The House of Storms (20 page)

It was an enticing prospect. Both of them living in a nice house in some better part of Bristol, perhaps Saint Michael’s Hill or Henbury, and she decently retired. A young lass to do the fetching and cleaning; someone for Cissy to boss and befriend. And a white balcony for them to sit out on during warm evenings. A cellar, as well, for a few bottles of the best vintage of the small trade. And jewels and dresses, too—things for her to wear when they paraded together along Boreal Avenue.

Trees silvered. Windows banged. Clouds were moving. There were no ships left out in the Bristol Channel, and he was glad for that, for this was like no other storm he’d ever witnessed. Sweat oozed from him. His teeth and eyeballs felt cold. The light was greenish, it was purple, then it was no light at all. The weatherman’s moustache began to writhe and twitch. If he’d had any hair on his head, that would be stirring as well. He wished he could chuckle at the thought, but his mind was filled with strange, uneasy calculations about just how well-earthed and magicked this weathertop really was, and what sort of weather front this was, to be stirring so far across the Boreal Ocean from its tropic origins.

He’d thought that there was no sound left in the world, but now, at its vanishing, he realised there had been one. He was so used to the water-wheel’s chanting that its stillness felt like a blindness. Suddenly, after all his years of faith, the weatherman had no confidence in his weathertop. Cissy was right; he shouldn’t be up here. But it was too late now, and the blackness was spreading. It filled his eyes and his thoughts. Then, in a roaring blast, the first thunderbolt shattered across Invercombe.

N
OTHING, PERHAPS, BUT THE SHADOW
of a shadow.

For a long while, Tom Meynell found it hard to be sure as he gazed at his bedroom doorway. As the air grew fitful, raising the curtains, he was reminded of the prophets and madmen with whom he’d never have thought to compare himself. Stare at one space for long enough, and the thing you most loved would eventually form. The wind surged, the sky boomed, longing for rain. And there she was. Alice.

He said, ‘You’re not really here, are you?’

‘I’m not. But…’ She moved from the doorway more clearly into the room. It was hard to see what she was wearing, other than that it fitted her beautifully. But, with her, that was hardly so very strange.

‘I’m glad you’ve come, Alice. I’ve been waiting.’

‘Don’t tell me.’ She was standing before him, partly outlined and partly translucent in the stormy wash. ‘You want to ask me a lot of questions.’

‘Not really.’ It was true. ‘But
this
is extraordinary—whatever it is that you’ve managed. I’d say you were a ghost, but I know you’re not.’ He noticed consciously for the first time that she was carrying a small glass tumbler between the tips of her joined hands.

‘I’m merely using the telephone, darling.’ A smile of acknowledgement at the word
merely.
‘I know it probably seems like more.’

Surely there would be possible commercial uses to this discovery? But Alice was Alice, and quite what it must be like to be in one place and yet wander at will in another currently escaped Tom. ‘But this storm. What would happen if there was a lightning strike to one of the transmission stations? You know how the relays lock. They can be down for days …’

But she just smiled and shrugged faintly as the curtains flared and flickered through her, for risk was part of what she was.

‘Can I touch you? Is that possible? I mean, you’re holding that glass.’

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.

W
ORK 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.