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.
III
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.
‘I used to come to Bracebridge sometimes with Missy—on days like this, just as the chimneys of the houses started smoking,’ Anna said as we wandered further up the hill amid the long shadows of the monuments. ‘We had to go shopping for soap and flour like everyone else, although I know you find that the hardest thing to believe about us …’ Her eyes gleamed. She swallowed. ‘Missy even offered to take me here, but I dragged her away through the twilight. I didn’t want to know then, Robbie, about my mother, my father, about anything to do with this place. All I felt was this lost …’ She sniffed and looked up at the paling sky. The muscles in her jaw quivered. ‘Rage. That was probably why I was so awkward with you when you came with your mother that summer to Redhouse. I knew you were part of a past I didn’t care about, a life that had been taken from me by some accident in this stupid town …’
The sun was settling beyond Rainharrow. The last gleams of its rays poured incredibly to illuminate the rooftops of Coney Mound in shades of gold and brown. I thought for a moment, just as we closed the churchyard gate, that there was a figure standing amid the far yews, but with another glance the darkness had settled. It had gone.
Past the wall where the young lads smoked and the giggling girls trailed past on summer evenings, at the better end of Coney Mound which was almost lowtown, to a house where the front was unlit, but the chimney was smoking, and the faint lights of the kitchen glowed into the parlour with glints of glass and porcelain. Anna pushed her chin down into her coat and let out a long, cold breath. 12 Park Road, with a decent bit of back lawn where you might actually grow something. This was where her parents had lived.
SHOOOM BOOM. The day the engines stopped—the day that Anna’s and my life had changed before we were even born into them—was a vague absence, a stillness, in the interminable library records, distinguishable by some meetings cancelled and football matches postponed, repairs to the damaged town hall, a few new buildings commemorated a year or so later to replace those which had inexplicably vanished. Beth was right—people hated digging into the past here almost as much as they detested people who were ikey. My few more direct enquiries about those times, even when I forced myself to stay late in the Bacton Arms and knock back slippery pints of Coxly’s, were met with blank stares or dark hostility. Anna, in her quieter way, did far better.
By asking the neighbours, she found the Stropcocks’ old house, which wasn’t so far away from that of her parents on Park Road, a thin but double-fronted grace-and-favour dwelling which the Toolmakers still owned. Yes, they’d left the town, him on a promotion which had arrived surprisingly quickly, come to think of it, with the way the lesser guilds usually worked. But no one quite seemed to know where it was that they had gone. No one much cared, either—but it had been in the spring of year 86, which was soon after my mother and Grandmaster Harrat had died. And they had lost a baby a while before; little Frederick Stropcock’s grave was up there in the shadow of St Wilfred’s, although the tangles of nettles told us far more clearly than all the records in the world could ever have done that the Stropcocks, the Bowdly-Smarts, never visited Bracebridge.
‘Someone like Stropcock would love to come back here and lord it over everyone,’ I said after tea one evening as I stood at the sink and scrubbed the pans with a lump of old swarf. ‘Did I tell you I saw him once when I went into Grandmaster Harrat’s guildhouse? It was throu
gh a door on Christmas evening. He was eating at their table ..
From our kitchen window, there was a view across half the valley. The settling pans were glowing, and the lights of a train were just snaking out of the valley. Behind me in the cramped room, I could hear Anna moving about, the clink of the grate, the rumble of the clotheshorse as she put up the day’s washing. The high guildswomen she’d known in London would have been appalled by this transformation. But we were happy playing at this life, or pretending that we were playing at it.
SHOOOOM BOOM. The sound of the aether engines had changed. I was sure of it now. The first beat was too slow, the second too quick, and the pause between each surge and strike was a moment too long. I studied the faces in the street, these busy people who had been here too long to care or notice and would happily remain forever frozen in this Age. I watched the whistling window cleaners, the street sweepers whom I was sure had never existed before, the men on ladders who scrubbed bricks and cleared gutters. The whole of Bracebridge was glancing at its shoulders, removing stray speckles of engine ice like dandruff.
Grandmaster Harrat’s house on Ulmester Street had been replaced, but the new house was swathed in scaffolding. Builders were whistling out with barrows of glittering dust which looked too beautiful merely to throw into a skip; perhaps it was taken all the way to World’s End. I’d imagined, when an aether town such as Bracebridge came to its end, that the process of its encrustation would be precise and gradual, welling up like water. But this white sparkle had no reason to obey logic; it was an effusion of magic.
I migrated from the public library to the Halls of the Lesser Guilds, which the Toolmakers shared with the Ferrous Workers and the Pressmen. In many ways the building was similar, except that the guildsmen who lounged here were allowed to smoke and their chairs were old leather and more comfortable. I was greeted by the custodian like the prodigal Toolmakers’ son I claimed to be. He was a lad I’d known at school who now had five children and another on the way. Of course, he’d telegraph the necessary forms to confirm my membership—but everyone knew who I was in Bracebridge, so why hurry? Clocks ticked. Men snored. Dust fell and rose. All of it to the same cracked rhythm. There were books of spells. Manuals for long—dead machinery. The old pages breathed up at me with a scent of rusting staples.
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