‘Good grief, girl. Did you do that on the brambles? Why in the world didn’t you say?’
No, she thought. No, I did do that, but not on the brambles, no. And not today. Not recently. I thought that was all healed up now.
That was a lie, of course, but she was quite used to lying to herself, silently, in the privacy of her head. She’d been caught out, apparently, by this one.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but I really do . . .’
And she really did. Right then, right there: she sat down on that convenient solid suitcase and watched blood drip on to the bare wood of the floor.
‘Yes. Yes, of course.’ When he was flustered, when she wasn’t looking at him, Tom didn’t sound anything like the hippy that he looked, hairy and mystical and remote. Just a nice English middle-class boy: the kind that she’d tried to overleap entirely, from Billericay to Cliveden in a single bound.
He had no idea, of course, of his significance. No notion of being a symbol for anything. His hair was just in the way suddenly, needing to be swept back – with the inside of his wrist, an oddly feminine gesture, as he had blood on his own hands now – while he crouched beside her to look more closely.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I don’t think it’s that bad, actually. They’re not deep. Only bramble scratches. Just, I suppose it will bleed if you cut yourself just there. Try to hold the hand up if you can, don’t encourage it. Gravity’s not your friend at the moment. Look, will you be all right if I leave you, just for a minute? Only, I think Mother Mary ought to have a gander at this . . .’
Of course she’d be all right. She didn’t know who Mother Mary was, she hadn’t thought she was coming to a nunnery, but she supposed it didn’t really matter. Mother Mary and Father Leonard, ruling their community with a rod of iron and the stroke of a bell. Two bells. Two strokes, sharp as a razor. Singing through her brain, singing through her wrist . . .
This little piggy had none.
She didn’t want anything, really. She never had, not really. Even Grace at her greediest, her most immediately grasping: even then, it had all been a cover story. Only that she was too late, too slow to see through it. If she’d really cared about the money and the status and the glamour, she’d have taken better care of them.
That was what the unkind people had said about her poor baby. Almost word for word, again and again, in print and in her hearing: if she really cared, she’d have taken better care. They didn’t even think they were unkind. On the contrary, it was the kindest thing they could think of to say, which was why they didn’t care if she read it, if she overheard it. Some of them would say it to her face. Thinking themselves oh so kind, not to accuse her of worse. Being generous, making allowances. Digging in their wilful stilettos, needle blades that cut and cut, that made her bleed and bleed.
Not like this. When she bled like this, it was because she did it to herself. After she’d stood over her baby’s little grave in the parish churchyard with the great bell tolling above her head, after she’d realized once and for all that she never really did want anything else: then, well, why not? It had seemed the least she could do.
She watched it come, this little blood, this gesture. Watched it spatter on the floorboards. Didn’t cry. Not any more, not now. There had been too much crying already. Grace was tougher than that, and Georgie was – well, too bewildered. Out of her depth. You needed to know what you’d lost, before you could weep for it.
Or bleed for it.
It was odd, to find herself sitting here bleeding. She really hadn’t expected this. Hadn’t anticipated it, in all her many imaginings. Well, how could she?
Here came footsteps. From inside the house, blessedly, not from the outside door and the cloakroom. Nobody else would be coming in to ring the bell while she sat here waiting, while she bled.
Here was Tom back again. She didn’t lift her head but she recognized his green trousers, his bare feet.
With him – well. Mother Mary, presumably.
White robe, over the kind of sandals her mother might have worn. Seeing the two pairs of feet side by side, with the hems of those clothes at ankle height, she found herself thinking again of her Robin Hood book. Robin and the wicked abbess, who had drained his life away . . .
No. She shouldn’t be thinking about that, while her own blood dribbled out to stain their flooring.
The woman gave her small chance to think about anything.
‘Well. What’s this, then? Just scratches, Tom tells me, but even so. They need looking at, he says. Hold your arm up, then, there’s a good girl. No, higher than that. Hold it in the light, where I can see what’s what. Besides, elevation will help to stop the bleeding. It’s uncomfortable, I know, but keep it up. Above your head, yes, like that.’
