled before they spat water. The flush worked, though, and the water was scalding. That was something, an unexpected comfort. She’d stayed with millionaires and lordlings whose plumbing would have been a scandal to Victorians.
Washed, refreshed, not ready – but at least not bloody now, except beneath the bandage – she left coat and case together in a corner and came out to find Tom waiting on his own.
‘Mother Mary went ahead. She’ll let people know that you’re here.’
Was that a good thing? Perhaps. She didn’t know. She didn’t really know anything, except that she was here now, committed. Engaged.
‘She said you weren’t to call her that.’
‘She said you weren’t. I’m a hopeless case; she gave up on me long since. Hungry?’
Oddly, she was.
‘Me too. I hope you don’t mind vegetarian. Not everyone here is actually veggie – we don’t have rules like that – but a lot of us are, and it’s good that we can grow most of what we eat. Some people are really evangelical about it, and they’re the ones who do the shopping and most of the cooking, so meals tend to work out that way. It’s safe, anyway. Something everyone can eat.’
‘I don’t really know,’ she said. ‘I suppose so.’ Lentils and rice, then. What did it matter? She’d never cared that much about food. Dinner was an opportunity to be amusing, enchanting, available. Bright eyes, provocative manners, witty gossip. Eating only got in the way.
Here was a broad open hallway, stairs going up. Someone had started a mural, swirling patterns, meaningless to her eyes; also, she didn’t think it was finished. Perhaps that was the point.
High double doors standing open, the buzz of conversation. Here it was, then.
It seemed dark in there, heavy shadows, compared to the house around. Oil lamps and candles: well, she was used to that. People liked to eat in the half-dark. Actually, she thought it came from the women, people like her, who weren’t too concerned with what lay on their plates. Candlelight made big eyes lustrous, hid flaws, made up for clumsy make-up, drew the shadows in close like curtains around the table.
In other rooms, other houses, it did all of that. Not here. The room was just too big to be made intimate. It must have been the ballroom once, when this was a grand family house. Now it was – well, communal. Where they gathered, where they ate. The walls were hung with fabrics, which could hardly be safe with all those flames around. The candles were in jars and on tables, but even so. The house had electricity, which they weren’t shy of using elsewhere. She thought she’d use it in here too.
The tables were all different shapes and sizes but more or less the same height, not high at all. Tables with their legs cut off, she thought, mostly. They were arranged like an echo of the house, three sides of a square, and she was walking in at the open end for everyone to stare at.
It’s hard to set your chin mulishly and stare back, she found, when everyone’s head is a yard lower than your own. All the angles are wrong for everything you know about stubborn display.
People sat cross-legged or else sprawled on cushions, propping themselves up on one elbow like Romans. Mostly they had arranged themselves around the outside of the horseshoe; there were no cushions on the inside, and the few who sat there had tea towels slung across their shoulders or aprons worn over their other clothes. Cooks and servers, she guessed: doing the job casually, the opposite of silver service. Working inside the horseshoe for the sake of convenience, bringing big pots and bowls and ladles, dropping down to grab a bite themselves, five minutes’ rest, a word with a friend over the way.
It was like an arena, that broad open space between the tables. It was hard to see, coming into this high shadowy space from the bright-lit hallway; harder still to see past the flickering lines of candles, the occasional musky glowing globe of an oil lamp; but she thought that was Mother Mary in her white, just where she’d look to find the heads of the family, in the middle of the long row facing her. Most likely that was the promised Leonard sitting beside Mary, a middle-aged man with a grizzled beard, and would she have to walk all that way to face him, so utterly exposed, like a supplicant pleading to be taken in . . .?
Apparently not. Tom took her arm and drew her to one side. She thought he might be laughing at her quietly, behind all that facial fungus. She thought he was most exactly reading her mind.
‘Not that,’ he said. ‘We don’t run gauntlets here. Of course people are curious, but they don’t get to stare you down, not all at once. This isn’t a circus. Here, sit here.’ At the end of one of the horseshoe’s arms, exactly the opposite of what she’d been anticipating: closest to the door, least easy to look at.
And Tom at her side, tall, overshadowing; reaching out a long arm to hook two bowls closer, working the ladle from a giant tureen. ‘If you need to ask what this is, the answer’s stew. Best not to ask, I always think. Just let it happen to you.’
She shrugged, which was possibly unkind when he was trying so hard, but right now that was as much as she could manage. Her wrist hurt, in that achy way that wasn’t worth making a fuss over; the thought of it was worse, like barbed wire tangled all about her so that every flinch away just dug it deeper in.
It wasn’t possible. Her wrist had healed months ago, months. With scars, because the surgeon who sewed it up had made no secret of his contempt and couldn’t be bothered to do a delicate careful job – she almost thought he almost wished she’d got it right and was lying cold on a slab for dissection, rather than pale and red-eyed and flinching from his needle – but he couldn’t have done so poor a job that they would be tearing open again, could he?
Under the weight of an unaccustomed suitcase, carried for an unaccustomed way? Perhaps he could. Perhaps that long haul had strained ill-married flesh too far.
