I thought she was the lucky one.
People did come, at last, too late, as ever. By then Georgie was on her feet: standing in the doorway, holding on to the open door, bellowing for help.
She was holding on because standing up was actually quite hard; she was urgent for help to come because – well, because there was nothing she could do herself.
Grace never had been any good at anything actually useful. Except the swimming, perhaps – and what use had that been, now that she’d actually used it?
Right now, here and now, the girl she’d saved was doing worse than before, and she could do nothing for her. She had no gifts of healing, no training, no power to save. Here and now, all she had was a voice.
Even that was weaker than she liked. She who had screamed delight across terraces, through whole sleeping country houses to be sure that every man in hearing would at least know that Grace was at it again, doing what she was known for, what she was invited for: she barely had the wind to rouse a corridor tonight. And even now she wasn’t sure; she harboured some treacherous little Tom-voice that whispered you’re dreaming, you’re delirious, you’re weak from loss of blood. Lake water and shock have poisoned your mind. You see monsters in the fire, remember? You hear bells underwater and think they cut your wrists. And what, you think you should wake the house because you think some horror vampire creature you spun from the dead baby you couldn’t bear is sucking the life out of this other girl instead of you . . .?
Put like that – well, she didn’t have to put it like that, or like anything. She didn’t have to make sense, only noise.
She screamed, she bellowed, and people came. Mary came, and the captain and Webb came together; and behind them more people, people she couldn’t name, she hadn’t met them yet.
Something at least was obviously wrong, beyond this new girl shrieking blue murder in the corridor. Kathie was lying sprawled half across her pallet and half on the bare floor. Someone knocked the light on and she looked appalling, pale and gone, worse than she had in the ruddy firelight below when she was half burned and the other half drowned.
Georgie hadn’t been wrong, then, to rouse people. Any more than Mary had been wrong to set a watch; any more than Tom had been right to abandon it. He was here too, running in, squeezing through: too late, and desperately guilty.
It was what happened. Other people suffered, for her fault.
Mary and the captain bent over Kathie, lifted her back into bed, tried to rouse her. Webb was awkward, uncertain, trying to help and only getting in the way: which was unfamiliar ground for him, emphasizing his uncertainty, making things worse. Eventually, Mary snapped at him; the captain spoke more solicitously.
Webb grunted and came away. Came to her instead: blocking her view into the room, turning her around with irresistible hands on her shoulders, drawing her down the corridor.
‘Come on, you come with me. Poor Georgie, you are having a bad time of it, aren’t you, since you came to us . . .?’
I was having a bad time before this. She didn’t say it. There wasn’t any need; he knew already. Why would she have come here, else? And the last thing she wanted was to start, even to start to explain how everything bad that happened here was all her own fault, it had to be, everything stemmed from her.
She believed it, because it was true, but even so.
Webb took her through a door she’d never have found by herself, hidden in the panelling; down a narrow stair to another floor, and along to another room.
This was his room. She knew it the moment she walked in. Indeed, she knew it beforehand, just from the way he opened the door for her. There had been a hundred men or more – well, boys, a lot of them, but still – and a hundred rooms, and every one of them was different, a new occasion, but even so . . . They might be shy or anxious or embarrassed about showing her their room, they might be proud or excited, they might be utterly offhand; it didn’t matter. There was still that sense of a passport issued and a boundary crossed. It might be by invitation rather than invasion, she might be utterly and thrillingly welcome there, and even so. She was a female entering male territory, his. It was always an occasion.
Even here, even in the middle of the night, in crisis. He opened the door for her; the light was already burning. She stepped inside.
And stood looking for a moment, as she always did, just to see what she could learn. What his room had to say about him. It was often more revealing than what a man would say about himself.
She used to use that information for herself, what little benefit – less and less, these days – she could scrape up. Mostly that used to mean money. It still did, she supposed, even here. Money’s not an issue, but of course it was for her, and she was doing a job of work for Tony. This was what she’d be paid for if she got it right. It was quite hard to remember that in all the dizzy strangeness of the place; she felt more like a supplicant than a spy, when she didn’t feel like a victim or a heroine, both.
And when she thought about making Tony happy, it wasn’t about the money, much.
Right now she wasn’t thinking about Tony much at all. Webb’s room, and Webb himself standing right behind her, above her, as he drew the door closed at their backs; and there was his bed under the window, a mattress on the floor like her own, with the covers thrown back as he must have scrambled out of it, some of yesterday’s clothes still scattered where he hadn’t scrambled into them. He was wearing jeans and nothing, bare-chested and barefoot with his hair caught back in a ponytail for the night, and she said, ‘I thought you weren’t supposed to sleep alone?’
He looked down at her and laughed and said, ‘You know, most girls would blush when they said that. Or a second later, more likely, when they realized what they’d said.’
‘I . . . don’t blush much.’ But that was Grace, not Georgie talking. It was wrong; of course Georgie was a blusher. Nice English girl in trouble, of course she was. But she couldn’t fake that, and she couldn’t make it true: only hang her head and hope he’d hear it as a lie and take the blush itself for granted.
She wasn’t sure that Webb took much for granted. He was too careful.
Still: he laid a hand flat against her shoulder and steered her towards the bed, while she felt curiously grateful for the worn cotton grandad shirt she seemed to be wearing for a nightie, which was certainly not her own and she couldn’t quite remember putting on. Mostly, she didn’t bother with nightwear. She liked to be a little shocking, and she didn’t really see the point of clothes in bed. They only got in the way. She liked to feel a man’s bare skin against her own; it told her things, the same way that his room did. Different things from what he said himself.
‘It’s true,’ Webb said, ‘we’re really not supposed to have our private spaces – but this is where I work, it’s not a bedroom. Sometimes the work gets on top of me, though, there’s so much to do I can barely take a break; and then it makes sense to have a bed in here that I can crash on for a few hours. Leonard doesn’t mind, so long as I don’t treat it like a privilege. It’s a tool, is all. This is how I contribute best to the family.’
And, what, you don’t ever share it with anybody else, this tool, this room with a bed and a door and a key in the lock?
Not that he’d need to, of course. If they wanted to shag, he and Kathie, there were rooms for that. But this was inescapably his own room. Everything here said so: his things on the floor; his papers on the desk; his maps and plans and pictures on the wall.
She wanted to look at those more closely, but she’d rather he wasn’t watching while she snooped.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I thought you were taking me somewhere I could sleep . . .?’
‘I am,’ he said. ‘I have. You can. Oh, not with me, don’t look so wide-eyed awkward.’ He was laughing down at her from only inches, almost an open invitation whatever his words were saying. ‘I’m not about to seduce a girl on a night like this, when she’s been through so much already. Besides, Kathie’s my girl. Didn’t you know? But if you’re not too fussy about the sheets, you can use my bed for the rest of the night. I won’t be needing it any more.’ Whatever had happened to Kathie, he meant to be right there at her side.
