IT WAS A HOT, HEAVY AFTERNOON when Alice left the house of Enforcer Scutt, but Bristol, even greyed, still had an edge of lightness, almost of unreality, in its coloured tiles and extraordinary over-leaning shapes of the houses, which seemed to have bulged and risen like cake dough. She glanced up, briefly smiling, at the arched window of the enforcer’s bedroom in case he should have arisen from his sprawled snorings. But that was hardly likely, and in Cornelius Scutt she was convinced she’d found someone who lay at the fulcrum of the west’s mendacity.
Past these gingerbread houses, and a sweetshop on the corner, she turned towards the plainer reek of the docks, which were even messier and more ancient than London’s. Churches and almshouses mingled amid confusing fingers of water so filled with ships that they seemed like dry land. Bigger magics were practised with this heavy industry, and the air resounded, amid all the other sounds of engines coughing and barrels rolling and chutes spewing and pallets being dropped, with the oddly accented cries of western spells. Here was a spiked trap for kingrats which, her endless curiosity driving her to explore the dark as well as the light places, gutters and piss-smelling alleys, she almost stepped on to. Here were festering, whispering clumps of cuckoo-nettle. There was no way of telling that this place was in recession, although Alice knew that it was. She gazed over the jangled rooftops at the smokestacks and silos of the big sugar importers: BOLTS, KIRTLINGS; their names shimmered huge upon sooty walls. Big players, certainly, but everything here was stuffed rigid with pomp and restrictive practice, and set ready to fall at the slightest push.
Cargoes of this and cargoes of that. Swarthy men and peculiar accents. Wafts of alien spells and smells from strange vessels. Negro crewmen and dockhands, physically fine specimens with no evidence of obvious maltreatment or the lash. Freemen or bondsmen—it was impossible to tell, although their presence here seemed subtly wrong to Alice in much the same way as Cissy’s did at Invercombe. An easterner at heart, she still thought that black skin equalled slavery. What would happen to Bristol’s economy, Alice wondered idly, if that prop were kicked away? Smiling, she reached the Bristol Exchange. They were almost used to her now, and after she’d dealt with all the usual bowing and scraping, and had drunk a cool glass of dilute limeade to get rid of Enforcer Scutt’s aftertaste, she settled herself inside a telephone booth with little fuss, and firm instructions that she should on no account be disturbed.
As always, there was so much to be done. There were contracts and investments in the west to be redirected, alliances to be forged or broken, and the first commercial processings of bittersweet to be supervised. More than for herself or for her guild or for Tom, it was for Ralph that Alice now felt as if she was doing all these things. Not quite, perhaps, the Ralph who picked over rocks at Invercombe with that shoregirl and was fuller than ever with science and some new theory of his, but the man he would soon become. He’d be knowledgeable and powerful and handsome. He’d be loved and feared. Almost, in fact, herself made male.
With her routine calls finally finished, she decided to stay in the booth a while longer and practise her recently refined skills. Doing so, calling up the spell, she was drawn, as ever, towards Invercombe. Even before Weatherman Ayres brought the late afternoon rain, the garden’s colours had a gloss, a glow, a density, and the buzzbugs already shone like huge glow-worms beneath the deep-cast shadows of the trees. Their minds, as Alice brushed against them, were thoughtless—scarcely minds at all—but the sense of being here, the fragmented hues, was impossibly strong. The conflagration of scent, shape and colour of a particular flower was something they yearned for as nothing else in their sharded, spinning worlds and Alice, in all her human complexity, basked in the absolute moment of entering a pyrepoppy as a timeless sharing of mutual need. Then she wafted on across the parterre gardens and up through the pinetum towards the beacon of sunlight which was the Temple of Winds. Beyond that, where the land fell away in the cliffs which guarded Invercombe’s northeast side, a small boat was moving by twitches of its oars.
Ralph, bare to the waist and below the knees, felt cool escapes of sweat from his back and armpits as they entered Clarence Cove. Marion had dragged off her blouse once they were out of sight of the shore, and was wearing scarcely more. He knew, loved, how her skin changed shade, but now only subtly, in the places her vest and hitched skirt kept hidden. They’d dutifully taken swimming costumes with them, but by now they were used to swimming brown and naked as seals.
They dragged back the oars and stilled the boat. Ralph looked up at the portion of the house which peered from the top of the cliffs, which was just one coral cluster of chimneys and the balcony of his mother’s empty room—for she was in Bristol today—although it was hard to shake off the sense of their being watched. The sea sucked and boomed. The entire cliff face beneath Invercombe was honeycombed with caverns, although he and Marion had been warned by Cissy never to attempt to go below the level of the generators in the house. Real caves were slippery and dangerous, and as likely to be vertical as horizontal. Ralph peered over the boat’s side as the last of the ripples settled. The sea here really was astonishingly deep. Clear as well—the sense was almost vertiginous. Sunlight blazed through the water and was slowly lost.
‘This’ll do …’ Marion unpeeled her cotton top. Then, balancing so well that their boat scarcely bobbed, she stepped from her skirt and knickers. She was so beautiful, yet a shadow fell briefly over Ralph. The thing about summers, he thought, is :hat the deeper you get into them, the less there is left.
‘What about over there?’ One of the caves in the cliffs looked more than wide enough for them to row their boat inside. There even looked to be a sort of natural jetty where they might manage to clamber out.
But Marion shook her head. For a moment, he thought, and as far as it was possible, her as she was, to seem that way, she almost looked slightly uncomfortable. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I’m too hot to row any further. Let’s just dive in from here, shall we?’
