House of Bells

by Chaz Brenchley

She might be grateful. Kick a bit, struggle a bit, sink in the end.

  She didn’t really understand what she was here for herself, why Tony would really have sent someone so obviously unready for the task. Untrained, untalented. Here she was, making her first clumsy attempt at spying for him, trying to work Webb out; and here she was, getting caught already.

  Hearing the door open behind her, when she was leaning over the desk trying to make sense of it all; and Webb was the only one who ever came in here when the door was closed. He’d said that as if it was a guarantee and not a trap. This would be him, then: and apparently she could blush after all as she straightened abruptly, as she turned around to face him, as—

  Oh.

  Not Webb.

  ‘Hullo, Tom.’

  ‘Hi.’ He almost sidled into the room; she couldn’t tell behind his hair and beard, but she thought he might be blushing as fiercely as herself. He couldn’t be embarrassed, could he, catching her with her legs bare, obviously nothing on under the hem of the shirt? Surely not: it was decent enough, as long on her as her dress of yesterday. And this was a commune, for crying out loud. They shared bathrooms and bedrooms without a second thought. He must be used to nudity; he should be utterly casual about it. So not that, then. But something was making him awkward, coming between them, keeping his eyes from meeting hers . . .

  Oh. Yes.

  ‘Are you in trouble,’ she asked bluntly – anything to distract him from what she’d been doing, how he’d caught her spying – ‘over leaving us last night?’

  ‘Webb had a word with me, yes.’ He sounded like a schoolboy, after an unpleasant encounter with a prefect. Those were always worse than teachers. So Grace had been told, at least, time and again, by rich old men nostalgic for their days at public school. At least only a couple of them had been nostalgic for the cane that apparently came part and parcel with such encounters.

  Georgie would know all about prefects, from her own experience rather than billiard-room reminiscences and bedroom favours. She smiled sympathetically. ‘Poor Tom.’

  He shivered, crossed his arms over his chest and rubbed his hands up and down his shoulders. ‘Poor Tom’s a-cold.’

  He was being deliberately theatrical, his turn to offer her distraction. She did at least know that much. Georgie would know what he actually meant, most likely. Grace not, but she bluffed it anyway: changing her smile to a laugh of recognition and then allowing him a change of subject as he clearly didn’t want to linger on that one. She turned boldly back to Webb’s desk and the wall behind it, and said, ‘What is all this?’

  If Webb had been as nasty as she guessed, Tom shouldn’t mind betraying a few of his secrets. Maybe she was cut out to be a spy after all; maybe she had a natural gift for it, turning one man against another . . .

  ‘That’s Webb’s web,’ he said, coming to stand beside her. ‘He says it helps him keep track of all the connections in his head, if he has it spread out on the wall like that. Me, I reckon he just thinks maps are cool.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right. And I expect he is, too. Both ways. But what is it? What does that mean, Webb’s web?’

  ‘He has this network, places like us all across the world. Well, not like us, exactly. People who think like us – except not that, either. People like the captain, who’ll play host to people like us. It’s how we’re going to change the world.’

  ‘Is it? How’s that, then?’

  He pulled a face. ‘It’s really hard to explain to people outside the web. Which is the point, really. You have to be able to think like us, before you can think like us; you have to learn how. And then you can’t think any other way, and then it doesn’t need explaining.’

  ‘Try anyway. Because, you know. I don’t think like you.’ And I don’t think you think like Webb either, but if you want to tell me different, go ahead.

  ‘Right. Webb does this better, because . . . Well, because it’s his idea. And because he’s Webb, y’know? But he says that if you only think rationally, then war is impossible. Not just wrong, it’s impossible. You’re not a pacifist if you can’t fight, you’re something else, something higher . . . you’ve evolved. That’s what Webb is all about: helping us to think rationally. Which means writing a new language to think in and teaching us how to use it.’

  ‘What, you mean like 1984?’ Grace couldn’t often bring books to the conversation, but here she could: memories of school time, where hers must overlap for once with Georgie’s, because everybody did Orwell. Days and days of sitting in the back of the class and being bored, but still something seemed to have sunk in. ‘Doublethink, and “Peace is War” only the other way around, and stuff like that?’

  ‘No, not like that. Almost exactly not like that.’ He shrugged helplessly, then apparently decided that was feeble and tried again. ‘In Orwell’s book, everything is a lie. Big Brother is lying to the people, and the people are lying to each other, they’re lying to themselves. Newspeak is an instrument of lies: that’s what it’s for, that’s all it’s capable of. Webb’s universal language will be an instrument of truth. It won’t be possible to lie. That’s the point. If you can’t even think a lie, if you can’t express it, then how can you conceivably go to war to defend it?’

