The House of Storms (61 page)

After a long shifterm of storms, the weather remained unseasonably calm in much of the West. At Invercombe, the waterwheel had frozen on its axle, but the weathertop continued to summon waves of warmth so strong that summer briefly reigned. Against Ralph’s predictions, the trees and plants proved capable of budding, and the grass greened at an astonishing rate. Walls warmed. Even the shadows cast by the low winter sun seemed, by some refraction of the cloudless sky, to hang higher and brighter in the sky.

All instincts for tidiness amongst the followers were lost as the house’s windows remained open and rugs were laid for picnicking upon the lawns, and then forgotten and trampled into the earth. Furniture was laughingly borne down the terraces. Soon, there were roses unbudding over chests of drawers and grandfather clocks chiming amid the hollyhocks. At night, the glamours and glows of the garden were far more inviting than the unlit house, and many took to sleeping outside. If they slept at all, that was, amid the shameless love-making which prevailed not just in Invercombe but across much of England as old distinctions and rivalries were rendered briefly pointless. The night air was drenched in pollen and murmurs, and grew softly alive with glimpses of limb and petal; it sang with cries and gasps.

Ralph’s old bed, his old room, were no longer the places they had once been, and he persuaded a couple of the followers to help carry him outside into the gardens, where the fervid air had grown ridiculously warm. The place he settled on was by the seapool, where a sofa from the peacock room had already found its way. He lay down and looked up the sky. Butterflies, roused early by the heat, rested on the flower-embroidered cushions, and vines twined up from the quickening carpet of grass as shadows played over him from the wavering trees. Invercombe breathed around him, and he breathed with it. Then he heard footsteps. They came and went so slowly, and his weary consciousness came and went with them, that he’d long decided that they didn’t really exist when a trembling shadow began to inch its way over him.

‘Ralph …’

The voice, the face, were almost entirely different. But he smiled. For Ralph knew that it was finally time to humour the mumbling old creature his mother had become, even if he could never quite forgive her, and ‘Old Alice’ soon became a familiar figure at Invercombe, wandering to and from the house bearing trembling trays of food to her recovering son, or sitting talking with him just as she had always done on their long-ago journeys across Europe, which was now almost all that she remembered.

Amid this green riot, the house felt damply old. You could hear the creaks and gives as ivy tore and old timbers and stones settled. The best stairs were no longer straight, and blisters of falling plaster were revealed as tapestries were hauled from the walls to make bedlinens for the lovers in the citrus grove. Marion explored the new emptiness of these rooms, or sat for long hours in the telephone booth, where the mirror still hung reflectionless. There was an odd sense of life without its beckoning darkness, as if something was happening either too quickly or slowly for her to notice. The gardens, for all that daisies were jauntily pushing up through the terrace paving and moonivy now clothed the statues, held less appeal to her; she grew tired of disturbing the bodies she so often found coupling on the beds they had brought out, and headed for the shore. Here, summer also briefly reigned, although the waters she waded beyond the edge of her familiar space of rocks grew suddenly cold and Wales dissolved into the mist which hung beyond this core of warmth. Invercombe might be losing its chimneys, but her shore was unchanged, and she wandered barefoot, although the sense remained—and more especially at twilight or as she moved back through the gardens—that she was still being watched.

On the fourth morning, when the early roses had already lost their petals and the later sallows were fully in flower, she encountered Ralph. He was up and walking the gardens, albeit with the aid of a stick, and he looked better, even if he had aged with a rapidity which almost matched his increasingly weak and incoherent mother.

‘Ah, Marion!’

Like two guests at a party who felt that they should know each other, there was a moment’s awkwardness as they stood together in the scented sunlight, but she managed a smile even as she noticed the greys at the edges of his hair, the dryings and draggings of his face. He was no longer the old Ralph and it was only with wry sadness that she realised they were standing on the close walk just beyond the pyrepoppies amid which they had once made ecstatic love. Falling into step, they wandered along the paths. Everything seemed quieter today, and they both agreed that there were fewer followers here now. If, indeed, that was how any of them still thought of themselves.

