The House of Storms Page 7

  Alice picked her way around the mess. Celia was almost still now. Only her lips were trembling. Although the garden remained sealed from the outside air, Alice felt a swift, clean breeze passing over her, tumbling the elegant paper cups which had held the tartlets; some side effect of the spell which the pages she’d studied hadn’t mentioned, but not unpleasant.

  Half-kneeling, Alice studied Celia’s face. The focus of Celia’s gaze was inward, receding. She was nearing the final moment. But still her lips quivered. Was that not a word? Carefully, Alice parted her hair from around her left ear and leaned close to Celia’s mouth.

  ‘I thought we …’

  Was that what she had said? And was could befriends the intended end of the sentence? Alice smiled warmly into the woman’s dying eyes. It would make a suitably mundane epitaph. She studied the irises as they widened. Then, in a final foul exhalation, Celia was gone. Had she been thinking of her lost husbands? Was there emptiness? For a moment, Alice surveyed the scene. The plump stems of Celia’s doll-like wrists were decorated with numerous bracelets. Breathing through her mouth, raising the left hand by its littlest finger, she eased one off. It was a thin hoop of silver set with tiny shards of beryl or ruby—expensive enough, but amid all this ostentation, no one would notice it. Putting on her coat, sliding the souvenir into her pocket, she crushed the second wineglass beneath her heel and left 28 Charlotte Street.

  The morning’s sunlight had vanished and Bristol seemed a different city as she took a cab to the Telegraphers’ great guild-house and transmission works, which rose across the harbour at Redcliff in the shades of the riotous growths of stone which were the colours of bruises. Genuinely cold now after the heat of Celia’s rooftop, she stepped out in the eye-stinging grit outside the guildhall’s front entrance. She greeted a tiered succession of lower and higher and upper and lesser and ordinary and senior guildsmasters before being ushered through halls and up stairways filled with a comforting, everyday hum. Not even for the arrival of their own greatgrandmistress did work stop here, and Alice was glad of that, and glad for the brightening glow of the telephone lines which fanned out from the high tower which was always a feature of the major edifices of her guild, although this one, being in the west, was more like a jet of erupting masonry. From up here, standing beside the antique but potent haft through which telegraphers had once communed, the darkening layers of windy western landscape already looked ensnared, entwined, enmeshed. Hers…

  ‘You’re not cold, are you, Mistress… ? We could always…’

  She shook her head. It was a fine thing, to belong to this guild.

  Down below, in a sea of relays, in the spooling copper ribbons of spells, in snake pits of wire and grommet, the great minds of the reckoning engines endlessly unspan their song. And it seemed not only right but necessary that she should use a telephone booth.

  These little spaces. One place, endlessly duplicated and joined. Alice curled her fingers around the dialling handle and studied her face in the oval mirror. She tilted her jaw, but there was nothing to see. That blood pearl—and a mere fragment, so that she hadn’t yet had to resort to searching the shore again—had done its work. She was composed, complete. But, even as she smiled back at herself and the small light overhead glowed on the silvered blonde of her comb-set hair, the red pearl swelled in her mind to the larger globes of the hellebore cherries and, like some bloody embolism, continued growing. She blinked, swallowing something which seemed to fill her throat. She was older, and it had nothing to do with her looks.

  The light hummed. The chair, no matter how lightly she sat in it, ticked. She remembered the small animals which Jakob the gardener had once trapped in the grounds of her aunt’s house. She’d sometimes come across them and had taken them out, cooed to them, tried to make them see and understand and properly love her like the pets she was disallowed and thus always craved. But they wouldn’t listen. They were always too squeally and scratchy and afraid. So she’d killed them instead, carefully and slowly, and in many different ways. And as they died she would fix their little black eyes in her wondering, questioning gaze. Even then, she’d wanted to know, to understand, so that she could pinion that last moment of life and thus leave it for ever behind. But, just as had been the case this lunchtime with Celia, it remained a continuing mystery. Her hand played with the telephone’s dialling mechanism, which, the thought occurred to her, mimicked the prototype at Invercombe. Buzz, buzz went the light. Tick, tick went the chair. This, she supposed, was the nearest one ever got whilst living to the essence of death. These endless little departures of the unforgiving moment.