I’m sorry my nightmare came and ate her instead of me. I’m sorry . . .
She should let him go, then, pronto. Then she’d be free to nose among his things. Only she started shaking, a little, when she only thought about that scene upstairs: the girl fallen back into unconsciousness, fallen half out of bed and utterly into the dark. Her own personal dark, the emptiness of Grace. She really didn’t want to be left alone with that guilt, but she had no way to say so; only, ‘Wouldn’t you be better here, just for a bit? If this is where you work? It’d settle you down, at least . . .’ Sit at the desk there, do whatever it is you do, I’d find that comforting. I could sleep, I think, maybe, if there was just another presence in the room. No doors, no walls between them. She had more sympathy with Leonard than she knew; she almost asked to go up to a dormitory, to sleep in with everyone else, as everyone else was doing.
She didn’t want to be picked out, set apart. That was the last thing.
She couldn’t ever have what she actually wanted. That was the first thing, the rule of her life.
He said, ‘My work is everywhere, love. Wherever I am, there’s work for me. This is where I come when everything else will let me, it’s my refuge; but I’ll watch over Kathie the rest of this night. You can sleep easy, undisturbed. That’s why I want to put you here, because no one’s going to come in looking for either one of us. There aren’t many safe spaces in the house; this is one of the few. When that door’s shut, people steer clear. So go on, get your head down. I’m going to sit right here –’ turning the desk chair around to face her and doing just that, emphatically, just the thing she wanted – ‘and watch until you’re asleep, the way I should have been watching over you upstairs. Whatever’s happened, I ought to have been there, and I’m sorry I wasn’t. I don’t know what happened to Tom; he said he’d sit in for me but obviously he didn’t.’ A distracted frown promised trouble for Tom.
She was curious herself, what had taken him away, but she didn’t want to see him disciplined. Whatever they had in the way of discipline, these people . . .
She said, ‘He was there, I remember, I spoke to him – only I fell asleep, and then he wasn’t . . .’ It wasn’t much of a defence, but defence never worked anyway. The prosecution always won; that was how the system worked. How it looked after itself.
He said, ‘Well. I’ll ask. I’d like to know. But it doesn’t matter now. I don’t suppose he could have done anything anyway, except fetch help and save you having to scream your head off. Bed now, you. You look dreadful, all eyes. Like piss-holes in the snow.’
‘Oh, thanks . . .’ That was automatic; so was the face she made, little-girl rudeness, sticking her tongue out at him. It was the kind of thing her old men enjoyed, Kensington suits puffing cigars and dressing her up in baby-doll outfits, expecting her to behave to suit. She was too tired and shaken to be right tonight, to be Georgie.
She didn’t think he’d noticed. He just smiled, a little, and sat waiting, the epitome of patience. After a minute, she slithered obediently into his bed.
Her body seemed to fit naturally into the dent he’d left. It was still warm, and it smelled pleasantly of male occupation. She pulled his blankets in under her chin and blinked up at him.
‘Close your eyes,’ he said.
She might have been mulish and refused. She might have been foolish, little-girl stubborn, demanding stories; she might have been all Grace, trying to lure him in with her: ‘Just for a while, just for company.’ But she seemed to have rediscovered Georgie; or else she was just glad to give over control for a while, to do as she was told for once; or else she was just too tired to do anything else.
She closed her eyes and didn’t hear it when he left the room. Her body had remembered just how much it favoured lying still and warm and silent; her conscious mind had left the room already.
True to Webb’s word, no one came to wake her before the sun did, striking down through a gap between closed shutters, sliding over her face like a hot slow feather.
She opened her eyes on a sneeze, closed them indignantly, couldn’t recapture either the dream or the sleep that she had lost both together. Accepted reluctantly that she was awake, then, and took a moment to work out where.
Only a moment: too much had happened, too quickly. She felt already as though she’d been here too long. A sensible girl would be packing already, heading out. Heading home.
But Tony would be unhappy, and none of her questions would be answered let alone his, and – well, Grace had never been a sensible girl. It was a point of honour, almost.
And she was alone, in what might or might not be Webb’s bedroom but was most certainly his office; and sooner or later he was going to come and check on her, so her best chance for snooping was right now.
Out of bed, then, and straight over to that desk. Webb had a scarily organized mind; she could tell that just by looking. Box files, folders, a Rolodex – a hippy with a Rolodex! – and ledgers. Accounting ledgers, and a daily diary, and what seemed to be copies of every letter he sent out in response to the letters he’d received, and . . .
Really, it was easier to look at the wall. And more interesting, unless that only meant less scary. She could look at the wall and not have to think, not have to play detective: though it was still clearly important and probably did still need thinking about. Here was a map of the world, and here all around it and overlying the edges of it were postcards pinned up, and a thread of one colour or another ran from each postcard to a point on the map, where it was twined around a drawing pin. Presumably the pins marked the place the card had come from. It was all very sweet and a little bit obsessive and very male, she thought, boy all through. Only, it seemed too young for Webb, the sort of decoration she’d expect in her twelve-year-old cousin’s bedroom, if he had pen pals across the world. It wasn’t unlikely; the last she heard, he was collecting stamps. But that had been a while ago. Maybe he would have moved on; maybe he was collecting rock and roll albums by now, with girls on the side. Maybe he wasn’t even twelve any more, he might be older. She hadn’t really been paying attention, this last year or two. But then, she’d had no cause to. His mother had made it perfectly clear, publicly clear that Grace was not to see her precious boy again, not corrupt him with gifts, not taint his pure innocence with words or kisses from her sullied mouth.
It hurt, but she could live with it. Everything hurt, and here she was, still alive. Despite her best efforts.
Maybe the house would help out there. Webb had saved her, last night, maybe; but Webb wouldn’t always be around.
Perhaps he wouldn’t always be willing. If he ever understood what she was here for, who had sent her, who she really was – perhaps next time he’d leave her to sink.
She might be grateful. Kick a bit, struggle a bit, sink in the end.
She didn’t really understand what she was here for herself, why Tony would really have sent someone so obviously unready for the task. Untrained, untalented. Here she was, making her first clumsy attempt at spying for him, trying to work Webb out; and here she was, getting caught already.
Hearing the door open behind her, when she was leaning over the desk trying to make sense of it all; and Webb was the only one who ever came in here when the door was closed. He’d said that as if it was a guarantee and not a trap. This would be him, then: and apparently she could blush after all as she straightened abruptly, as she turned around to face him, as—
Oh.
Not Webb.
‘Hullo, Tom.’
‘Hi.’ He almost sidled into the room; she couldn’t tell behind his hair and beard, but she thought he might be blushing as fiercely as herself. He couldn’t be embarrassed, could he, catching her with her legs bare, obviously nothing on under the hem of the shirt? Surely not: it was decent enough, as long on her as her dress of yesterday. And this was a commune, for crying out loud. They shared bathrooms and bedrooms without a second thought. He must be used to nudity; he should be utterly casual about it. So not that, then. But something was making him awkward, coming between them, keeping his eyes from meeting hers . . .
