House of Bells (5 page)

She still had her gloves on, she realized. Of course she did; they were instinct, in London. They should go. She needed to show willing to the commune.

She'd take them off when she got there, perhaps. Make a point of it. That would work.

She waited, then, gloved hands in her lap, suddenly too sick to eat a scone. Grace Harley had no nerves, that was widely known and commented on: but Georgie Hale? Sick to her stomach, poor Georgie, any time she had to face the unknown. She'd make it through, she always did – but she never had to diet, and she often had to chuck up privately beforehand.

Not this time. She drank tea, and didn't excuse herself to the ladies' even to check her make-up. Grace would have done that without even thinking about it; Georgie didn't even think about it. At last Mr Cook drained his glass and folded his paper, stood up and glanced around for her and said, ‘If you're ready, then?'

It was strange: he looked like one thing, was apparently something else, and sounded like a third thing altogether. His voice was educated, refined almost, in defiance of his dress and his position. She might have tagged him for a teacher or a college lecturer, by the way he sounded.

Not by what he drove. He had an old Bedford van, an ugly pug-nosed vehicle in grubby beige, decorated with dents and patches of red oxide around the wheel arches and seals, anywhere that rust might have attacked it. She couldn't quite see why even rust would want to.

Now she might believe him as a janitor, seeing what he shifted from the passenger seat to make room for a passenger. A galvanized mop-bucket handily filled with cleaning things – Ajax and dusters and floorcloths and a scrubbing-brush poking out jauntily over all. A wooden box of tools and jars and tobacco tins and blue paper packets. He was of an age and type with her grandfather, she thought: which meant that the jars would be full of meths and turpentine while the tobacco tins and packets would hold screws and nails and useful hooks and such, some salvaged and some bought new by the half-ounce. She used to love visits to the ironmonger with Grandad. It was a memory Grace and Georgie could reasonably share: the mops and hoes and axes hung from the ceiling like weaponry on display; the ranks of wooden drawers behind the counter, each with its paper label; the smell of steel, as it seemed to her. And the way the assistant in his brown overall would fold a crisp flat sheet into a paper carton, weigh out the near-liquid flow from one or another of those drawers, seal it with a wafer and write down the contents:
2" nails
or
½" screws
. She'd have one packet of her own to carry home, marvellously impressed by the weight of it and the way the contents shifted if she squeezed, that sense of sharpness even through unpunctured cartridge paper, sharpness and light, bright things contained . . .

Somewhere beyond that thought lay a sadness, which again Grace and Georgie shared. She didn't want to follow it down. She'd rather just stand here, mute and a little desperate, watching this other old man make space for her. His tools were used, his tins were battered, but everything else was new and looked clean. And it all lay on a sheet of fresh newspaper, not on the seat directly; and the seat itself might be worn almost through the leather, but it looked clean too when he whisked the paper away. And the cab smelled of nothing worse than Golden Virginia, not the petrol fumes she'd half expected; and he did her the courtesy of rolling down his window before he lit the thin twist of paper and tobacco in his mouth.

He didn't try to talk. She thought he was probably the silent type in any case, solitary by nature and quiet even with his friends, what few he had. She hadn't known many like that; they didn't come to Soho, by and large. Her grandfather, though, yes. One or two boys at school, one or two boyfriends since.
The ones that didn't last
, she liked to say, except that no one really lasted. Even before . . .

Even before.

She tried to draw him out, in any case. ‘This place, this Hope's Harbour – D'Espérance, did you call it? Tell me what it's like.'

But he just smiled, shook his head, said, ‘No one can tell you about D'Espérance. You have to find out for yourself.'

She was a fool; she thought he meant the commune, the strangeness of it, how ill its hippies fitted into this rural life.

A little later she still thought that, all of that. It was, quite plainly, true.

