The House of Storms Page 16

  She considered. ‘But you must do so slowly, and tell me where.’

  He chose her left cheek, and then, greedily, also the push of her hair. She was so silky smooth. Almost grainless. Angel flesh. She was just as he remembered.

  ‘I suppose you know why I’m here.’

  ‘I think so.’ He laid his hand back on the bed. ‘I’ve been waiting …’ Raising it, he made a clumsy gesture, and was unsure from the chill he felt whether his fingers had brushed through some part of her or if it was merely the sense of the storm. ‘For I don’t know how long. It’ll come as a relief, to be honest. I’ve had enough.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, darling.’

  He nodded, and wondered what the word sorry, for Alice, meant. ‘I’ve signed those papers, by the way. The thing was becoming a farce.’

  ‘Not that they mattered.’

  ‘I don’t suppose they ever did.’ They shared a smile. The air tasted sharper now. The light was growing bluer. ‘Although I’ve always wondered about my father—’

  ‘I thought you said there would be no questions.’

  ‘Is this how you came to him?’

  ‘Oh, no. This is something I’ve only been able to manage after years of what I suppose you might call experiment. Thanks mainly, I think, to that lovely house. It seemed to teach me to speak. But don’t ask me how. Or why …’

  ‘And tonight, if you’re not here—I mean, that glass really is …’ He trailed off at Alice’s look. After all, the woman he loved was entitled to retain some of her mysteries.

  ‘Will you drink it?’

  ‘I ate those cakes, didn’t I?’

  ‘Ah, is that what you thought! But imagine what would happen, if word got out that you’d died after sampling bittersweet.’

  As always, she had a point. ‘But, even now …’

  ‘That’s why it’s important that you die in recognisably the same way that your father did. People will imagine some odd inherited weakness. And you have been behaving a little …’ A pause. Heavy on the carpet as falling marbles came the first few drops of rain. ‘Unusually. All that riding. And giving things away.’

  He studied the glass. The fluid inside was as darkly translucent as she was. ‘What’s it like?’

  For a moment, she was fractionally uncomposed. ‘Darling, I don’t know.’

  He nodded. The rain was washing through her now, patting the backs of his hands. He thought of Jackie, and wondered, if his death would be the same as hers, and if it would bring her closer to him, and why he had ever left her.

  ‘I’ll take it, Alice. But I want you to promise that you’ll never do anything to hurt Ralph.’

  ‘He’s my son, darling. I never, ever would.’

  On this one thing, he decided, he must persist. ‘But I want you to swear.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘I want you to swear on yourself. On your beauty and mystery. On everything you are.’

  Alice did so solemnly, her chin raised. She was a spell, a swirl of dark and rain.

  Carefully, Tom took the glass from her ghost fingers. He raised it to his lips, and drank. Alice was closer to him now. Closer than ever. More beautiful as well. Her infinitely blue eyes, as he fell bucking and gasping, were the last things he ever saw.

  XX

  WORK ACROSS ALL LONDON had stopped for the morning and the telephone lines laid like ribbons of night as people lined two and three deep along Wagstaffe Mall to watch a large funerary carriage drawn by plumed black horses go by, with Ralph and the guild’s grandmasters walking behind in slow procession amid the muffled toll of bells. First there was a public ceremony in Northover Chapel, and then a so-called private one beneath in the extraordinary onyx crypt of the Telegraphers’ Guild. Ralph, standing at the spread wings of a golden eagle to make his address, had expected to find himself nervous before this lamp-lit sea of faces, but he found that he didn’t care. Of all the people here, only his mother, unique and angelic and proud in her loss and quite, quite beautiful in widow’s black, mattered to him, and he realised that all he felt for his father was a dim sense of the loss of the diffident but essentially decent man he’d hoped he might eventually have come to know. Ralph had been sitting in Invercombe’s library on the morning after the big storm. The sky had cleared and the pavings outside were already dry, but the moaning, restless air had flapped at the spread pages of his notebooks until he’d got up and closed all the windows. The papers seemed to grow more chaotic as he attempted to reduce and collate them. More than ever, he was becoming conscious of how little he knew.

