LONDON, ALICE THOUGHT AS SHE PREPARED to leave her Northcentral townhouse, had come as a shock. It was as if something in the west had left her amazed like some stupid bumpkin by sights she’d long grown used to. But her car was waiting, gleaming and darkening in the flash of Hallam Tower, and she let the great buildings and the morning’s traffic pass her by. Part of her thoughts were still with Ralph, but today she had other fish to fry.
Dockland Exchange, almost old enough now to be picturesque, still soared over the docks. If the story of her guild could be rewritten, Alice would certainly have chosen a different location for its main halls. Sometimes, she even permitted herself daydreams of taking over the halls of the Beastmasters or perhaps even the upstart Toolmakers along Wagstaffe Mall, but today such hopes were far off. And she supposed, as she stepped out and looked up through the turning cranes at the great, tall edifice where her husband worked, that there were advantages to be gained in having your head office close to the real means of production. Wealth, she knew as she stepped over slippery spillages, was essentially a messy business, and had little to do with marble halls and courtrooms.
She took the lift, but nevertheless stopped at many floors, unannounced at first, although word that the greatgrandmistress was about had soon spread upwards. Uppermasters and highermasters scurried amid the clatter of typewriters, air-tubes, message trolleys, ribbon-reads. As always, she made a special note of those most knowledgeable and hard-working; such men were useful to her guild, but then again, they could pose a threat.
Tom had already been long at his desk when she reached his wide top office. Club luncheons and morning walks had their parts to play in the smooth functioning of the Great Guild of Telegraphers, but these were difficult times, and she felt a twinge of pity for him. He looked measurably older now, and had been unable to properly sustain an erection last night despite their long separation. If he carried on this way, he’d be in his grave even sooner than his father. But this, Alice decided, as she laid her hands on his shoulders and kissed the thinning hair on top of his head, this was the difficult end of a difficult Age. Everyone would have to make sacrifices.
‘I really must get down to that house of ours in the west.’
‘Of course you must.’ She straightened up, removed her gloves. Light gleamed on the paintings and panels. Up here, London was bright, blue-grey. As soon as you get the chance, you must take a proper rest, darling.’
And you say Ralph’s much better.’
‘He’s not just better, darling. He’s mended, and he spends all his days out on the beach. He’s even made friends. Honestly, darling, you’d hardly recognise him. Otherwise, I would never have left him and come here.’
Tom sighed and smiled. At least something’s going the right way.’
She sat by his desk, and they began to talk business. The figures prepared for her by the reckoning engines hadn’t been done in quite the way she’d asked, but nevertheless they told the expected story. Profits were down. Costs were up. Pessimism was always more infectious that optimism—you only had to listen to the conversations in the clubs—but the Telegraphers were suffering even more than the other Great Guilds. Alice had taken her eye off things far more than she’d imagined during Ralph’s illness, and this was the price they were paying. But she had plans.
‘Let’s go outside. I’ve something I want to explain to you.’
Out on the balcony, the tart London air rushed over them. From up here, the huge roofs of the warehouses seemed to be climbing over each other in their eagerness to get to the crowded river.
‘Strange, you know, that old Grandmaster Pike should die in the way that he did,’ Tom, who wasn’t looking at the city at all, was saying. ‘I mean, to fall from a balcony. It reminds me of that chap who was talking of buying into some of our shares a few years back and restructuring the board. What was his name—Digby? No, Drigby. He died in a fall as well, didn’t he?’
Lightly, but unblinkingly, Alice met her husband’s gaze. ‘What are you thinking?’
‘I don’t know really,’ he sighed, his eyes drifting from hers to follow the movement of a crane towards a ship. ‘People dying, I suppose.’ There was a long pause. Tom’s eyes, he studied without seeing the clamorous scene below, seemed lost and strange. ‘These are hard times for us, Alice. But everyone says we’re the luckiest couple on earth, especially now Ralph’s properly mended.’
‘And we are. And we will be.’ Alice composed her profile and let her eyes glitter in the wind. ‘We own, as you know, a lot of land on the east coast. It’s poor stuff mostly, and we lease most of it for grazing at a few pennies an acre. Of course, it was where we were supposed to be siting that new telephone line that Pikes were supposed to have built, but I think there’s something else we can do with it…’
She’d planned this moment, had envisaged it happening much as it really was now out on Tom’s balcony, although things were almost spoiled by a sudden swirl of London wind as she tipped out the contents of the envelope she’d removed from her pocket. Light and dry and green, the stuff almost scattered from her palm before she managed to cup it. But there was still enough left for Tom to dab his wetted finger into her hand when she prompted him to taste it.
He pulled a face. ‘It’s almost sweet—but it has a kind of edge to it. What’s it called?’
‘Bittersweet. People in the west occasionally use it as a herb. But it never grows that well there. It thrives, you see, on poor soil, cold conditions. It’s a practical crop for us to grow on that land along the east coast.’
‘For what?’
‘Do you know how much sugar cane we import each year from the Fortunate Isles to feed England’s sweet tooth?’
‘But I’m not aware that there’s any kind of shortage.’
‘There isn’t.’
‘You’re saying this could be grown and marketed as a substitute …’ Tom swallowed, his cheeks still working and his eyes watering slightly. He saw her point; he always did. They made a good team—she with her ideas and subtle influences, he with his hard work and determination. Bristol would have less trade and London would have more, and the Telegraphers’ Guild would profit enormously …
‘I’ve had a little research done,’ she continued. ‘You’d be amazed at the uses bittersweet can be put to. Not just cakes and chocolates and for stirring into tea. Scents and cosmetics as well—meat pies and cheeses—especially anything that’s been cheaply made—all benefit from a little sweetening.’