It was that or she was mad after all, believing that the strike of a bell could slice raw living flesh apart. If that was true, what need butchers? Monks would do. Vicars could take carcases to pieces with their great church bells. Buddhists could bone out quail with little tinkling finger-cymbals. No one need ever cut themselves again with crude and cruel razors . . .
She had stew. She had a spoon, because he passed it to her. She had another hand. She cradled the bad one in her lap and spooned stew listlessly. From hand to mouth, and—
‘Oh!’
He was grinning – no, smirking at her. Delighted with himself, for making it happen that way. Discovery, untouched by warning or anticipation or any kind of hope.
‘Told you.’
Stew, was it? She supposed it was, if soup meant a liquid with solid things in it, if stew meant solid things bound about with gravy. If you could distinguish between them.
Just the gravy was dark and rich and remarkable, a tingling dense eruption on her tongue, like licking the essence of savoury. There was salt in there and spice and somehow meatiness, although she was willing to believe no meat; and she wanted more, immediately and imperatively.
And this time there was a piece of vegetable on her spoon, and never mind, she took that too for the sake of the liquid that cloaked it; and she couldn’t have named it but the vegetable was all crunch and flavour and freshness, a delight against the settled maturity of the stock, and she wanted more of that too.
She spooned and chewed and swallowed. At some point, Tom thrust a piece of bread into her other hand, her bad hand; and it wasn’t bad enough – as Mother Mary had foreseen – to stop her using it for this, holding bread and lifting it to her mouth for biting.
Tom didn’t say anything about the bread. He’d been purposefully dismissive of the stew, just because he knew how good it was, how rare; the bread he put into her hand, take it or leave it, no comment.
She did take a bite, but it was brown and fibrous, chewy, rough, too serious for her. She was a frivolous girl, when she could manage still to be a girl at all. Just across the table was another girl, long hair conscientiously plaited, skirt to her ankles, bare feet tucked under; she was eating bread with conviction, where any woman Georgie knew would be plucking at it, rolling little pellets, leaving the solid crusts on her side plate.
Every woman Grace knew would be ignoring it altogether.
Here there was no side plate, nothing so decorous. No tablecloth, either. She had known, had eaten in houses where the polite thing was to use the tablecloth for your bread. The upper crust was strange. They couldn’t just afford plates, they had plates by the dozen, by the many dozen, all matching, all frighteningly valuable. That might have been why they didn’t use them, except that all the other courses came on that same crockery: just not the bread. Someone had told her once that it was because in olden times there weren’t any plates, your bread served as the plate and went straight on the table, and this was a modern version of that – but she hadn’t really believed him, then or since. People did like to wind a girl up so, when she didn’t understand a thing.
She didn’t like the bread much, didn’t want it, but didn’t want to put it down. She was fairly sure that these people would frown on waste. She chewed her way through a few more bites, but really, the stew was all she wanted. Stew and more stew.
Bless him, Tom had noticed. He served her another ladleful before even her bowl was empty; and a little after that, he reached across to snare that hunk of disregarded bread from her poor sore hand and eat it heedlessly himself.
‘Sorry,’ he mumbled around the crust, ‘it’s a little earnest, the bread we make. A bit on the worthy side.’
It was. They made it, he said, in a wood-burning brick oven they’d built themselves in the stable yard. She thought they could have used their loaves for bricks, to build another. And didn’t quite like to say so, but the thought made her giggle regardless. He quirked an enquiring eyebrow at her; she shook her head, dropped her gaze, went back to eating stew.
After a while, she remembered that she was here on a mission. She was supposed to be spying, not really in retreat. There was no point actually living out her cover story, shy girl on the run, hiding from her own life. Tony might not pay for that, he might not feel obliged; money might suddenly become an object after all.
Between spoonfuls, then, she looked around as best she could, peeping from below her fringe. Shifting her weight, shifting her legs from one side to the other, taking any opportunity to face another way, snatch another view. She was like a buttonhole camera, secretly bold.
If she caught someone’s eye, well. Even a shy girl would peek about, wouldn’t she? Once she’d come this far? And then dart her eyes back to her bowl again, then peek again.
She wasn’t sure if she’d ever been honestly shy, but she did seem to have Georgie in her bones. She understood that girl, from the inside out. Even if she’d never been her, or anything like her.
There were a lot of people here, a lot of faces to peek at. No point trying to learn them in this difficult light, at distance, in snatched glances through her hair. Any more than there was any point trying to pick out individual voices in the general buzz of conversation. Just impressions, then. It was as much as anyone could ask of her, the first night here. As much as she would ever ask of herself.
There were as many women as men here, she thought, more or less. It was hard to be sure when they all sat together, when so many wore their hair long and loose, when they were bent over bowls or turned towards one another with their heads close, when their clothes had little to say about what sex they were. While they were sitting down, at least. She might reasonably hope not to see boys in skirts, though she expected plenty of girls in trousers.
She was wearing a minidress herself, to keep in character. One more swivel from one hip to the other, one more tug at the hem of it where it rode up high on her thigh; Tom said, ‘You’re really not used to sitting on the floor, are you? Poor Georgie.’
