House of Bells (19 page)

‘It is,' he said. ‘It's all those things. You can write music as easily as words; I'll show you that. When you write your name, it'll be like you're writing the song of you.' And he whistled that little trill of notes again, which she'd thought he had made up just for her. Apparently, it really did say
Georgie
. ‘Or formulas. You could do engineering in the language, and know that your buildings were safe and your machinery would keep working.'

And your milk won't turn sour, and your dogs and your children will all behave with strangers, and your babies won't die whatever you do, and . . .

She didn't believe in a perfect society. She didn't believe that she'd found one. Ruthlessly, she said, ‘How's Kathie, do you know?'

‘Oh. I'm not sure that anybody knows. She's . . . not really awake. Her eyes are open, but she's not there. Not responding. Acid flashback, maybe? Or she's just got lost, somewhere inside herself. We tried to call her out, but . . .' A helpless shrug finished the sentence.

I guess she doesn't speak your language well enough. Or you don't.
That was Grace, being nasty. Seeing true, though: he was thinking, for sure, that if the language had been perfect and both of them fluent, he could call and she would come to him, from wherever her poor mind was wandering.

‘She needs a doctor,' Georgie said, anxious and guilty. Thinking that what Kathie most needed was for last night not to have happened: not to have danced too close to the fire, not to have plunged too deep in the water, not above all to have spent the night with her. Not to have been betrayed, blindly and absolutely:
her, take her, don't take me . . .

Was that really what had happened? She wasn't sure, she couldn't think – but it might as well have been. Deliberately or otherwise, it came down to the same thing in the end. Kathie suffered for Grace's fault.

‘She's getting one. Mary knows, if Leonard doesn't – she knows when something's beyond her. We've a doctor in London; he's something to do with the house. Always has been, I think. He dates back before the captain found it, at any rate. Like Cookie, he came with the lease. Webb's gone to phone him.'

Of course there was no phone in the house. It was one of her great expectations, that the essentials of life would be taken from her. But: ‘Wouldn't it be quicker just to take Kathie into town?' It took a day to come up from London, even if their doctor was prepared to drop everything and come right now.

‘To the cottage hospital? Sweetheart, there's nobody there who could help. To them she'd just be a drugged-up hippie chick taking up a valuable bed. They'd be horrible to her and horrible to us. And they'd take her anyway, take her away from us and not do her any good, and we can't have that. She's better here. We'll keep her comfortable until the doctor comes. Meanwhile, for my penance, Webb says I have to show you everything you didn't see last night.'

He didn't seem too distressed about it. Georgie thought his real penance had happened already, in that interview with Webb; Grace wanted to think he hadn't been punished enough. She wanted to blame him.
If you'd done what Webb said, if you'd been there in the room, the . . . thing might not have come, wouldn't have come because I wouldn't have been all alone and afraid in the dark like that, I'd have been talking to you; and if it had come anyway you could've protected Kathie from it. From me . . .

She wanted to, but even she couldn't really make it his fault. She knew what she'd done. Perhaps it was only that she'd been too slow, but even that was a choice. She was quick enough, when a thing was to her benefit. Grace couldn't hide in Georgie.

Even so, she said, ‘So where were you last night? Where did you go?'

‘Out to see Frank.' He had a mulish cast to his mouth, apologetic but defensive; he still thought it was a reasonable thing to have done, despite the consequences.
Not my fault
, he wanted to say.
I wasn't to know.

He probably had said exactly that, and it had done him exactly no good whatsoever.

‘In the middle of the night?' And
out where?
and
who is Frank, is he Francis, is he the man I'm looking for?
But one of those questions was unaskable and the other could wait.

‘Yes. He doesn't sleep much, and he doesn't like to be alone all night.'

‘I thought nobody was ever alone here?'

‘Nobody should be. But Frank won't come into the house. We usually go out to him, one of us or some of us, at some point, just to scare his spooks away; and I wanted to ask him not to ring the bell, if it upsets you.'

‘Oh, what? But – no, you can't upset the whole house, just for me . . .'