Oh. Yes.
‘Are you in trouble,’ she asked bluntly – anything to distract him from what she’d been doing, how he’d caught her spying – ‘over leaving us last night?’
‘Webb had a word with me, yes.’ He sounded like a schoolboy, after an unpleasant encounter with a prefect. Those were always worse than teachers. So Grace had been told, at least, time and again, by rich old men nostalgic for their days at public school. At least only a couple of them had been nostalgic for the cane that apparently came part and parcel with such encounters.
Georgie would know all about prefects, from her own experience rather than billiard-room reminiscences and bedroom favours. She smiled sympathetically. ‘Poor Tom.’
He shivered, crossed his arms over his chest and rubbed his hands up and down his shoulders. ‘Poor Tom’s a-cold.’
He was being deliberately theatrical, his turn to offer her distraction. She did at least know that much. Georgie would know what he actually meant, most likely. Grace not, but she bluffed it anyway: changing her smile to a laugh of recognition and then allowing him a change of subject as he clearly didn’t want to linger on that one. She turned boldly back to Webb’s desk and the wall behind it, and said, ‘What is all this?’
If Webb had been as nasty as she guessed, Tom shouldn’t mind betraying a few of his secrets. Maybe she was cut out to be a spy after all; maybe she had a natural gift for it, turning one man against another . . .
‘That’s Webb’s web,’ he said, coming to stand beside her. ‘He says it helps him keep track of all the connections in his head, if he has it spread out on the wall like that. Me, I reckon he just thinks maps are cool.’
‘I’m sure you’re right. And I expect he is, too. Both ways. But what is it? What does that mean, Webb’s web?’
‘He has this network, places like us all across the world. Well, not like us, exactly. People who think like us – except not that, either. People like the captain, who’ll play host to people like us. It’s how we’re going to change the world.’
‘Is it? How’s that, then?’
He pulled a face. ‘It’s really hard to explain to people outside the web. Which is the point, really. You have to be able to think like us, before you can think like us; you have to learn how. And then you can’t think any other way, and then it doesn’t need explaining.’
‘Try anyway. Because, you know. I don’t think like you.’ And I don’t think you think like Webb either, but if you want to tell me different, go ahead.
‘Right. Webb does this better, because . . . Well, because it’s his idea. And because he’s Webb, y’know? But he says that if you only think rationally, then war is impossible. Not just wrong, it’s impossible. You’re not a pacifist if you can’t fight, you’re something else, something higher . . . you’ve evolved. That’s what Webb is all about: helping us to think rationally. Which means writing a new language to think in and teaching us how to use it.’
‘What, you mean like 1984?’ Grace couldn’t often bring books to the conversation, but here she could: memories of school time, where hers must overlap for once with Georgie’s, because everybody did Orwell. Days and days of sitting in the back of the class and being bored, but still something seemed to have sunk in. ‘Doublethink, and “Peace is War” only the other way around, and stuff like that?’
‘No, not like that. Almost exactly not like that.’ He shrugged helplessly, then apparently decided that was feeble and tried again. ‘In Orwell’s book, everything is a lie. Big Brother is lying to the people, and the people are lying to each other, they’re lying to themselves. Newspeak is an instrument of lies: that’s what it’s for, that’s all it’s capable of. Webb’s universal language will be an instrument of truth. It won’t be possible to lie. That’s the point. If you can’t even think a lie, if you can’t express it, then how can you conceivably go to war to defend it?’
‘What, are all wars started over a lie? Is that what you think?’
‘It’s what Webb thinks.’
He spoke with all the passion of the convert. Grace had met young men fresh from a Billy Graham crusade, high on Jesus; they had that kind of fervour. It was like a fever; she didn’t trust it.
She thought she was starting to get the measure of this place, maybe. It wasn’t the captain who’d be the guru here, that wasn’t what he was after. He just did what he said: he kept the place ready. Waiting. For Webb, or people like him. Leonard and Mary were the housekeepers, not the guiding lights. They laid the fire and stood back, waited for someone else to set the blaze.
She wondered if Webb was what they wanted, what they thought they’d been waiting for.
‘Webb’s language,’ she said slowly. ‘You said it will be this, it will be that. Isn’t it finished yet?’
‘I don’t think it’ll ever be finished. As we evolve, so will the language. It’ll have to. But at the moment – no, it’s not ready. In a way it’s barely even begun. He’s still putting his teams together. All across the world, see?’ He took her back to the map, to all those strings and pins and postcards. ‘He’s got teams building vocabulary in ashrams in India, grammar in lamaseries in Tibet. Teams in communities in Australia and California and upstate New York. He went all the way around the world, talked to everyone who’d listen, gave them the same basic grounding, all the work he’d done already. Then he left them to it. It’s about trust, as much as anything. But if the seeds are right – and they are – there’s only one way it can grow. And that’s upright, beautiful, incontrovertible . . .
‘Somewhere along the way, he met the captain. Leonard wasn’t interested in the language, not to get involved – he says he’s too old to learn a new trick, and he’s been through war already, he knows what he thinks about that, and sometimes it’s necessary. I think he’s right, he’s too old to reshape his mind to fit a new reality.’
‘Or he just doesn’t want to. Maybe he’s happy the way he is.’ She thought Leonard seemed pretty sussed already, content with himself and what he was doing here. What he was making happen.
‘Maybe. He doesn’t know what he’s missing. But I suppose no one ever does, do they? Unless they’ve had it and lost it, I mean. If you haven’t tried, you can’t know. Like sex, or getting high, or . . . Georgie? Are you OK?’
‘Yes. Yes, sure. I’m fine. I’m sorry, I just . . .’
‘Oh – you had your baby, and you lost it. Him. And I reminded you. It’s for me to be sorry; my words run away with me sometimes. I love this thing so much, I forget to think who I’m talking to. That won’t be possible either, in the language.’ He tried a smile, weakly, hopefully; she gave him one back, a little wetly. Each of them trying as hard as the other. He was nice, and so was Georgie. And he was unexpectedly sensitive, for a young man; he cottoned on quick, to see what had upset her.
That was useful, maybe. She could use it. Professionally. She sniffed and rubbed her cheeks on her sleeve like a little girl – and then cursed herself silently and looked around for a mirror and couldn’t see one, and glanced surreptitiously at her sleeve and no, it was fine, no make-up: that was long gone, what little she’d been wearing yesterday – and dragged them both back determinedly to what mattered. ‘So they met in India or wherever, Webb and the captain, and . . .?’
‘Yeah. And they kept in touch, and when he was back in this country, Webb came up here to see what Leonard was doing. It was a promise, you see, that there’d be a space for him. A place to work, where he could pull his own group together, and then send them out to spread the word. Words. Spread the words. That’s what we like to say, do you see . . .?’