‘Fresh people have come to Invercombe, as well as those who have left,’ Ralph said. ‘After all, who cares about guild warning signs now? And they’re bringing the most extraordinary rumours. It’s said that all of the main reckoning engines are still working, but that they’re not in anyone’s control. And did you know a crude postal system’s been started between London and Bristol? Riders, men on foot, or with carts. Can you imagine—we’re going back three Ages!’

‘People can’t just dance and make love.’

‘They can’t, can they? And you know, I still haven’t got the faintest idea whether that’s a pity or not. For what it’s worth …’ His steps slowed beneath the green shade of the pinetum. ‘For what it’s worth, Marion, I’ve sent a letter to my wife back in London. The Elder knows whether it will ever get there, but I’ll keep writing and sending them until I get there myself to ask Helen if she wants me back.’

‘There’s little to keep you here, now, Ralph. Not unless you count your mother, and I suppose she belongs in the East as well, if she ever belongs anywhere.’

‘That isn’t what I mean, Marion. I just wanted to say … I just wanted to tell you how much I loved you.’ He laughed. ‘There!’ He stopped and turned, gesturing to the green-lit trees about them. ‘I’ve said it! And look, not one single thing about the world has been changed.’

‘That’s not true,’ Marion said. ‘I loved you as well. It’s just…’

‘Something we could never find a word for?’

Unthinkingly, neither of them seeming to lead the other but the moment happening to a will of its own, they embraced. Marion laid her head against Ralph’s shoulder. No longer with the remote bedside manner of old, but with a twinge of a sexual urge, she felt the shape of his body. They kissed, and Ralph laid his hand across her right breast. But, even in this radiant garden, it was only a ghost of their old passion, and they soon drew apart.

‘So … You’ll be leaving?’

‘No.’ Ralph shrugged. ‘Or not quite yet. The guildsmaster part of me, the husband and father part, wants to get back to London as soon as possible. But the rest of me feels that there’s still something here at Invercombe which hasn’t been done. After all, this is where the spell was sent out from. And there have been, as I say, the oddest rumours. So I think I’ll just wait here for another few days to regain my strength.’

‘Have you seen Klade?’

Some of the old greyness and worry reasserted itself over Ralph’s features as he shook his head.

Klade was difficult for Marion to find for the very reason that he was often close by, watching and following her. With so-called followers frolicking half-naked through the greenery, he found a cherishable sense of security at the edge of the quieter places where she moved, in the silences and the distant shine of her silhouette as she walked the shore, and in her startled, absent gaze when he stumbled as he followed her back towards the house through the flower-lit pathways at nightfall.

Sometimes, he watched the other followers as well, and witnessed their breathy fumblings and listened to their liquid grunts. With his mother and father—and a wasted creature who claimed to be his grandmother—so near, Klade told himself that he was no longer alone. But alone was how he felt, especially as Inver-something began to take on some of the scents and disorders of Einfell. He missed Ida. He missed the Big House and the Ironmasters. He missed the Shadow Ones. He missed their song. Really, all the comfort he had left was Marion Price, for she and he were, Klade decided as he followed her, alike in so many ways. In their wandering wonderingness. In their need, which he respected, to be alone.

Picking up her trail as she headed towards the shore by some unthinking route, tasting the dewy grass which had been shaped by her bare feet, he watched as she and the man who was his father met and talked. Their words were drowned by the sigh of the trees, but soon, he was sure, they would beckon him from the patch of shadow where he crouched. Together, they would all Laugh and Hug and Dance in the sunlight. But instead they ceased their talking and put their mouths together just like all the others. Klade watched in disappointment, and yet was saddened when they stepped apart. In his distress, Klade remained crouching in the same spot even as Marion Price walked closer to him along a turn of the path.

‘Ah … Klade.’ There was that odd look in her eyes as he straightened up. ‘There’s something I want you to help me with.’ She used the smile he’d seen her give to Outsiders and followers when she wanted a job done. ‘It’s a bit of a grim task, but there are graves which need digging for the soldiers who died at the folly. You need have nothing to do with their bodies …’ As if Klade hadn’t seen bodies. ‘I just need some help with digging the holes.’

