The Light Ages (33 page)

Uppermaster Stropcock and his wife. Here at Walcote House, and stinking rich, and calling themselves Bowdly-Smart. This was even odder than my presence here. What had they done to manage this seemingly magical trick? Whatever it was, I had the advantage. Stropcock must have slapped and intimidated so many potential apprentices that he didn’t recognise me. I poured myself another cup of coffee and felt my hands grow more steady. I decided that I would stay on here for the rest of the celebrations after all.

The white walls of the seaward side of Walcote House rose above sheer white cliffs, from white sands. The cliffs curled east away from Saltfleetby and then on towards Folkestone like a protective arm. Below them, in waters clearer and bluer than the sky, sailboats hung, fish darted, bright weeds waved. Weightless swimmers were beckoning as I took the long steps down.

‘It’s Master Robbb—bert … !’

Sadie, as under-dressed this morning in a blue-striped costume as she had been over-dressed the night before, surged out from the sea towards me. Jaunty in her bathing cap, touching me with fish-wet hands, she told me she had seen little of what had happened last night, but had heard
everything.
Laughing, she sent out spray. That huge vase going over!

‘You must come and join us in the water, Robbie!’

But I shook my head. I couldn’t swim—the Withy or the Thames never held much attraction once you knew what poured into them—and I had a headache. So I sat down on the crystal beach and watched the bathers.

Highermaster George flopped down by me. His limbs were thin in his striped swimsuit, licked like sunlight with golden fur. He laughed away my attempts at an apology for last night. Such performances were seemingly a matter for congratulation. Why, he’d once been ill over a pile of everyone’s coats in someone’s house and had dined out on the tale for the rest of the season … We fell into silence. Sails drifted past in the heat, their reflections upturned. The bathers swam out to a diving platform and basked like seals. With an apologetic backward glance, George joined them. These swimmers had the restless energy of children. They laughed and played in the water. They crashed through the spray. There were servants, black figures patrolling the edges of the sands, stooping like wading birds to offer iced trays. Sadie returned to me, her hair clinging to her shoulders.

‘Oh, I know how you must feel. Try this. It’s a guaranteed pick-me-up. My own special recipe.’

A crystal glass the same no-colour of the ocean, and as cold and salt and deep. But I really did feel better after it—or at least different. And I became conscious as I sat in the sun of a figure further off at the edge of the headland, walking at the lip of the waves. Grey knee-length shorts, a tucked-in white blouse, hands in pockets, long hair and bare calves. The bathers were still laughing, splashing, arguing over the rules of some complicated game. No one else had noticed Anna Winters. The heat shimmered, dissolving her for a moment like the wind puffing out a flame. I got up. Moving quickly across this dry white sand was like running in a dream. It took me an Age to reach her.

‘D’you know what all this stuff is made of, Robbie?’ she asked without turning her head, still gazing out at the sea. ‘Classroom chalk. All of it. Isn’t that strange?’

I looked down at the blurred sand as I caught my breath. It was obvious now that she’d said it. ‘Why,’ I gasped, ‘wouldn’t you talk to me last night?’

‘Aren’t we talking now?’

Shaking my head, I felt Sadie’s potion swimming within my skull. ‘But you seemed so annoyed that I’d come here. And that thing you did to me last night, with the vase, the drink …’

‘You think you need
help
to behave like a clumsy drunk!’

‘I’d thought we were friends.’

‘You mean like you are with Sadie, or with George?’

‘They’re just people I happen to have met.’ I waved my hands. ‘At the end of the day, the people here are just like people everywhere else. In fact, they’re much worse because they just live and eat and drink and do nothing. I know that now, Anna. It’s probably the only thing I do know about them.’

‘I do wish you hadn’t come, Robbie. But at least you’re calling me Anna.’

‘And you really want me to leave?’

‘No. Not now. You’re here, aren’t you? And perhaps I was too harsh on you yesterday …’

Annalise stuffed her hands deeper inside her pockets. Her hair slid over her shoulders, the sunlight chasing up and down it with the pulse of the waves. A larger wave came rolling in, clear as glass, changing the angle of her legs. I felt my trousers go sodden to my knees.

