The House of Storms (41 page)

They headed upwards. No need for a weathertop here; the whole point of this edifice was that, no matter what the season was, the flowers never ceased blooming. The graceful white bark of Cathay. The huge red trunks of Thule. The vines and lianas of Africa. Ralph, for all his botanical instincts, found that it was like wandering inside a huge glass case, even down to the breathless sense of trapped air. But then they came to the sunny pathways dedicated to the Fortunate Isles, and here it was harder for him not to believe. They were too high and too sheltered in this jungle landscape to catch the grumble of traffic, and the air smelled verdant. There were palms and gingers and peppers and myrtles. Walking beside him, even, could have been the presence of a different woman—here, Ralph forced his mind shut. He was thinking about the past far too much these days. Moments amid his family were far too precious to waste.

They reached the summit, where Flora and Augustus were already waiting, and the upturned bowl of the sky pulsed down on him, and the light had a rawness, and all of London was small beneath. Everything, the waste paper bins and the groups of families and the lads who were kicking a football, seemed unmoored and adrift.

Ralph remembered his father as he said goodnight to his children that evening. He’d promised himself that he’d be different to Tom Meynell in such situations, but the very act of thinking that promise, and then of acting it out by going into the extravagant toy-grottoes of their bedrooms, chapels of childhood where Flora was sitting up reading and Gussie was already lying with the light switched off, somehow negated the possibility of it ever being fulfilled. It all came back to him. A big man, weary from his day, looming uncomfortably from the landing to squat at the edge of your bed as you lay there wishing him and his entire world away. Questions he’d rehearsed and now, and knowing that they could tell, wished he hadn’t. That purely sweet childhood smell. The worst thing of it was that part of him, the largest part of him, thirsted for the reports which a military courier was waiting for him to sign for in the hall.

‘Not long to Christmas now, eh?’ Pincer movements and possibilities of assault clawed red arrows through his head. ‘What are you expecting from the Lord of Misrule?’ Darkness heaped up from the corners, smothering his breath. Misjudging the distance—wishing he’d shaved again, but that would probably have meant more blood—he kissed a cheek, hitting bone against bone.

Hurrying downstairs, he bore the buff folders off to his little-used study. The desk had been his father’s—the one he’d been sitting at when he, much to his own private anguish, had sometimes been sent to wish the man goodnight or good morning or goodbye when he was a little older than Flora was now. Much of the other furniture was also the same. He’d intended this appropriation when his mother sold off their house as a kind of tribute to the man. Instead, by recreating the room he’d so disliked entering, he realised he’d been taunting himself. Sighing, he untied the reports and set to work, but thoughts of the Fortunate Isles, white or black beaches, the sheer blue clarity of the sea, kept returning. He’d rarely doubted the truth of Habitual Adaptation, but he’d come to think of it differently over the years. What had once been entirely beautiful, a parade of the life teeming and dividing into ever more extraordinary adaptation and complexity, now seemed too much like a commentary on events in this late Age. What, after all, was war but humanity’s more organised way of the strong eliminating the weak? And what kind of being might prosper when everything was geared towards self-interest? We should all be monsters, he sometimes thought. If, that is, we’re not monsters already.

The bat things, the nocturnes, couldn’t be regarded as a serious military threat, but they made another lurid story—another thing for his soldiers to fear, another dent in morale. Then there were reports of a rapid-growing and hitherto unheard of creeper blocking many of the roads along which the advance convoys were attempting to progress. It seemed as if the West, in the moment of its cornering, was uncoiling itself like some dangerous snake. He scanned communiqués from the northern sea-front where things seemed to be going far better than they were close to home. Maritime matters had never been of much concern to him, but tonight, as he unfurled the printouts under the fan of the desklight, he was reminded of how close this war truly was to winning. The North Sea had been a cauldron of skirmishes and sinkings a year or so before. Now, it was a matter of tidying up mines and killing the odd rogue dolphin.

His gaze caught on a name. The coastal vessel
Hell’s Bliss,
Owen Price, Helmsman-captain, was currently moored in London for minor repairs. He wondered, in fact, if that wasn’t why he’d been looking at these papers in the first place. After all, there was nothing like a wound unlanced, a scab unpicked. But perhaps this was simply something he needed to do back here in London to clear his head and recover some kind of purpose when he returned to the gaping pit of Hereford with whatever new orders and support and finance he could prise out of High Command. He put away the folders, clicked off the study lights, locked the door, descended the stairs.

