Not by what he drove. He had an old Bedford van, an ugly pug-nosed vehicle in grubby beige, decorated with dents and patches of red oxide around the wheel arches and seals, anywhere that rust might have attacked it. She couldn’t quite see why even rust would want to.
Now she might believe him as a janitor, seeing what he shifted from the passenger seat to make room for a passenger. A galvanized mop-bucket handily filled with cleaning things – Ajax and dusters and floorcloths and a scrubbing-brush poking out jauntily over all. A wooden box of tools and jars and tobacco tins and blue paper packets. He was of an age and type with her grandfather, she thought: which meant that the jars would be full of meths and turpentine while the tobacco tins and packets would hold screws and nails and useful hooks and such, some salvaged and some bought new by the half-ounce. She used to love visits to the ironmonger with Grandad. It was a memory Grace and Georgie could reasonably share: the mops and hoes and axes hung from the ceiling like weaponry on display; the ranks of wooden drawers behind the counter, each with its paper label; the smell of steel, as it seemed to her. And the way the assistant in his brown overall would fold a crisp flat sheet into a paper carton, weigh out the near-liquid flow from one or another of those drawers, seal it with a wafer and write down the contents: 2" nails or ½" screws. She’d have one packet of her own to carry home, marvellously impressed by the weight of it and the way the contents shifted if she squeezed, that sense of sharpness even through unpunctured cartridge paper, sharpness and light, bright things contained . . .
Somewhere beyond that thought lay a sadness, which again Grace and Georgie shared. She didn’t want to follow it down. She’d rather just stand here, mute and a little desperate, watching this other old man make space for her. His tools were used, his tins were battered, but everything else was new and looked clean. And it all lay on a sheet of fresh newspaper, not on the seat directly; and the seat itself might be worn almost through the leather, but it looked clean too when he whisked the paper away. And the cab smelled of nothing worse than Golden Virginia, not the petrol fumes she’d half expected; and he did her the courtesy of rolling down his window before he lit the thin twist of paper and tobacco in his mouth.
He didn’t try to talk. She thought he was probably the silent type in any case, solitary by nature and quiet even with his friends, what few he had. She hadn’t known many like that; they didn’t come to Soho, by and large. Her grandfather, though, yes. One or two boys at school, one or two boyfriends since. The ones that didn’t last, she liked to say, except that no one really lasted. Even before . . .
Even before.
She tried to draw him out, in any case. ‘This place, this Hope’s Harbour – D’Espérance, did you call it? Tell me what it’s like.’
But he just smiled, shook his head, said, ‘No one can tell you about D’Espérance. You have to find out for yourself.’
She was a fool; she thought he meant the commune, the strangeness of it, how ill its hippies fitted into this rural life.
A little later she still thought that, all of that. It was, quite plainly, true.
He drove her up and away, out of this valley and over a bleak moorland rise where nothing flourished, it seemed, but sheep and gorse and rocks amid the scrubby soil; and then down into dark woodland, and eventually through a gap in a tumbledown stone wall that seemed to be losing its eternal battle against the trees. There had been gaps all the way along, but this was more formal. It must once have been a proper gateway, with a proper drive beyond. The gate was gone, and one stone gatepost too. Atop the other was perched a guardian both ancient and modern, a young man dressed all in green, with flowing hair and beard. He had folded his legs beneath him and played a wooden flute as they swung by. He might have stepped straight from the pages of mythology, a wood spirit, a faun; he might have stepped straight from her imagination, her vision of what a hippy commune must be like. Or from the pages of Tony’s rag, his readers’ prejudice.
He was, presumably, what she had been sent here to report on. A symptom, the pure essence. Everything that’s wrong with youth today, blustery colonels would mutter into their moustaches.
Was he really watching the road, guarding the gateway? There might have been an acknowledgement as his eyes met Mr Cook’s through the windscreen: a lift of his eyebrows, a lift of his flute. Licence to pass. But there was nothing he could do, surely, if the van had been a stranger: no gate to close, no way to turn a vehicle away. Perhaps he had a walkie-talkie and could warn the house that it was coming?
