The Light Ages (47 page)

‘You’ve not done so badly, lad …’ He stopped himself tipping his drink into his saucer. ‘Eh?’

‘We received the cheques,’ Beth added. She was sitting beside Anna, who was trying hard not to look queenly. The only chair left in the room was the one that had pride of place in the small bay of the window, which we reserved for guests. My father had given up guildswork on East Floor several years before. He worked now most nights and some lunchtimes at the Bacton Arms, helping to clear up the left-overs, although from Beth’s expression I guessed that that mostly involved him drinking them.

‘And you’ve been inducted?’

‘It was down in London.’

‘And you’re looking for work?’ My father’s neck looked scrawny and abraded in the collar and the tie I knew he detested wearing. ‘And this is your Mistress … ?’

So the conversation went round, and the cakes sat uneaten, and the ground pounded. SHOOOM
BOOM.
It continued that way on Noshiftday, when he and Beth insisted we came around for lunch, which was the usual grisly back end of beef frazzled in the oven up the road.

‘So? You’re from the south … ?’

Anna nodded and chewed hard at a lump of beef which she’d unadvisedly gone for first, then made her second mistake in trying to help it down with a greyish-green segment of last season’s sea-potato. She gazed at father’s and my beers, which she wasn’t supposed to like. I suppressed a smile. I’d never realised before that the rules of eating in Bracebridge were almost as complicated as they were in Walcote House.

‘Yes,’ she said eventually. ‘But I have some relatives in Flinton.’

‘Hmmm. Flinton.’ My father nodded as if that explained everything. Anna’s Flinton connection was news to me as well, but the place was perfectly chosen. Near enough across Brownheath to account for her loose ties with the area, but far enough away, in view of the long-standing mutual animosity between the towns, to put off any further enquiries.

My father tilted his head to me. ‘And I gather you’ve been busy down at the library?’

I nodded. Pages of old newspapers and guild announcements crackling open like seedpods into the sneezing, sparkling air. It was the ordinary things—especially the photos, the bland lists of names, births and deaths and marriages and inductions and awards and disciplinary procedures—which pulled most strongly at me. Then there was the annual Toolmakers’ tug of war held on summer’s guildays between the masters and the uppermasters. My father was there back in year 57, standing frozen for the photograph on the sunlit rivermeads, grinning for the camera through the browns of age. His shirtsleeved arm was looped around a fellow guildsman, who was also just a master then, and wore a fringe instead of the greased back widow’s peak which so amplified the smallness and pointedness of his features.

‘I’m just curious,’ I said. ‘I came across a name just yesterday which I was sure I remembered. Stropcock—wasn’t he your Uppermaster?’

‘Never should have got the job,’ my father said more vehemently and quickly than I’d have expected. ‘He was a mean sort of bastard.’

‘Father …’ Beth said warningly.

‘He’s not here in Bracebridge now, though, is he?’ I persisted. My father snorted. ‘Shouldn’t think so. Got promoted again, didn’t he?’

‘I thought I heard someone mention his name once …’ I slowed, grateful for the lump of sinew I was having to chew. ‘When I was down in London.’

My father snorted and wiped his moustache. Stropcock in London was just taking it a little too far. ‘Furthest he ever got, as far as I heard, was Preston.’

‘The past’s gone, isn’t it?’ Beth added, giving me a look which suggested it had better stay that way. But from here I could see the turn of the stairs which led up to my mother’s old bedroom. SHOOOOM
BOOM
There was something odd here, something adrift, something tingling in my blood, grinding at my bones. It was as if Anna and I had stepped off at a place which nearly was but wasn’t quite Bracebridge.

‘Books, the library …’ My father worked his mouth and hooked a fingernail inside a molar and spat out a piece of gristle into the serviette Beth had laid out for him. ‘And I never thought you were brainy.’

‘Down in London,’ I said, ‘I worked for a newspaper. I wrote articles.’

‘What was the paper called?’ Beth asked.

‘The New Dawn.’

They both returned to their food. ‘One of
them
papers was it?’ Father muttered eventually. ‘Used to have one like that up here. A lad touting it for tuppence, if you please, ‘til he got the shit beaten out of him.’

Beth put down her knife. ‘Father!’

‘Well, it’s true. Telling us guildsmen that we’re wasting our lives working hard and bringing home a decent packet.’

‘Working men in London are often the same …’ I began, then managed to stop myself.

