The House of Storms (49 page)

Ralph Meynell, or the scraggily bearded invalid Ralph Meynell had seemingly become, was walking with her now, and she supposed it was part of the madness of the war and this procession, or perhaps merely an expression of their weariness, that neither of them had seemed that surprised to find each other. After all, this procession of followers resounded day and night to losses, reunions, loves and animosities forsaken or renewed …

‘I’ve seen so many things since I fled Bristol,’ she told him. ‘Before that, I could still pretend that there was order. I could pretend that there was some purpose and the hope of saving lives.’

‘This war…’ Ralph spluttered and put his hand to his mouth, and the grumbling, tooting, thumping crowd elbowed around them as he spasmed into a fit of coughing and Marion waited beside him for it to stop. She had seen this hot brightness, this thin and cheery sense of purpose, many times with tubercular patients, and knew that it normally presaged the final crisis. ‘It’s like a drug, an addiction,’ he said eventually. ‘It led me
so
far. I even thought I could end it all by Christmas—I mean, the war. Take Hereford, at least. But all I’ve done was cause more and more death …’

The coughing subsided. He still wore, Marion noticed, the remains of a senior Eastern officer’s uniform, but no one here took that as any indication of who he really was any more than it might have occurred to them that the figure, possibly male or female, who hunched beside him was the physical incarnation of Marion Price.

‘Is that why you left Hereford?’ she asked as they moved on. ‘Deserted—whatever it was that you did?’

‘I was arrested. I’d tried to make contact with the West by relinking a telephone connection. I thought I could talk to them about peace.’

Marion almost smiled. Perhaps some part of the invalid who limped beside her really was the old Ralph Meynell. Still ridiculously idealistic—still imagining there was reason and logic in the world.

‘And then?’

He coughed again. ‘There was an ambush. I think the Beetle Lady wanted me as much as she still wants you.’

‘What for?’

‘I do think she really remembers us from Invercombe, or imagines that she does. In another life, she was a guildslady called Doctress Foot. We met at her Hotwells. Do you remember, that time we went to Bristol?’

Marion nodded. Previously, it would have been hard to imagine that anyone could change that much. But now, confronted by the evidence of what had happened to Ralph, and to herself …

‘It all goes back to Invercombe,’ he sighed. ‘Everything does.’

‘But why? Why
us
?’

‘We’re nothing. It’s all of this’—he gestured around him at the followers—‘that counts.’

‘But this is madness.’

‘And you’re walking with us, Marion.’ He lowered his voice slightly at the mention of her name, although she doubted if anyone else would ever have heard his wheeze in this stomping, yelling herd. ‘So you must be mad as well.’

The countryside through which they were passing had been saved from the destruction of battle. Those residents who had stayed on watched warily from upstairs windows or from around doors, whilst the few soldiers and police had made the obvious calculation of numbers and vanished when they heard of the procession’s approach. Still, as they thumped and steamed and the pipes piped and the earth trembled, there was none of the pillage which Marion might have expected. And still the Beetle Lady shouted and beckoned and waved in her mad raiment,
No, no, this was not the place
—
Listen! You must move on
… as they passed farm gates and post boxes and waymarks. It was bizarre, to witness the followers passing through this ordinary Western winter landscape; the untouching of two realities. In their wake they drew the curious, barking dogs, children, the mad. Some hung back or vanished. Many, many others joined with the shuddering march.

Ma-ri-on…

Boom-ba-boom …

Marion wondered just how long this blurred sense of order would last. When would hunger and frustration break out—in the next town, at the next farmhouse, the next village? And once that line had been crossed, what of sanity would remain? She was worried as well because of the gathering ranks of deserters who had been drawn to this procession. Word of their passage would certainly have swept along the telephone lines which hung dark across these fields. It could surely only be a matter of time before a regular army was mustered to see they were bloodily dispersed. The whole situation was hopeless, and yet she was marching towards Einfell and Invercombe to the rhythm of her stolen name in the hope of finding her lost son. She supposed that Ralph was right; she probably had grown a little mad herself …