Actually, she preferred it, though not quite like this. Give her a soft shagpile carpet, room to stretch her legs and a man in a chair behind to lean against, something slow on the record player and his hand on her cheek. With everything that that implied, before and after. Really, she was no good on her own.
She was on her own here, and needed to be good. She said, ‘I’m not wearing the right clothes, that’s all.’ Another tug, another shift, like a girl dressed for fashion but uncomfortable with showing so much leg. Like a little idiot who had run to the country, to a commune, without giving a moment’s thought to what that meant. Like a girl whose suitcase was full of city dresses, yes. If anyone was looking, if anyone cared enough to look.
There’s something going on there, Tony had said. Go in like an innocent, and if you get caught – well, be guilty of something else. Of being yourself. Why not?
He was a clever lad, Tony. She almost felt safe, almost.
‘Not to worry,’ Tom said. ‘We’ll sort you out something to wear, something you’ll be comfy in. This evening, after you’ve talked to Leonard.’
Sitting this way, at this angle to the long room, she could see Leonard and Mary quite easily, no need even to move her head. Not that it did her much good at this distance, in this light; they were too far away to read expressions, let alone lips. Not that she knew how to read lips anyway. A proper spy, she thought, would be better trained and better prepared.
If this was a movie, she’d be doing everything right. Being herself in the city, bright lights and cocktails; recruited at a party, briefed in glamorous Soho; going undercover far from home, disappearing into a sinister commune under another name, living secretly among strange and dangerous people who harboured ambitions that she didn’t understand.
But then, if this was a movie, she’d be James Bond. Jane Bond. Cool and lethal, enigmatic, desirable.
A lot of men desired Grace Harley, but that was different. That was . . . quite horrible, actually, when she thought about it now. She’d become collectable, something to be bragged about in that cold, dismissive manner that expensive men liked to cultivate. ‘The Harley girl? Lord, yes. I’ve had her. Who hasn’t? Grace and Favour, they call her: she’ll do anyone a favour, if you only have the grace to pay her.’
It was almost true, that was almost the worst of it. It wasn’t what she wanted; it wasn’t anywhere near or anything like what she wanted; but she couldn’t have what she wanted, so why not?
This wasn’t a career move, just a diversion. She wasn’t really a spy, or a reporter. Whatever happened here, soon enough she’d find herself back in London and doing what she did again, being who she was. Grace Harley wasn’t a job, she was a life sentence. The judge had understood that, she thought. He’d even been sympathetic, a little. You’ve been punished enough. What that really meant was: Go out and be who you are, learn to live with yourself. It’s never going to get any better.
If she did well here, Tony might hire her to work for his paper properly. She could write about fashion, maybe. Or be a gossip columnist. They didn’t even use their own names; that could be a whole other kind of going undercover, being herself at parties and then writing them up, having the whole world of London wonder who she was, this Bella Donna who went everywhere and knew everyone and was so scathing about them all in print . . .
But she’d still have to go to the parties and be Grace Harley. From here, already, it looked unbearable. She couldn’t imagine how she had survived it all these months. Brazen they called her, but it wasn’t true. Brazen meant brassy, she’d looked that up; and brassy meant hard. Stubborn under all that surface polish, the immaculate shine. Not crying yourself to sleep any night you found yourself alone; not stubbornly setting out to make sure you never were alone if you could help it. They thought she didn’t care. What they never saw was how hard she had to work to keep herself from caring.
From where she was sitting, the way she sat, it was easy to tell when the meal was over. There was no formality to it: only that Leonard and Mary stood up, bowed a little to this side of the room and to that, and turned away from the table. Turning inwardly, towards each other, like lovers do. Military men all went the same way, she’d noticed, as though they were drilled to do it, while two businessmen would turn independently, away from each other. If Leonard and Mary shared a word or a touch she couldn’t see it, but their bodies declared an intimacy that she ought to be aware of. Whether or not it was passionate or physical. The elderly could still get it on, she knew – too well, she knew it! – but they had ways of mattering to each other without needing to sleep together. She knew that too and envied it, almost. Looked forward to it, almost.
There was another set of double doors behind where they had sat. They went through those alone, with no fuss at all, and let the door swing closed again behind them.
That was when she realized that all the room’s talking had died when they rose, that everyone must have been keeping a quiet eye on them just as she had. As the door closed at their backs, there was a single soft sigh, as though the room itself had let out a breath of disappointment. Really, it was half a hundred mouths in unison, acknowledging a loss, the departure of the guru.
It was odd, slightly. He didn’t look like a guru: a shortish man, slightly bandy-legged, with a neat aggressive little beard and a weathered face. Commonplace clothes, jacket and trousers: Mother Mary might dress in robes, but not he.