‘And all them marches. What the hell was that about
butterflies?
Why, there’s even some guildsman barmy and disrespectful enough to bring down one of God’s own good churches—’

‘That’s
enough,
Father,’ Beth put in. ‘I’m sure we don’t’ want to spoil our Noshiftday meal with men’s talk of politics, do we, Anna?’ She smiled semi-sweetly at Anna. Then there was suet pudding.

‘I’ve found some old things of yours,’ Beth said when we’d finished eating and Anna had quite properly ignored Beth’s protests and started stacking the plates in the sink. ‘You might as well take a look at them. It’s just up the stairs.’

I followed my sister up the narrow rise.

‘It’s just stuff.’ She gestured towards the small pile of old schoolbooks and other objects which she’d laid out on the landing floor. ‘But of course, you left without taking anything. We thought you were dead. Then cards started coming. Eventually, cheques as well—but I’ve thanked you for those already, haven’t I, so I don’t suppose I need to thank you again. Even then, we weren’t really sure if you were still living, especially after all we’ve heard about London recently.’

To Beth, to the people of Bracebridge, London in this last year had become a place of blood and flame.

‘I could have sent you a card or two back,’ she continued. ‘Like last year when Father and I went to Skegness. We’re not country mice up here. We do travel as well. But we never had your address, did we?’

‘I had too many.’

The brooch she was wearing, the twist in her mouth as she looked at me, were both my mother’s.

‘I’m sorry, Beth.’

‘For yourself?’

‘No. For us both …’

We stood there for a moment. The air beat around us. ‘I didn’t see you at church this morning.’

‘It’s not something Anna and I do.’

‘Ah!’ She nodded as if it all made sense now. ‘And do you remember what the word
ikey
means?’

I had to think. Anna, downstairs, was talking to my father, clinking plates, rocking open drawers.

‘It means stuck up, Robert Borrows, and there’s not much of a worse thing you can say about someone here, other than perhaps that they like delving into the past. The people here in Bracebridge are
nice. You
know how nice they are. They might go to Skegness these days, but they won’t understand you coming here with that pretty wife of yours on what seems like an odd kind of holiday. I should get some work, if I were you, Robert Borrows, if you really do plan to stay here …’ Beth stomped down the stairs.

Schoolbooks. Ink blots, fingermarks and stains.
Five Useful Verbs. What I Did Yesterday.
We couldn’t have written about what we did on our holidays then; the people on Coney Mound hadn’t been able to afford such things in the way that they seemingly could now, against every other trend of this Age. Plonked on top of my few old things was a glass snowstorm bubble which contained a corroded miniature of Hallam Tower. Half the water had evaporated. Instead of aether for the lantern, there was a tiny lump of glass. I’d never seen it before in my life. I gave it a shake, watched the greenish water slop, and smiled. This, if George had really wanted it, was the very opposite of Hallam Tower. Beneath, heavy and curling with damp, were a few children’s storybooks.
Now, Goldenwhite …
And there she was, still wandering the forest depths, through the blooms of damp and age. I recognised the story as one which my mother had told me, although in memory there had been no book; the words always seemed to spin fresh-minted from her head. And Flinton—hadn’t she once said that that was where you might once have found Einfell? Grey houses under grey slagheaps—and now Anna came from there as well.

I stood up, dusting my trousers, and climbed the ladder which led to my old space in the attic; weighed down with lumber and age, the trapdoor wouldn’t budge. But here behind me was my mother’s room. Bed, a different wardrobe, chair and fireplace. I could see that Beth had made one or two attempts to reclaim the place—a vase here, a lace doily there-but its terrible essence remained. SHOOM
BOOM. D’you want to see just how far I can stretch myself …
A few lumps of coal, oddly glinting, lay in the cold grate. They were like jet, and greenish—a scatter of jewels, peacock-tinted with jade. This bedroom was like an old scene, freshly painted. My feet crunched slightly as I crossed the floor. I worked open one of the empty drawers. Beth had placed balls of lavender inside each, tied up in squares of old linen, but they gave off no scent, and felt cold and hard and heavy. I undid one of the ribbons. Inside was a solid glittering lump; the florets of lavender were encased in engine ice. And fanning across the walls was more of a watery glitter which I had taken at first for damp or frost, but crumbled to my touch and left my fingertips glittering.

SHOOM
BOOM
SHOOOOM
BOOM.