‘Is everything all right?’

He jumped at the sound Helen’s voice from the middle landing. ‘Something’s come up,’ he called up to her, hand already on the front door. ‘I shouldn’t be too long, if you’re planning—’

‘Oh? And I was thinking …’

‘Yes?’

‘Oh, nothing, darling.’ Beautiful in diamonds and a blue dress, she’d obviously had something—perhaps a small dinner, surprise gathering, or a trip to the cinematograph to see some ghastly patriotic film—planned.

‘I shouldn’t be long. I could …’

‘No.’ She waved him away. ‘You go and do whatever it is that you need to do.’ The thing was, he thought as he stared up her, that she seemed relieved.

Outside, London was evening-dim. Winter, and all the logistical complications it entailed, was already gathering. He could reel it in his bones. Still, the city seemed more itself by streetlight. and he was able to find his way unthinkingly east and north towards the docks. Along Wagstaffe Mall and past the Great Guildhalls and the theatres along the Strand. Goldsmiths’ Hill was a starry bridge of windows; Great Westminster Park pyramid of light at his back. People swept past him. Women in stoles and luminous jewellery, the men sleek as newly processed photographs, glossy white and black. Ralph had to glance down at himself to check what he was wearing, which seemed to be this afternoon’s shirt and jacket, which felt thinly cold by the time he reached Tidesmeet, and, having forgotten any proof of his identity, had to endure several minutes questioning by the guards at Collis Gate before he was admitted.

In war, the docklands seemed to be thriving. Weathertops were stirring. Ships moaned along wharves. Still, the skyline struck Ralph as odd until he remembered his own guild’s tower which had collapsed in the Falling. Reaching the quays, he found the Helmsman’s quarters, and gave his rank and name to a sentry, and waited until a broad figure emerged from a doorway. Ralph found that he was shivering as he walked over to meet Owen Price.

‘Oh. It’s you.’

‘I saw you were in port, Owen. I thought we might have time for a drink. Of course, if you don’t…’

The Owen Price which all these years of peace and war had made shrugged his bulk inside a uniform which might once have fitted some other man, and they fell into step and headed between the warehouses in near silence. There had never been any real pretence of friendship, but at the same time, it had often struck Ralph on their occasional meetings that they both felt that they deserved each other’s company, with its inherent reminders of lives unlived and misunderstood betrayals. He’d first come across Owen’s name by chance amid a roster of others near the start of the war. His eye had alighted on the name Price. Not that he’d known Owen Price well back in that lost summer at Invercombe, but he was sure he’d been studying to be a helmsman—from what Marion had said, he’d struggled somewhat—and that same profession and forename would have been too much of a coincidence. This was before the East had alighted on Owen’s kinship with Marion—in fact, it was before Marion’s true fame, although Ralph still felt somewhat responsible for all the subsequent publicity, which, along with the arrest and accusations of spying which had preceded it, had hardly contributed to what now passed for warmth between them. But Owen Price seemed to have been as ill-equipped as Ralph was himself for photo-shoots and empty speeches, and had sunk back into the anonymity of routine maritime service.

They reached an inn beside an old ropeworks, a mariners’ haunt, which was filled with big men with sun-lined faces, their muscled arms blued with tattoos and marks of the haft. It was plain that Ralph didn’t belong here, although he did his best to take the lead by ordering two beers from the sullen barman, and then was grateful to retreat to a small alcove with Owen.

They talked, as seemed inevitable, about the progress of the war, and both men pretended an optimism which they plainly didn’t feel. Owen had already finished his beer, and the next drinks he signalled for came with chasers as well. Ralph watched Marion Price’s brother as he downed the cheap spirit which passed for brandy nowadays, at least this side of England’s divide. Another drink, and the slight tremor he’d noticed in Owen’s hand had almost gone. Of course, drinking was as common as cursing and breathing amongst these sort of men, but it was plain from the red threading of Owen’s cheeks and eyes and the bloated puffiness of his features that he consumed more than most, or was poorer at taking it.

