The Light Ages

by Ian R. MacLeod

  The place looked much smaller than I’d imagined. Its walls were lower. Its gables and chimneys were hunched and mean. The only gate was locked.

  Wait! Master, Mistress!’

  The land agent almost fell off his bicycle in his hurry to reach us. He bowed and presented his card.

  Mistress Summerton’s prison-house had been through many changes of use and occupancy, but the rooms, with their few random scraps of furniture, looked far bleaker than they would have done if they had been entirely empty. How many years, I wondered as the agent chattered about potential for improvement, had it been since she had clawed at these walls? The best part of a human lifetime. Perhaps Anna was wrong, and this wasn’t even the place. But I as inspected the windows I found the rusted marks of old bars and the remains of heavy shutters. The panelled walls, when I rapped them, sounded hollow.

  ‘That’s a most unique aspect of this property. Almost every room has a space around it—probably for insulation. It means that they could all be enlarged. Of course, you could re-use most of the panelling. Everything’s sound. All you’d need is a good carpenter. We at Adcocks have strong links with the local guild …’

  Oxford had already sunk into the smoky well of evening as Anna and I walked back down towards it, but its spires rose and gleamed with the last of the sun. Our train was already waiting at the station.

  We reached Yorkshire in the racing dark. Stations flashed by with glimpses of windows, milk churns. A ruddy-faced old woman came swaying down the carriage, the shoulders of her coat shining with dirt. She sat down beside us and began talking in a way that no Londoner would have ever done as the telegraphs blurred white trails in the darkness. Then the train stopped and the guard came shouting that this was Bracebridge, Bracebridge, Bracebridge …

  As the smoke of the train faded, Anna and I carried our cases over the iron footbridge my mother and I had once crossed on our way to Tatton Halt. It was dark in the yard outside the stationhouse where the coal was kept and timber was stored, near to the pens of the sleeping pitbeasts. It wasn’t much past ten in the evening, but this was Nineshiftday—the tired end of the long slog towards next payday, and the Lamb and Flag was scarcely lit.

  ‘Don’t you want to go to your father’s?’ Anna asked. I shook my head. ‘I’d rather wait until morning.’

  ‘So—where do we stay? Isn’t that a hotel up there … ?’

  It was—or rather an inn; the Lord Hill, which was the closest Bracebridge possessed to such an establishment. My mother had had to steel herself the few times she’d been in there, although, dim against the grainy hills, the building had shrunk in the time I’d been away. I took a breath. My heart was pounding. All of this was too sudden, too quick.

  SHOOOM BOOOM SHOOOOM BOOM.

  I laughed out loud.

  ‘What is it, Robbie?’

  ‘That noise!’

  ‘You mean you’ve only just noticed?’ As Anna shook her head in amazement, I led her on up the streets towards the smaller shops at the bottom of Coney Mound, with cards strung in their windows. Mongrel puppies were for sale—or had once been. A cot—scarcely used—told its own story. Anna blew on the glass and wiped the mist with her sleeve, peering forward in the dim gaslight. And there it was. SMALL HOUSE FOR RENT FULLY FURNISHED SUIT YOUNG GUILDSCOUPLE NO PETS NO MARTS. The sign looked almost recent.

  Past Reckoning Hall, past the removals yard. The address of the keyholder was at the east of Coney Mound, looking right over the river-swept bowl of the valley. She studied us in the light of her front door, smoothing her hands across the greyed front of her apron.

  ‘Thought I heard the night train stopping. Doesn’t happen much these days.’ Mistress Nutall had the brisk getting-on-with-it manner of many a Bracebridge widow. ‘So you’re after the house? Master—Mistress—is it … ?’

  ‘Borrows,’ Anna said before I’d had time to think. ‘We’re just up from London. You know how things are.’ Without my noticing, she’d slipped the silver ring she’d been wearing to her left hand. ‘My husband here-Robert—he has connections with the town.’

  ‘Connections?’ Mistress Nutall studied me. She was younger than I’d first thought—I could see her, or her sister, crowded in a straining pinafore at the Board School girls’ entrance—or perhaps I was getting older. ‘You’ll be of the Toolmakers’, won’t you?’

  I nodded, too astonished by all these revelations to look surprised.

