The House of Storms (55 page)

‘I showed Klade what little’s left of the aether today,’ he said, after dabbing his lips again. ‘We talked about the life he might eventually lead, or at least, I did. He seemed…’ He gave a rheumy chuckle. ‘I think he was humouring me. But at least I got the knife he was carrying around off him. I’m really not sure he was safe with it.’

‘I saw him as well. For the first time, he actually came to
me
, which I suppose is something. He let me shave him and cut his hair.’

‘He must look very different.’

‘He looks rather like you.’

Ralph pushed at the food. ‘Amazing, isn’t it,’ he said eventually, ‘how well everything is preserved? Part of me still wonders if the readings are wrong, and we’re all poisoning ourselves with aether.’ He coughed. Tinned asparagus dropped from his fork. ‘Klade worries me, Marion.’

‘He worries me as well. The way he looks at you—everything he says—it’s never quite what you expect. But who knows what he’s been through? He certainly doesn’t talk about it. Or, if he does, we fail to understand …’

‘Perhaps we’d be having this conversation anyway.’

‘Anyway?’

‘If you and I had …’ Ralph fumbled again for his handkerchief, and Marion waited for him to subside. ‘If you and I… If we had …’ Still, he couldn’t finish.

‘I think I know what you mean,’ she said eventually. ‘Klade’s not at an age when parents are supposed to think that their children are behaving in any proper way.’

‘So—our children are always a disappointment to us?’

‘You have other children, Ralph. You should know.’ She was being hard on him, she supposed, as she pushed aside her plate. ‘What I mean is—’

‘No, Marion.’ Ralph raised a thin nugatory hand. ‘You’re almost right. But it’s the other way around. Parents are certainly a disappointment to their children, but they’re an even bigger disappointment to themselves. That’s the thing …’ Working back another cough, he took another hurried sip of the wine. ‘The thing that’s hardest to bear.’

More food came and went. More wine, as well. With it, Ralph brightened. Even across this long space of linen, she could almost feel the heat he gave off.

‘The state of balance this house had managed to maintain is quite extraordinary,’ he was saying. ‘It really is as if the Beetle Lady was entirely right and it had been waiting for us. And Habitual Adaptation. You know, all the information we put in is still stored in that reckoning engine. You and me, even. And Klade as well. All of the scattered pieces of our lives have come back together here. Don’t you think it’s our duty to make the most of this chance?’

Marion nodded, although she wondered what particular chance it was that he meant.

‘I do truly regret the things I turned my back on when I left here, Marion. I made wrong decisions. I know that now. Always did, I suppose. But the one thing that’s left to me is this theory. The data was always there. We were far more thorough than we realised. We just lacked the skill to collate it properly. But thanks to all my training—which, by the way, I mostly hated—I have that now as well. Nothing’s entirely wasted. You know, I’d given up believing in destiny. But I do now. And I want you to promise me something.’

‘Promise?’ She imagined he meant something to do with Klade. Ralph had odd ideas about his son becoming some ordinary guildsman—or more than ordinary, she supposed, seeing as Klade was of the Meynell clan, at least in his eyes.

‘Oh …’ Ralph, sensing her wariness, bared his loosening teeth and receding gums in an understanding smile. ‘I simply mean that I’d like you to take whatever you can of my—our—work on Habitual Adaptation with you when you leave Invercombe. I’m not asking you to move mountains, Marion. My feeling is that the world will be more ready and receptive once this war has ended.’

‘I’ll do what I can.’ No point in her protesting that he’d be able to do the job himself; telling lies wasn’t how you helped the dying. ‘But I really don’t know what we’ll be facing out there. Or how long any of this can last.’

The candleflames leaned. Even beneath the shelter of Invercombe’s weathertop, was she the only person to feel the imminence of a gathering storm? But Ralph, like these half-maids and part-footmen who clumsily tinked glasses and chipped the edges of plates as they lumbered about in their ill-fitting uniforms, was borne along by this sham normality.

‘I really do wish I had the energy to explore the gardens and get down to the shore, but the data’s all here. There’s the library, and there are climate records which have been automatically transcribed all these years, and those of the workmen who came to this place. The seasons here have certainly been most odd. These last few shifterms, it’s actually been getting
warmer
.’