He followed her across an expanse of flowers and grass to a musty shed, where she found two spades. As his flat, sharp blade slid into Invercombe’s earth, it seemed to Klade they were preparing to bury the war itself. Noon passed. The day proved not quite so warm as the one which had preceded it, but it was hot work. When a hole grew deep, Marion Price, her hands warm and slippery with sweat and earth, helped him out, and Klade did the same for her. He gripped her waist as she leaned against him, and the sigh of the trees, the colour of the sky, deepened. In the golden mid-afternoon, with eight wormy spaces of shadow laid out in the greensward, he noticed that the flowers of late summer had already bloomed and would soon be dead. Striking his spade, he rested his arms and watched as Marion began to cut the next grave’s turf.

‘I’m glad we’ve done this together, Klade. It’s no recompense, but something’s always better than nothing …’ The trees chanted. Sweat had shaped and darkened her blouse. Klade knew the differences of a woman’s body from his own well enough by now, and he was puzzled by his unreasoning desire to discover the exact nature of his mother’s. ‘And I—this is a terrible thing to say, but I had a sister who took ill and died very quickly when I was young. And when I see Ralph … Well, I wonder why he was spared and she wasn’t.’ She laughed. Sensing where his gaze was settled, her fingers redid the loosened buttons on her blouse. As if I’m still expecting to find some sense in the world.’

‘There isn’t.’

Her stance altered. ‘You should ignore my rambling, Klade. You have youth, health, plenty of time. Ralph will be able to help you start a new life when he leaves Invercombe far better than I ever could. Just remember that that old woman isn’t the sweet old lady that I know she seems. It’s a—’

‘Why are you afraid of me?’

She wiped back her hair. ‘But I’m not.’

The scent of bared earth grew stronger as he walked towards her around the line of graves.

‘Klade—I don’t understand …’

But she did. After all, if his father and all the other followers could do these things, why not Klade? And he loved Marion Price. Of that much he was certain. And surely she, as his mother, must love him as well? His hands reached for her and she stumbled back, tripping over her fallen spade, and Klade stumbled with her, conscious of her resistance, but also that he was big and that she was small, and how once he’d gripped her arms and pushed her all the way down into this fragrant autumn turf, she’d be unable to escape until he had done all the things that he wanted. But surely this was not the way love was supposed to be, for she was shouting for him to let her go as she twisted this way and that away from his seeking mouth, then slammed her elbow into the side of his skull. Klade shook his head, seeing stars. As his sight cleared, the vision of this fear-struck female, her eyes wide and her mouth slack with terror, made him loosen his grip. In a series of kicks and squirms and giving resistances, Marion Price crawled away from him.

Saddened, exhausted, his face pressed against the scented earth, he lay listening to the softening thud of her departing feet. His hand lolled over the meadow grass into one of the graves, and it seemed logical that he should roll the rest of the way into it. For he was the Bonny Boy, and the soft earth surrounded him. He curled up as the air cooled and it grew entirely dark. Then it began to rain.

Leaves dropped and clogged the pathways and drifted down the gullies into pools where they joined with all the petals and seeds and rotting fruit and dead insects of Invercombe’s quick seasons, causing overflows and blockages which widened into chain-mailed puddles within which wardrobes warped and paddled their lion’s feet, whilst precious tapestries leaked rainbows of dye.

Marion spent the night crouched and shivering on the weathertop’s iron gantry, looking out across the lightless dark. Every now and then, as the wind roared up and the rain washed more heavily against her, she felt the structure give another ominous shift. This, for the first time, was ordinary weather, brought here to Invercombe by nothing more unusual than the prevailing winds. She wondered what Ralph was waiting here for, and then if he hadn’t perhaps already gone back to his life and his family without saying goodbye. She wondered, as well, why she’d remained here for so long herself. But the world beyond, as the high gantry creaked and dripped and, in a series of triumphant rushing roars, the River Riddle began to tear the water-race far beneath her apart, still seemed empty and unformed. Going out there would be like walking into a mirror. It would be like throwing herself off this drop.

The night was long, but she found that she was still crouched on the bare wet iron, her hands blued and her jaw rattling, at the coming of dawn. Naked tree by naked tree, bare grey field by bare grey field, the warless winter landscape of Somerset revealed itself through the continuing downpour. It seemed at first to Marion that it was entirely deserted, but then she saw a stutter of yellow moving between the black hedgerows. Two lights. Yellow, unwavering. She climbed to her feet and watched as the headlights of England’s only functioning car clawed towards Invercombe.