The House of Storms Page 11

  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.

  XII

  THE LIGHTS OF THE SEVERN BRIDGE were just starting to glimmer as Ralph helped Marion and her father push their surprisingly obdurate boat into the rising tide. Ralph, as he heaved, was no longer the frail greatgrandmaster-to-be of other years. With his ragged clothes, with his browned skin and sun-bleached hair, he’d come to look more and more like the other figures who wandered the shore. So did Marion, although she was merely slipping back to a natural state. Soon, dark-haired, barefoot and swiftly busy, both full-grown but still impossibly young, even their appearances had grown somewhat alike. The other shorefolk who waved and chatted to them would sometimes ask if they weren’t perhaps related?

  Mud slipped under his feet and knees, and then, with a sucking rush, the keel slid from them. Ralph, as he attempted to catch and climb into it, was surprised by the sudden lightness with which the boat skipped away from him, and fell headlong into the deepening water. A momentary panic as salt-bitter water rushed into his mouth and throat, then Marion was helping him up.

  ‘Can’t swim, eh?’ Her father chuckled. ‘And I thought you said you’d been on lots of boats.’

  More carefully, as Marion helped steady the boat, he climbed in. He was soaked, but the air and the water were too warm for any discomfort, and it hardly seemed worth explaining that the ships he’d sailed in had possessed ballrooms and promenade decks. This was a different kind of sailing entirely, just as it was another kind of living, and it was amazing how easily the weathertopless sail filled even on a night this still.

  Each day now had an easy rhythm. In the mornings, Marion and Ralph often investigated the rocks on the seaward of Durnock Head. Apart from its geological significance, it was a marvellous landscape for climbing, and for Marion, much as for Ralph, this summer was a chance for her to experience the freedoms of a childhood she’d scarcely known. As the air across the Bristol Channel grew impossibly clear and the ships became toys you could cup in your hands, they would begin to unprise the shale, each layer breaking with that sense of newness which only the chink of a hammer could create. Sometimes, they would discover a scatter of shells, some would be recognisably like the ones they found every day on the shore, whilst others would be strange. Or they would find worm-casts, or odd things which looked like giant woodlice. Ocean drawn back to ocean, they wetted the facets in nearby pools, and Ralph imagined he was moving beneath the waters of some lost sea.

  They often went to Clyst at lunchtime, but the other Prices scarcely saw the vast distance which Ralph had travelled to sit at their kitchen table. Ralph’s skin was tide-marked with salt and sunburn, and he had a decent knowledge of the shore, even if he did give some of its creatures the strangest names. He’d even absorbed a little of the western accent. Only Denise asked the sort of questions which you might expect to have answered by someone high-guilded. But London was a shrug. Paris was a smile and a vague shake of the head.

  By mid-afternoon, the heat drove them to the fragrant shade of the citrus grove, or they headed down Invercombe’s dimming stairways to the cool alcove of its reckoning engine. Once oiled and brushed of dust and rust, and peeled of their cobwebs, the device’s tumblers and levers still moved with the slick ease of all good machinery as Ralph and Marion attempted to input the information they’d gathered about life on the shore into punch-cards. The work was considerable, but he was sure they were making progress.

  Now, the evening had settled into glowing night, and they were reaching deeper waters where the air changed its moods and scents. Ralph glanced at Marion’s father—her dad, as he’d come to think of him—who was nudging the wooden tiller with his calloused fingers. Marion, meanwhile, was holding the boom rope. They both had this careless manner when they were doing the work of shorefolk, although Ralph had known long before tonight’s dunking that this was deceptive. The skills they possessed were as complex as any of the Great Guilds, and considerably more fascinating. He’d been out with Marion’s brother Owen on a mudhorse to help clear and collect the salmon traps. He’d helped Mam strip willow switches, and he’d headed with the whole village on magical nights when everyone went eel-trapping, pushing the fizzing chemical lights beneath the thigh-deep water and steering the sleek, undulating bodies into whispering nets. Ralph had done all of these things, and rejoiced in them. And soon, it would be Midsummer, and he already knew this Midsummer would be marvellous and entirely different, for the plans and the preparations were enormous. Even tonight’s voyage was part of them, although he still didn’t know quite how or why.

  There was darker water now, so clear you could see right down into bottoml
ess nothing. Marion’s dad was murmuring instructions, checking the distant landmarks. The Temple of Winds was just a glint of moonlight. Lights scattered north towards Avonmouth clustered as if drawn on strings towards the tiara of the Severn Bridge. Big ships hung tall across the waters, sleepy-still as they waited at anchor with lights at their topmasts, or churning ablaze through the main outer dredge-ways as they went about the business of the guilded world. You could see inside the lit windows of their cabins, and breathe the smoky rush they bore from their weathertops and engines.

  Marion tugged the boom. Laying a quick hand on Ralph’s knee, which sent a warm shudder through him, she squeezed past to take the rudder. Dad leaned over the side, peering into the depthless waters. He then began to stir a stick of driftwood and mutter something until threads of faint luminosity started to form. Was this some phosphorous effect? But Dad was still muttering, almost singing, words too quick and slurred for Ralph to catch. A glass float—sparkling blue, a mirror of the night—bobbed up. Dad lifted it into the boat. A thin strip of tether, then a thicker stream of rope, followed.

  Ralph helped pull whilst Marion coiled and stowed, with the exquisite press of her forearm coming and going against his back until the rope lay coiled wyredark on the floor of the boat in the gaining light of the rising moon. He’d just witnessed, he realised, the casting of a spell. But now a crate was emerging and he was too absorbed in getting the thing over the side. He had to lean so far back against its weight that he feared they’d be capsized. Then, in a final rush, the crate was on board.

  Gushing slats revealed the green shapes of bottles. Dad gave a wide grin. ‘Nothing but the best for this Midsummer, eh? Now—let’s get back to shore and have this stuff hidden before we run into the bloody Excise Men …’

  XIII