‘The seasons can’t turn backwards though, can they?’

‘You can’t have summer after autumn, if that’s what you mean.’

Somewhere in the house, a clock shivered silvery bells. ‘All this power,’ Marion said, ‘all this aether. What
is
in control?’

Ralph shrugged his coathanger shoulders. ‘I don’t know. Although …’

‘Although what?’

‘I’ve looked at some of the records. It’s there in the reckoning engine as well, as a sort of shadow. This place wasn’t abandoned by the aether workers because of the war. They left before that. And then there was a huge surge. Most of the aether they’d re-purified and was seemingly left unaccounted was exhausted in one single rush.’ He fell quiet.

‘So? What happened?’

‘It was …’ Ralph didn’t cough, but his hands closed around his latest handkerchief. ‘It was on the day of the Falling. The day of the destruction of the Dockland Exchange.’

And no one has ever traced it to here?’

Ralph shook his head. ‘Invercombe was the private property of my guild. And by then, everyone had left. So there were no witnesses. Attempts to reclaim the remaining aether had already been deemed too costly and dangerous to be practical.’

‘Deemed by whom?’

‘My mother has always taken responsibility for major decisions about the running of the estates of the Telegraphers’ Guild.’ His fingers balled and unballed the handkerchief. ‘Her authorisation’s the last thing on the files …’

After the meal had ended, Ralph made noises that he would follow Marion as she headed up the best stairs, then hung back as if gaining his energies as he leaned beside the curling balustrade. She knew that he would probably spend the night working and sleeping down by the reckoning engine. That was, if he slept at all. The bedroom in which he had spent that lost summer was still nominally his, but it was a place he avoided even now that it had been cleaned and aired of all the stench and sea-wreckage.

A fire shone warmly over the wide, tautly made bed in her own room. The curtains had been drawn, although their fall was less than perfect, and Marion felt compelled to cross the carpets to straighten them, and they stirred towards her as she did so in chill fingers of the wind which passed across Clarence Cove. Looking down from here at night, you could still see a faint glow. Like that ormolu clock frothed with golden birds, which ticked although its hands never moved, Invercombe seemed caught in some perpetual moment. She’d have been far happier back in the servants’ quarters where she’d once slept, but they had been occupied by the people who had assumed her old roles. And this was, indeed, a fine room.

So many of England’s great houses had been ransacked by the war. Marion herself, with a busy glee which she now understood better, had strode along their corridors demanding that unhygienic tapestries, flurries of pointless furniture, be instantly removed. But here she felt at home. She opened the lacquered lid of the gramophone. She’d never possessed such a device herself, although she could see how it would be a comfort to turn it on at the end of a difficult day. Marion smiled as she watched the arm rise and fall towards the turntable with the glide of good engineering. She was already humming to herself, although she had no idea of the record’s tune, but the needle skidded, and what came out was a crackling howl. For some reason, the machine was playing backwards. She turned it quickly off.

She undressed, guarded the fire, lay down. The curtains stirred. The sound of the gramophone still turned in her head, but when the ormolu clock finally chimed, it joined seamlessly with her dreams.

Next morning, she was roused by breakfast on a tray. The curtains were drawn for her, and sea-driven rain swept at the windows as sunlight came and went. It was already nine o’clock. Marion had rarely slept this late, although, as she poured herself a third cup of tea and pondered another slice of toast, she couldn’t help wondering why.

Invercombe could run itself, and the minor dilemmas which were put to her as she toured the house were just part of the ritual. She approved lunch from the menu which had been prepared by a guildsman who had previously run a tearoom in Bath. She congratulated a master-launderer from Saint Austell on the whiteness of his sheets. She told herself that she should be accounting supplies and organising something more practical than this vapid role-playing. But she didn’t.
Ma-ri-on.
Softer now, a murmur on lips rather than a full throated cry, the sound surged and whispered along the hurrying corridors where the threads of cook’s framed mottoes had faded so irregularly beneath their glass panes that their dimmed shapes were more reminiscent of some obscure spell.

