‘Come looking, have you?’
I spun around. ‘I was just—’
‘I can see what you were just doing.’ Mistress Summerton stood there.
‘I’m sorry.’ The little room seemed to whirl around me. ‘I should have waited outside.’
‘In this weather? I do understand—who wouldn’t be curious? But I sometimes get lads, unwanted visitors—’ She made a gesture. ‘As you can probably imagine, they trouble me ..
I followed her back down the stairs. She began pumping up the stove, then warming the water in the kettle.
‘You know what’s happening tomorrow?’
She gave a dry chuckle and stirred the pot. ‘Of course. It’s Midsummer.’ She looked far older than I remembered as she gave me the steaming toy cup and saucer. Still hatless, her skull was visible beneath her wispy grey hair and her skin was stretched and gaunt; a withered skeleton. I sipped the scalding liquid as she watched me with her strange bright eyes. The wind boomed. My wicker chair creaked.
‘The thing is,’ I said, ‘there’s much talk that this whole Age will end tomorrow. Not because the guilds will it, but because the people do. And you know how it all began here with this exhibition. So what I was thinking, what I’m saying is, that things might happen here tomorrow, and it might not be entirely safe for you to stay.’
‘Entirely safe, eh? I don’t think my life’s ever been that .. ‘But you know what I mean.’
‘I’m not going anywhere tomorrow,’ she sniffed. ‘There’ll be a lot of my plants to rescue once this weather has settled, apart from anything else. One of my cold frames has already blown clean away.’ Outside, the wind gave an extra-loud howl. Despite the heat, the vision through her window was white and wintry. ‘So I think I’ll stay here, if you don’t mind, Robert, changing Age or no changing Age.’ Her laugh was like snapping branches. ‘But, yes. I suppose I do know what you mean, and I’m touched that you thought of me when there are so many other things you could be doing.’ She stood up, finding her pipe and sucking on the dead dottle. ‘But I too have to work. I have to sell my precious blooms. Why otherwise, do you think the Gatherers’ Guild permits me to live even here, in this abandoned place? You have no idea, for example, just how much it costs me to keep Annalise or Anna whatever she now calls herself in the manner in which she’s become accustomed. Although I suppose that you probably do have an idea by now, seeing as you’ve been hanging around in the same kind of company …’ She banged a few tins in search of tobacco. ‘I used to have savings, you know. But not any longer. They’ve all vanished even without my spending them. I don’t know what’s happened to money ..
When my tea was finished I followed her outside into her gardens. She was in a mood I’d never seen her in before.
‘Look at this place.’ The combed beds were flattened, madly waving. ‘All my work. All my efforts …’
‘It’s still beautiful.’
‘You’re going to tell me next I should be proud.’
‘Aren’t you?’
‘It isn’t mine to be proud of, is it?’ She was still bare-headed and wearing a sacking apron which snickered about her. ‘Nothing is.’
‘Have you met Anna’s friend, Highermaster George Swalecliffe?’
‘How could Anna share me with someone with a name like that? Still, I suppose he might just think I was that dreadful supposed aunt of hers, if she wasn’t supposed to be dead already.’
‘George’s a kind and decent man. He’s not like the rest of them.’
‘And Anna is?’
I shook my head. Her eyes were rheumy, brown as a dog’s, I thought—or tried not. ‘Anna’s unique. And George sees something of that in her. And he, too, sees the need for change. He has a deep sympathy for the downtrodden …’
Another bitter laugh. ‘Well, perhaps he should come and meet me.’
We came to an avenue of roses. The bushes bowed and scratched in the moaning wind. ‘All this talk of change,’ she said, ‘and what difference would any of it make to me?’ From one of her pockets, she produced what looked to be the same pair of secateurs which she’d been carrying when she opened the door at Redhouse to my mother. I watched as she grasped the swaying branches and began to snip—this alien creature with hands like twigs, her clothes whipping and smoking about her to reveal a blurring glint of that cross and C on her tiny chest.
‘You should forget about me, Robert, no matter what happens tomorrow. And you should try to let go of Anna, too, or whatever it is of her that you’re holding on to. She could have been many things—she could perhaps have even been the creature of wonder that you wish for and which I’m so plainly not. But she isn’t.’