Well. He must have something. She’d find out, one way or another. I’ll do my best for you, Tony love. Even if there’s really no mystery, if this is just an excuse to be nice, to get me out of town . . . It was a suspicion that had crossed her mind more than once, that this was really a charade all aimed at her, for her benefit, to find her another way to live. She liked to dream sometimes that Tony really was that kind underneath and really did care that much, that he’d disguise charity as a job of work. Not even fantasy Tony could seriously imagine that she’d settle to life in a commune at the arse end of the world, but yes: to get her out of London for a while, off the front page of the papers? Even his own paper? Fantasy Tony would do that. Actual Tony not, of course not. Actual Tony would look for his own and the Messenger’s advantage, and do something nice for her if it suited. Which meant that no, this wasn’t a hoax and she wasn’t being double-crossed; which meant . . .
Never mind. Someone else was standing now, but not turning away. A man, his long hair bound back with a leather thong. He held his hands up against the rising murmur and smiled broadly as it died back again.
‘Thanks, people.’ His voice was mellow but carrying; he was in his thirties, maybe, as near as she could tell; and, oh yes, he had something. Even at this distance, at the wrong end of a crowded room. A while ago – years now, but she still remembered it – she’d been at the back of a crowd when her host uncorked some fabulous bottle of wine at the front. She remembered how the smell of it had come to her, all that far away, at the back of all those other people; how it had perfumed the air, how it had silenced them all.
This was like that. Whatever it was about him, his gift, his gift of presence: it washed through all that long room like a swell of clean fresh water. People sat back on their heels, put down their bread, would have strained to hear him except that they didn’t need to, he came through loud and clear and easy.
‘Just a few announcements, to keep everyone up to speed. We’re running short of wood again, so anyone who’s walking in the valley, do your share and drag back a branch or two. Fallen branches only, of course. Give the trees a chance.
‘And Cookie says the power’s off in the west wing for a reason, he’s very suspicious about a box or a relay or something and he’s waiting for parts, so don’t fuss at him about it. We don’t need electricity out there anyway; it’s just an inconvenience. If anybody’s sleeping over that side, they only have to get out of bed to switch it off. Candles are easier, so long as you’re careful.
‘Talking of being careful, there’s a leak in the painted bathroom. Just cold water, so don’t be alarmed, but you’ll get wet feet paddling about in it. Cookie says he’ll get to it in the morning . . .’
It was like parish announcements at church when she was little, when her mother still made her go. She should have drifted off, let her thoughts wander and her eyes too. And yet, and yet. He was like the most charismatic vicar ever. Or that really cool teacher that no school ever actually had, the one that all the girls would dreamily fancy while the boys vied for his attention because he came in on a motorbike and hung out with some deep band at weekends and would take half a dozen favourites off in the holidays for an adventure.
There’d been a succession of men at her school who had tried to be that guy. Probably every school had those: the ones who grew their hair and didn’t shave, wore coloured shirts and pendants, talked hip and always, always disappointed. She’d been like any of the girls, falling for it, willing to believe. Before they let her down, she would sit in class or assembly trying frantically to catch their eye, to be the one they noticed: to matter, somehow, more than her friends to left and right. It was what she’d always done, to chase after an elusive celebrity. And then catch it, and find it after all not worth the effort, not deserving of the dream.
She wasn’t even trying to catch this man’s eye, not pushing herself forward, not in the race any more.
And yet he was looking right at her now, his bright gaze snaring her through the shadows as he said, ‘As usual, Mary and the captain ask us to leave them alone this hour, to let them have some quiet time together. It’s not so much to ask, people, is it?’
It didn’t seem like anything at all. Who would worry about letting the old ones go off to bed, while this golden man remained to them?
But Tom touched her hand and said, ‘Don’t worry, Leonard will see you,’ even while a murmur of agreement was still rolling along the tables:
No, not so much, we’ll let them be, of course we will, don’t we always?
She just shrugged at him heedlessly, her eyes still fixed on that man as he made his way between two tables into the open arena of the floor, as he walked unhurriedly in her direction, as he came directly and indisputably to her.
Training held good; she knew how to stand up gracefully, even from the floor with nothing to hold on to. She was on her feet before his offered hand could be any use to her. On her stockinged feet, because she’d slipped her shoes off when she sat down; her head barely reached to his shoulder, though his own feet were bare. Tall as well as golden, then. And very much a man – nothing of the boy about him, nothing to prove. Not likely to be a disappointment, this one. It was probably just as well that she didn’t want anything from him.
He took her hand anyway, although she was up already and didn’t need the help: not to shake, apparently, just to hold it as he smiled down at her. Warmth and strength in his silky fingers, warmth and strength in his honey voice as he said, ‘I’m Webb. They tell me you’re called Georgie?’
She nodded, slightly unhappy at even that fractional lie. She’d never been a natural liar. She’d had to learn the art of it in bed, even, to boost the frail egos of the men who took her there. They only liked to be laughed at with their clothes on. In court she’d told the pure simple truths of all she’d done and everything she’d taken, the men and the money, the advantage and the risks. To the papers, too: nothing but the truth. It had done her little good. If honesty was the best policy, she had yet to be shown any good reason for it. It was just easier, that was all.