  ‘What, are all wars started over a lie? Is that what you think?’

  ‘It’s what Webb thinks.’

  He spoke with all the passion of the convert. Grace had met young men fresh from a Billy Graham crusade, high on Jesus; they had that kind of fervour. It was like a fever; she didn’t trust it.

  She thought she was starting to get the measure of this place, maybe. It wasn’t the captain who’d be the guru here, that wasn’t what he was after. He just did what he said: he kept the place ready. Waiting. For Webb, or people like him. Leonard and Mary were the housekeepers, not the guiding lights. They laid the fire and stood back, waited for someone else to set the blaze.

  She wondered if Webb was what they wanted, what they thought they’d been waiting for.

  ‘Webb’s language,’ she said slowly. ‘You said it will be this, it will be that. Isn’t it finished yet?’

  ‘I don’t think it’ll ever be finished. As we evolve, so will the language. It’ll have to. But at the moment – no, it’s not ready. In a way it’s barely even begun. He’s still putting his teams together. All across the world, see?’ He took her back to the map, to all those strings and pins and postcards. ‘He’s got teams building vocabulary in ashrams in India, grammar in lamaseries in Tibet. Teams in communities in Australia and California and upstate New York. He went all the way around the world, talked to everyone who’d listen, gave them the same basic grounding, all the work he’d done already. Then he left them to it. It’s about trust, as much as anything. But if the seeds are right – and they are – there’s only one way it can grow. And that’s upright, beautiful, incontrovertible . . .

  ‘Somewhere along the way, he met the captain. Leonard wasn’t interested in the language, not to get involved – he says he’s too old to learn a new trick, and he’s been through war already, he knows what he thinks about that, and sometimes it’s necessary. I think he’s right, he’s too old to reshape his mind to fit a new reality.’

  ‘Or he just doesn’t want to. Maybe he’s happy the way he is.’ She thought Leonard seemed pretty sussed already, content with himself and what he was doing here. What he was making happen.

  ‘Maybe. He doesn’t know what he’s missing. But I suppose no one ever does, do they? Unless they’ve had it and lost it, I mean. If you haven’t tried, you can’t know. Like sex, or getting high, or . . . Georgie? Are you OK?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, sure. I’m fine. I’m sorry, I just . . .’

  ‘Oh – you had your baby, and you lost it. Him. And I reminded you. It’s for me to be sorry; my words run away with me sometimes. I love this thing so much, I forget to think who I’m talking to. That won’t be possible either, in the language.’ He tried a smile, weakly, hopefully; she gave him one back, a li
ttle wetly. Each of them trying as hard as the other. He was nice, and so was Georgie. And he was unexpectedly sensitive, for a young man; he cottoned on quick, to see what had upset her.

  That was useful, maybe. She could use it. Professionally. She sniffed and rubbed her cheeks on her sleeve like a little girl – and then cursed herself silently and looked around for a mirror and couldn’t see one, and glanced surreptitiously at her sleeve and no, it was fine, no make-up: that was long gone, what little she’d been wearing yesterday – and dragged them both back determinedly to what mattered. ‘So they met in India or wherever, Webb and the captain, and . . .?’

  ‘Yeah. And they kept in touch, and when he was back in this country, Webb came up here to see what Leonard was doing. It was a promise, you see, that there’d be a space for him. A place to work, where he could pull his own group together, and then send them out to spread the word. Words. Spread the words. That’s what we like to say, do you see . . .?’

  She did see. She gave him the distracted smile that he was working for, to reassure him that she really was past the tears now; then she peered more closely at the postcards on the wall. If they had pictures, they were pinned up the wrong way round, with the message side facing out into the room; that was what had seemed strange when she’d looked before. That, and perhaps she’d subconsciously recognized from a distance that she didn’t recognize the letters they were written in. A close, dense script, angular and regular, exact, nothing like the vague and friendly loops of scribbled English.

  ‘This is headquarters now,’ Tom said quietly behind her. ‘As soon as Webb was settled, he wrote to all his groups. One by one, they’ve been replying. In the language, in the bare-bones version that we all have. The postcards are just for fun, really. They’re a sort of: “Are you receiving me? Report signal, over,” not much more than that. But there are sheafs and sheafs of paper too, going back and forth. Webb pulls it all together. He’s brilliant, you know. He’s a genius.’ It was said very plainly, in that way that hero-worship can be between men. A girl would have been starry-eyed and romantic, not trying to hide it. Tom struggled to be matter-of-fact, and gave himself away completely. ‘And then he teaches us. You should come to class, Georgie.’

  ‘Me? Don’t be daft. I can hardly speak English, and I never got the hang of French. You’ll never teach me another language.’