Briefly, the wind died. In a sudden, ragged flash of sunlight, the river, London, the great falling structure of World’s End, the white hills, swarmed into view.
‘Look at this place …’ She gestured with her secateurs. ‘You can see who this world belongs to, and it’s certainly not my kind, revolution or no revolution. In that house in Oxford, when I was young and I knew no better, I used to dream that there were many others just like me waiting in the world beyond. Like me—but infinitely more powerful. One day, tomorrow, I was sure, the gates would swing open, and I would tumble out, and the world would be more of everything than I had ever imagined. The trees, the very clouds, would shape themselves to the winds of my favour.’
And people would bow down before me—I believed that, too, even as I raved and gnawed …
‘But all I’ve ever seen of my supposed kind is creatures like poor Mister Snaith who cavort and dress up for you humans like tame apes, and the sad monstrosities in places like St Blate’s who don’t even know their own names. Still, I suppose we all need our stories …’ A click of secateurs. ‘Have this.’ She gave me a rose; it was deep red, velvet-petalled. ‘And promise me you’ll be careful tomorrow ..
I wished her goodbye and pinned the flower in my buttonhole. The wind shrieked through the empty panes of World’s End, driving my little boat back towards the north bank. The Thames was skinned with the same sparkling dust of engine ice which twirled over the rooftops and threw incredible shadows like coloured rugs and turned the people into strange harlequins. I caught my breath on the viaduct over Stepney Sidings. The tracks and yards below were silent and empty; it might have already been Midsummer Day. I thought of the time when I had stood on a much smaller bridge, gauging the moment when I might leap. And here I was now, on the eve of the change which I had spent much of my adult life working towards, and still thinking about jumping onto the backs of trains.
Then the wind shrilled and the long grey-black furnace of a big express bellowed beneath me, its wagons clattering point over point into the sidings. They were smart, blue-liveried. When the doors were slid back and ramps put out a whinnying herd of horses, huge, black, and almost as beautiful as Sadie’s unicorns, emerged. It seemed like a day for strange sights.
The fountains in Westminster Great Park clattered in wet rainbows across the paving. The perilinden trees tossed their leaves. The revolving doors of the foyers of the big hotels spun emptily. The buildings grew somewhat smaller when I reached Kingsmeet at the edge of the Westerlies, although they still remained grand. Only the numbered bellpulls and the slight wildness of their front gardens betrayed the fact that these apartments were distant relatives of Easterlies tenements. But social distinctions, I knew, were stacked as tightly here as they were anywhere in England. Here-along streets where the windows gave glimpses of rooms filled with too much furniture, or too little-lived the not-quite wealthy, those who were on the rise, or on the fall. The nearly-rich of Kingsmeet clung to Northcentral’s coattails and sometimes even visited its mansions, arriving in hired carriages at least as grand as those their hosts owned, and returning home later on foot, for the sake of economy. Here, too, in top rooms amid unfortunate confluences of plumbing, lived the artists and intellectuals who had enlivened many a greatguildmistress’s afternoon salon. Here, in a small bed-sit
ting-room on Stoneleigh Road, and at a rent which would have bought you half of Thripp Tenements for a year, lived Anna Winters, guildmistress of no particular guild. And nearby, around the corner and past a bicycle shop, also lived Highermaster George Swalecliffe.
I gazed up at the pebbledash frontage and the third-floor window of Anna’s room. I’d come this far before, but today was a time to move on—a time for change. Still, I had no idea what I would do, what I would say to her, as I pulled open the green wooden gate and tugged at the bellpull beside her name. One of the front door’s loose blue panes rattled in the grainy wind. Then the door drew back and a neighbour peered at me. She had a once-expensive shawl draped around her neck, slippers with holes in their toes.
‘You’re not that guildsman … ?’
‘What guildsman?’
‘Oh …’ She waved it away. ‘Just someone or other who’s been asking after Anna. She’s not in, anyway. You could try the institute around the corner, I suppose ..