She was sorry suddenly to be entering this house on a lie, even such a small one. People changed their names for all sorts of reasons, all the time: for politics, for safety, for escape, for sex, for fun. What kind of name was Webb, anyway? Not the kind you found on a birth certificate, unless it was a surname, and he wasn’t the kind of man in the kind of place to be going by his surname. No. He’d just chosen what he wanted people to call him, and so had she, and—
And she was still sorry to be telling him a lie, even if it didn’t really matter. Even if he knew it and didn’t care. Perhaps it was only her guilty conscience, but she had a feeling that he could see right through her.
He said, ‘Well, if you’re ready now, Georgie –’ if you’ve got your story all prepared was what she heard, though the tilt of his head towards the table seemed to say if you’ve finished your supper – ‘why don’t you come on through and meet the captain?’
‘I, um, thought you said he wouldn’t want to be disturbed . . .?’
‘He’s not generally available after dinner. If he was, he’d never have a moment to himself, or for Mary. He does always like to meet newcomers, though, as soon as may be. This is the best time, when you can sit and talk and not be interrupted a dozen times an hour.’
‘Wouldn’t Mary rather . . .?’
‘I expect she would, yes – but she won’t say so. She learned long since that there’s no point arguing with Leonard, for his good or your own, when the good running of the house is an issue. That’s why we had to learn to keep away in the evenings, to stop him wearing himself ragged; it’s our own decision, not his. I’m not sure he even knows. Come on, now. An invitation to the captain’s cabin is a privilege, and no one here disdains it.’
‘Oh, I wasn’t—!’
But he was teasing her. She realized it too slow, smiled to acknowledge it too late. By then he was already walking, still keeping that loose grip on her hand so that she had to stumble after him or look absurd, tug herself free like a child not willing to be led.
She was willing enough, more than willing. He was playing faithful lieutenant and no more, bringing her to meet his commander – and she was still scurrying to catch up with him, still leaving her shoes as abandoned as poor Tom at the end of the table there, not a backward or regretful glance.
He took her across that open space, through the heart of the room, under everyone’s gaze. In her short shift and sheer tights, and never mind that she’d known these clothes were wrong, that she’d planned and worn them deliberately. She still felt like a cow brought to market, exposed to comment and ridicule – except that she glanced from one side to the other and didn’t think that anyone was commenting much, let alone laughing. She couldn’t see that anyone was actually looking at her, much. A curious glance here or there, but that was only the inevitable curiosity of a settled group finding a newcomer in its midst. Nothing judgemental.
She wasn’t sure that she could be so kind towards a stranger – or so unconcerned, it wasn’t even kindness – being led by the hand to the heart of things, where everyone else had been so bluntly excluded.
But then, she wasn’t a hippy. She wasn’t signed up for community living. Grace had hated school and left as soon as she could, left home at the same time, dumped flatmates as soon as she thought she could afford to. Georgie’s story wasn’t so different, except for being the one who was dumped and dumped again.
She was suddenly practising that story in the back of her mind quite urgently as they squeezed between tables and came to those high closed double doors beyond. It wasn’t Webb that she needed to convince here.
He pulled one door open and handed her through. She felt almost like an actress being brought to the front of the stage for her curtain call, except that this was a beginning and, however it ended, nobody was going to applaud. Nobody was going to applaud her, at least.
Webb’s fingers slipped away from hers at last, too soon. These next steps she had to take alone, and she was more than sorry about that. She could hear him right behind her, pulling that door closed again; there was small reassurance in that. A man had disappeared here. Maybe. At least one, maybe; maybe more. Something surely had been going on before that, before Tony had sent his man in, or why would he? He hadn’t told her much about it: only that there were rumours, worried parents, disapproving locals. The usual. Good fare for a Sunday morning.
If it was true, if this wasn’t an elaborate ploy to see her out of London for a while, make her feel differently about herself, better if she could.
Either way, she needed to stop thinking like Grace for a while. Think like Georgie. Be Georgie, as much as she could manage. That would be nicer, anyway. She was a nice girl, Georgie. A bit of an idiot, but that was all right. Nice girls are allowed to do foolish things, and feel sad after.
Nice girls are expected to be a little bashful, coming in to face an older man in a position of authority. Father, headmaster, priest, employer. Judge. It was all the same, always. They all judged you. Grace would be defiant, but not Georgie. She didn’t have it in her.
Georgie would creep forward, uncomfortably alone: eyes on her fingers as they twiddled with each other, as her right hand fussed at the bandage on her left.
She’d find herself walking over carpets, for the first time in this house: fine Persian carpets, that Grace would have recognized from all those country houses in the days when she was welcomed there, that Georgie would know from the nice homes of her parents’ wealthy friends. There was always a story, if you looked for it.
Walking into smoke, into the smells of various smokes. Joss, of course, there had to be joss; and a stale background smell of tobacco mixed with something rougher and sweeter, cannabis, of course someone had been smoking joints in here; and more immediately, prominent and demanding, a richer darker tobacco that brought her head up regardless, and there he was.