A radio wouldn’t sit too well with Lincoln green. Perhaps he was neither myth nor modern; if it weren’t for the flute, he might have stepped from the pages of her Robin Hood book instead. His clothes looked authentic enough, hand-sewn rough stuff, maybe even hand-woven. Maybe even the flute was right. They might have had flutes in the greenwood. In which case he’d probably lay it down and pick up a bow from behind a tree and shoot an arrow up to the house in signal . . .
She wasn’t usually this fanciful. Grace wasn’t. The opposite thing, rather: professionally down to earth. Grace would be looking for the walkie-talkie. Maybe this was Georgie, taking charge. Taking possession. Being herself, dreaming of a better time: when she was a little girl, reading books and dreaming of outlaws in the forest.
It was Grace’s book, but never mind. That copy had been lost long since. No one could confront her with the evidence, her name on the flyleaf in childish schoolgirl script.
Besides, they wouldn’t need to. She wasn’t here to deny her past, not really. Just in seeming; and then to be caught out, and then . . .
Well. Then she didn’t know. Then she’d play it by ear. Amazing Grace.
In the meantime, Georgie was daydreaming about outlaws and arrows and a forest that was almost magic but never quite – and Mr Cook was slowing the van suddenly, here in amongst the trees, where a sudden rutted track ripped itself away from the drive.
‘I go that way,’ he said with a jerk of his head, leaning on the wheel and gazing at her. Monumentally patient, and not budging. Not going to budge. Not even going to say it, but you go the other way: it was written in the moment, absolute.
‘Oh! Um, won’t you take me up to the house . . .?’ I thought you were my way in.
‘No,’ he said. No, he meant. He wasn’t unkind about it, just immovable. She could no more wheedle him than push the van with him inside it.
She wasn’t delaying the moment; she honestly couldn’t quite work out how to open the van door from inside. He had to lean across and pull the hanging cord for her, lean a little further yet to push the door open. She wriggled out, stepping into deep leaf-litter on the verge; he passed her case down to her, slammed the door, put the van into gear and drove away.
Left her standing. In the late sun of a northern summer evening, in the shadow of a strange wood, in the grip of what should perhaps have been a storm of temper – what she wished would be a storm of temper – but was really not.
Nor a storm of tears, not that. Just a surge of self-pity that was not quite enough to lift her and carry her on along the drive, nor quite enough to suck her back to the road. It bogged her down, rather, held her here in the gloom of the trees, unnerved. She’d be jumping at shadows, except that it was all shadow in all directions: like standing in a photograph, in black and white, which really meant a thousand shades of grey. That was her mood, as much as her surroundings. She wasn’t even frightened, nothing so extreme: only weary to the bone of her, depressed, unwilling. And—
This little piggy went to market.
—she had that damn nursery rhyme in her head again, and couldn’t shift it. Sometimes she thought it was her punishment, except that it never seemed enough. You’ve been punished enough, but not with this.
Sometimes she thought it would drive her mad, except that that might be a kindness. The mad didn’t suffer, did they? If she’d been sure of that, she might have run to madness long ago.
This little piggy stayed at home.
Wouldn’t have said yes to this stupid, stupid adventure.
Maybe.
She wanted to go home right now, but she had no way to get there. Not till the morning. If she walked back to the station, there wouldn’t be a train.
She should just go on up to the house, then. Just for tonight, and see how she felt in the morning.
Besides, she was hungry now.
This little piggy had roast beef.
She was hungry, but apparently not hungry enough; she still wasn’t moving.
The breeze was cool, but not cold or strong enough to move her. Apparently.