  The house was incredibly quiet. Every single clock seemed to have ceased beating in the aftershock of the storm. Then, sensing someone standing at the library door, Ralph had felt a surge of unease. It should have come as a relief to him that the figure was no one more surprising than Cissy Dunning, but there had been a look on her pleasant face he’d never seen before, and she’d said nothing until she’d settled herself down by him and laid her hands upon his knees.

  London’s shops had reopened by noon after the funeral, although there was an extravagant stand-up banquet beneath the frescos of the Hall of Great Guilds. Ralph, who’d previously talked to waiters and explored corridors on the few such occasions he’d attended, was endlessly buttonholed. There was Highclare, his new good health, something about his father being a great loss, then, invariably, how marvellously his mother—who was surrounded by black flocks of mourners—was taking it.

  The day ground on. There was a meeting for him to attend high up in the Dockland Exchange. He’d only previously glimpsed this committee room through closing doors, but now he was expected to sit at the head of the table, and required to endorse many documents. What’s worrying them, the thought struck him as his name was endlessly blotted, is that I’ll die before I reach my majority. He thought of his father, sitting in this same chair, surrounded by the same or similar faces. Then be thought of Marion, of the shore-scents of her skin, and wondered if it was ever possible to get close to someone after being this far away from them. For the first time since his father’s death, he genuinely felt like crying.

  His mother, who’d been absent at the start of the meeting, came in, changed into a different black outfit which showed off the glow of her hair, and the effect she had upon people’s faces like the play of sunlight. The arrangements which had just been enacted had been prepared in case of such an eventuality many years before, for Ralph could not be formally invested until he had been trained and inducted as a telegrapher. Meanwhile, a trusteeship was in place. His mother, of course, would be its chief.

  When the meeting dispersed, he stood beside her on the balcony of his father’s empty office and was surprised to note how much taller than her he now was. That small difference of inches seemed far greater than the drop from the balcony, where all of the docklands and most of London lay below.

  She gave a sad laugh. ‘All this life and bustle. People stop for a few hours. They think of it as an early lunchbreak, and quietly ask each other who it is that’s died this time. Then they go back to work.’

  ‘You’d tell me that was the way of the world.’

  ‘Oh—it is… The duty engineer here said he thought it would be wrong for telegraphers to be working normally at all today, but I said …’ She sniffed. Her hands brushed her eyes and came away glittering. ‘But I told him the best tribute he could make to Tom was to get everyone working.’ She sniffed again, then smiled at him. ‘Come on, I’ll show you …’

  She took him down through clamorous reckoning engines and the extraordinary spectacle of lined banks of chalcedonies glowing like phoenix eggs. This, he thought, is how my father and I can get closer, although it was hardly a comfort, today of all days. His only consolation, here in places where Marion would have been hopelessly lost, was his mother. She was his helpmate and support. All these years of telling him about people and duty; now, and after the farcical false start of that meal back at Invercombe, he finally understood.

 
Next day was for the ceremonies which acknowledged his new status as Greatgrandmaster-in-Waiting. Striving and failing that morning not to cut himself as he shaved, Ralph thought the face which stared back at him from the mirror already seemed changed. He had to wear another new suit, and shoes which were torture after all the slow marching and standing of yesterday. And that was before the chains and caps and capes. In a final flurry of bells and guild reliquaries, he was presented to the prime haft at the pinnacle of the Dockland Exchange. Thorny and black, the thing absorbed the cloudy sunlight and all the sounds of the docks. There were similar objects at Walcote’s famous Turning Tower and at offices such as Bristol or Preston, all of which he would have to chant through using arcane spells during days of magnificent procession once he’d come of age. But to touch the haft now and without the necessary preparation, he was quietly warned, would probably wreck his mind. It was a sobering thought, on this most sober of days.

  Back at last at their townhouse, his socks removed and his feet throbbing, he took dinner on a tray with his mother that evening. The first fire of the year twitched and snapped in the lilac room’s grate. Just the two of them; it was almost like old times, and he appreciated the gesture and her presence more than words could say.

  ‘You did so well, darling,’ she told him. ‘Everyone was saying so. And not just in your earshot. Or mine. Or so I hear, anyway.’

  ‘Being stared at. Now I know how the beasts at London Zoo feel.’

  She smiled and laid aside her tray. It had come out more bitterly than he’d intended. ‘Believe it or not, that’s something you get used to. But then I suppose the lions do as well—so think of yourself as a lion. And you, darling, hold the keys to your cage.’