Leonard, the captain, master of this house and of her fate, at least for this little moment: sitting on an old worn cat-scratched settee, the kind of furniture that was endlessly familiar to Grace – all those rooms in all those country houses: people with houses like that hold on to everything, and pass it down as it decays through generations of guest-rooms and family rooms and servants’ rooms and dogs’ – and not so much to Georgie, leaning into one corner-cushion while Mother Mary occupied the other.
He was smoking an Indian cheroot, black and thin and lethal. He gestured with it, that hand that was not stretched out along the sofa-back towards Mary, and tapped ash into a bright jade pot on a trefoil table beside him, and said, ‘I’m sorry about this,’ though he patently wasn’t, it was as much a part of him as the beard on his chin. ‘Old sea-dog habit that I can’t break now – I’d break myself if I tried it. Filthy things, but people put up with me regardless.’
Of course they did. She understood it now. Webb’s impact was long-distance, the teacher addressing the hall; it didn’t get stronger close to. The captain’s was immediate, here and now, you and me, not for sharing.
His beard bristled with iron vigour. His blue eyes were faded, salt-soaked, ironic; his skin had weathered sun and wind, ten thousand days, a thousand thousand miles. His voice still held a Navy crispness, under a roughening of tobacco and hard use. And of course he’d been in the war, so had every man his age, every man worth anything – not half the men she knew in London, those who had fucked her and spurned her and judged her and fucked her anyway – but there was more than that. Something of her own father in him: the last thing she’d have looked for, the last thing she’d have hoped to see, but there it was, clear and authoritative and revelatory.
She said, ‘Merchant Marine?’ Her father called it the Merchant Navy, with a kind of stubborn pride; when he talked about the king, as often as not he meant George V, who’d given it that title after the first war. The way her father spoke, you’d think he’d been in the service at the time, that the sea was in his blood. In truth he’d signed up in 1939 to avoid conscription, got out as early as he could, and used his wartime contacts shamelessly ever since. She really didn’t want to see a similarity here. And yet, there it was: something about distance, experience, another kind of life. In her father it had touched him, marked him, tattooed his skin perhaps. If you wanted to be clever, if you wanted not to remember that he would be the last man ever to have himself tattooed. In this man it was sunk bone-deep, ocean-deep. She might be willing to bet that he did have tattoos, but only the way a ship had flags: superficial, for the benefit of others. Himself, he didn’t need telling who or what he was, or where he’d been. Or what his service had been worth. The old sailors she’d met, the real sailors, still called it the Merchant Marine.
He grunted. ‘Clever girl. Sit yourself down.’ Patting the cushion of the settee beside him.
There was, she supposed, just room enough for three, if she didn’t mind being pinned between him and – what, his partner, his co-host? His first mate in the naval sense? Or in the biological sense, his wife?
Grace would have sat somewhere else, deliberately at a distance. By nature she didn’t do obedience, or joining. In the war she’d have waited for her call-up and then been the most difficult draftee she could, all lipstick on parade and cigarettes with the quartermaster’s men behind the stores. In a commune – well. It was hard to imagine Grace in a commune, willingly or otherwise.
Georgie, though: Georgie only wanted to make other people happy, in a way that she couldn’t make herself. She’d sit where she was told to, with never a mulish lip.
Went to do that, then – and swallowed down her huff of relief as Mother Mary rose up at her approach, shared a private women-only smile with her, said, ‘Sit here, dear,’ in her own place, the far end of the sofa.
She could do that. Georgie would do that; yes, and curl her legs up and half turn her back to the man at the other end, look at him half over her shoulder, self-protective, harmed.
‘Don’t get him going, mind, on his time at sea,’ Mother Mary went on. Standing over her, protective herself. Even Georgie might uncurl, a little, in her shadow. ‘He’ll bore you half to death. And poison you the other half, with those cheroots. Would you like a cup of tea?’
There was a little spirit-stove in the corner, a kettle already steaming. Adding its fug to the twining smoke of the joss sticks in a brass holder, set on the window sill above. She smiled a nervous thank you, and never mind if she looked a little bewildered; she was a little bewildered. She really didn’t understand this place. Nor Mother Mary. The captain was easier, at least in her imagination. She could piece together a story for him. Not for this woman, busy with pot and kettle and water, with caddy and spoon and leaves. She had been a nurse, she said; she ought to be a matron now, ruling patients and probationers alike with a rod of iron, brisk and brutal and beloved. Instead – well, people here called her Mother, though she didn’t want them to. Presumably she did the same thing: tyrannized and treated hurts, kept good order, walked about in the captain’s shadow and let him take the glory.
Whatever glory there was, guiding a group of long-haired hippies from one day to the next, in chase of something unknown. Perhaps she didn’t understand him either. Grace would challenge him about that, ask him straight out: what are you here for?
Georgie wouldn’t. She’d be too afraid of having the question bounced straight back at her.
She said, ‘I’d love to hear about your travels, uh, Captain . . .?’
‘You call me Leonard,’ he said. ‘To my face, at least. I know everyone calls me the captain behind my back, but I don’t have to hear it. I had forty years at sea, from deck boy to master, and no one using my own name all that time. It’s enough. I’m ashore now, and not even the Royal Navy would call this house a ship. We’ll have no titles here.’