She did see. She gave him the distracted smile that he was working for, to reassure him that she really was past the tears now; then she peered more closely at the postcards on the wall. If they had pictures, they were pinned up the wrong way round, with the message side facing out into the room; that was what had seemed strange when she’d looked before. That, and perhaps she’d subconsciously recognized from a distance that she didn’t recognize the letters they were written in. A close, dense script, angular and regular, exact, nothing like the vague and friendly loops of scribbled English.
‘This is headquarters now,’ Tom said quietly behind her. ‘As soon as Webb was settled, he wrote to all his groups. One by one, they’ve been replying. In the language, in the bare-bones version that we all have. The postcards are just for fun, really. They’re a sort of: “Are you receiving me? Report signal, over,” not much more than that. But there are sheafs and sheafs of paper too, going back and forth. Webb pulls it all together. He’s brilliant, you know. He’s a genius.’ It was said very plainly, in that way that hero-worship can be between men. A girl would have been starry-eyed and romantic, not trying to hide it. Tom struggled to be matter-of-fact, and gave himself away completely. ‘And then he teaches us. You should come to class, Georgie.’
‘Me? Don’t be daft. I can hardly speak English, and I never got the hang of French. You’ll never teach me another language.’
‘Webb could. And the language is . . . natural. Inevitable. It practically teaches itself.’
He was really eager, but she wasn’t here to sit in classes all day. Grace had left school behind her, just as soon as she could. Not Georgie, of course, but even so . . .
‘I don’t think so, Tom. I’d rather be making myself useful to Leonard and Mary.’ And Tony. Using any chance she had to nose around. Ask questions. In a language she understood.
One thing Grace had always had going for her, she understood people too. Better than she did English, sometimes. The silent language of the body: gesture and expression and the way they held themselves. She read Tom’s disappointment, and Georgie wanted to be kind to him; she said, ‘Perhaps you can show me the shapes of the letters later, and explain how they work. It looks like code to me. Or maths, or music.’ Anything she couldn’t read. Signs to tell her future. She didn’t have a clue where she was going or what she would do next. Sometimes that terrified her, more than anywhere she’d been already, or the worst thing she had done. Or the way it followed her, sat in her head, curled up beside her in the dark.
‘It is,’ he said. ‘It’s all those things. You can write music as easily as words; I’ll show you that. When you write your name, it’ll be like you’re writing the song of you.’ And he whistled that little trill of notes again, which she’d thought he had made up just for her. Apparently, it really did say Georgie. ‘Or formulas. You could do engineering in the language, and know that your buildings were safe and your machinery would keep working.’
And your milk won’t turn sour, and your dogs and your children will all behave with strangers, and your babies won’t die whatever you do, and . . .
She didn’t believe in a perfect society. She didn’t believe that she’d found one. Ruthlessly, she said, ‘How’s Kathie, do you know?’
‘Oh. I’m not sure that anybody knows. She’s . . . not really awake. Her eyes are open, but she’s not there. Not responding. Acid flashback, maybe? Or she’s just got lost, somewhere inside herself. We tried to call her out, but . . .’ A helpless shrug finished the sentence.
I guess she doesn’t speak your language well enough. Or you don’t. That was Grace, being nasty. Seeing true, though: he was thinking, for sure, that if the language had been perfect and both of them fluent, he could call and she would come to him, from wherever her poor mind was wandering.
‘She needs a doctor,’ Georgie said, anxious and guilty. Thinking that what Kathie most needed was for last night not to have happened: not to have danced too close to the fire, not to have plunged too deep in the water, not above all to have spent the night with her. Not to have been betrayed, blindly and absolutely: her, take her, don’t take me . . .
Was that really what had happened? She wasn’t sure, she couldn’t think – but it might as well have been. Deliberately or otherwise, it came down to the same thing in the end. Kathie suffered for Grace’s fault.
‘She’s getting one. Mary knows, if Leonard doesn’t – she knows when something’s beyond her. We’ve a doctor in London; he’s something to do with the house. Always has been, I think. He dates back before the captain found it, at any rate. Like Cookie, he came with the lease. Webb’s gone to phone him.’
Of course there was no phone in the house. It was one of her great expectations, that the essentials of life would be taken from her. But: ‘Wouldn’t it be quicker just to take Kathie into town?’ It took a day to come up from London, even if their doctor was prepared to drop everything and come right now.
‘To the cottage hospital? Sweetheart, there’s nobody there who could help. To them she’d just be a drugged-up hippie chick taking up a valuable bed. They’d be horrible to her and horrible to us. And they’d take her anyway, take her away from us and not do her any good, and we can’t have that. She’s better here. We’ll keep her comfortable until the doctor comes. Meanwhile, for my penance, Webb says I have to show you everything you didn’t see last night.’
He didn’t seem too distressed about it. Georgie thought his real penance had happened already, in that interview with Webb; Grace wanted to think he hadn’t been punished enough. She wanted to blame him. If you’d done what Webb said, if you’d been there in the room, the . . . thing might not have come, wouldn’t have come because I wouldn’t have been all alone and afraid in the dark like that, I’d have been talking to you; and if it had come anyway you could’ve protected Kathie from it. From me . . .
She wanted to, but even she couldn’t really make it his fault. She knew what she’d done. Perhaps it was only that she’d been too slow, but even that was a choice. She was quick enough, when a thing was to her benefit. Grace couldn’t hide in Georgie.
Even so, she said, ‘So where were you last night? Where did you go?’
‘Out to see Frank.’ He had a mulish cast to his mouth, apologetic but defensive; he still thought it was a reasonable thing to have done, despite the consequences. Not my fault, he wanted to say. I wasn’t to know.
He probably had said exactly that, and it had done him exactly no good whatsoever.
‘In the middle of the night?’ And out where? and who is Frank, is he Francis, is he the man I’m looking for? But one of those questions was unaskable and the other could wait.
‘Yes. He doesn’t sleep much, and he doesn’t like to be alone all night.’
‘I thought nobody was ever alone here?’
‘Nobody should be. But Frank won’t come into the house. We usually go out to him, one of us or some of us, at some point, just to scare his spooks away; and I wanted to ask him not to ring the bell, if it upsets you.’
‘Oh, what? But – no, you can’t upset the whole house, just for me . . .’
‘Of course we can. We could, if we had to. This is a community; we take care of our people. But it won’t upset anything, not to use the bell. It won’t upset Frank. I’ll take you to him, you’ll see.’
‘Can you take me to a bathroom first?’ Even dressed as she was, even knowing there might be men in there, that was suddenly rather urgent. ‘And find me something to wear?’