  Clogs slapping, heels showing white through the holes of her stockings, Mistress Nutall led us through the cold dark towards 23 Tuttsbury Rise; an end-of-terrace, although it was hard to make much out of it this far from the road’s solitary lamp. A small hall with the parlour one way, front and back kitchen the other. Plenty of coal in the coalshed, although it might be a bit damp. There were tapers and firelighters and matches, and lime in the privy. Mistress Nutall would bring us milk as well, and a nub of bread and a cup of sugar. Anna and I were waited on ridiculously that night by Mistress Nutall and her neighbours. The house was lit and warmed. The lanterns were replenished. The front bedroom double bed was made. Borrows, Borrows—yes, they knew the name, and Anna, she looked pale and I seemed peaky. Tea so hot and strong you could stand your spoon up in it, that was the trick. We were fussed and flustered over. We were treated like high guildspeople.

  Finally, we were alone in the house with the crackle of the fire and the beating of the engines and the empty sound of the wind outside pouring over the pines and birches which sloped down from this side of Coney Mound in a loose cliff which, on lost summer days with the brown Withy sweeping beneath, we children had climbed. SHOOOM BOOOM SHOOOOM BOOM, and Anna, Anna Borrows, was sitting opposite me in this Bracebridge parlour, her hair ridiculously aglow and the small, familiar furniture pulsing and receding as the firelight and the memories beat over me.

  ‘We’re here,’ she said. ‘So what do we do now?’

  ‘We’ll see ..

  I puffed out the lanterns, settled the fire in its grate. Through the wall, in coughs and scrapes, I could hear our neighbours doing the same. The arrangement of the stairs in this house was different to my own on Brickyard Row a few streets away. These led up from the hall, with a turn halfway over the larder. Anna bore the lantern first with the railings sweeping behind her across old wallpaper and the paler spaces where family pictures had once hung. There was no doubt, in my mind at least, about which of us was going to sleep in what Mistress Nutall had called the master bedroom, where the newly aired blankets were so drum tight that Anna’s case, when she tossed it down, almost jumped off again.

  ‘We must make a convincing enough couple …’ In small gestures of hers I’d never seen, Anna ran her hands down her sides and pulled clips from her hair.

  ‘People would never think otherwise of us, Anna. Not here …’ I watched in the bevelled mirror; the way she pushed back her hair again as it fell more loosely when she bent to open her case.

  ‘You really want me to have this room?’

  ‘Someone’s got to have it, Anna. They’ll be looking for the lights—our shadows.’

  ‘I thought you just said … ?’

  I shrugged. How could I explain all the things I knew about these people, this town?

  She began to hang out blouses on the rattling hangers in the wardrobe.

  ‘The room next door’ll be cold. I’d say try to light the fire, Robbie, but didn’t Mistress Nutall mention that it smoked?’

  ‘Perhaps I’d be better off downstairs.’

  She took out a bigger, longer dress—something which would have been virtually ordinary in London but which opened itself here in dark folds like the petals of one of Mistress Summerton’s roses. She smoothed it against herself, then smiled at me over it. I went back into the lower part of the house, where only the fire and the stove were now glowing. SHOOOM BOOM SHOOOOM BOOM. I heard Anna moving about upstairs. Someone in the house next door was still coughing, and probably would be all night. Here on Coney Mound, you grew used to suc
h things. I went outside through the bitter night to the privy, knowing my way through the dark all the way to the feel of the latch, and wondered as I stood there and the air rose up at me what Anna had thought of this sour place when she used it.

  I closed all the doors. I gave the kitchen stove a final rake. I ascended the stairs. Outside her room, Anna had left the spare sheets and blankets Mistress Nutall given us in a tidy pile. I took them into the back bedroom. The darkness rose and fell. I could taste smoke in my mouth. SHOOOM BOOOM SHOOOOM BOOM. BLESS THIS HOUSE in needlepoint, homely stains across the mattress. But there was something about this room which I couldn’t bear. I went back down the stairs with my blankets and punched the cushions on the settee. The curtains didn’t quite meet, and wavered in the wind. The cushions, cold, and faintly damp, sagged and dug under my back. But it would do.

  II

  I WAS WOKEN IN THE MORNING by the sound of someone banging on the front door. Still mostly dressed, I stumbled blearily through the hall where a female shape dimmed the frosted glass. It somehow didn’t look like Mistress Nutall. The wind had blown up the cliff from the river all night and the door was stuck frozen in its frame. When it burst open in a flurry of ice and light, I saw my mother standing on the step.

  ‘I can’t stay just now,’ she said. ‘But, Robert, you could at least have said you were coming …’

  It was my sister Beth; word of my arrival had spread quickly on Coney Mound. She wouldn’t come in—Board School down in the valley was depending on her, and even as we stood there and thought about hugging each other and decided that the moment had already gone, the big sirens at Mawdingly & Clawtson started howling. Beth now wore the enamel badge of the Schoolmistresses’ Guild on her navy coat, but it seemed a little bit late to congratulate her on finally passing her exams. And I was married? I nodded even more awkwardly as I felt what I had previously thought to be Anna’s small but necessary deceit beginning to grow a life of its own. Some guildmistress she must be, Beth’s look said, to let her master be up in his braces at this late hour without any sign of breakfast. We stood there for a few moments longer as the wind whipped over us and Beth’s resemblance to my mother came and went with every beat of the aether engines.