‘Hear, hear,’ came devoutly from the corner. From Mary that would be, then, not Mother Mary. She would try to remember. People should be allowed to choose what people called them.
That was a very Georgie thought. She was almost proud of herself. Of both her selves.
Webb was laughing at them all. Settling on the floor, not far away, where a long-armed stretch would let him drop his ash into the same pot that Leonard used; lighting a long neat joint that he’d had ready, just to be sure that he had some ash to drop. Another candidate for first mate, was he? That was how it looked to jaundiced Grace.
Someone else who took the name he wanted. Fair enough. She wouldn’t challenge that, but she did say, ‘What’s funny?’ – and that was all Grace, and she was almost ashamed of herself. Of just the one self, Grace, because of course Georgie wouldn’t stand up to her for a moment and couldn’t be expected to.
He said, ‘You’ll learn. But truly, Leonard, you can’t go laying down the law and then complain when people salute you for it. Any more than Mary can embrace four dozen folk at once, remember all their birthdays, and still resent it when they call her Mother. Some titles just . . . accrue. You can’t choose not to be what you are.’
‘Of course you can,’ Mary said. ‘You can choose to be Webb, plain and simple.’
Which confirmed a lot of her suspicions and underlined, she thought, what everyone was saying here, and even more what they were thinking. But Webb said, ‘Oh, that, of course – but I can’t choose not to be me. I can only choose what you call me. A Webb by any other name would smell as sweet. And if you will stalk around insisting that everything be shipshape, you can’t complain when people call you captain, because you are; and if you will insist on mothering everyone, Mary dear – including slapping us down when we’re naughty – then, you know . . .’
‘Oh, be quiet and smoke your nasty thing. Why you insist on that grim resin when we have perfectly good home-grown weed I cannot imagine, but—’
‘You see?’ Webb pulled a whimsical face and shrugged extravagantly. ‘Even when we’re arguing about it, she can’t help doing what she does. Give it up, Mother. Some fights are lost before they even begin.’
Some fights are fought over and over again as demonstrations, for other people’s benefit. She understood that. She’d seen it happen in the grandest houses in the land, between the highest ranks of people; and all for her own benefit, or at least to impress young Grace Harley, born of Billericay. That wouldn’t happen now, but she didn’t want it. She never had.
She didn’t want it here either, even if it was done with better humour. She said, ‘So it’s not a ship. That’s good, I didn’t think that I was coming to a ship – but I’m sorry, I’m still all at sea here. Actually, what is this? What are you all doing here?’
‘Waiting,’ Webb said, with another snort of private laughter.
‘Growing,’ Mary said, bringing her a mug of tea.
The mug was roughly thrown and coarsely glazed, and she didn’t think it would be very steady if she had a table to set it on; she wrapped both hands around it, in lieu of steadiness, and waited to be enlightened.
‘Being ready. Getting ready,’ Leonard said – which seemed to be the same things in the same order, but . . .
‘Isn’t that the wrong way round?’ she said, because the only other thing to say would have been ready for what?, and she wasn’t ready for that. ‘Don’t you have to get ready before you are?’
‘No. You need to be in a state of readiness first, before you can begin to prepare.’ His cheroot had gone out. He frowned at it distractedly, fussed a little with matches and flame, puffed out thin clouds of evil-smelling smoke until it was drawing again to his satisfaction. Ready then, he went on – or else he started again, or else changed the subject entirely. Or, possibly, answered her original question.
He said, ‘When I was a young man, I was all over the show. All at sea, yes. Hong Kong to Honolulu, Surabaya to San Francisco to St John’s. Then the war . . . happened. I was on the Arctic convoys, Archangel, Murmansk. I saw . . . No, never mind what I saw. Things I wouldn’t tell a lady. I survived, though half my crew mates didn’t. I swore I would never go into the cold again. I went back to the tropics, worked tramp steamers around the Philippines for a while, then found my way to India.
‘Where I stayed. For a while. I left the sea. Yes, it was a surprise to me too – but I wanted something I couldn’t find on shipboard. I wanted horizons beyond a metal hull and the companionship of a dozen men just like me, war-scarred and closed in, locked down. Every ship I served on was like a can of damage, brewing in the heat. It might be the first smart move I ever made, getting out while I could.
‘And then – well, there was India. Before the rush, before the hippy trail brought us half the youth of Europe and the States too. Hell, I practically built the hippy trail. All too literally, some stretches: the road from Hussainiwala down into the Punjab, I worked my way across that land. It was unheard-of, a white man labouring alongside the natives, but they were very good for the most part. They allowed it. I had no caste, do you see? So people could be outraged, but no one was offended.
‘And I learned. I visited ashrams in the Deccan and monasteries in the hills; I talked to holy men on the road. I think I met Kim, though he was an old man who’d almost forgotten that he’d ever been white. I found my way up into the Himalaya, inevitably, and over the border to Tibet. The people there were careful of me, so that I didn’t run into trouble with the authorities. I was there a while – they are a remarkable people – but I couldn’t stay. My simple presence put my hosts in danger. They went to extraordinary lengths to keep me safe, but I couldn’t do the same for them.