The landscape dimmed. Earlier and earlier now as the year turned towards its close, it was growing dark. Flares were lit, the flaming crowns of dead branches. As sparks drifted and the chanting grew ever louder, it seemed that they could see further and further ahead over the unrolling hills. What
was
that light at the edge of the horizon? A signpost flickered in the passing flames, and Marion was sure she recognised the name. Not that she’d been to Edingale, but hadn’t Dad once bought a pig from a man who’d lived there? It was all so impossibly strange … The followers spread out from the road to rest amid a mixture of copse and pasture. Fires were started. The stranger creatures which had been part of the procession, those which hid from daylight, emerged shyly to crouch before the singing heat. Food was thin, and there was scarcely any water. For all the Beetle Lady’s encouraging words, there were mumbles of disappointment. Where, indeed, was the manna? Where were the pillars of smoke and fire? Where was this happy place called Invercombe, Avalon, Paradise, Eden, Einfell—whatever
was
its name? But the songs were a help, and the bodies and fires provided some shelter in the closeness of their gathering.

She found Ralph some dirtied hunks of bread and a few capfuls of watery milk. What he proved incapable of eating, she gave to the old man who was hugging himself beside them. She even allowed a little for herself, for she, as well, was some ailing creature, and since leaving Bristol she’d come to treat this husk of Marion Price with something resembling her old beside manner. She’d been kindly, but remote. The begging, the cutting of her hair, the swapping of clothes, the asking of favours, the sleeping and eating as winter set in, the shedding of what seemed to be left of her identity, had all been accomplished by looking down on herself with distant, clinical sympathy. After all, she came to realise, Marion Price had never belonged in only one time or one place. She had always borrowed identities and purposes. Shoregirl, maid, penitent mother-to-be, riverperson, nurse, administrator, figurehead, lover; none of them had ever really been her.

And this war. The guns, the madness, the gleefully organised brutality. How could wrong and right matter so much that bones poked from the mud and skin hung from the trees? What exactly were these armies defending? Ways of living? Preferences in food or religion? She didn’t believe in bonding, but now it seemed to her that, one way or another, most of the population of England was enslaved. Since fleeing Bristol and trying to find her way towards Einfell in the teeth of a fresh enemy advance, she’d witnessed a war which even the unsanitary chaos of her hospitals had kept at bay.
Boom-ba-boom… Ma-ri-on
… As if the Marion Price she’d discarded had grown into the spirit of all the destruction she saw around her as some final conflict gathered and the guns of both sides came to taunt her in their distant rage. Her name shook the air. It was scrawled on walls. She found it carved in the grinning ribs of a corpse. And then she had encountered other followers who had grown in number and had joined in turn with this vast procession which now bickered and coughed and sang and dreamed. And then she had met Ralph Meynell—or whatever he’d become.

‘I was wrong, you know,’ he said as he shivered inside the blanket she’d found for him. ‘When you walked out—what I said to you that day in Sunshine Lodge.’

‘What
did
you say?’

He gave a wheezy laugh. ‘I can’t remember. And we never did get to the Fortunate Isles, did we? Either of us? Or find a better name for Habitual Adaptation. And I’ve seen Owen. Did I tell you that, Marion?’

‘How is he? Is he still… ?’

‘He’s fine—or as well as anyone can be in this war. The work he’s doing isn’t particularly dangerous, although it hasn’t been easy for him, being the brother of Marion Price.’ Dim redness and light pooled and went from Ralph’s eyes. ‘But he told me the truth, Marion. Before that, I never knew. He told me about the baby that died …’

As instantly as the striking of a match, she felt her old angers and disbeliefs flare inside her. ‘Your
mother
knew—your so-called greatgrandmistress. It was she who persuaded me to go to Saint Alphage’s.
She
was the one who stopped me coming back to you that day in Bristol.’

‘I know about that now, Marion… But the money had vanished from that account my father created for me. Did you know that? All of it?’

‘And you thought that I… ?’

Ralph nodded, coughed. ‘I didn’t know what to think. Forgetting was like falling, and there are other things as well. Things I can’t… It suited my mother to keep me in the dark.’

‘All these years, and you call it the
dark
! What do
you
know about darkness?’