‘I did tell her, Mother.’ That was Tom’s murmur, somehow self-effacing and self-justifying, both at once.
‘I’m sure you did. And then you had the sense to fetch me, so that I could tell her too. Hmm. These are actually quite shallow, despite all the dripping. No need for stitches. Tom, run and fetch me the first-aid kit. And you, girl, look at me. Yes, look at me. What’s your name?’
Thus adjured, she did that: lifting her head to see the whole of the woman, rather than the fringes of her gown. Which was quite plain and practical, if white robes were the order of the day; and the woman inside it the same, quite plain and practical. In her forties at a guess, pushing fifty perhaps, with iron-grey hair done up in a bun; a pleasant face and a firm accustomed manner. Nothing hippy in her anywhere, except for that robe. But that was probably true for nuns too, that they seemed quite normal women except for the wimple and the habit.
‘I’m Georgie,’ she said, because she was now, she really was. Nothing of Grace left in her: none of that bright glitter jewel hardness, none of the angles, no resistance now.
‘Well, Georgie. I sent Tom away because I do need my kit – this needs a proper dressing; because he was being no help at all, which is no surprise at all to either of us; and because he may believe that these are bramble scratches, but I have yet to encounter the bramble that can scratch skin that deeply through a coat and gloves. I was a nurse in the war, and I know scar tissue when I see it. These are old cuts opening up again, aren’t they?’
She nodded, helpless to deny it.
‘So: do you want to tell me why you cut yourself?’
A shake of the head. Helpless to answer.
‘Fair enough. You can keep your secrets if you must – though this isn’t a good house for secrets; they’ll fester if you’re not careful of them. Still, never mind that for now. What have you been doing, to open these up? They look like they had healed before this.’
A shrug: she had no answers, except it was the bell, the sound of the bell that cut me, doesn’t it cut you too? All of you? She could sound quite mad, if she tried. Better not to try, then. Better to huddle in on herself and say nothing.
Here came Tom to save her, running back down the corridor with a box in his hands, white-painted with a vivid red cross on the top. Truly a first-aid kit, then: as unexpected as anything in this house. But then, with a former nurse in authority, why wouldn’t it have a first-aid kit? Hippies could be as careful as anyone, at need. A commune could be a community, and a community could look after itself. It wasn’t anything like the world she was used to, but she’d always understood that other people were different. Incomprehensible, but not necessarily wrong. Better, maybe. That might be something to discover.
Iodine on her cuts, then, and a bandage wrapped around; and as the older woman tore the end of the bandage and tied it neatly off, she said, ‘You’ll do. No need to worry about using the hand – you can hold a fork with it if you’re that way inclined. Come on through to dinner.’
She stood up a little warily, found Tom rather enchantingly there to help if she needed it, too shy to offer if she didn’t. Gave him a smile to acknowledge both, a little shake of the head at her own stubborn independence – and then thought of somet
hing, said, ‘Oh, I should do something about my suitcase . . .’
‘You should,’ the woman agreed. ‘You should leave it where it is. No one will touch it here. You don’t need to be worrying about things.’ She might have meant your things, but that wasn’t what she said. ‘Come along.’
Stalwart thing, her suitcase: something to hold on to, a weight, a weapon. Something to sit on, a support. She hated to abandon it, all alone in the corridor there. Also, she didn’t quite believe that bland reassurance. One of Tony’s reporters had disappeared here. Been swallowed up. Some of the stories she told herself about that, of course they would go through her case.
And find, perhaps, what they were looking for, traces of Grace; and then it would be a whole different story she was telling herself, telling them.
Tony might prefer that, actually.
She gestured awkwardly, just to draw attention to her hands. ‘Please, is there a washroom . . .?’ Blood on my gloves, and I still have my coat on.