She stood until the last glimpse of the van’s tail lights was lost between the trees, until the last sound of its engine was lost beneath the soft sounds of a wood in evening. She wasn’t really imagining that he might relent and come back, no. She wasn’t imagining anything, really. Only standing here, with her case at her feet and the road dim before her in the failing light and absolutely no desire to pick up the case and set her feet on that road and go forward.
Except that she couldn’t go back, not now. Not from here.
So really she might as well go forward.
Except . . .
Except that somewhere she could hear a great bell tolling, somewhere ahead, and she really did hate bells. So maybe she would just stand here for a little, until it stopped.
Except that she was standing here, peering, listening – and there was no sign and no hope of the van coming back, but something was certainly coming.
She could hear it like a beast between the trees, between the strokes of that damned bell, pressing through the undergrowth, coming.
Except that what she heard was the undergrowth it pressed through, the leaf litter it trod in, the noises it made in the world around. Not itself, nothing of its own sounds. She thought it had none. She thought it was woven of silence, nothing there.
She could see it like a shadow among the shadows, a darkness drawing in, local twilight compacting into night. A shape made of absence, a nothingness so solid it made all the world seem hollow else.
Coming.
Light goes away; darkness doesn’t come. Darkness is just there, all the time, like silence. Waiting.
This, though: this was coming. Personal, intentional, here for her.
Imagination didn’t bend the world, push shrubs aside, snap twigs and crush rotten fallen boughs beneath its weight. She wasn’t imagining a thing.
She wasn’t screaming, either. Wasn’t running away.
She hadn’t ever been punished enough, and it was a monstrous lie to say so. Everything she did was punishment, everything she did to herself; none of it ever measured up.
Maybe she’d just stand here, let this thing come. This little piggy.
The voice in her head, chanting nursery rhymes to the slow rhythm of a distant bell—
—was her own voice, which somehow didn’t seem fair. If she was going to be sucked down into nightmare, she thought at least she might have hoped for one last echo of someone else chasing after her. Something to snatch at, if not to hold on to. Not company, not comfort, but something. That, at least. Tony’s voice, perhaps. Or the light gurgling laughter of—
No. Not that. She didn’t deserve that.
This, now. She deserved this. Let it come, then.
She stood and waited, and almost called it on.
THREE
Apparently, she’d closed her eyes. Not that brave, then, to stand and watch it come.
She only realized when she started hearing something else, over the relentless sounds of its approach, over the thudding impact of the endless bell.
There was music somewhere in the wood, drifting through the trees: low and plaintive, haunting almost, a breathy melody that seemed as right as moonlight, as natural as wind song. And utterly impersonal, heedless, unattached: the very opposite of what so threatened her. Close, perhaps, but remote. Like someone standing by her and looking at the stars.
Close, though, and coming closer. And the shadow . . . wasn’t. At least, all she could hear now was music. No crashing, blundering progress as that weight of silence surged towards her.
No bell.
This little piggy stayed at home.
She might almost open her eyes now. Almost.
One more breath, and she could smell – oh lord, the whole country of England, all the damp dank buried wonder of it, what she went to the city to forget. To escape, along with everyone else.
Nothing coming. No reeking threat, no monster; no mysterious emptiness, vacuum, absence. She wasn’t quite sure what that would smell like, but not this.
With an effort, then, she did open her eyes . . .
A man stood in the roadway.
Unless he was a faun, unless he had goat’s legs beneath his trousers.
But no, even in this fading light she could see his feet in sandals, no hooves. Dressed all in green else, with long brown hair caught back in a ponytail and as much beard as he could manage: he was, of course, the man they’d passed at the turn-off, sitting on a gatepost keeping watch.
Young man, younger than that beard made him look – or else, now that she was looking properly, it was the straggly sparseness of the beard that emphasized how young he was, despite all his efforts to seem older.
He wanted to be Pan, she thought, in his forest. Playing music to his trees.
It was his flute, of course, that she had heard. Cutting through the bell-strokes, turning away the silence. Like a statement, I am here, and so she wasn’t alone, and so that absence could not come to haunt her. She kept it at bay with company, always, when she could.