Still, and perhaps it was merely the effect of the admittedly harsh taste of the raw bittersweet, he looked doubtful.
‘If you think, darling, that the costs—’
‘Alice, it’s not the practicalities which worry me. If you of all people say that we can, I’m sure we’ll be able to sort things out. I’m not so much concerned about bittersweet failing as I am about its success—and what the consequences of that might be.’
Sometimes, Tom could be as strange and stubborn as Ralph. But it was already far too late for them to back out, and she knew he wouldn’t let her down. Effectively, the planning documents were already approved and merely required his signature. The deed was already done. But Tom didn’t need her to explain all of that to him. He’d work it out himself.
Late that same evening, after a day’s hard catching up with her own paperwork, and when the exchange had emptied of most of its staff and even Tom had gone home and she was certain she would not be disturbed, Alice entered the private telephone booth on the topmost floor. It was pleasingly odd to sit in the place where her husband had so often spoken to her, and there was a dusty, leathery smell in the booth which she’d noticed during their calls. She glimpsed herself in the mirror as she opened the connector. It was as if some part of her was still out there, waiting.
She dialled, and, with what was now practised ease, breathed her new spell, and surged down the great vein which ran through the centre of Dockland Exchange to its subterranean reckoning engines. It would be good to involve these machines more closely in the development of bittersweet, but she knew they were fallible. It wasn’t their fault—nothing ever was—but the economic data they received, especially from the west, was corrupted by all the fudge. One day, she silently promised this whirling mesh of information, the world outside will be exactly as you imagine it is. Logic will reign. Your predictions will be perfect. But now, she headed on into the national network and leaped east to west across England from relay to transmission house until she reached the here of Invercombe’s telephone booth, which seemed to her, and more than ever now that she was away from the place, the most specific here of all.
Alice regathered herself within the distant mirror. She could hear clocks ticking. Slowly, ghost limb by ghost limb, she slipped from the glass, and then out of the empty booth. Beyond the best stairs, where the simulacrum of her gaze caught in one of the house’s many mirrors, there remained only furniture and long evening sunlight, but she no longer felt the crisis which she had first experienced to realise that she both was and wasn’t present. The inner hall was deserted. Flowers hung in vases, momentarily scentless. She made the effort. Yes, that was better. The best stairs breathed in silent ascension. Her presence held. Slippery and invisible as a shadow within a shadow, Alice drifted forward. The simulacrum of her gaze caught in one of the hall’s many mirrors. There was nothing for her to see, but she no longer felt the crisis which she had first experienced to truly realise that she both was and wasn’t in the place she imagined. I am, she thought to herself, and would probably, if such a thing were possible, have chuckled, getting better and better at this. The combination of movement and keeping focus was still the trickiest part. To concentrate on that old oak chair, this marble bust, then the distinctive swirl of wood on the panelling of the far doorway, it was necessary for her to fill herself with each factual solidity before she moved on from it.
Drifting forward in pauses and dashes, she entered the dim, whitewashed corridors of the servants’ halls, and then passed down through workrooms and storerooms. Invercombe grew cave-like in its depths, with pillars of glossy rock curving into darkness where salt air pulsed out to the beat of the waves. Strung across the roofs, wavering faintly like the feelers of some enormous lobster, were rubberised, red-coated cables. A swishing and a buzzing filled the air. Here in its musty alcove was that old reckoning engine, ticking with lazy agitation through its local streams of data within which—and this was still amazing to consider—she herself was now represented. Deep in this basement, underground but still lit through by archways with the glow of fading daylight where the Riddle cut the valley at its deepest, two fat, laterally placed generators squatted and growled like angry beetles. But their turning wasn’t the main source of the noise, which came from outside where the buckets of the waterwheel were chanting yes, yes, yes, as they filled and turned.
From here, she could have gone further into the honeycomb of Invercombe’s sea-bowels, but instead she looped up along the pylons towards the glow of the weathertop. For a moment, she was electricity, and then she was the weathertop’s outer gantry, where the soft green of all Somerset lay in one direction and the valley and the gleaming Bristol Channel lay in the other. And there was Weatherman Ayres, looking down towards the path which led to the orchards. Alice followed his smiling gaze, and saw, humming and swaying and topped with a dotted red head-scarf, the round, unmistakable figure of Steward Dunning. She was bearing a heap of silver-fronded sallow in a big wicker basket back from the physic garden. Really, this was a job for cook, but Invercombe’s steward looked entirely happy. Indeed, Weatherman Ayres’s gaze, of which Alice was now part like the silver throw of an invisible spiderweb, had a warmth and a hunger to it which had little to do with the prospect of tonight’s supper, no matter how fine it would inevitably be. These, indeed, were strange, abandoned days.
Alice drew back to the gantry of the weathertop. At other times this was as far as she would have dared extend herself from the telephone booth, but the loveliness of the deepening evening was in her as well, and the trees of the pinetum were beckoning. In a mere simple leap, she slipped from branch to branch, shade to shade, then slid down towards the cascades, and passed through the fronded mouth of the grotto, and the peculiarities of the specimen trees. She reached to the seapool. It would be pleasant just to float here in this blood-warm salt. But from there a final fence rambled its way around Durnock Head, and it was set with a gate, which was her next obvious destination. Then she moved across the long shadows of the rocks towards the gaining scent of the sea.
The tide was far out and the sense of life here was very different, away from Master Wyatt’s control. It fought and hunted and consumed itself. Far out across this shining expanse, three figures moved like wyreblack flames. On a twist of sand, a broken limpet shell, a hank of old fishing net, the white bones of a gull splayed across the blazing sunset. Alice drifted towards them.