Ralph couldn’t bring himself to keep up, and the glasses piled around him until Owen settled for just ordering for himself. Still, he felt drunk and dizzy enough when, and as always, the conversation turned towards the past, and Marion.

‘Come as a shock, eh?’ Owen muttered, hotly belligerent now. ‘All these years, and you could have been a daddy if that baby hadn’t died at birth.’

Ralph moved the damp circle of the glass he was pretending to drink and nodded. Here, at least, was something they could entirely agree on. He had to admit that the shock of discovering from Owen that Marion had been pregnant had been immense. Still was. Probably always would be. ‘She never said anything.’

‘That’s how Marion is. And you don’t still really think she took your father’s money?’

Ralph shook his head. ‘Of course I don’t.’

‘Four and a half thousand pounds.’ Owen whistled. ‘Maybe she should have taken it. Maybe we could have buggered off to the Fortunate Isles and Dad need never have bothered trying to honour his part in that small trade delivery. Maybe then we wouldn’t be sitting here like the fools we are and wishing everything different.’

‘I’m truly sorry, Owen …’

‘Sorry doesn’t crack it.’ Owen’s still essentially happy face contorted in a spasm of anger. ‘My father died thanks to your bloody Excise Men.’

This was always the time, Ralph remembered, when he wondered why he bothered to torment himself with these meetings. But the wound remained fresh and raw. ‘Don’t suppose you’ve heard anything from her?’ he asked—always did; he couldn’t help it.

‘What? As if
she
could write me a letter, and it would get through to me? They’d think it was some kind of code or spell—the whole bloody East’s undoing. They don’t even trust me to write to
her
, for Elder’s sake!’

But Owen Price wasn’t essentially a belligerent man, Ralph thought, only a deeply aggrieved one. And here he was, general of the East, unwitting impregnator of Marion, fleer of Invercombe, the closest thing Owen was ever likely to encounter to the cause of his grievances. But perhaps that was something; a favour of sorts. Long ago, in the first wake of his returning to that room in Sunshine Lodge, Ralph had allowed himself to believe that Marion and the Price family were fleeing to the Fortunate Isles with his father’s money. But the truth was, he’d have taken whatever excuses his mother had offered him in his precarious state as protection for his continuing need to be Ralph Meynell, greatgrandmaster-elect of the Telegraphers’ Guild. Then, too quickly for him to think otherwise, had come life at Highclare, which he’d coped with as well as she had predicted, and yet hated even more than he’d imagined. That had been followed by wave after wave of challenge. Becoming greatgrandmaster, and then a husband, and a father. And then this damnable conflict. War twisted time and identity, and to find Marion Price re-emerging through its mottled prism, her face changed in Western newsprint but still endlessly recognisable, had been far less surprising to him than it should have been. Even discovering the truth of her pregnancy and stillbirth from Owen had made a sad kind of sense. In fact, the condition of surprise itself seemed to have been put on hold for the duration of hostilities.

Smoke bloomed through what was left of the inn’s air, which was turning rowdily breezy as boozy mariners sang their party-trick zephyrs. Ralph felt distant from the scene, and from himself. For want of anything better, and to clear a sudden constriction of his throat, he took a long gulp of beer. It didn’t help. The stuff came gargling back. He spluttered and coughed and wiped his mouth.

‘Wouldn’t touch that now, if I were you …’ Owen nodded towards the brightly dancing contents in one of Ralph’s several glasses. ‘It’s got blood in it.’

Then they were standing outside in the alarming cold, and Owen was talking of his duties aboard the
Hell’s Bliss,
a cheaply converted trawler which hunted for the few remaining renegade Western dolphins, their bodies rusted with bloody rivets and failing armour plate. Always more of a propaganda weapon than a true threat to shipping, their explosives had generally spoiled. It was easy enough work, as long as you didn’t allow yourself to think of these rotting creatures as sentient beasts.

‘Why did you choose’—Ralph had to ask before they parted—‘to fight for the East?’

Owen Price studied him with almost the same look of contempt he’d borne when they first met. ‘If you need to ask that,’ he said, ‘then why the hell are you fighting for the East yourself
^?
’