Except that it had never been physical before, never made noises in the world. Never broken a path on its way to reach her.
He lowered the flute from his lips and said, ‘Hullo.’
His voice was as sweet as his music, soft and husky and irredeemably young. She thought he probably practised that. Well, not the young part; that he only had to live with. For a while. It would pass.
What she had to live with was eternal. Still, she could manage this much. She took a breath, licked dry lips and said, ‘Hullo.’ And then, because she had to: ‘Did you . . . did you hear anything? Moving, I mean, in the wood just now?’ Not the bell. She didn’t even want to think about the bell.
‘Oh, has Big Bertha been scaring you, crashing about in the undergrowth? I was wondering why you were stood here all alone in the middle of nowhere.’
I’m standing here all alone because your janitor abandoned me. In the middle of nowhere. Aloud, she only said, ‘Big Bertha?’
‘She’s our pig. Well, not ours: she is her own pig. Entirely feral. I suppose she or maybe her mother escaped from a farm hereabouts, and she’s been living wild and free ever since. We see her occasionally, but mostly she’s just noises off. Just as well, really. You wouldn’t want to get too close; she’s not safe by any measure. But then she doesn’t want to get too close to us either. It works out. Everything does, you’ll find, here. Welcome to Hope’s Harbour, by the way. My name’s Tom.’
Tom, Tom, the piper’s son. That wasn’t fair.
Except that it was, of course: more than fair, generous even, against what she deserved. Nothing could ever be punishment enough. If nursery rhymes were going to run through her mind like streams of scalding water, she wouldn’t try to dam them up in seething pools, no. Better to let them run, dabble her fingers in the fierce sting of them, take off her shoes and paddle.
She said, ‘Georgie. I’m Georgie Hale.’ Nervous and fanciful, standing frozen in the middle of the road because she didn’t dare walk on, because she thought their pig was a ghost of absence, a haunting hollow shaped like a boy who never was. That was Georgie all over.
More than once
Grace had thought she might run mad. Wished for it, almost. Perhaps it was happening at last. Perhaps this was Tony’s last gift to her: to rip her in two and let the two halves torment each other crazy.
Not his plan, though. Not deliberate. Not to say he wouldn’t be that unkind, he didn’t think that way – of course he did, of course he would if it benefited him, his paper, him – but this, out here? No. He wouldn’t see the benefit.
He might still make it happen, regardless. Let it be.
He might not care.
She hoped he’d care.
It might be easier to fight, if she thought he was doing it deliberately. She might want to fight it, then.
‘Georgie. Georgie . . .’ He rolled the name around his mouth as though trying the taste of it. Then he lifted the flute back to his lips and tried a brief phrase, a sudden trill of notes. Tried it again, seemed to like it; he put more breath behind it, let it dance out into the wood. From his mouth to the pig’s ears; she thought about silk purses and sow’s ears and grew a little confused, decided she was too tired to reach for a joke. Besides, there had been nothing funny about her mood a minute ago, and there was nothing funny in it now. It was lighter, a little; men did that to her, the company of men, it lifted her. Even hairy young men in the half-dark, whose faces she couldn’t really see.
And the sense of imminent danger had receded. The pig in the wood. Yes. She would believe that entirely. She could do that. No little-boy-lost, no sucking shadows, just a feral animal crashing about in the undergrowth.
She was still afraid, but of normal things, what loomed ahead: encounters, people, secrets. Work. Everything had that shadow now, of dread until it happened; nothing was ever quite as bad as it might have been. That was something to hold on to, maybe.
Her case was something to hold on to, something to carry. Tom was walking up the lane, and she was following. Apparently. She had after all found someone to take her in.
He played as they walked – sometimes he skipped, or danced a few steps in the beechmast – so that she felt like a child at the heels of the Pied Piper, following the soft thread of his music through the dark.
House of Bells Page 4