‘Yes, of course. I’m sorry, I’m rushing you, aren’t I? Briskness gets to be a habit, I find; if I wasn’t brisk, I’d never get anything done. Never get any of these to do anything, I mean.’ With a little nod at Tom, who was apparently happy to stand in for everyone and be criticized. ‘Time has a different measure in Hope’s Harbour; no one hurries, but the clock does rush around.’
‘There aren’t any clocks,’ Tom said.
‘Hush. And don’t tell Leonard, but I do still carry a watch.’ A nurse’s fob, on the inside lapel of her robe: she flashed it at them, tucked it away again. Briskly. ‘Someone has to.’
‘Yes, Mother.’
‘And my name is Mary. Don’t let them tell you any different, Georgie. I’m nobody’s mother now.’
Neither was she. The bells were a constant reminder. She had to face down the ship’s bell again, turning back in defiance of instructions. It was silent like a knife, heavy with potential, brooding. She walked stiff-legged, wary as a cat under a dog’s eyes; scooped up her case and looked to Mary with her head cocked inquiringly. Of course she’d need her case in the bathroom. And time, that too. Time to catch her breath, scrub blood out from under her fingernails. Put her gloves to soak in cold water. Silly, useless gestures: they’d expect those from a new girl, her first day. It was important to seem inappropriate, not to be prepared.
FOUR
The lavatory they brought her to was a big square room, half a dozen basins, half a dozen cubicles. Seats and doors with the varnish worn from the wood; old heavy ceramics with cracks and chips in the glaze; taps that almost needed two hands to turn them, then hissed and gurgled before they spat water. The flush worked, though, and the water was scalding. That was something, an unexpected comfort. She’d stayed with millionaires and lordlings whose plumbing would have been a scandal to Victorians.
Washed, refreshed, not ready – but at least not bloody now, except beneath the bandage – she left coat and case together in a corner and came out to find Tom waiting on his own.
‘Mother Mary went ahead. She’ll let people know that you’re here.’
Was that a good thing? Perhaps. She didn’t know. She didn’t really know anything, except that she was here now, committed. Engaged.
‘She said you weren’t to call her that.’
‘She said you weren’t. I’m a hopeless case; she gave up on me long since. Hungry?’
Oddly, she was.
‘Me too. I hope you don’t mind vegetarian. Not everyone here is actually veggie – we don’t have rules like that – but a lot of us are, and it’s good that we can grow most of what we eat. Some people are really evangelical about it, and they’re the ones who do the shopping and most of the cooking, so meals tend to work out that way. It’s safe, anyway. Something everyone can eat.’
‘I don’t really know,’ she said. ‘I suppose so.’ Lentils and rice, then. What did it matter? She’d never cared that much about food. Dinner was an opportunity to be amusing, enchanting, available. Bright eyes, provocative manners, witty gossip. Eating only got in the way.
Here was a broad open hallway, stairs going up. Someone had started a mural, swirling patterns, meaningless to her eyes; also, she didn’t think it was finished. Perhaps that was the point.
High double doors standing open, the buzz of conversation. Here it was, then.
It seemed dark in there, heavy shadows, compared to the house around. Oil lamps and candles: well, she was used to that. People liked to eat in the half-dark. Actually, she thought it came from the women, people like her, who weren’t too concerned with what lay on their plates. Candlelight made big eyes lustrous, hid flaws, made up for clumsy make-up, drew the shadows in close like curtains around the table.
In other rooms, other houses, it did all of that. Not here. The room was just too big to be made intimate. It must have been the ballroom once, when this was a grand family house. Now it was – well, communal. Where they gathered, where they ate. The walls were hung with fabrics, which could hardly be safe with all those flames around. The candles were in jars and on tables, but even so. The house had electricity, which they weren’t shy of using elsewhere. She thought she’d use it in here too.
The tables were all different shapes and sizes but more or less the same height, not high at all. Tables with their legs cut off, she thought, mostly. They were arranged like an echo of the house, three sides of a square, and she was walking in at the open end for everyone to stare at.
It’s hard to set your chin mulishly and stare back, she found, when everyone’s head is a yard lower than your own. All the angles are wrong for everything you know about stubborn display.