Webb says I have to show you everything, but actually that only seemed to mean the things that Tom found interesting, which mostly meant things outside the house. There were dormitories in the attics that she hadn’t seen yet, there was a whole wing she hadn’t even looked in; these people fitted this house about as well as these clothes fitted her. A woollen shirt and a long plain skirt: rough to look at, and rough on her skin. She didn’t quite understand why she couldn’t have pretty Indian cottons, though she was grateful not to have bells on the hem. Shifting her shoulders uncomfortably within the coarse fabric, clenching her toes to keep simple handmade sandals on her feet, she felt as though she’d been swallowed by some over-earnest primitive religion.
When she asked about the other wing, Tom shrugged. ‘Just rooms we don’t use yet, mostly. We’ll need them when the language spreads, when people want to come here from all over. Leonard thinks they’ll come for other reasons too, but it’ll be the language more than anything. Come on, I want to show you the gardens.’
‘It needs a better name,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘The language. What’s it actually called? What do you call it?’
‘The rational language, the universal language . . .’ He seemed at a loss. ‘It doesn’t have a name. Why would it need a name?’
‘Because it’s new, because you need to sell it. You’re excited, I can see that, but it doesn’t sound exciting.’
He was shaking his head, bewildered. ‘You’re not getting it; it’s not like that. It’s not a commodity that we have to sell. Once people understand, it’ll sell itself.’
‘You’re the one who doesn’t get it. You need to sell it to people who don’t understand, who haven’t learned about it, who don’t dig languages or hippies or communes or peace or politics. It needs to have a name.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Talk to Webb.’
She didn’t want to talk to Webb. Nor did Tom want her to, she thought. He was happy enough to talk about Webb, but not to hand her over; he wanted to have her to himself. It was quite sweet, and obligingly obvious.
In perfect accord, then, they came out of the house and crossed the yard behind. Here was the arch through to the stable yard, below the stopped clock; she suppressed a shudder and tried not to cradle her wrist. No bells rang out, nothing happened, she didn’t start to bleed.
‘Welcome to the Museum of Failed Endeavour,’ Tom said as they came out into enclosed sunshine on cobbles.
‘I’m sorry?’ She was being idiotic herself, she knew, looking about for curious horses and a dungheap. She’d stayed in too many great houses, swept through too many stable yards in too many sports cars; expensive motors and expensive beasts were still what she expected, even while her head knew perfectly well that there were no horses here, and no sports cars either.
Even so: she was being idiotic, but he was incomprehensible.
He grinned. ‘That’s what Webb calls it.’ So naturally it was what he called it too. ‘Well, he uses our own word; that’s a translation, but it’s close enough. We’re all interested in self-sufficiency here. A place this large, it has to feed itself and more, better. It needs to contribute to the wider community. We need to earn our place. We do voluntary work in the neighbourhood, and we make things for sale or to give away. Simple, wholesome things. Craft things. At least, we try. People have ideas, and this is where they come to try them out. Oftentimes, this is where they stay . . .’
Proper stable doors led to workrooms, rather than proper stable stalls. No straw on the floor, no tack hung on nails on the walls. Instead, old reclaimed machinery stood on bare and dusty stone. She stood looking at a giant wooden corkscrew, and knew that it couldn’t possibly actually be a giant wooden corkscrew, and said, ‘What is it?’
He was almost laughing now, but not at her. At his friends, his housemates, his community: almost at himself. ‘It’s a cider press.’
‘Is it?’ She thought about that for a moment, and found an obvious other question. ‘Where do you get the apples from?’ As far as she knew, apple country was the other end of England. She’d walked in orchards with lordlings and generals’ sons and eager politicians, she’d watched young men gather windfalls and seen urchins scrumping in the trees and scrambling over walls to get away; but those had been all in Devon and Somerset and Dorset.
Now he was laughing aloud. ‘Quick, aren’t you? Yeah, we had to buy the apples in. Even if we could grow them here, if we planted an orchard, it’d be years before we had fruit. Decades, maybe. And I don’t think the ones we bought were the right sort. Anyway, the cider tasted foul. If you want to try it, there are bottles and bottles in the old still-room, back in the house. We can’t throw it away, but we sure can’t sell it. We keep trying to hide it in the dinner. If there’s a nasty aftertaste one night, that’s because another bottle’s gone into the stew.’
The next door down stood wide, and the space inside was occupied. She didn’t go in, only peered from the doorway: shifting lights and busy shadows; an old tin bath raised up on bricks over a trough of flame. The smell of paraffin, and – ‘Oh! Candles!’
Long dipped tapers hung in pairs, in colourful tangles on the walls.
‘It’s almost our only successful industry,’ Tom said. ‘One of these days they’ll burn down the stable block, but in the meantime we have light for ourselves and more that we can sell at market. It pays for itself, at least. I don’t think it actually makes a profit, but it keeps the electricity bill down.’
And they enjoyed it, clearly, those people in there: felt themselves useful, doing their bit. She remembered what Leonard had said about that, and she still thought they were like children, playing with wax and string and fire. They wanted her to come in; they wanted to show her what they did; they wanted her to join them. She backed away from their welcome, not what I’m looking for, no.
The next stable held woodturning tools, lathes and chisels and mallets in racks. No people.
‘I think they’ve given up,’ Tom said. ‘Rick and Paulie thought they could make plates and goblets and candlesticks, but apparently it’s quite hard.’ Indeed, the work gathering dust on the bench bore witness: split and misshapen pieces, bowls and cups that looked more like they’d been hacked with blunt edges from twisted trees. ‘I think it needs a decade of practice, and they didn’t give it a month. They’re off in the woods now, gathering dead timber for Frank.’
‘Why does Frank . . .?’ And who is he, and is he who I’m looking for? And will he want to be found?
‘Charcoal,’ Tom said. ‘It’s his thing; he makes charcoal. It’s all right, Cookie keeps an eye on him. He won’t let anyone burn down the woods.’
She had no idea how charcoal was made, or really what it was for. They used to draw with it at school, but she didn’t think he meant those long neat sticks that would snap in a moment in careless childish fingers. People burned it, she did know that, but she wasn’t quite sure why.
This wasn’t the time to ask. Here was another workshop, where they did basket-weaving and made willow hurdles and wanted to learn how to thatch. She wasn’t sure there was any thatch up here in the north, but that wasn’t going to stop them. An intense man with a pale wispy beard and vivid eyes told her it was the finest way to roof, the only honest way to roof, a tradition that dated back to earliest times. The passion for slate had ruined the countryside, he said, and ruined the villages of England too. The cities could look after themselves, apparently; they were beyond hope and deserved whatever they did to themselves – self-scarring, he called them – but the villages should have been protected and were not, but could still be recovered. If people would only learn to live under thatch . . .
Tom rescued her, quite bluntly. ‘Sorry about that. People get passionate here. Cob’s safe to be passionate about thatch; nobody’s ever going to let him rip their good weatherproof roof off and sleep under reeds instead.’
‘Does he sleep under reeds himself?’