The institute was a cheap extension to an ugly church. Posters for cancelled amateur recitals and whist drives flapped on the front notice board and it was stiflingly hot and dark inside. For while I could scarcely see, but I finally discerned that placards were being hammered and painted. And George was everywhere, encouraging and supervising an odd mixture of guild widows, retired highermasters, their sibilant-voiced daughters and sons. He gave me a delighted near-hug when he saw me and instantly set me about sanding the splintered edges from a stack of plywood squares. I gazed about me through the busy gloom, searching for Anna. I still didn’t know whether to feel encouraged or dispirited to think that these people, who raised their little fingers when they drank tea even when it came from chipped enamel mugs, should also want England to change. What New Age could we possibly share? George’s vision of hand-dyed fabrics, well-made dressers, folk dances on the village green? But there she was, in a corner by the rudimentary stage, working at stitching together the strips of the coloured banner which flowed across her lap. Even in this dowdy place, with the doors banging in the wind and people tripping over each other in their hurry to seem busy, a different light fell on her from the wire-threaded window at her back. Remote, cool, heraldic. The needle dipped and rose. The thread gleamed, and it and her hair were the same colour as the gold in the cloth. My heart ached pleasurably as I smoothed the rough wood. I could have stayed doing this charmingly pointless task, and watching her, for a whole Age. This, I thought, is the real Anna Winters. She’s the face you glimpse on a rushing train. She’s the voice you hear from a room next door but never meet. She’s all of those mysterious things, yet even when you stand close by her, or gaze from beside the rattling dustbins at the window of her room, the mystery remains.
She looked over, pulled an exasperated face, then beckoned me over.
‘Will you help me with this, Robbie?’
The cloth of the woven banner was fine but slippery. It floated up in the hot drafts which tunnelled across the hall every time someone opened the doors.
‘Hold this while I knot it ..
The design was complex and hard to make out amid the folds. ‘This material’s so difficult to work, even now I’ve almost finished it.’
‘You made all of this?’
She gave a small nod which was both mocking and knowing. Of course I did, Robbie. After all, she was Anna Winters, who could turn her hand to anything, from playing the piano to dancing to this, yet never chose to make a special show of any of it. Outside, the gritty afternoon billowed on. But she and I were the centre beyond the storm. Stillness radiated across the marvellous cloth from Anna’s graceful hands.
‘You’ve been with Missy, haven’t you?’
I looked at her a little more warily. ‘How can you tell?’
‘That flower.’ Her fingers brushed my lapel, and I saw that Mistress Summerton’s rose was dusted with a sparkling dew of engine ice. ‘But I’m glad you went to see her today. She’s lonely over there, although I know she’d hate me for saying it. And I should go more often. I feel guilty for not doing so.’ She lowered her voice as George breezed over to see how we were doing. ‘But you’ll understand it’s hard.’
Cradled in the quiet light, Anna worked on. The cloth slipped through my fingers. The needle rose and fell.
‘I think I do,’ I said eventually.
‘Do what?’ She looked up at me, small silver earrings swinging on their threads from the lobes of her ear.
‘Understand why you live as you do.’
She smiled, nodded, continued working. Anna Winters, who was here simply because this was what people of her kind in Kingsmeet were doing today, and because she wanted to be supportive towards her friend George and, perhaps, even towards me and all the rest of us citizens who had struggled so hard for change across the Easterlies. Not that she believed in this New Age, and not that she didn’t. She was Anna Winters, and she thrived on how people felt, and on making them happy, just as she was doing now for me. The needle sank and rose. The banner unravelled across her lap, waterfalling in beautiful pools, and the motion of its making was so soothing that I felt as if I was being put together, mended, made whole.
‘What do you think will happen?’ I asked.
She paused in her sewing. ‘I don’t know.’ She looked up at me. Her green eyes dimmed, then brightened. All this talk of change, and what difference would any of it make for me? Mistress Summerton’s words came back to me. But Anna looked entirely wonderful, serene and cool. ‘Do you?’
I shook my head. ‘Look, Anna—’
‘You’re going to tell me to be careful, aren’t you? That’s what everyone seems to be saying today.’
I smiled.