  Did he? It seemed an odd thing to say.

  ‘And you look so healthy now, darling. The very last bit of your disease really has gone, hasn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose people were commenting on that as well?’

  ‘That’s hardly a bad thing in itself.’ She paused. Drifts of firelight played over her lovely hands. ‘After the death of your rather—the sudden way he died, which was so like what happened to your dear grandfather—wouldn’t anyone be concerned?’

  Ralph understood the meaning in the blues of her eyes. After all, he’d spent the entire summer studying the complexities of inheritance and the thought had certainly struck him that he. too, might well be destined to die in apparent good health from some sudden spasm of the brain.

  ‘You shouldn’t worry, darling. I know you have your father’s dark hair, but in almost every other respect, looks, mind and bearing, you’re far more like me than him. Everyone says so.’

  Ralph returned to his food. Somehow, he believed her.

  The day after, with his mother detained in London by phoneys and meetings about the trust fund and some odd new herb his guild was apparently developing, Ralph took the train back to the west alone—or at least unaccompanied, for every porter and steward and stationmaster seemed anxious to make an impression on him. It was evening by the time he reached Invercombe, and the house was coolly dark and knowing as it loomed in the twilight. Inside, it was entirely empty. Apparently Marion and most of the other maids were in Luttrell, celebrating some feastday of their guild. There was no sign of Cissy, either, this being the time of day which she spent privately with Weatherman Ayres.

  Pricked by a long-delayed curiosity, and ignoring the continuing itchy and irritating sense that he wasn’t alone, Ralph headed down stairways and along storeroom corridors towards the cellar rooms. For the first time this year, he had to click on the recently renewed lights to find his way, and the old reckoning engine ticked to itself in its whitewashed bay, lazy relays flashing a corroded sea-green, seemingly dreaming not of Habitual Adaptation, but of messages unsent, cries unheard. Ralph, in a sheer animal instinct he’d heard of but had never previously experienced, felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise like a dog with its hackles. But he pushed on.

  Beyond the last of the glowing lightbulbs, where the bricks gave out, the tunnel nevertheless continued, dipping down. Hands laid against the clammy rock, he ducked along the passage. The floor went down in dips and slants. His feet skidded, then encountered a step, studs of crumbling cement. The passage seemed entirely dark, but, as his eyes grew more accustomed, a faint light still glinted across the black, wet stone. He studied his hands. The black stuff, the slime, was almost certainty organic. Even down here there was life. He thought, as he moved on, of knotted tubercles which had grown and faded in the darkness of his own lungs. Then he tried not to think of anything at all. The salt air, the unmistakable boom and suck of the sea, drew and pushed at him, and Ralph felt as if he was on the lip of some new revelation when, beyond an angle of this cave or passage and in the very last of the light, his progress was blocked by a heavy iron gate. It creaked away from him, then held on a heavy chain. All he could see beyond was darkness. All he could feel, hear and smell was the living song of land against sea.

  Sighing, frustrated and afraid, he ran and clambered back up the tunnel and followed the winding, widening stairs. The sun had set. Even in the main part of the house, he now had to turn on the lights to find his way. The place remained deserted, and his London luggage still lay where it had been left in the hall for the non-existent maids to put away, although he discovered that ghostly hands, most possibly Wilkins, had borne some kind of wooden crate up into his bedroom. Imagining yet another portion of his belongings had finally been spat out from the ruminations of the western postal system, he glanced at the tag. Invercombe’s address was written there in what he was sure was his father’s handwriting, and it was stamped on the day of his death.

  Tearing off the seals and wrapping, all Ralph found inside was a heap of pebbles. His first thought was that his father had been behaving at least as oddly as several people had hinted before he died. His second was that he’d sent him these stones in a clumsy attempt to help him in his geological researches. He didn’t know which was more sad. They were flints of the sort which abounded on the blue-grey shingle beaches of the southeast, and he was wondering what to do with them, when, in the puzzled process of reaching deep into the box, his hand brushed against one.

  Like putting a needle into the middle of a record, or the disorientating surge of a crossed line on the telephone, the sense was immediate. Information flooded into him, then, as he drew his hand back, it instantly stopped. It took a moment’s more rummaging to locate the stone. Balling it in a loose sheet of paper to avoid the rush of data, he bore it to the glow of the nearest lampshade. There were no signs, no seals, nor the characteristic hole in the middle, but this was nevertheless some kind of numberbead, and Ralph placed his hand upon the pebble more deliberately, and let the message from his dead father unfold.