  She dialled Tom’s private booth in his office at the top of Dockland Exchange. As always, he was delighted to see her, and even more delighted that she’d taken the time to visit his colleagues at the Bristol Exchange today. And it was a miracle, really, that Ralph was getting so much better. He really must get away from London and visit them. As Alice encouraged her husband in his vague plans, she thought how sweet it was that, despite all the years of evidence to the contrary, he still managed to believe that he could have days off like any of his common guildsmen.

  And how about that contract?’ she asked. ‘The one for the new eastern telephone line.’

  ‘Oh, that’ Tom sighed, and quite a lot of the brightness seeped out of him.

  Alice understood that things never happened with the simplicity with which they should, but still, the tale of cancelled meetings and misunderstood instructions with which he now regaled her sounded like a poor joke. Basically, the upshot was that Pikes the contractors were counter-suing and stood to make a better profit out of protracted legal action than they did out of actually doing any work.

  ‘It’s all a bit of a mess,’ Tom said, shaking his head as he often did at the wrongs of the world. ‘Of course, these things always look worse than they are. And I really shouldn’t bother you with shop.’ But he looked wearied, and Alice felt the same as they said goodbye and his ghost faded to be replaced by the falling darkness of the empty mirror. The connector was about to ping as it broke the connection, but she pressed it down and remained staring into the blackness.

  The idea of making better use of the telephone no longer seemed like an absurd personal vanity. After all, it had been more than a century since the last great advance. And who better than her, as her guild’s greatgrandmistress, to make the next leap? Now, it seemed, the entire spell—for a little more magic, she was certain, and rather than the clumsy intrusions of technology, would be all that was needed—was with her. Since she’d been at Invercombe, the final walls and uncertainties had fallen with almost absurd ease. Sometimes, it was almost as if the phrases she’d been perfecting had murmured themselves to her on the quiet breezes which passed along its corridors; although, Alice being Alice, and just like the magics in her portmanteau, they had in truth been acquired through considerable effort, industry and subterfuge. Certainly, she’d awoken once or twice recently as if startled by some presence in her room. But that whispering she’d heard was probably just the pulse of blood in her ears, or the tides which washed against the cliffs far below and infused the house. Perhaps, she’d decided, this is merely what artists call inspiration. But whatever it had been, she could feel it and Invercombe calling to her now, and the complex exhalation of sounds she now recited seemed to come, as with all the best magics, as easily as living.

  There. As lightly as a diving swimmer submitting to the will of gravity, she felt herself being physically pushed towards the mirror. She and the emptiness within joined, embraced, and she poured along the networks which fanned out across Bristol. Unanchored as she was from the normal safe protocols which governed telephone communication, it made an exhilarating ride. A maintenance spell from the sorting machines at Temple-meads took her down local lines into the patient arms of transmission routines where she was sucked across the city. She glimpsed bright little cars, and the silos of the sugar processing factories and the wrinkling flash of Clifton Dam. The
re were shipyards and jostling spars and funnels and flags. There was the jewelled cathedral. The streets were torrents of light, bearing along tiny specks which moved as if driven by some vast and indeterminate current instead of separate wills of individual people. Her scrutiny gathered and moved through junctions and relays, leaping switchbox to lamppost with the droop and rise of each individual telephone line until she came to Charlotte Street. It was all so easy! If she could have laughed, she would have laughed. If she could have cried, she would have cried. But she was scarcely Alice, and yet she was, and a small commotion was going on outside number 28, where servants were weeping, and guildsmen were doffing their hats. Drawing to the last droop of the telephone line which had borne her here, the ghost of Alice watched as Cheryl’s body, wrapped in a red and blue bedspread, was carried down the steps towards the waiting black carriage.