‘Of course we can. We could, if we had to. This is a community; we take care of our people. But it won't upset anything, not to use the bell. It won't upset Frank. I'll take you to him, you'll see.'

‘Can you take me to a bathroom first?' Even dressed as she was, even knowing there might be men in there, that was suddenly rather urgent. ‘And find me something to wear?'

Webb says I have to show you everything
, but actually that only seemed to mean the things that Tom found interesting, which mostly meant things outside the house. There were dormitories in the attics that she hadn't seen yet, there was a whole wing she hadn't even looked in; these people fitted this house about as well as these clothes fitted her. A woollen shirt and a long plain skirt: rough to look at, and rough on her skin. She didn't quite understand why she couldn't have pretty Indian cottons, though she was grateful not to have bells on the hem. Shifting her shoulders uncomfortably within the coarse fabric, clenching her toes to keep simple handmade sandals on her feet, she felt as though she'd been swallowed by some over-earnest primitive religion.

When she asked about the other wing, Tom shrugged. ‘Just rooms we don't use yet, mostly. We'll need them when the language spreads, when people want to come here from all over. Leonard thinks they'll come for other reasons too, but it'll be the language more than anything. Come on, I want to show you the gardens.'

‘It needs a better name,' she said.

‘What?'

‘The language. What's it actually called? What do you call it?'

‘The rational language, the universal language . . .' He seemed at a loss. ‘It doesn't have a name. Why would it need a name?'

‘Because it's new, because you need to sell it. You're excited, I can see that, but it doesn't sound exciting.'

He was shaking his head, bewildered. ‘You're not getting it; it's not like that. It's not a commodity that we have to sell. Once people understand, it'll sell itself.'

‘You're the one who doesn't get it. You need to sell it to people who
don't
understand, who haven't learned about it, who don't dig languages or hippies or communes or peace or politics. It needs to have a name.'

‘Oh, I don't know. Talk to Webb.'

She didn't want to talk to Webb. Nor did Tom want her to, she thought. He was happy enough to talk about Webb, but not to hand her over; he wanted to have her to himself. It was quite sweet, and obligingly obvious.

In perfect accord, then, they came out of the house and crossed the yard behind. Here was the arch through to the stable yard, below the stopped clock; she suppressed a shudder and tried not to cradle her wrist. No bells rang out, nothing happened, she didn't start to bleed.

‘Welcome to the Museum of Failed Endeavour,' Tom said as they came out into enclosed sunshine on cobbles.

‘I'm sorry?' She was being idiotic herself, she knew, looking about for curious horses and a dungheap. She'd stayed in too many great houses, swept through too many stable yards in too many sports cars; expensive motors and expensive beasts were still what she expected, even while her head knew perfectly well that there were no horses here, and no sports cars either.

Even so: she was being idiotic, but he was incomprehensible.

He grinned. ‘That's what Webb calls it.' So naturally it was what he called it too. ‘Well, he uses our own word; that's a translation, but it's close enough. We're all interested in self-sufficiency here. A place this large, it has to feed itself and more, better. It needs to contribute to the wider community. We need to earn our place. We do voluntary work in the neighbourhood, and we make things for sale or to give away. Simple, wholesome things. Craft things. At least, we try. People have ideas, and this is where they come to try them out. Oftentimes, this is where they stay . . .'

Proper stable doors led to workrooms, rather than proper stable stalls. No straw on the floor, no tack hung on nails on the walls. Instead, old reclaimed machinery stood on bare and dusty stone. She stood looking at a giant wooden corkscrew, and knew that it couldn't possibly actually be a giant wooden corkscrew, and said, ‘What is it?'

He was almost laughing now, but not at her. At his friends, his housemates, his community: almost at himself. ‘It's a cider press.'

‘Is it?' She thought about that for a moment, and found an obvious other question. ‘Where do you get the apples from?' As far as she knew, apple country was the other end of England. She'd walked in orchards with lordlings and generals' sons and eager politicians, she'd watched young men gather windfalls and seen urchins scrumping in the trees and scrambling over walls to get away; but those had been all in Devon and Somerset and Dorset.