‘But it’s you I worry about,’ she said. ‘And George over there. And all the people like you and him, which seems to mean most of London at the moment. Hopes are such brittle things, and they can hurt you when they break.’ The needle gave a final dip. She took the thread and tugged at it with her teeth. It made a sharp momentary indentation in her lower lip which I longed to smooth away. Now.’ She stood up. The cloth rustled about her. ‘It’s time. Take this end for me, will you?’
The cloth spread out from Anna and I as we walked away from each other across that little Kingsmeet hall. There was scattered applause and firework oohs and ahhs as we unfolded the great long night-blue banner with its patches of russet colour and its gold and silver threadings. It shimmered and fluttered in the drafts like those kites on the Kite Hills, ready to take flight into this New Age. I’d expected it to form some picture or slogan, but Anna’s banner fluttered in gold and abstract swirls. Look at it one way, and you saw a comet-crossed night sky. Look at it another, and there were the folds of distant mountains, the spells of some arcane guild, the faces of children. The teasing, glittering colours invited you to see whatever you wanted to see in them. I realised that, from her own unique standpoint, Anna had cleverly captured the very heart and spirit of this coming Midsummer Day.
I left a little later and walked back through London. The sun was lower. The winds swirled black and orange and pounded against the walls of the yards. Something would happen tomorrow. That was true now beyond certainty. But how? And what? A trickle of sweat chilled my back. I was just off Doxy Street by now, and close to Ashington, and walking beside a bow-fronted row of poulterers and cheese merchants. They were shut now, probably had been all day, and the street was empty of all life and traffic. For once, in London, I was entirely alone. The shadows were climbing out from under the eaves as the sun sunk deeper in its veils. They stretched smoky fingers to tug at my clothes and retreated in crazed shrieks of glee. As I took a short cut along a side alley, I had to resist the stupid urge to look back, or to flee. The wind had tipped over the dustbins and was banging them about, flinging their contents into filthy heaps. I was picking my way over them when I sensed that something had followed me into this alley. I spun around to face it, and I saw, with an odd sense of triumph, that a figure really was standin
g behind me amid the spilled tins of rancid fat. It was a guildsman. Darkly dressed. Darkly cloaked. He wore no hat or hood, but his face was hard to make out although I knew that his eyes were upon me, and that they were amused, and knowing, and predatory. He stood there in the hot shadow darkness of that stinking alley, radiating the sick, draining complacency of knowing everything that I would never know.
‘Who are you?’ I tried to yell, although it came out as a whisper. ‘What do you want?’ I stumbled back around the tumbling, clanging dustbins towards him, careless, despite my fear, of anything beyond the need to know. ‘Why are you doing this? Just tell me. Just ..
Then the wind gave an even mightier surge and my feet slipped in the spillages of rotting cardboard. When I regained my balance, my hands scrabbling along the walls, all that was left of my dark guildsman was a twirl of engine ice and London rubbish.
VI
GET UP, ROBERT! IT’S LATE MORNING.
My eyes prickled open to absorb the stained ceiling of my tenement room. This was Midsummer Day, and the wind had drawn back and it had rained in the night, puttering restlessly through my dreams. Saul was singing on the floor below as he washed at his basin and Maud sounded bright and cheery for once as she lumbered about with her growing belly. At long last, her sickness was fading. She was blooming into pregnancy, and eating enough for twins, as Saul cheerily said.
Outside, the engine ice of World’s End’s hills had become a coat of varnish in the night’s rain. The whole world seemed almost impossibly stark and clear. On Sheep Street, we joined up with Blissenhawk and left Maud to tend Black Lucy in preparation for the last ever edition of the New Dawn. Then, arm in arm, gathering ranks, we headed west. By the time we’d passed out of Ashington the crowd was so big that it welled up like a river over the edges of Doxy Street. Rumour was rife, sweeping us back, pushing us forward. The Twelve Demands had already been conceded! The money system had been changed! The dollymops were with us, in their gladdest of rags. So were the Undertakers, in their black top hats. And the Lesser Beastmasters, with their familiars on their shoulders; miniature furry citizens, chirping and waving tiny flags.
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