‘No, of course not. He sleeps in the dorms with the rest of us. Come on now. I really do want you to see the garden.’
The garden was his passion. Along with Webb and the logical language, of course: but this was something Tom could show off, legitimately his own. He led her down an unexpected passage in the far corner of the stable yard, and here at the end was a dungheap and a narrow wooden gate in a wall beyond; lift the latch and step through and it was almost like Narnia, almost another world.
It was a walled kitchen garden, as four-square as the stable yard, but everything there had been messy, dirty, decaying almost as she watched. Here was order, neatness, regularity, success. Cabbages and cauliflowers and leeks marched in regimented rows, vigorous and thriving; the dark soil between was free of weeds, freshly watered, freshly turned. It reminded her of her father’s allotment, her ritual Sunday visits – except that small patch of council land had always been a trial to him, a duty, sheer effort. This was vast in comparison, and a labour of love.
Tom took her up and down the rows and introduced her to his peas and beans in their pyramids of hazel, his raspberry-canes and strawberry beds, his solid swedes and turnips and his potatoes in their mounds. More and more, celery and salsify and: ‘This will be asparagus, it will, you’ll see. Three years, we’ll have our own asparagus.’
Three years, she wouldn’t be here. She hoped to God she wouldn’t be here. She didn’t say so.
After the vegetables came the herb beds, and the same in squads of pots: cuttings of lavender and rosemary and thyme and tarragon, dozens and dozens of them, rank after rank. ‘We sell these too, at the weekly market. They’re really popular.’ And he was really proud.
Lastly his joy, all along the north wall, where it would catch all the sun that England gave it: ‘We call it the orangery, but it’s not really, it’s a peach house. Frank found the account books somewhere, so we know. There aren’t any peaches yet, I just use it for a greenhouse and a potting shed, but all the pipework’s still here for the steam heat, and Cookie’s checked the boiler out; he says the system’s sound. The stove’s in that hut in the corner there, where I keep my tools. Next year, I’ll plant peach trees . . .’
This year, he’d spent every moment he could spare in replacing broken panes and repainting the framework, so that the peach house was a gleaming white monument that ran all the length of the wall. It was hot in there under the sun’s hammer, and she wasn’t sure she liked it. She praised it for his sake, but was glad to leave.
Still glad when he took her at last out of his wonderland, through a gate of open ironwork on to a path that led up into the woods. Now she was working for Tony, going to find Frank.
A stream ran across the path, a narrow freshet with bare mud banks, too small to bridge and too steep-sided to allow stepping stones. Tom leaped across, barefoot and casual; then he turned back, held a hand out. ‘Can you jump?’
Obviously, jumping was what people did; the mud bore many proofs. If she tried it in these sandals, she’d lose them and probably slip backward down the bank and into the water, flailing for his helpless hand. On another day in other company, Grace would have done that regardless, gone with a shriek and risen up dripping, cackling with laughter like a child, deliberately childish to amuse the man she was with.
Here, today, she slipped off the sandals and hooked the fingers of one hand through the woven straps, tested the mud cautiously beneath her feet, tensed, and leaped.
And landed, cool damp mud absorbing the shock of it, oozing between her toes as they dug for grip. Tom’s hand was there but she didn’t take it, didn’t need it. She found her own balance, lifted her face triumphantly, smiling, happy – and the phrase was there in her head already, like a child, and it turned itself unexpectedly into a question.
‘Why aren’t there any children here, Tom?’ There should have been small bare footprints among the adults’, rocks and branches in the water from where muddy hands had tried to dam the flow. A rope swing hanging from a tree. There really should be a pack of giggling, chasing children, here and everywhere: all over the house, heedless and hungry and beloved, cared for by everyone indiscriminately. That was her notion of a hippy ideal, and she couldn’t believe she was alone in that. Not here, of all places. She was just as glad not to have children about her, but she didn’t understand it.
‘Cookie won’t have them on the property. That’s about the only rule he has.’
‘Cookie won’t have them?’
‘That’s right. He says this would be a bad house for children, and that’s that.’
She wanted to ask why the janitor got to make the rules, but there was a smell of smoke in the air, sudden distraction. And the path turned, and here was a clearing, with more than a swirling smoke to surprise her. There was a great turfed mound leaking smoke here and there between the turfs, like a man leaking smoke between his teeth. The smoke rose white and thin, drawing her eyes up to where an old stone tower reached higher than the trees. It looked like a church tower in miniature, plain and strong, only that the church was in ruins now and only its tower was left to point like an accusing finger at an abandoning god.
Among the half-fallen walls and heaped rubble of its ruin, someone had built himself a home. It looked half like yesterday’s bonfire before the flame: a shapeless structure of salvaged planks and doors, covered over in places with tarpaulin and in places with more turfs, a green and growing roof.
‘Hey, Frank! Are you in?’
‘And where else would I be?’
Tom’s call produced first a sour response, a voice that seemed almost to rise from the earth itself, and then a figure that did the same. He emerged like something dark and dangerous from an unexpected hole between one door and the next, which startled her almost more than anything: if a man built his house with doors, surely one of them should open?
But these doors were walls, apparently, and this man was as mad as his house, or looked it. Grimy and wild-eyed, he wore a suit that Grace could recognize as Savile Row, though it was caked in mud; his feet beneath it were as bare as theirs, as bare as his chest where the jacket hung open because the buttons were long gone.
The trouser buttons too – the fly was gaping wide. She did try not to look.
‘Frank, this is Georgie. She’s our new arrival.’
‘Oh, aye. The girl who can’t hear bells, or else they make her bleed.’
Now she sounded mad, and she hadn’t even said anything yet. She glowered at Tom for giving away her secrets, but he didn’t get the message; he was most likely pleased with himself for being so thoughtful, bringing the problem to the source.
The source was looking at her almost hungrily; she couldn’t meet his eyes. Instead, her gaze slid back to that sudden tower, and she said, almost without meaning to, ‘Is that where the bell is?’
‘That’s right, aye. It’s not the original, mind; that went when the chapel went, fire and fury. Story says the old bell’s at the bottom of the lake.’
Heavy sonorous striking through the water, cutting and cutting. Making her bleed. She believed it immediately, and wanted to know the story without actually wanting to hear it, for fear that simple talk of bells might open up her hurts again.
Tom said, ‘Well, you’re the man for stories, Frank. That’s why I brought Georgie to meet you, so that you could tell her about the house.’
He thought it was a kindness, to both of them. She thought it a cruelty, each to each.
Frank said, ‘The house? I don’t like to talk about the house. I won’t go in there now, and nor should you. Nor should anyone. There are spirits abroad in that house. I have them bring my meals to me here. You should go home, young lady.’
‘I don’t have a home to go to.’ Grace tried to say that as a lie, as part of Georgie’s story: only that it felt suddenly and immediately true. She had a flat to go to, nothing like a home.