He drove her up and away, out of this valley and over a bleak moorland rise where nothing flourished, it seemed, but sheep and gorse and rocks amid the scrubby soil; and then down into dark woodland, and eventually through a gap in a tumbledown stone wall that seemed to be losing its eternal battle against the trees. There had been gaps all the way along, but this was more formal. It must once have been a proper gateway, with a proper drive beyond. The gate was gone, and one stone gatepost too. Atop the other was perched a guardian both ancient and modern, a young man dressed all in green, with flowing hair and beard. He had folded his legs beneath him and played a wooden flute as they swung by. He might have stepped straight from the pages of mythology, a wood spirit, a faun; he might have stepped straight from her imagination, her vision of what a hippy commune must be like. Or from the pages of Tony's rag, his readers' prejudice.

He was, presumably, what she had been sent here to report on. A symptom, the pure essence.
Everything that's wrong with youth today
, blustery colonels would mutter into their moustaches.

Was he really watching the road, guarding the gateway? There might have been an acknowledgement as his eyes met Mr Cook's through the windscreen: a lift of his eyebrows, a lift of his flute. Licence to pass. But there was nothing he could do, surely, if the van had been a stranger: no gate to close, no way to turn a vehicle away. Perhaps he had a walkie-talkie and could warn the house that it was coming?

A radio wouldn't sit too well with Lincoln green. Perhaps he was neither myth nor modern; if it weren't for the flute, he might have stepped from the pages of her Robin Hood book instead. His clothes looked authentic enough, hand-sewn rough stuff, maybe even hand-woven. Maybe even the flute was right. They might have had flutes in the greenwood. In which case he'd probably lay it down and pick up a bow from behind a tree and shoot an arrow up to the house in signal . . .

She wasn't usually this fanciful. Grace wasn't. The opposite thing, rather: professionally down to earth. Grace would be looking for the walkie-talkie. Maybe this was Georgie, taking charge. Taking possession. Being herself, dreaming of a better time: when she was a little girl, reading books and dreaming of outlaws in the forest.

It was Grace's book, but never mind. That copy had been lost long since. No one could confront her with the evidence, her name on the flyleaf in childish schoolgirl script.

Besides, they wouldn't need to. She wasn't here to deny her past, not really. Just in seeming; and then to be caught out, and then . . .

Well. Then she didn't know. Then she'd play it by ear. Amazing Grace.

In the meantime, Georgie was daydreaming about outlaws and arrows and a forest that was almost magic but never quite – and Mr Cook was slowing the van suddenly, here in amongst the trees, where a sudden rutted track ripped itself away from the drive.

‘I go that way,' he said with a jerk of his head, leaning on the wheel and gazing at her. Monumentally patient, and not budging. Not going to budge. Not even going to say it, but
you go the other way
: it was written in the moment, absolute.

‘Oh! Um, won't you take me up to the house . . .?'
I thought you were my way in.

‘No,' he said.
No
, he meant. He wasn't unkind about it, just immovable. She could no more wheedle him than push the van with him inside it.

She wasn't delaying the moment; she honestly couldn't quite work out how to open the van door from inside. He had to lean across and pull the hanging cord for her, lean a little further yet to push the door open. She wriggled out, stepping into deep leaf-litter on the verge; he passed her case down to her, slammed the door, put the van into gear and drove away.

Left her standing. In the late sun of a northern summer evening, in the shadow of a strange wood, in the grip of what should perhaps have been a storm of temper – what she wished would be a storm of temper – but was really not.

Nor a storm of tears, not that. Just a surge of self-pity that was not quite enough to lift her and carry her on along the drive, nor quite enough to suck her back to the road. It bogged her down, rather, held her here in the gloom of the trees, unnerved. She'd be jumping at shadows, except that it was all shadow in all directions: like standing in a photograph, in black and white, which really meant a thousand shades of grey. That was her mood, as much as her surroundings. She wasn't even frightened, nothing so extreme: only weary to the bone of her, depressed, unwilling. And—

This little piggy went to market
.