‘With their help, I came down over the mountains into Nepal. Even that time was a revelation to me: long nights under the stars, talking and walking and being silent. I had finally turned around and was starting to head home, and I hadn’t realized till then quite what I was taking with me. In Kathmandu, I met my first Western longhairs. It was too soon to call them hippies, for we didn’t have the word yet. I called them beatniks, I think, though that was really the culture they’d come away from, looking for something else.
‘It had taken me years to go as far as I did; it took me years longer to come back. By then they were everywhere. I watched them and envied them – they were young, for the most part, they hadn’t had the war as I had – and I seemed to spend half my time helping them out of trouble. They were . . . spectacularly naive. And irresistibly attractive, despite that or else because of it. Those that I helped mostly headed home after, determined to echo the kind of life they’d glimpsed or dreamed of, somewhere they had better hopes of making it happen and getting it right. It’s always easier to rebuild Eden in your own backyard, when the original is full of other people who are not at all like you.
‘You could say that having taken a hand in building the hippie trail, now I was doing the same for the commune movement, sending kids back to the land, back in their own land. At least this time I knew more or less what I was doing. I’d watched these kids trying to live together in ashrams or villages or improvised communities, I’d listened to them building dreams of how they could live together back home; I already had my own ideas how well that would work, and how I could make it better. Which was the first inkling I had, that I wanted to make it better: which would mean coming home, and then finding a space, and then . . . well, this.’
A gesture of his hands in the soft light and the smoke, to encompass the house and the woods around and everyone who dwelt there.
And her, apparently, presumptively.
She said, ‘What makes this better?’
‘Discipline.’ That didn’t come from Leonard, it came from Webb: puffing at his joint, still laughing. Not stoned, she thought, not yet. Just amused.
‘Rules,’ Leonard said. ‘Oh, don’t worry: this isn’t shipboard, and I’m really not captain. We don’t run everything to the clock. But we do have rules. Everyone eats together, and everyone sleeps together. Not in the orgy sense, unless you really want to, but communally. Nobody sleeps alone. There are rooms for those who want to couple up and those who want to play, for a night or a week or a lifetime; otherwise, we all doss down in dormitories. Walls between us cause more problems than they solve. I won’t have them.’
There had been, presumably, hammocks swinging below decks, all swinging together, snores harmonized in rhythm. Something to hold on to. And then, presumably, a captain’s cabin, isolation, extremity. Something to let go. The loneliness of command, the man on the summit of the mountain: achievement, and what else? A power that he didn’t want, that he’d walked away from. A career and a lifetime left behind. Five oceans left behind. He was a long way here from the sea.
He had been further. Literally in the mountains, sleeping in temples and longhouses with warm bodies clustered all around him. She could see how that would influence a man, how he might try to bring something of it back with him. Even so: ‘If you don’t want people being private,’ she said, ‘if you don’t want them going off by themselves, why come here?’ This house was too big. She hadn’t seen halfway around one wing of it yet, and even so. She could take everybody from the ballroom at her back and isolate them, one in each room that she came to, and there would still be rooms left over. A lot of rooms.
‘So that we can be ready,’ he said. ‘As we are. When they come, we’ll always have space for them.’
‘When who comes?’
‘Everybody.’ Just for a moment then he was mad, or else he was a messiah, both. His smile, his gesture encompassed the world. This was a church, then, after all.
She just looked at him.
He chuckled and drew his hands back together. Here’s a church, here’s a steeple – except that the steeple was a chimney, smoking.
He said, ‘You came. So have all these others. So will others yet, as the word reaches out. Here’s a community that works, in every sense. That’s the other rule, the one we haven’t told you yet. Everybody works. What you work at, that’s up to you. Inner peace or world peace, waving joss or weaving jute, we don’t care. It’s not “do what thou wilt”, that’s discredited, though it comes from Augustine of Hippo, with love attached. Our rule is “be who you are”. One way or another, that tends to keep people busy.’
And then he looked at her, and puffed on his foul cheroot, and said, ‘So who are you, Georgie Hale?’
This was it, her moment. Tell her story, explain herself. Little bits of truth, like slates nailed on to a frame of solid lies; they might make a roof, to keep the rain off. For a while.
Be who you are. She opened her mouth to break that first commandment, to be someone utterly other than herself – and back in that corner again, by the shuttered window, Mary lit new joss and rang a little bell.
Just a little brass trill – it was nothing, a mention to the gods, not worth mentioning. But it made the hangings billow all along the wall there, where there must be other windows closed behind them; and there was a shape that formed behind that shifting fabric, small and dire. It might have been a boy just standing there, being there, waiting, ready.
And there was a drip, drip between her feet, and that wasn’t her cup of tea, no, spilling from her heedless hand. That was her hand, where unheeded blood was dribbling from beneath the bandage and running down her fingers and drip, drip dully on to the rug where really she shouldn’t have heard it at all because really she should have been screaming.