Now he was laughing aloud. ‘Quick, aren't you? Yeah, we had to buy the apples in. Even if we could grow them here, if we planted an orchard, it'd be years before we had fruit. Decades, maybe. And I don't think the ones we bought were the right sort. Anyway, the cider tasted foul. If you want to try it, there are bottles and bottles in the old still-room, back in the house. We can't throw it away, but we sure can't sell it. We keep trying to hide it in the dinner. If there's a nasty aftertaste one night, that's because another bottle's gone into the stew.'

The next door down stood wide, and the space inside was occupied. She didn't go in, only peered from the doorway: shifting lights and busy shadows; an old tin bath raised up on bricks over a trough of flame. The smell of paraffin, and – ‘Oh! Candles!'

Long dipped tapers hung in pairs, in colourful tangles on the walls.

‘It's almost our only successful industry,' Tom said. ‘One of these days they'll burn down the stable block, but in the meantime we have light for ourselves and more that we can sell at market. It pays for itself, at least. I don't think it actually makes a profit, but it keeps the electricity bill down.'

And they enjoyed it, clearly, those people in there: felt themselves useful, doing their bit. She remembered what Leonard had said about that, and she still thought they were like children, playing with wax and string and fire. They wanted her to come in; they wanted to show her what they did; they wanted her to join them. She backed away from their welcome,
not what I'm looking for, no.

The next stable held woodturning tools, lathes and chisels and mallets in racks. No people.

‘I think they've given up,' Tom said. ‘Rick and Paulie thought they could make plates and goblets and candlesticks, but apparently it's quite hard.' Indeed, the work gathering dust on the bench bore witness: split and misshapen pieces, bowls and cups that looked more like they'd been hacked with blunt edges from twisted trees. ‘I think it needs a decade of practice, and they didn't give it a month. They're off in the woods now, gathering dead timber for Frank.'

‘Why does Frank . . .?'
And who is he, and is he who I'm looking for? And will he want to be found?

‘Charcoal,' Tom said. ‘It's his thing; he makes charcoal. It's all right, Cookie keeps an eye on him. He won't let anyone burn down the woods.'

She had no idea how charcoal was made, or really what it was for. They used to draw with it at school, but she didn't think he meant those long neat sticks that would snap in a moment in careless childish fingers. People burned it, she did know that, but she wasn't quite sure why.

This wasn't the time to ask. Here was another workshop, where they did basket-weaving and made willow hurdles and wanted to learn how to thatch. She wasn't sure there was any thatch up here in the north, but that wasn't going to stop them. An intense man with a pale wispy beard and vivid eyes told her it was the finest way to roof, the only honest way to roof, a tradition that dated back to earliest times. The passion for slate had ruined the countryside, he said, and ruined the villages of England too. The cities could look after themselves, apparently; they were beyond hope and deserved whatever they did to themselves – self-scarring, he called them – but the villages should have been protected and were not, but could still be recovered. If people would only learn to live under thatch . . .

Tom rescued her, quite bluntly. ‘Sorry about that. People get passionate here. Cob's safe to be passionate about thatch; nobody's ever going to let him rip their good weatherproof roof off and sleep under reeds instead.'

‘Does he sleep under reeds himself?'

‘No, of course not. He sleeps in the dorms with the rest of us. Come on now. I really do want you to see the garden.'

The garden was his passion. Along with Webb and the logical language, of course: but this was something Tom could show off, legitimately his own. He led her down an unexpected passage in the far corner of the stable yard, and here at the end was a dungheap and a narrow wooden gate in a wall beyond; lift the latch and step through and it was almost like Narnia, almost another world.

It was a walled kitchen garden, as four-square as the stable yard, but everything there had been messy, dirty, decaying almost as she watched. Here was order, neatness, regularity, success. Cabbages and cauliflowers and leeks marched in regimented rows, vigorous and thriving; the dark soil between was free of weeds, freshly watered, freshly turned. It reminded her of her father's allotment, her ritual Sunday visits – except that small patch of council land had always been a trial to him, a duty, sheer effort. This was vast in comparison, and a labour of love.