  Alice went straight up to see Ralph when she returned to Invercombe. He was out of bed and the curtains of his room were still open, although there was surely little enough to see out there beyond the faint glow of a few early lanternflowers. She brushed her knuckles against his cheek; this son of hers who was growing up. ‘We really must get you a razor.’

  But Ralph never looked quite as pleased as she expected when complimented on his becoming a man.

  ‘Your father says he might come down,’ she added. ‘I wouldn’t get your hopes up too highly, although I’m sure he’d love to.’

  He nodded. ‘I was thinking that I might get properly dressed tomorrow. You know—go out into the garden. There’s so much I need to study.’

  ‘I sometimes wonder if that isn’t how you wear yourself out. Not everything has to be understood and explained. You do know that, don’t you?’

  He gazed back at her. She saw his throat working. He was suppressing something, but perhaps it was merely a cough. ‘I sometimes think you try too hard as well. I mean, look at you today—I can tell you find it exhausting.’

  ‘Well, I do, but…’ Quickly, fully formed, the idea came to her. ‘But there’s something you can do to help me, darling. I mean, getting better isn’t just about wandering around gardens and knowing the names of flowers. You’ve got to learn how to meet people as well.’

  ‘People?’

  ‘I was thinking just a few local dignitaries. It would just be a dinner here, downstairs. It’s about time this house had some other visitors than us, isn’t it?’

  Alice kissed Ralph goodnight. Heading down the corridor to her own room, she was met by a tray-bearing Steward Dunning.

  ‘I know you didn’t ask for anything, mistress. But cook thought…’

  Alice was a touch hungry. And thank the Elder it was plain, simple food. Cinnamon toast, a ripe red apple—although even these things had a innate richness here in the west. The ordinary milk was close to what easterners would have called cream, and the tea steaming from the white porcelain pot smelled as seductive as ever. ‘That’s most considerate.’ She made as if to hold out her hands and take the tray, and then to be struck by a thought. ‘And this wonderful tea, by the way. It isn’t the mixture that I had brought up from London, is it?’

  ‘Well…’ The steward gave the carpet a sideways glance.

  ‘Oh, I’m not complaining. I was just hoping cook might let me know the name of the suppliers so that I can order some myself.’

  ‘I’m not sure that supplier is exactly the word for it, Mistress. You know how these things can be.’ The steward’s gaze was frank now. If she hadn’t been holding the tray, she’d probably have tapped her nose. Alice smiled and nodded. She understood.

  ‘Did you find time to visit the post office, by the way, Mistress?’

  ‘Oh, yes … I think I made some progress, but the place was almost shutting by the time I got there.’

  ‘Well, never mind. These problems eventually sort themselves out here in the west. It just takes a little patience …’

  Alice went to bed early that night. She gazed up into the sea-swelling darkness after she had turned out the light and remembered the times of her childhood, that damp old house. When she’d finally discovered that all her inheritance had been lost or wasted, she’d lured her aunt to the falls at the bottom of the gardens. It had always been her favourite place, with that sense if you stared at the waters that they were hanging still and the rest of the world was moving, although her aunt had seemed to float far more easily than she sank as Alice struggled to drown her. It had been like wrestling a huge, angry frog until the moment came when, after all the thrashings, tie surface of the waters had finally subsided. She remembered those dulling eyes, that gaping mouth, that vanishing moment of departure from life, before her aunt’s dead body had turned and floated across the pool.

  Then she was walking the path around Stow Pool in Lichfield on a smoky autumn evening. Here, surely, was her good friend Cheryl Kettlethorpe. She quickened her steps, certain that there was something vital they needed to discuss. But Cheryl was elusive, and she was wearing a fur coat which was the colour of the twilight, which deepened and darkened as the light fled from the lake until, when Alice finally caught up with her, all that was left was chill, misty starlight, and a nagging sense of something unsaid.

