The Light Ages (63 page)

‘But what happened,’ she asks, ‘to poor Mister Snaith?’

I shrug. ‘I really don’t know. When I last looked for him, he’d already left that warehouse. Some people just fall through the cracks of life ..

‘Ahhh …’ Through my skull, her fingers, the breath of the wind. ‘You’re calling him a person, now ..

‘Isn’t he?’

‘Well yes and no and perhaps. I thought he might have turned up later in the tale, in the part that you and I are still living. I thought that he might have made it to that fabled place—to Einfell.’

Einfell.
The word sounds different from her. It’s still a breath, a spell.

Her fingers draw back, then caress my eyes. ‘So. This
is
one last thing you still believe in?’

‘Of
course
I do,’ I say. ‘I took the train there only last Fourshiftday …’

E
INFELL.

There it was, the word I’d dreamed of spelled out on the sign of a station in Somerset, and painted on the firebuckets and picked out in white flowers in the little bed beneath. Einfell. But I still half-expected the wooden platform to dissolve. And it was a warm day, Niana; a sunny day quite unlike this one. And there were stoneclad houses along a tufted road, and dust on the hedges, and the sounds and the smells of cattle. Einfell. The birds were singing.

To a signpost, and then another. Of the few other people who had got off the train, one, I realised with the odd awkwardness that comes on such occasions, was heading in exactly the same direction. She was just ahead of me, and seemed oddly familiar in the waddle of her walk, the scarf she’d tied around her grey hair, the stretched and faded polka dots of her dress. A plump body in a sunlit lane, with a face, warmed and reddened, which finally smiled back to me.

‘You’re going there as well?’

We walked the rest of the way together, talking absently at first about our journey here. She had a large wicker basket propped against her hip which was covered in a gingham teatowel, and I imagined that it contained food, until the towel caught on a bramble. Underneath, there were jars and packages of various proprietary soaps and cleaning fluids.

‘What’s you name? I hope you don’t mind me asking …’

‘Not at all. I’m Mistress Mather. My husband—well, he’s in there ..

As we walked to the gates of Einfell, Mistress Mather told me of how she and Master Mather had
fallen out,
as she put it, over her husband’s long hours at Brandywood, Price and Harper, and his obsession with his work. Stupid, really, but then that’s how it is when you’re young. She’d gone to live with her sister in Dudley, and she’d fully expected he’d come for her in a few days, or at least send a telegraph. But he was a shy man, and he’d thought she’d meant far more in her leaving than she really had. And she’d found work, and she became worried after a shifterm or two about what, if she did go back, the neighbours would say. Such are the burdens we make, eh? And then, years after, she heard about St Blate’s. But here-well
this
is different, isn’t it … ?

‘You come to Einfell often?’ The phrase still sounded strange on my lips.

‘Often as I can.’ We’d reached the gates, and she knew where the bell was to ring for the porter. ‘Me and my sister, we’ve moved to Bristol so I can be near him. Not that things are the way they used to be between me and him, but life’s life and you have to get on with it, don’t you?’

I could only agree that you did. Then the gate was opened, and I was detained whilst Mistress Mather was allowed to waddle up the rhododendron path towards the sunlit, flatroofed buildings.

‘We don’t permit anything containing aether in it here, sir,’ I was told, and I assured the porter that I’d brought nothing that would fit such a description until I read through the dog-eared cardboard list.

‘What about all that cleaning stuff?’

‘Mistress Mather knows to read the contents on the packet.’

Divested of my tieclip, my fountain pen, my pocket knife and my collar studs, and probably lucky to keep my shoes and jacket and still to be wearing my cologne, I finally made my way towards the main entrance. There were trees and parkland. There was a smell of clipped grass. Figures, too distant for me to see in this bright sunlight whether they were Children of the Age, were wandering. Through swing doors, I introduced myself to the nurse at reception and found that I really was expected. There were many windows along the corridors. The atmosphere was sunny. The place smelled like an exceptionally clean hotel.

We finally came to a door numbered like all the rest, and the nurse turned to me.

‘You knew her, didn’t you?’

I shrugged. ‘I used to.’