Finding herself at a loose end now that she had cut everyone’s hair, the
bang bang bang
of a wind-thrown window drew her on into the peacock room. After she’d closed it, Marion noticed that one of the patterns in a row of Cathay plates was off true. As she straightened it, a plate further along the rail turned the opposite way. She tried again. Another plate, invisibly interlinked, turned. Shaking her head, but far less puzzled than she should have been, she headed back into the inner hall where the telephone booth gloomed beneath the best stairs, and found herself gazing at its bell. It seemed that it was the only one at Invercombe which hadn’t yet rung.

Pulling on her old frayed coat, Marion went outside. It
was
getting warmer. Although the clouds still turned, flutters of greater brightness surged across the top terrace where the statues stood caught in mid-gesture as if they had just hopped on to their plinths. Huge seedheads rattled. Dry sweeps of sallow and lavender flailed. She thought of poor Ralph; the boy who’d once craved logic was now a man talking of his destiny to prove a theory which disproved destiny’s existence. Thunder crackled. A blue flicker, a wave of sunlight, then a rolling boom. Orchards on one side and the walled and parterre gardens on the other. She’d hoped that by wandering and not consciously looking for her son, she might bump into Klade; but she remained alone, and the pools lay momentarily flat, filling themselves with the sky then feathering in a fresh gust. There were brighter colours in the more shaded hollows as evergreen bushes shyly produced new leaves and fruit.

More and more of the gardens spread like a stormy rock-pool below her as she climbed past the specimen trees and ascended Durnock Head. Was it possible that Alice Meynell really had used Invercombe’s unreclaimed aether to cast the spell which had destroyed her own guildhall? Hadn’t she been there herself at the time of the Falling, and only narrowly survived? But she
had
survived, her guild had grown—and this entire war could almost be traced to the Falling’s aftermath. For all the rumours, Marion thought as she climbed the temple steps, no one would ever believe that the guild which had suffered most could have engineered it…

The wind boomed in the temple’s domed white roof. It thrummed the pillars like harpstrings, then swirled back in a sudden clarity which revealed the Bristol Channel. Wales unrolled its mountains. A few ships were moving. There as ever, crossing the water in proud, sun-dazzled leaps, was the Severn Bridge. Little though she cared for feats of guild engineering, Marion’s heart ached to think that this graceful structure would almost certainly be destroyed by one side or the other in their final advance.

Boom boom boom.
The wind, low and shrill, high and loud, quiet and slow, called to her as she climbed from the temple. Unavoidably, and although she knew that lunch would soon be arriving in the west parlour, she was drawn towards the shore. The waters of the seapool lapped and gurgled as she headed through the gate, then out across the bare wet sand where the tide teemed across great silver stretches of sheer, unrippled light. She had come this way before the war began, and, then as now, the ever-changing shore mocked her by seeming almost the same. These rocks, these scents, these flaps of bladderwrack. Even before she had thought about it, she’d taken off her shoes. Chill sand burrowed between her toes as she walked amid the casts of lugworms and empty razor shells. Shrimps darted for cover in rockpools as she stooped, and something in her lower back tautened, but it was pleasant to dig her fingers into the sand and find a cockle’s ridged shell. Strewn oysters, as well. Her fingers split one apart, and the creature inside gulped and breathed. She felt saddened by her unthinking act, but noticed something red under the glinting tongue, and prised it out. For this was
Cardium glycymeris,
the beady oyster, and here was a blood pearl. She’d once pretended these were money or jewels—sweets, when Denise was around.

Habitual Adaptation was, indeed, a clumsy name for something as harsh and beautiful as the process which Ralph sought to define. It was founded on death and cared for nothing but reproduction and survival, yet could produce this shore, this house, this world. No word, no phrase, could ever match something so wild and all-encompassing. Marion looked about her and squeezed her toes through the tide’s thickening rush. Then, suddenly, there was a figure. Her skin chilled. For hadn’t she been re-enacting the very moment when Alice Meynell had come to her? But this shape was smaller, and it was quick and it was light. Laughing, too. Marion ran towards it before, in a swirl of shade and sunlight, the mirage of her lost sister Sally vanished.

This day had passed as inexplicably as days always did at Invercombe, and the sun was already setting as she re-entered the valley. Up in the house, a fine teatime array would soon be cooling itself, and she hadn’t even seen Klade. Still, she turned away from the house’s lit windows and took the path which wound up between the sighing fir trees towards the weathertop. The building had a fragile glow, then turned ashy grey as the light fell away.