  VI

  AS THE SHIFTERMS TURNED towards April, Invercombe was tremendously astir. Everything in the grounds, to the urgings of the sun and Weatherman Ayres’s weathertop, was growing, stretching, swelling. Yellow kingcaps shone at the margins of the green pool. Ferns uncoiled in the pinetum and the pyre-poppies beside the walled gardens began—much too early—to blaze and glow. In the linoleum dark of the servants’ halls, Steward Dunning had to preside over angry meetings. Master Gardener Wyatt complained of unseasonable bugs and late plantings. Cook was upset for having to serve forced rhubarb when they should still have been subsisting on potted. Even Wilkins was fretting about his drays. Cissy could have listed a good dozen problems of her own, but she kept silent as Weatherman Ayres started to bluster about how all this would have been mutiny on the ships he’d sailed, then cast her varieties of the same longing glance he had been giving for most of these last twenty years.

  Now, there was to be a dinner. After much consideration, Alice had invited Doctor and Doctress Foot, Enforcer Scutt, Reverend-Highermaster Brown. Local worthies. Dull or interesting, depending on your view of ditchwater, but useful nevertheless. This would be nothing like her grand soirees and dances, but it would be the first formal dinner of Ralph’s adult life, and antique dinner services and jorums were decanted from their wrappings and found to be cracked or crazed, and vital ingredients of condiment and cutlery were discovered to be missing. But Alice strove to remain calm and swanlike; whilst, beneath the waters, all was mad paddling.

  There was the ordering of Ralph’s first formal suit, and she saw, as the tailor she’d summoned from Bristol ran his tape across Ralph’s shoulders, how her son was shaping into a man. She also suggested he try a little of the wine she’d selected from Invercombe’s maze of cellars. It turned out he’d drunk so much spirit and morphine over the years that he was almost immune to intoxication, but nevertheless she showed him how to water it by the amount which was expected at dinner of a lad—young man, really—of his age.

  Then the sixth day of April, an Eightshiftday, arrived, and it seemed that nothing was ready. Alice strode the house, checking flower arrangements and sympathising over minor crises in the kitchen whilst surreptitiously scanning the ingredients cook had gathered, many of which bore no labels. She even visited the weathertop to impress upon Weatherman Ayres that the weather at Invercombe this evening should be warm and clear.

  Ralph was half in and half out of his new clothes when his mother entered his room and her gaze took in the knotted ruins of his tie and cummerbund.

  ‘This stuff should come with some sort of manual.’

  ‘Your father’s not so very different.’ She shook loose his bow tie. ‘Raise your chin. Under and under and then in.’

  ‘How can I manage this on my own?
Couldn’t you perhaps get one of the maids … ?’

  ‘The poor things are all much too busy.’ His mother, a red spill of his cummerbund shining in her hands, was watching him carefully. And I’m sure you’ll be fine if I just help you with this. Here… It’s a bit like wrapping a bandage. Put your arms up. Now, turn towards me.’ Ralph revolved. The cummerbund obediently encased him. And you really shouldn’t worry about this evening, darling. The people, quite seriously, do not matter. Just think of it as a couple of hours you’re spending in a slightly different way to the way you’d probably ideally be spending them. That’s what I do. And you really do look the part.’ Her hands smoothed him. He felt the cool, familiar sensation of her close presence. That fresh-linen scent of hers which never really changed no matter what perfume she was wearing. ‘I’m so, so proud of you. And this …’ She went to pick up something she’d brought in without his noticing. ‘It’s just something you might find useful’

  A blue plush-covered box, somewhat lopsidedly weighted, embossed with an R and an M. The sprung lid leapt open. Inside were the glinting components of a shaving kit.

  After his mother had left, Ralph addressed himself to the mirror. The razor was a Felton—he’d seen the adverts on placards at railway stations—but this model was gold-plated. And was that big stud on the ivory handle of the shaving brush really a diamond? Running the water, humming to himself in the way that he imagined men were supposed to, he assembled the razor and began to shave.

  Apart from the blood leaking onto his collar, the face which peered back at him when he’d finished seemed little changed, and, for all the mess that he had made, Ralph decided he could do little to improve on the effect. He paced the room. He considered looking at his books. He decided to go outside.