I was conscious, as I left the room and descended the stairs and faced their stares, that Beth and my father would have heard me moving about their little house. It was time for us to leave.

I
CAME BACK FROM THE LIBRARY
on Twoshiftday morning to find Anna sitting with the
Guild Times
spread before her on the kitchen table. Highermaster George Swalecliffe was on the front page. These first days, she’d seemingly been happy to busy herself with the rituals of domesticity. She had aprons now, and the blacking for the stove had worked its way under her fingernails. She’d experimented with cooking ham and cabbage, bleaching teatowels, drying herbs—failing and succeeding in equal measure under the guidance of the other women of the street who vied with each other over the best way to do each thing. Cautiously, step by step, Anna was travelling back towards the lost life of the parents she’d never known. But George’s name, the reports of the trial which had began yesterday, had jolted her back to London.

Bits of the bun she’d taken to wearing had come loose over her face and there was a burn across her thumb from yesterday’s bread-making, which had resulted in a black lump of far greater solidity than the aethered bricks from which Bracebridge was made. She’d rolled back the sleeves of her fraying and greying blouse and her stigmata looked like a wet ruby; raw and inflamed. I turned the paper around, reading it as I ate. George had made a long statement in court, which even this newspaper summarised. They called him
the deranged architect
but his views about the wrongness of the Age were somehow allowed to seep through. Tame though it seemed after the columns of the
New Dawn,
it was extraordinary to read of such things even being hinted at in the
Guild Times.
Something was plainly happening—I almost wished I was back in London—but to me it all seemed forced and wrong. I suspected that the guilds were using George to concoct a version of the Twelve Demands so watered down that even they might pretend to accede to them.

Anna remained preoccupied as we walked the afternoon streets and alleys of Coney Mound.

‘I feel so responsible for what happened to George,’ she said eventually. ‘It wasn’t just recently. It’s—what is it that men say about women?’

‘That you led him on?’

With Anna, that was a wild guess. But she nodded. ‘We’ve known each other for years, and I think what first attracted us was the fact that neither of us was part of the crowd …’ She chuckled. Her face was half hidden by the upturned collar of her herringbone coat, which glittered with her breath. ‘And the fact that we weren’t attracted to each other, if you see what I mean. It was an odd sort of courtship. I suppose we were like people trying to dance, watching what others did but never understanding. It was never what we
were.
The only time we ever kissed was that time when you saw us—at Walcote …

We were walking beside the small shops where we’d found the advertisement for our house. The sky was solid blue. The cold, even in this sunlight, was brutal. Apart from the white gleam of Rainharrow, the snow had held back on Brownheath, but you could feel the weight of it longing to fall like silent thunder.

‘His dream of some better Age was never mine, either, much though I enjoyed sharing it. And then there was Butterfly Day. When I found him—when I’m supposed to have rescued him—the men who’d caught him just seemed to run off when I shouted his name. I think they were almost as ashamed as George was about what they were doing to him. But perhaps just my knowing was hard enough for him. Anyway, George was bleeding and crying, and I took him back to Kingsmeet. The noble working man—he couldn’t blame them, so he blamed himself, and perhaps he blamed me…

‘He took me up Hallam Tower just before. I should have seen it coming as well, Anna.’

‘Perhaps I should have told him what I was—
am.
Sadie as well—perhaps that would have made the difference. I mean,
you
know, Robbie, and you’re still here.
You’ve
never betrayed me ..

We had walked on past the houses, unthinkingly pacing together to the rhythm of the engines, towards the rise of St Wilfred’s. The graveyard was winter-bleak. But there was the stone, set above my mother’s grave. The guilds were good at paying for such useless things. Still, I was moved to see it here amid all the others as I had never been when I was younger. We wandered up through the dead grass to another stone. AETHERMASTER EDWARD DURRY 46–75. Anna’s father, who’d been only five years older than I was now when he’d died on the day the engines stopped beating. Amongst the many papers and remnants of that time which I’d now collected, I’d found a photograph of him and his wife Kate in an old guild yearbook as they headed towards some dance. Caught in flashlight, they made a handsome couple, him especially—almost bursting out of his best suit with a grin which was broad and unashamed. Anna looked even more like him, I’d decided, than she did her mother. But she was alive, and as she leaned forward and touched the stone beneath which he was buried, I could smell the scent of her hair through the cold air, like fresh straw and almonds.