  ‘Aye, well, the Borrows lad—don’t you remember him? Mother took bad. Really bad, if you get my drift. But that’s all old history. Old Frank’s still around, of course. Sister looks after him and teaches my daughter’s little Alf. Then, puff! Turns up one night again with a wife and everything. Pretty little thing—but seems a bit vague. Staying at the house on Tuttsbury Rise that used to be Mother Ricketts’. Been down south, and you know the way it is down there. Now he’s come back here, tail near enough between his legs. Oh, yes, he’s been inducted. Toolmaker, just like his dad. Always do, don’t they? My lad was just the same and look at him now. Oh, no—hasn’t done any proper guildswork in years, by the look of him. Not a haftmark on his lily-whites. Can’t even say the pulley-twisting spell for toffee, is my guess. Still, Maureen says we should be kind. He took a chance and it didn’t work out, and now he’s back here in Bracebridge. It’s in the blood, ain’t it … ?’

  The Tenshiftday market was in progress when I left Anna and went down the hill into lowtown that first morning. The town hall clock had acquired a new face. Rainharrow gleamed with snow. People I didn’t know smiled at me, and those that did—old schoolmates, ex-apprentices grown pompous and jowly in their minor rank, and women who had once known my mother or scolded me for dirtying their washing with a football—came up to say hello. Happy and uncurious, they were genuinely pleased to see me. By returning to Bracebridge with little more than a wife and two suitcases and the dim hope of work in my father’s old factory, I had done them the favour of confirming that there was nothing out there which their town couldn’t offer. Their accents were extraordinary—it was almost like my early days in London—but, like spells in a dream, I found that I could understand them easily.

  Bracebridge was surprisingly prosperous. It wasn’t just that new town hall clock. Several of the buildings had new red roofs, and the market was bustling. Even the guildmistresses of Coney Mound were out buying fresh groceries, whilst my mother had most often waited until the bargains of the afternoon. The town, in the shock of my first full immersion in it, looked more cramped than I remembered, but also newer—a brightly painted toy version of itself. Yet the whole north of England, in the pages of the New Dawn and many another paper, was supposedly in ferment …

  Just like any diligent schoolchild, I began my researches into Bracebridge’s past in the town’s public library. The place looked brighter and cleaner than I remembered, but otherwise little had changed. A few elderly guildsmen were pretending to study the news in the sunlit dust as they pulled at their nose hairs. I wondered as I studied their faces if I shouldn’t have gone straight to see my father back on Brickyard Row. But Beth standing at the door had been enough of a shock for one morning. So I bought myself a pencil and a cheap notepad, and moved back through the sleepy shelves into the past which this crystalline present seemed to hold and mirror so perfectly; back towards something, although I still didn’t know quite what. SHOOOM BOOM SHOOOOM BOOM. This was better than Black Lucy in Blissenhawk’s cellar. For the first time since Butterfly Day, I felt a genuine urge to write.

  All the windows were open and the rugs were hanging out in the yard and smoking with dust when I returned to our house that lunchtime. The women along Tuttsbury Rise had all taken pity on Anna, who had no proper boots, poor soul, not a single workcoat or apron, and struggled to boil a kettle on an ordinary coal stove. But Anna was nothing if not adaptable and she greeted me with her hair tied back and her cheeks reddened. She looked entirely beautiful, did this new Mistress Borrows, as we settled down at the scrubbed kitchen table to the bread I had brought and the dried sausage she’d been given by Mistress Martin at number 14.

  We finally called on my father at seven o’clock that night, after we were sure that Beth would have returned from Board School and had a proper chance to warn him. It was no distance at all from Tuttsbury Rise to Brickyard Row and my hand was on the gate and pushing it slightly up and to the side in the way it needed before I’d fully realised. Then Beth was at the door again and I saw with a pang that she’d dressed up for us as she took in Anna, in her far better clothes with the lights of the town shaped from the darkness behind her. There was a fire lit in the front parlour and lemon cakes were laid on the cornflower plate of which my mother had been so proud, although they had lost the gloss of their icing in the time they’d been waiting. Some men puff out and bloom as they get older, but my father had greyed and shrunk. He almost bowed at Anna. The porcelain trembled as Beth poured out the tea.

  ‘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 h
elp 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.