Into the silence that followed, she added, ‘I want to stay here,’ which was a lie pure and simple, just to remind her of her purpose.
Tom brightened abruptly, and she could have cursed herself, but apparently she didn’t need to. Frank said, ‘That house is cursed,’ and he might sound as mad as he looked but she thought he was right none the less. Except that he thought he could take shelter in the woods, and she remembered last night when she arrived and something – nothing – had been coming for her through the trees, and she thought he wasn’t at all safe out here, on his own in his troglodyte life.
She said, ‘Cursed how?’ and he shook his head.
It was Tom who had to answer her, saying, ‘Frank knows more than any of us about the house. More than Cookie, even. He vanished into the library as soon as he arrived, pretty much, and researched all its history. If there are ghosts anywhere, Frank knows where to find them.’
‘There are ghosts everywhere,’ Frank said. ‘The house gives them shelter, but they don’t belong there. People fetch them in.’
The sucking shape that was her own unborn child, dead before he came into the world, growing in the shadows, getting bigger, getting worse. He was right, she was sure.
A breeze stirred the smoke, wrapped a thin sheet of it around them, made her cough.
Frank stretched his nostrils and inhaled contentedly. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘That’s a good burn.’
‘Is that . . . how you make charcoal?’
‘In a clamp, aye. Build the logs around a chimney, high and tidy; turf it over and drop lighted coals down the chimney to make a fire at the bottom, low and slow. Then the collier’s task is to watch it, five days and nights. If the coat cracks, if air gets in, it’ll burn up and all your work is wasted.’ Even as he spoke he was stalking around the mound, slapping fresh damp earth from a bucket wherever he thought too much smoke was oozing out.
‘Five days and nights – and just you to watch it?’
‘Aye. It’s a lonely life.’ But he relished that, had set himself deliberately apart here. And people came out to talk to him, Tom had said so; he wasn’t really that solitary.
But: ‘What about sleep, how do you manage?’ No clocks, so he couldn’t have an alarm to wake him up.
‘Oh, I don’t. I daren’t. Not during a burn. If a log shifts and tears the turf, it could all be gone in a flare. I’m always here, always watchful.’
‘We come out to keep you company, Frank.’ Tom sounded almost indignant. ‘You know you could sleep while we watched . . .’
‘You kids? I’ll not trust you. You’ll get high, or get heavy with each other, and not notice when the whole clamp collapses and sets the wood ablaze. No, I’ve learned, it has to be me. You’re welcome to sit with me, help me stay awake, I’m grateful for that – but I’ll watch my own fires every time.’
Five days, five nights without sleep. Time and time again. No wonder he looked half mad. No wonder if he was half mad. She’d known people do that at weekend house-parties, never go to bed at all between Friday and Monday, but only with the help of pharmaceuticals, and they were mostly incoherent by the end.
She thought he was Tony’s missing journalist, he must be; she just wasn’t at all sure that he’d remember it.
Tentatively, she said, ‘So where are you from, Frank, what did you do before—?’
And wasn’t at all surprised to be cut off, before she’d even found an end to her question: ‘You don’t ask that, lass. Not ever, not of anyone. We’re here now. Someone wants to tell you, fine, but you don’t ever ask.’
It was like being in prison, then. She’d thought it might be. People might tell you, but you never asked what they’d done to put them there.
With her, of course, no one had ever had to ask. They all read the papers; they all knew already.
Frank was looking at her now with something more than speculation in his eyes. Something knowing. He might not remember his own past, but he might remember hers. Her face, her real name. A Fleet Street journalist, working for a red top – for Tony’s red top, above all: what could be more likely? A rational man might tell himself that he was wrong, that there was no possibility of Grace Harley being here, but this man wasn’t rational. There was nothing to stop him leaping to insane conclusions that did just happen to be true.
Hastily, she said, ‘What’s that you were saying about the old chapel here burning down? And the bell in the lake?’ It was the last story she wanted to hear, but the first thing she thought of, sitting high in her memory, right there, just as she sat here on the chapel’s old stones right in the shadow of its tower, under the mouth of its dreadful bell.
He said, ‘Back in the day, in the seventeenth century, the master of the house had his private chapel out here, with a priest’s house by. Why he didn’t want him in D’Espérance itself – or why the man wouldn’t go, more likely – I’m not clear. There is no record, though I do have my suspicions. I think he was a wise man, though he did a foolish thing. Anyway, here he was, in place and in authority; and the master of the house was murdered. By his wife, it may have been, or by his housekeeper; there are different tales told. By a woman, though. And that was petty treason either way, the murder of her lawful master by a subordinate, wife or servant as she was. A man would have been drawn and hanged; for a woman, she must be burned at the stake. And so she was, at the priest’s order and at the hands of the house servants, by the waterside here, and her remains flung into the lake. There was no due process, no trial. The local Justice of the Peace was outraged. He sent his constables to arrest the priest, but the man was tipped off; he was long gone before they came for him. His house and the chapel burned that night, though it’s not known who set the fire. As I said, the story has it that the chapel bell went into the water in chase of its mistress, and no priest has served here since.’
Her head was full of pictures, then and now: fire here, fire by the lakeside. A woman in the flames. A woman in flames. A hand reaching out of flame, to set another girl alight . . .
A bell in the water, endlessly tolling a death that had not quite happened yet. Endlessly sounding a warning, perhaps, like church bells in the war: beware, beware! Fear! Fire! Foes! Trying to tell a world that would not listen how she was not dead yet, how her spirit still lingered somewhere between the fire and the water, how she could still snatch out at the heedless.
Doing that good work, a word to the wise, to any who could hear – and still finding time to punish Grace, that relentless bell, to slash her stitches and cut her wrist to the bone. It should warn the world, maybe. Have her burned too. She didn’t quite know what petty treason was, but killing your own baby had to count, surely? And dying in a fire, horrible, maybe that would finally be punishment enough.
Maybe she should have thrown herself into the flames last night, instead of the water. Tried to find the lady. If she’d known she was in a three-card monte – the woman in the flames, the bell beneath the water, her baby dead and everywhere and coming – she might have done just that. She knew she couldn’t win.
Here came an interruption: a boy in corduroy, jacket and jeans, running easily up the path. She shouldn’t call him a boy, perhaps, he was maybe her own age, but oh, he looked so young in his tangled hair and his tangled innocence. He nodded to her dispassionately, said something to Tom that she couldn’t understand, couldn’t even disentangle the complex sounds of it enough to write them out in her head; when he said the same thing to Frank, he won himself no more than a scowl and a curse.
‘Speak English, damn you, if you don’t have the Gaelic! I’ve none of your heathen tongue and do not want it.’
‘Oh, come on, Frank. You’ve learned that much. The captain says it’s time for lunch.’ And he repeated the phrase, slowly and clearly, still unintelligibly.