—she had that damn nursery rhyme in her head again, and couldn't shift it. Sometimes she thought it was her punishment, except that it never seemed enough.
You've been punished enough
, but not with this.

Sometimes she thought it would drive her mad, except that that might be a kindness. The mad didn't suffer, did they? If she'd been sure of that, she might have run to madness long ago.

This little piggy stayed at home.

She wished she'd stayed at home. If she'd stayed at home instead of going to the doctor's party, she wouldn't have seen Tony that night, wouldn't have let him or the champagne – say it was the champagne – make her giddy.

Wouldn't have said yes to this stupid, stupid adventure.

Maybe.

She wanted to go home right now, but she had no way to get there. Not till the morning. If she walked back to the station, there wouldn't be a train.

She should just go on up to the house, then. Just for tonight, and see how she felt in the morning.

Besides, she was hungry now.

This little piggy had roast beef.

She was hungry, but apparently not hungry enough; she still wasn't moving.

The breeze was cool, but not cold or strong enough to move her. Apparently.

She stood until the last glimpse of the van's tail lights was lost between the trees, until the last sound of its engine was lost beneath the soft sounds of a wood in evening. She wasn't really imagining that he might relent and come back, no. She wasn't imagining anything, really. Only standing here, with her case at her feet and the road dim before her in the failing light and absolutely no desire to pick up the case and set her feet on that road and go forward.

Except that she couldn't go back, not now. Not from here.

So really she might as well go forward.

Except . . .

Except that somewhere she could hear a great bell tolling, somewhere ahead, and she really did hate bells. So maybe she would just stand here for a little, until it stopped.

Except that she was standing here, peering, listening – and there was no sign and no hope of the van coming back, but
something
was certainly coming.

She could hear it like a beast between the trees, between the strokes of that damned bell, pressing through the undergrowth, coming.

Except that what she heard was the undergrowth it pressed through, the leaf litter it trod in, the noises it made in the world around. Not itself, nothing of its own sounds. She thought it had none. She thought it was woven of silence, nothing there.

She could see it like a shadow among the shadows, a darkness drawing in, local twilight compacting into night. A shape made of absence, a nothingness so solid it made all the world seem hollow else.

Coming.

Light goes away; darkness doesn't come. Darkness is just there, all the time, like silence. Waiting.

This, though: this was coming. Personal, intentional, here for her.

Imagination didn't bend the world, push shrubs aside, snap twigs and crush rotten fallen boughs beneath its weight. She wasn't imagining a thing.

She wasn't screaming, either. Wasn't running away.

She hadn't ever been punished enough, and it was a monstrous lie to say so. Everything she did was punishment, everything she did to herself; none of it ever measured up.

Maybe she'd just stand here, let this thing come.
This little piggy
.

The voice in her head, chanting nursery rhymes to the slow rhythm of a distant bell—

—was her own voice, which somehow didn't seem fair. If she was going to be sucked down into nightmare, she thought at least she might have hoped for one last echo of someone else chasing after her. Something to snatch at, if not to hold on to. Not company, not comfort, but something. That, at least. Tony's voice, perhaps. Or the light gurgling laughter of—

No. Not that. She didn't deserve that.

This, now. She deserved this. Let it come, then.

She stood and waited, and almost called it on.

A
pparently, she'd closed her eyes. Not
that
brave, then, to stand and watch it come.

She only realized when she started hearing something else, over the relentless sounds of its approach, over the thudding impact of the endless bell.

There was music somewhere in the wood, drifting through the trees: low and plaintive, haunting almost, a breathy melody that seemed as right as moonlight, as natural as wind song. And utterly impersonal, heedless, unattached: the very opposite of what so threatened her. Close, perhaps, but remote. Like someone standing by her and looking at the stars.

Close, though, and coming closer. And the shadow . . . wasn't. At least, all she could hear now was music. No crashing, blundering progress as that weight of silence surged towards her.

No bell.

This little piggy stayed at home.