  XXI

  THE WESTERN CHAMBERS of the Ringwrights’ Guild lay in a narrow street in Bristol’s Old Town. Pillared buildings which had seen better days and endless generations of pigeons huddled around each other in cobbled courtyards, turning their backs away from the coralstone fantasies which had proliferated elsewhere. Ralph studied a browned brass plaque.

  ‘I suppose this is where we decide not to go in.’

  ‘But it would be a shame to have come this far,’ Marion said, and he had to agree.

  Inside, and up creaking stairs, they entered an office set with long cases of ancient-looking files. A tuning fork stood on a desk. Ralph gave it a ping.

  ‘Yes?’ A small, stooped man emerged and peered at them through wire-framed glasses. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m Master Ringwright John Turner. This is my wife, Mistress Eliza. We’ve just arrived in Bristol this morning from Kent.’

  ‘Looking for work, I’d guess?’

  ‘We’d like to get our bearings—’

  ‘Most wise. I’m Master McCall of the Second Harmonic’ He offered a hand. Ralph took it, wondering if he’d missed some essential curl of the index finger in his researches into the life of this guildsman hi
s father had given him.

  ‘I’m afraid my, ah, guildcard was stolen.’

  ‘Some light-fingered bastard in the east, eh? Over there, I hear that it happens all the time. No problem. Now, if you’ll just permit me …’

  The most extraordinary moment came when Master McCall unfurled a long printout. Running down columns of names, humming Ss and Ts, Master McCall’s browned finger finally alighted on MSR J TURNER (E: SPSE) IDCT KNT GH. OTVE 1ST, then the same long unique number Ralph had carefully memorised from his father’s numberbead.

  ‘Here’s a temporary pass. Valid for six months. Get your photo retaken sometime and bring it back in and we’ll turn it into a real one, but there’s no hurry. Lost your tools as well, did you?’

  ‘Some … We’ve left all our luggage back at Templemeads.’

  Master McCall heaved shut his ledgers. Unhooking his glasses, he polished them. This is when it comes, Ralph thought. Some obvious bit of protocol he’d missed. ‘Problem is,’ he said, ‘you can take as long as you like to settle here, but I can’t promise you’ll find any work. It’s as hard here as it probably is in Kent. Not that I don’t think you’ve done the right thing, moving west, but you’re the third chimer I’ve had here this last shifterm. Quite a lot are just passing through, mind. There’s better work to be had out in the colonies. Thule, the Fortunate Isles, maybe even Africa. That’s where I’d be putting my money …’ He chuckled. ‘If I had any.’

  Ralph nodded. He glanced at Marion. Chimer, he supposed, was a play on the name and function of this guild.

  ‘Places to stay—I’d recommend Sunshine Lodge if you want something cheap and not too scummy. Maybe the Las-come, if you’re really stumped for cash. And stay clear of the east side of Redcliff at night…’ Master McCall gave the temporary guild-card a thudding stamp and waved it towards Ralph. And welcome to Bristol.’

  They took late breakfast in a nearby chophouse, calling each other Master John and Mistress Eliza in loud voices now just for die fun of it. He was dressed in a leather-patched jacket and a pair of trousers he’d borrowed from Wilkins. Marion wore a loose homespun shawl and a long tweed skirt. As far as it was possible for him to judge, the couple he’d glimpsed in the plate glass windows of the shops they passed on their way from Templemeads Station fitted in with the morning crowds. Not that anyone seemed to notice, in this smoky racket. Marion had taken the full day’s leave she’d accumulated in her work as a maid. Only yesterday, Ralph had been endorsing more of the papers which his mother regularly sent down for him. Was endorsing different to signing? He didn’t care. It was just so marvellous to get away from everything—even Invercombe, and the stress of trying to make sense of all they knew about Habitual Adaptation. He loved this stale bread and chewy meat. He felt, genuinely, like a different person—and as if a huge burden had been lifted. For these moments alone, to be drinking warm beer in a Bristol chophouse with Mistress Eliza who was also Marion, he was eternally grateful to this father.