‘I know it’s not your fault,’ she said as she started walking away from the bathers and towards a turn in the headland, her lovely head stooped in that way of hers, her face in profile against the sparkling water. ‘I don’t blame you for what you’ve done—or for your life. It’s nothing to do with your being a radical and a mart and not some wealthy Northcentral guildsman, as I know you’re probably thinking. These people are no better than you are, Robbie. I understand that as well. But you shouldn’t imagine that they’re worse than you either.’

‘You know I saw Mistress Summerton?’

‘Of course I know.’

‘And you know what she told me?’

‘I can imagine. That tale of hers and all those terrible things back in Brownheath and the death of my poor mother and how Missy saved me and raised me and did everything and that it’s really her money that still keeps me going. It must have taken most of the day, until you got up in that box in the Opera House to gawk down at me.’

‘It’s been part of my life, too, Anna—the things that happened. My mother was a friend of your mother’s. She died as well. It just took longer.’

‘I’m sorry. I know all of these things. But they’re in the past, aren’t they? We’re adults. We’ve made our own choices. That’s why we’re walking here now.’

We walked on, in the bright sunlight, beside the waves. Not so long ago, Anna, I thought, I’d probably have agreed with every word you said about the past being gone and finished. But not now. ‘I can’t help feeling,’ I said carefully, ‘that, after all we’ve shared without even knowing, we might be able to help each other ..

Annalise blinked slowly. Her eyelashes were as blond as her hair.

‘You think you know what I am, don’t you? That’s the place from where your problem comes. It was a pity, really, that I let you find me at the fair. Yes, it was fun at the time, but it was also a mistake …’ She shot me a look colder than the waves. ‘And now you come trailing after me with half-understood secrets.’

‘You’re different, Anna. How can you deny that?’

‘I don’t. But everyone’s different in their own different way.’

‘That’s just a riddle. You’re-’

‘What?’ She threw up her head, the sunlight thinning her limbs. ‘You mean, I’m like Missy? Or—who is that dreadful creature? Mister Snaith? Believe me, Robbie, you really don’t know! They’re not me!’ She waved her hands as if she was banishing something and the sea flashed dark through them. Then she stopped and turned. She held out her wrist. Of course, the Mark was there now. Its scab glinted on the pale inner curve of her wrist like a ruby.

‘This
is me.’

I opened my mouth, but it filled only with the dull burrowing ache which I always felt in the presence of Anna, Annalise—whoever or whatever she wasn’t or was. That ache was growing even now as the wind picked up and drew a slash of hair across her face; it continued growing when I had thought it could grow no more and had already consumed me. But her lucent flesh; the very substance of Annalise. I could have studied it forever. Her veins were so fine I could see the living pulse within them like a darting blue fish. She let out a sigh and stamped her bare right foot in the waves and yanked her arm away from me.

‘You really are hopeless Robbie!’

‘But you could be so many things. You could have been anything! So why this?’

She turned and continued walking. Up ahead, the cliffs were divided by a steep vee. A pathway led up from the beach beside the stream which cascaded down from it, winding from side to side on neat little wooden bridges as we followed the ferny shadows. It was a chine, moist and cool and dark even on this hot morning.

‘Unlike you,’ she was saying as she walked briskly ahead and the water fell beneath us and pooled and fell again, ‘I don’t see that there’s anything wrong with simply being happy. And then in making happier the lives of the people who surround you. Your problem is that you imagine happiness is too easy, that it’s some cheap illusion to be scorned in favour of …’ Searching for the words, she glanced back at me. ‘Whatever it is that you want to bring down on us all, Robbie.’

Vegetation dripped. Mist rose. A rainbow hung in a shaft of sunlight. I half expected each turn to reveal the house of that imaginary aunt.

‘But it’s been a struggle sometimes, that I’ll have to admit. And I suppose I
am
different, or I could be if I let things get through to me. When I enter a room, I can feel people’s thoughts like the roar of this water. When I pass a haft, a building, a machine, I have to close my mind to it or else its spell comes tumbling into me. If I were to blur my eyes, if I were to open my ears and forget myself and let it all in, the whole world would overwhelm me. It’s like a madness. And I’m lost then. I’m like those poor creatures you hear about. The ones far worse than Missy whom they keep in St Blate’s. So why on earth should I want that? It’s a door which I’ve always striven to push shut.’