‘I mean in the
past,’
she said in that half-disgusted way in which people often refer to the last Age nowadays. ‘I wouldn’t spend too much time dwelling on it if I were you. She’s not like that. She’s a saint, but she gets impatient. She only likes to look ahead.’ The nurse strode off down the shining corridor, heels clipping.

Breathless and lost, with my heart already pounding, I thought briefly about knocking, then simply opened the door.

‘Ah, Robbie …’ The sunlight was behind her as she moved around the desk. She was offering me her hand, and she was dressed in the same uniform as that nurse. There were filing cabinets, a calendar, nothing in her office that wasn’t practical. Not even a single pot plant. ‘You’re slightly earlier than I’d expected. Otherwise, I’d have ..

She was still holding out her hand. It felt rough, warm, detached. ‘This is an impressive place.’

‘That’s what everyone says.’ With the light behind her from the window, I couldn’t see if she was smiling, or quite how it was that she now did her hair. ‘Sit down.’ She moved back to her desk. ‘It’s a fair journey from London. Can I get you tea? I think we can manage something to eat.’

‘That’s all right, thank you. The, ah, station name—it came as a shock …’

‘Stupid, isn’t it? But it costs a lot of money to run a place like this. We have an official title, but the local people don’t seem to mind the name, and you sometimes have to play to people’s preconceptions before you can change them. The art of compromise—it’s not something I’m good at, but I’ve had to get used to it. Did Nurse Walters give you a tour?’

‘She brought me straight to see you.’

‘Oh? Well, perhaps later.’ Anna almost sounded surprised. Was this the first chink in her armour—the sense her employees had gained that I was different from her run-of-the-mill visitors?

‘To be honest, I came to see you, Anna. I met this woman on my walk from the station. It’s really quite the most extraordinary coincidence—’

‘You mean Mistress Mather? You forget, Robbie. It was you who took me to St Blate’s’. I made some efforts to put them back in touch. It’s worked very well.’

‘What does he do here?’

‘Just the ordinary things of life—just like all of us. As best he can.’

Nurse Walters had been right about Anna. All my plans, all the things I was going to say and do … I reached slowly into my inside pocket and extracted the strip of paper which I had made out yesterday in one of the great banks which inhabit the rebuilt edifice of Goldsmiths’ Hall. My hand shook as I placed it on the desk, halfway towards Anna. There was a pause. My eyes had adjusted somewhat to the light which poured in behind her from the grounds and I could now see that she hadn’t cut her hair short as I had first imagined. Rather, she’d plaited it up and wound it around in a tight, impatient bun. Strands hung loose. They glimmered silver, and her face reminded me now of her mother’s as I had glimpsed it long ago, although Anna was far older now than Kate Durry had been when she died; a vision of how she might have been, if her life had continued, if Anna had been born ordinary, and if she had lived with her parents in that house on Park Road. But her father was an aetherworker and mine was only a toolmaker. By the standards of Bracebridge, there would still have been an impossible distance between us.

‘This is …’ Anna took the cheque and held it close to her eyes, studying the amount. ‘Entirely unexpected. And incredibly generous..

I knew that Anna had money of her own, a sort of wealth, even if she’d probably hate the phrase. It came from Mistress Summerton’s long occupancy of Redhouse, and her acquisition of rights over that land which, in a landmark legal case which I knew George and Sadie had a large role in swaying, passed on in her estate. Children of the Age are now permitted to own property. And, Anna, officially, had never been anything more than entirely normal in any case. She must have been back to Redhouse, although she had sold every acre, and I wondered as she studied my cheque if I should mention the survival of our fountain. But that was in the past. Anna had a watch pinned to her blouse. Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick
went the sound of its mechanism.

‘I thought,’ I said, ‘that you could do something more useful with it than I could.’

Slowly, Anna laid the cheque back down on the desk. Her hands had that scoured look which comes from being plunged for too long and too often into tubs of washing. ‘Perhaps we could. And we’re always seeking donations. But this is such a large amount. It’s just that …’ Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
‘In my experience, unsolicited gifts always come with strings of some sort attached.’