But Ralph said nothing as he shuffled on, and she sensed that, for all his chains of command and his fine houses and his stupid Eastern ignorance and everything that his war had brought down on him, he had perhaps glimpsed some deeper kind of darkness in the life he’d been living, even if it was something he could still scarcely barely bring himself to face. He’d stopped shivering, but his breath remained an agitated wheeze. It occurred to Marion that, like many of the patients she’d sat with as they began to sense the nearness of death, he was asking her for absolution. But she couldn’t give that to him. The girl, or the young woman, who could had long gone from this earth, and so had the arrogant young man. Instead, perhaps, she owed this new Ralph the truth. But that was the hardest thing; the truth always was. Einfell, for all her wanderings against the teeth of this winter war, had been the one direction towards which she’d found it hardest to draw her own thoughts. Cradle memories, creased limbs, the downy scent of hair—all the things she’d striven to forget in the years since she’d walked from Bristol along the Avon Cut and decided to head up the river—had returned to her that night as she gazed at the records in Saint Alphage’s. Her baby hadn’t died. But with that knowledge had come all the old stories of aether-twisted monsters. And then there was Dad, the blue glass, Mam’s scarred fingers …

With something akin to her old bedside manner, Marion wondered whether Ralph’s mind and body were capable of coping with what she’d discovered about their son. In a way, it was like the decision whether to move someone for better treatment when the journey itself might kill them, or whether to tell a solider that all his mates were dead, or that the letter he’d sent to his fiancée had come back
not known at this address
. But this pain, if pain was what it was, was at least at much hers as it was his. Wasn’t there still hope and purpose? And if it turned out that there wasn’t, perhaps she and Ralph would be better off leaving this world.

‘Look, Ralph …’ she began. She’d thought, inasmuch as she’d ever thought of a moment such as this, that these events and feelings would be difficult, if not impossible, to express. Instead, the words rushed out. And not just about the baby she’d lost so many times and in so many ways that the truth about his seeming survival was just another form of separation, but about her family and the river and the lost village of Clyst and the dreams of the shore, and yes, goddamit, about Ralph and Invercombe and what had been done to her by his own bloody mother and all the broken certainties and happinesses of that summer that some part of her mind was still stupidly trying to reconstruct.

When she’d have expected expressions of doubt or surprise, Ralph merely lay beside her and listened. He pressed closer to her, and she felt the breathy fever-heat of his bones, as, much to her frustration, she began to sob.

‘Who knows what’s good or bad, Marion.’

‘It’s like this war.’ She wiped her face, then balled her fingers into the earth. ‘It’s like
everything
.’

‘No—that isn’t what I mean. Listen, can’t you hear her?’ The Beetle Lady, her feverish energy far stronger than Ralph’s, was still stuttering and screeching as she wandered amid the followers and the quickening winter wind whipped and moaned. ‘We’ll be close to Einfell tomorrow. We’ll soon find out…’

The air was windily damp in the morning. Even as she and Ralph huddled at the heart of the followers, Marion felt as cold as she had ever felt as they marched on. After yesterday and the day before’s strange normalities, the few houses they now encountered were abandoned. The world, as the wind chanted through the hedges, seemed unmade and raw. But there was no mistaking the lie of this landscape, these signs and the mileposts, the shapes of the trees, the colours and textures of the earth. She could even sense the near-presence of the sea. Here a wooden finger pointed to Einfell, just as it might to any other place, and the procession followed, although there were murmurs of unease amid the chanting, which grew louder as a long, dark fence began to loom. For all the stories of Goldenwhite’s ragged army and palaces of dreams, this was a place few would have cared to visit even now in the uncertainties of war.

Then the road gave out entirely in the giant spreading of barbed fences, but the Beetle Lady was not deterred, nor apparently entirely irrational, for she drove them around and on, to the south and west, until they met an open gate.

Emboldened, the followers flooded through it, their fears suppressed by their numbers and the Beetle Lady’s urgings, and by the surprising ordinariness of what they found inside. Einfell’s roads were wild tangles of upturned concrete. Winter abandonment lay across its fields and woods. Why, they exclaimed as they fanned out through the deserted spaces where a few tired buildings sagged and leaned, this was just like every other place the war had left in its wake! But Marion, as she left Ralph behind and ran ahead of the laughing wave, realised that Einfell’s abandonment was far deeper. Had anyone ever lived here, in this recent Age? But a larger house showed a brighter patch of roof, and there were small signs, as she waded its dead nettles, that its garden had been tended. The front door, indeed, looked as if it had been recently broken in by angry hands. Breathless, she glanced behind her, but the shouts and cries of the nearest followers were still some distance away. She went inside.