People sat cross-legged or else sprawled on cushions, propping themselves up on one elbow like Romans. Mostly they had arranged themselves around the outside of the horseshoe; there were no cushions on the inside, and the few who sat there had tea towels slung across their shoulders or aprons worn over their other clothes. Cooks and servers, she guessed: doing the job casually, the opposite of silver service. Working inside the horseshoe for the sake of convenience, bringing big pots and bowls and ladles, dropping down to grab a bite themselves, five minutes’ rest, a word with a friend over the way.
It was like an arena, that broad open space between the tables. It was hard to see, coming into this high shadowy space from the bright-lit hallway; harder still to see past the flickering lines of candles, the occasional musky glowing globe of an oil lamp; but she thought that was Mother Mary in her white, just where she’d look to find the heads of the family, in the middle of the long row facing her. Most likely that was the promised Leonard sitting beside Mary, a middle-aged man with a grizzled beard, and would she have to walk all that way to face him, so utterly exposed, like a supplicant pleading to be taken in . . .?
Apparently not. Tom took her arm and drew her to one side. She thought he might be laughing at her quietly, behind all that facial fungus. She thought he was most exactly reading her mind.
‘Not that,’ he said. ‘We don’t run gauntlets here. Of course people are curious, but they don’t get to stare you down, not all at once. This isn’t a circus. Here, sit here.’ At the end of one of the horseshoe’s arms, exactly the opposite of what she’d been anticipating: closest to the door, least easy to look at.
And Tom at her side, tall, overshadowing; reaching out a long arm to hook two bowls closer, working the ladle from a giant tureen. ‘If you need to ask what this is, the answer’s stew. Best not to ask, I always think. Just let it happen to you.’
She shrugged, which was possibly unkind when he was trying so hard, but right now that was as much as she could manage. Her wrist hurt, in that achy way that wasn’t worth making a fuss over; the thought of it was worse, like barbed wire tangled all about her so that every flinch away just dug it deeper in.
It wasn’t possible. Her wrist had healed months ago, months. With scars, because the surgeon who sewed it up had made no secret of his contempt and couldn’t be bothered to do a delicate c
areful job – she almost thought he almost wished she’d got it right and was lying cold on a slab for dissection, rather than pale and red-eyed and flinching from his needle – but he couldn’t have done so poor a job that they would be tearing open again, could he?
Under the weight of an unaccustomed suitcase, carried for an unaccustomed way? Perhaps he could. Perhaps that long haul had strained ill-married flesh too far.
It was that or she was mad after all, believing that the strike of a bell could slice raw living flesh apart. If that was true, what need butchers? Monks would do. Vicars could take carcases to pieces with their great church bells. Buddhists could bone out quail with little tinkling finger-cymbals. No one need ever cut themselves again with crude and cruel razors . . .
She had stew. She had a spoon, because he passed it to her. She had another hand. She cradled the bad one in her lap and spooned stew listlessly. From hand to mouth, and—
‘Oh!’
He was grinning – no, smirking at her. Delighted with himself, for making it happen that way. Discovery, untouched by warning or anticipation or any kind of hope.
‘Told you.’
Stew, was it? She supposed it was, if soup meant a liquid with solid things in it, if stew meant solid things bound about with gravy. If you could distinguish between them.
Just the gravy was dark and rich and remarkable, a tingling dense eruption on her tongue, like licking the essence of savoury. There was salt in there and spice and somehow meatiness, although she was willing to believe no meat; and she wanted more, immediately and imperatively.
And this time there was a piece of vegetable on her spoon, and never mind, she took that too for the sake of the liquid that cloaked it; and she couldn’t have named it but the vegetable was all crunch and flavour and freshness, a delight against the settled maturity of the stock, and she wanted more of that too.
She spooned and chewed and swallowed. At some point, Tom thrust a piece of bread into her other hand, her bad hand; and it wasn’t bad enough – as Mother Mary had foreseen – to stop her using it for this, holding bread and lifting it to her mouth for biting.
House of Bells Page 6