‘It’s most of what I have.’

‘It’s certainly most incredibly generous. Although I rather expect your accounts are re-filling as we speak.’

She was right, but that was hardly the point; I’d give her all of that, as well. I’d give her everything. And outside, the glorious late spring light was sparkling over the trees and across the lawns. These grounds must go on for miles, and there were places in the distance where the copses gathered into deeper pools of forest. It required no imagination, no imagination at all, for me to see Anna moving through them at twilight, and along these corridors, carrying a lamp, trailed by strange and beautiful creatures amid wings of light.

I cleared my throat. ‘You know, Anna, Goldenwhite was never really a historical figure. I’ve paid skilled people to investigate all the records. There certainly were rebellions and outbreaks of war across the first Age, but there was no one figure, there was no one march. The burnt patch of stone in that square in Clerkenwell can only have been there for the last two hundred years. And there’s no tomb, and she never gathered her forces before they descended into London from the Kite Hills.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’ She glanced down at the cheque, her eyes an emerald mist, lined by a life of frowns or smiles and perhaps even a little laughter as well. Perhaps fearing that I might mistake her gesture in leaving it there, her left hand moved back towards it.

Just as she laid her fingers on it, I grabbed her arm.

‘I love you, Anna!’

The air fell silent between us. I was still holding her arm. Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick. My
fingers dug against the warm, soft skin, and I waited for something to happen, for her to repulse me or come forward—for the world to change.

‘Do I need to call for someone to help me?’ she finally asked.

‘No.’ I let go, sat back. My heart was hammering. Against my fingers, I could still feel the shape of her bones.

She sighed and rubbed her arm. ‘I thought perhaps it might come to this.’

I looked at her.
I love you.
I was still thinking it, screaming it out from my head.

‘I’m not what I was, Robbie. Look …’ Again, but more cautiously this time, she held out her left arm. It was still reddened by the marks of my fingers, but beneath, on her wrist, there was the stigmata, the scab, the Mark. ‘I don’t have to make this happen now. This is how I am—the thing just won’t go away. I’m ordinary. I would say I’m like you, Robbie, but I don’t think that ordinary’s what you ever were. It must have been that last night at Walcote House, touching that haft and sending out the message. It used up most of whatever was in me … And the rest has been going ever since. And to be frank, I’m glad. Who wouldn’t be?’

‘But that means—’

‘It doesn’t
mean
anything other than what you see here. It doesn’t mean that I can love. The only person I ever loved was Missy, and that’s all gone. Of course, I sometimes watch the couples who come to our station and walk these lanes on Noshiftday—they think it’s romantic because of that damn name. But that wasn’t me. That never was. Or is. I’m sorry if I can’t make this any plainer. Of course, and contrary to what Nurse Walters might have told you, I do think about the past. But I try not to make a meal of it.’

Make a meal of it.
Would the Anna of old have said something so mundane? But I didn’t know. I never really did know. ‘The children of the Easterlies chant about Missy when they’re skipping,’ I said instead. ‘Although it’s something about her being
here
and
near
and wanting to
suck their bones. D’you
think she’d mind?’

I could see her clearly now, my Anna, Annalise, with the sunlight all around her.
I love you, Anna.
But she didn’t hear. She simply smiled. ‘Not that much. And it’s not such a bad thing is it, to be in the minds of children?’

I smiled back at her.

And I’ve thought what I might do, Anna. I’ve planned it for so long, far better and more thoroughly than this foolish gesture of giving you my wealth. I’ve opened an aether vial and poured it into a silver cup and stared at it through all the night’s long hours and willed myself … I love you, Anna. I love you as much as I could ever love anything or anyone. But perhaps that’s not enough …

‘Things aren’t so bad,’ I heard her saying. ‘I mean, look at you. Look at this Age. And here, at what’s happened to me. This loss of what I was, it’s a beacon to the future. It means that a lot of the physical processes which cause people to change can perhaps be reversed. It’s something we’re studying. That’s why we have that total ban on aether.’

They’ll make a statue of you when you die, Anna, for what you’ve done here at Einfell, and for what you did to create this Age. And you’ll hate it.