With a kiss, she was gone, and Ralph was momentarily alone and looking down as she swam away from him towards the cool deep. Struggling, rocking the boat wildly, he followed. Once, in the distant time of not-so-long-ago, he’d never have believed that anyone could dive at all, but he’d left the old Ralph far behind, and only Marion, feet flashing and kicking through the swarming dark, lay ahead of him.
They rose, gasping, towards the sun, then dived down again. Deeper, this time. Their ears sung with lost guildsmen’s spells and dimness pushed at their eyes. Beneath was a moonlit place with a darkly white sea floor and flickers of fish, inkstains of weed. Then Ralph saw the bones of something lost and huge. Not some sea monster, but the remains of a ship. Slowly, rising to the air and kicking down, they gained their bearings. Marion found a green pendant amid the sprawled wreckage. Ralph, an encrusted marine implement which still whispered, when he touched it, of stars and sand. A boiler, its furnace lit with a cold inner fire. Fronds of weed, a temple of pale flames and rising banners, wafted about them.
Ralph felt, as his airborne lungs tugged at him with increasing urgency, a near-religious awe. Then Marion swam above him, and the light shone over her limbs and her hair wavered across her face amid the dancing weeds, and she gave him a siren wave. The scene was almost ridiculously beautiful, and he felt clumsy and lost as he hauled himself once again to the surface and clung to the side of the boat. Marion’s head popped over the other side. He was still gaining the necessary energy to climb back over the gunwale, but she was scarcely breathing hard.
‘I wonder,’ he gasped, ‘how it got wrecked there?’
‘Probably wasn’t…’ She flipped back her hair. ‘Sometimes pays to sink boats when you’ve finished with them.’
‘Why would anyone … ?’
But she was already climbing into the boat. As they lay eating the oranges they had picked earlier from the citrus grove—which had grown incredibly warm, as well as stickily sweet—they talked about all the new information they would need to catalogue back at Invercombe—species and phylums, every gathered bit of their shore—to create an unanswerable case.
‘You know …’ Marion launched the emptied white hull of an orange from the side of the boat. ‘All those things that went on a century ago when the Age changed. Haven’t people been saying that it should change again soon? Yet nothing’s happened, has it?’
Ralph’s gaze travelled with the sunlight along her thigh. He thought of her hands bunched in anger. Or waving flags. ‘I can see you on the barricades.’ He really could. Ma-ri-on. He could even hear the chant.
‘No, but… What I mean is, perhaps it’s us—this theory. Every Age is different, and ends differently, and perhaps we’re what will cause ours.’ She shifted her legs and picked pith from her teeth. ‘But what we need is a name. Something people won’t forget, like a brand name.’
As usual, she was right, and whilst Ralph struggled with the distractions of Marion’s body and the afternoon beat down on them, they considered Mutual Selection and Species Change and then Species Development and then Habitual Development and finally Habitual Adaptation, which still didn’t seem quite right, but was at least clever in the way it played on the mean-W& of both habit and habitat. So Habitual Adaptation it was, and at last there was a faint haze of cloud over the cliff top towards the chimneys of Invercombe, although Ralph’s thoughts were too distracted now by the shining divide of Marion’s breasts. His fingers traced the silky flesh. Her ribs rose and fell as she chuckled and her nipples tautened as she half-heartedly pushed him away. A shiver of breeze nudged their boat. He kissed her shoulder. She tasted bitter-sweet. Of oranges.
‘Don’t you sometimes worry,’ she murmured, her face so close to his that she was a lovely blur, ‘that we’re being greedy?’
But all he wanted to do now was run his tongue around her ear. Was everything he was feeling merely base instinct? Was the joy he felt now that she’d assured him it was safe for him to come inside her merely a tingling of nerves? Nature was nature, and they were part of it, here and now, and why would they ever want to escape?
It was just possible, they discovered, although hardly comfortable, to make love in a small boat. It was partly comical as they worried about splinters, yet wonderful as well as Marion drew up her legs and the sky darkened and the sea gasped and shuddered as he entered her and the boat rocked and the air moved warm and chill across his back.
Ralph lay beside Marion when they had finished. An oar pressed against his thigh and he was stuck with pieces of pith, and the sky was almost black as a new breeze hollowed Clarence Cove. Habitual Adaptation. It would have to do. In fact, as Marion’s salty, orangey scent mingled with that of the storm and the first raindrops struck his skin, it was the only thing in his world which didn’t seem entirely perfect.
Refreshed by her virtual journey through sea and sunlight and the cool of Invercombe’s caves, Alice returned to the Bristol halls of the Guild of Telegraphers and the heat of the afternoon, but decided, as a further refinement, to attempt to delay the moment of re-entering her physical self. It proved easier than she imagined to simply hover there in the glass amid the booth’s humid brass and leather. She studied the seated form of Great-grandmistress Alice Meynell. The fine architecture of throat and neck. Blue eyes which were cool and warm and unflinching even as they gazed into the booth’s mirror, which she saw, with a shock of both surprise and understanding, was entirely empty. Alice drifted, observed. Yes, she was beautiful. Even that slight sagging of the cheeks had been entirely banished this summer. But an odd thing was happening. How could it be, in this draughtless booth, that a few silvered wisps of her hair could be seen to stir? Passing and repassing herself, she tried to make it happen again. Fine as smoke, the strands drifted to her invisible will. A further effort, although it was nothing more really than the realisation that such a thing might be possible, and Alice saw, hovering as if drawn in palest reflection from the silvered shadows within the mirror, the ghost shapes of her own hands. As she turned them, admired, the smile on Alice Meynell’s face grew yet more lovely and enigmatic.