Frank snorted and turned towards the bell tower, towards the bell rope, towards the bell: and then remembered, and glanced at her, and snorted, and ducked back inside his subterranean home.
And came out with a long straight coach-horn, set it to his lips and blew a blast – to the north, she thought – and then another to each of the other points of the compass.
Tom looked smug as echoes rang back down the valley. His idea, to save her the cutting bell – or at least to save her imagining, as he thought, that the bell was cutting at her.
She could be grateful, even if he thought it was all her imagination. The horn couldn’t scratch her. All it did was make her feel hungry, thinking about last night’s stew and the long night since, all that had happened, the shock and horror of it and the skipped suggestion of breakfast.
They made a little party, then, leaving Frank and going back down to the house: she and Tom and this new boy – Leaf, he called himself – and he only wanted to talk to Tom and only in that language, which left her feeling deliberately cut out of the conversation. That was nothing new. Half the men she’d known for half her life had done that as a matter of course, treating her as furniture or wallpaper or pudding. It was more or less what she expected, but not here. Oddly, here it made her furious.
As they bypassed the walled garden and came back through the stable yard, she let the two young men drift ahead of her: a step or two, and then a yard or two, then further. Heads down, intent on what they were doing – walking, yes, and talking too, and in their private code which needed concentration and paid it back with delight: how clever we are, and how different! – neither one of them noticed they were leaving her behind. They walked out under the shadow of the archway into the further sunlight of the courtyard, and neither one of them noticed that she wasn’t even following them any longer.
She stood still and watched them go, just in case; then she turned and walked quickly out of sight. Sooner or later, one of them was going to notice she was gone. Tom, she thought, she hoped. He’d come back to look for her. She thought, she hoped. But she wanted him to find her doing something, something else, not waiting for him to remember her.
She was being adolescent, she knew – it was the kind of behaviour that got her into trouble at school, often and often, we don’t like attention-seeking here, missy – but even so. She did it anyway. Being honest with herself – Grace, perhaps, being honest with Georgie, because why not? – she did absolutely want Tom’s attention. And expected it, had come to expect it, because he’d given her so much of it already. And would probably have expected it in any case, because he was a young man and that was what they did, they paid attention to her. Because she was a woman, or because she was Grace Harley, or because she was available or famous or any reason else. There always was a reason.
In the meantime, though, she did also want to make Tony happy. That was what she did, because she was Grace Harley, because he was Tony. It was very simple, really.
She thought she had found his missing journo, and that was good. She thought Frank was at least halfway mad, and something in this house had made him that way. That was not so good, at least for Frank. For Tony, it might make a story; that was good. If she could find it. Journo Goes Mad was not a story. Commune Drives our Undercover Reporter Crazy might be, but she’d need more than that. She’d need to find out why and how.
And not be driven crazy herself in the meantime. And not just bleed and bleed and be a stranger.
She didn’t want to walk into the house right behind the boys, because Tom might or might not remember about the bell waiting just inside the door there, he might or might not think about her, but Leaf knew nothing. He’d reach out and strike it, twice and twice; and every stroke would cut her, and she’d bleed and bleed.
Instead she cut herself away like this, and Tom would come to find her. By himself. They’d be alone again, because everybody at work in the yard here had gone to lunch; and she’d snare him in the shadows, half tremulous Georgie and half impetuous Grace. Nothing reckless, nothing to scare him away: just her arms around his neck and a nervous kiss like a nice girl, her not-very-girlish body warm and suggestive against his, cooperative under his hands if he dared to reach to touch. Whatever more came later, that would be fine. Right now she wanted him wanting her, thinking about her, not focused on his precious language. Not at all. If she was a spy, he was her double agent, and she wanted to turn him. Here and now.
Actually, she thought he was half turned already, only he hadn’t realized it yet. She just needed to make things clear.
Boys could be very dim. Give her a man, every time – except this time. She wouldn’t try to turn Webb. She might let him seduce her while Kathie lay adrift, but that would be a different thing, another kind of spying.
Another world, and at least his pillow talk wouldn’t be in his secret language.
Where to let Tom find her, now? There was the cider press, but that was a failure. The same for the woodturning workshop. Those were all the wrong associations.
The Museum of Failed Endeavour, did Webb call this place? Well, she wasn’t going to fail in her endeavours. Not this time. Tony love, I’ve got your story for you. And, look, it’s not about me this time, except in a good way . . .
There was the bread oven, a cube of brick with a heap of wood beside – but she’d been rude about the bread and hadn’t eaten it. Again, the wrong story.
The candle-making workshop, though: candles were good. Useful to the house, and profitable too. I wanted to help, Tom, so I came in here to volunteer: only there’s no one around. I’ll come back another time. After lunch. Only – well, I don’t want to go into lunch with everyone else, they’ll all be ringing that damn bell as they come, so I thought I’d hang back. Thanks for coming to find me. You’re really sweet, you know that . . .? Oh, come here.
That would do it. She supposed there must be boys who could resist her, but Tom wouldn’t prove to be the first of them. Let her once get her fingers in his hair, he’d be hers for the taking. Any way she wanted.
Her wish, his command. Help me understand this place, Tom love. Tell me everything. He’d do that, and more. All unwitting, he’d spy for her, be her decoy and her translator, her bodyguard at need. And a friend in need, that too. A friendly body in her bed, a guard against the horrors of the night. There’d be no more running off and leaving her, she’d see to that. It wouldn’t be hard.
She stepped inside the workshop, leaving both halves of the stable door wide so that he could find her easily when he came looking, but in the unlit gloom where he wouldn’t be so shy, in privacy so he wouldn’t be looking over her shoulder to see who else was looking.
She could be smart sometimes, in some things. Sly, some people called it. Her.
Gloomy it was in there, but enough light spilled in at her back. Enough to give her a shadow, even, throwing it across the tin bath elevated on its bed of bricks. No fire beneath that now, though the whole space still reeked of paraffin. The bath was about half full of molten wax; on a rack above it, a hundred wicks hung warmly dripping. The candle-makers must only just have left, at the summons of the horn. It was odd to think of the whole house, the whole wide estate this way: people trooping through places just abandoned by other people just ahead. Mark my footsteps, good my page. Ghosts and followers – only, she was unsure slightly who the ghosts were. Those who went before, or those who came after?
Or those who never came at all. It wasn’t fair, suddenly to find herself thinking of her baby again: but that was life, unfair all down the line. You can never be punished enough.
Not even when still wax stirs all by itself, when ripples run of their own accord.
When flame erupts beneath, from a pool of paraffin that had been out and dead.
When shapes form in that shifting wax, hands that shape themselves and rise and reach for you with long deadly fingers.
When you don’t, can’t make the effort to pull away out of their reach. When it isn’t worth the trouble.
When you almost bend forward, indeed, to make it easy for them to close their hot soft lethal grip around your throat, as you’re still thinking oh, my baby . . .