‘But you have power—’

‘—don’t talk to me about power!’ she snapped. ‘I want my life as it is. I still want to be Anna Winters. I want to be happy and ordinary …’ We had neared the top of the cliff. The path was levelling out. Ahead of us was a gate. Predictably, beyond that, and seeing as we’d walked less than a mile, lay some part of Walcote’s huge gardens. You could still see the house’s many rooftops from here, and the high white spire of the Turning Tower. ‘If you want power, Robbie,’ she muttered, ‘you should look over there.’

The stream which fed the chine fanned out. There were ponds and water-gardens. Huge fish, golden-armoured, ancient-eyed, nosed our reflections. With every new turn and surprise, I tried to imagine how this urn or archway or that stretch of lawn might be put to better use in the coming New Age, but it was becoming difficult. This whole place had been designed to overwhelm.

‘And I’m still waiting for you to tell me,’ Anna opened the gate which led back down into the chine, ‘what’s wrong with being happy …’

‘Nothing. If that’s what you really are.’

We descended the winding paths back through the chine. The air down on the shore was midday hot. My feet dragged. My headache was returning.

‘Have you met Grandmaster and Grandmistress Bowdly-Smart?’ Anna shook her head. ‘Who are they?’

‘They’re here as guests. I thought they might—well, that doesn’t matter ..

We were drawing closer to the bathers again. They were still splashing, floating, playing.

Look! Is that Anna!

Yes, yes!

All the usual excited cries.

‘Everyone here seems to think the world of you,’ I said aimlessly.

Momentarily, Anna’s footsteps slowed and she nodded, seemingly pleased. If she has a weakness, I thought, it’s that she likes being liked. That’s why she puts up with me—that’s why she puts up with everything. Wet and ridiculous in their skimpy clothing, the bathers were rushing our way. I hung back and watched as they clustered around Anna, curious to see the exact nature of the trick she was performing. But in this different world she’d created, which was suddenly as real as the noontime heat, Anna radiated nothing more than happiness, and the guileless mystery of being what she was, which is something few of us can manage.

I sat down on the sand. The game the bathers had long been trying to play took shape now that Anna was here to urge them on, quietly directing from the edge of the waves, although, like me, she didn’t swim. Her friends suddenly looked graceful as mermaids as they swam and dived and chased each other. Finally, the morning had to end and, wrapped in towels, dropping soggy bits of swimsuit which the stooping servants collected for them, they performed the extraordinary dance of getting changed. Sadie, ruffled and damp in an expensive daydress, sat down beside me.

‘Makes a difference, our Anna, doesn’t she? Always has.’

Anna was talking to Highermaster George now. She’d taken off her sandals, although she’d managed to walk with me beside the waves without getting them wet, and dangled them by their straps. When she bent down to put them back on, I saw George’s hand trace the line of her back. My heart dropped, and then started pounding, as I watched him and Anna head up the steps towards the house.

‘Hey, you all!’ A plumy-voiced shout. A young guildsman—one of last night’s gathering around the piano—was standing over a rockpool, water trickling from his hands. He was holding something tiny and alive. ‘Look what I’ve just found!’ He gave a barking laugh. ‘It’s another of Sadie’s discoveries!’

Throughout the rest of the day, Walcote House continued awakening. There was an archery competition. Folk dances were performed on the lawns by charmingly dressed children of the local guilds. There were raffles and treasure hunts. In a brass and leather library there were crisply ironed copies of today’s
Guild Times,
which was filled with more strikes and lockouts, although the
Times
called them
insurrections
and
necessary precautions.
But from here, with the smell of sunlight on old hide, none of it, not even London itself, seemed real.

Back in my room, I lay on my fourposter bed and stroked the fine wood and rubbed at the dragging pain in my temples. Framed on the wall was a list of the charities this shiftend was supposed to benefit.
The Distressed Guildswoman’s Fund, The Society for the Restitution of Chimneysweeps, The Manx Home for Old Horses, Emily’s Waifs and Strays—
even
St Blate’s Hospice and Asylum;
it covered every imaginable kind of misfortune. And out on the lawns, guests were buying raffle tickets, attempting impossible tasks for a wager or slipping rolled ten pound notes into silver boxes. After their efforts, it was hard to believe that anyone could ever suffer from poverty, disease …