  ‘Webb could. And the language is . . . natural. Inevitable. It practically teaches itself.’

  He was really eager, but she wasn’t here to sit in classes all day. Grace had left school behind her, just as soon as she could. Not Georgie, of course, but even so . . .

  ‘I don’t think so, Tom. I’d rather be making myself useful to Leonard and Mary.’ And Tony. Using any chance she had to nose around. Ask questions. In a language she understood.

  One thing Grace had always had going for her, she understood people too. Better than she did English, sometimes. The silent language of the body: gesture and expression and the way they held themselves. She read Tom’s disappointment, and Georgie wanted to be kind to him; she said, ‘Perhaps you can show me the shapes of the letters later, and explain how they work. It looks like code to me. Or maths, or music.’ Anything she couldn’t read. Signs to tell her future. She didn’t have a clue where she was going or what she would do next. Sometimes that terrified her, more than anywhere she’d been already, or the worst thing she had done. Or the way it followed her, sat in her head, curled up beside her in the dark.

  ‘It is,’ he said. ‘It’s all those things. You can write music as easily as words; I’ll show you that. When you write your name, it’ll be like you’re writing the song of you.’ And he whistled that little trill of notes again, which she’d thought he had made up just for her. Apparently, it really did say Georgie. ‘Or formulas. You could do engineering in the language, and know that your buildings were safe and your machinery would keep working.’

  And your milk won’t turn sour, and your dogs and your children will all behave with strangers, and your babies won’t die whatever you do, and . . .

  She didn’t believe in a perfect society. She didn’t believe that she’d found one. Ruthlessly, she said, ‘How’s Kathie, do you know?’

  ‘Oh. I’m not sure that anybody knows. She’s . . . not really awake. Her eyes are open, but she’s not there. Not responding. Acid flashback, maybe? Or she’s just got lost, somewhere inside herself. We tried to call her out, but . . .’ A helpless shrug finished the sentence.

  I guess she doesn’t speak your language well enough. Or you don’t. That was Grace, being nasty. Seeing true, though: he was thinking, for sure, that if the language had been perfect and both of them fluent, he could call and she would come to him, from wherever her poor mind was wandering.

  ‘She needs a doctor,’ Georgie said, anxious and guilty. Thinking that what Kathie most needed was for last night not to have happened: not to have danced too close to the fire, not to have plunged too deep in the water, not above all to have spent the night with her. Not to have been betrayed, blindly and absolutely: her, take her, don’t take me . . .

  Was that really what had happened? She wasn’t sure, she couldn’t think – but it might as well have been. Deliberately or otherwise, it came down to the same thing in the end. Kathie suffered for Grace’s fault.

  ‘She’s getting one. Mary knows, if Leonard doesn’t – she knows when something’s beyond her. We’ve a doctor in London; he’s something to do with the house. Always has been, I think. He dates back before the captain found it, at any rate. Like Cookie, he came with the lease. Webb’s gone to phone him.’

  Of course there was no phone in the house. It was one of her great expectations, that the essentials of life would be taken from her. But: ‘Wouldn’t it be quicker just to take Kathie into town?’ It took a day to come up from London, even if their doctor was prepared to drop everything and come right now.

  ‘To the cottage hospital? Sweetheart, there’s nobody there who could help. To them she’d just be a drugged-up hippie chick taking up a valuable bed. They’d be horrible to her and horrible to us. And they’d take her anyway, take her away from us and not do her any good, and we can’t have that. She’s better here. We’ll keep her comfortable until the doctor comes. Meanwhile, for my penance, Webb says I have to show you everything you didn’t see last night.’

  He didn’t seem too distressed about it. Georgie thought his real penance had happened already, in that interview with Webb; Grace wanted to think he hadn’t been punished enough. She wanted to blame him. If you’d done what Webb said, if you’d been there in the room, the . . . thing might not have come, wouldn’t have come because I wouldn’t have been all alone and afraid in the dark like that, I’d have been talking to you; and if it had come anyway you could’ve protected Kathie from it. From me . . .

  She wanted to, but even she couldn’t really make it his fault. She knew what she’d done. Perhaps it was only that she’d been too slow, but even that was a choice. She was quick enough, when a thing was to her benefit. Grace couldn’t hide in Georgie.

  Even so, she said, ‘So where were you last night? Where did you go?’

  ‘Out to see Frank.’ He had a mulish cast to his mouth, apologetic but defensive; he still thought it was a reasonable thing to have done, despite the consequences. Not my fault, he wanted to say. I wasn’t to know.

  He probably had said exactly that, and it had done him exactly no good whatsoever.

  ‘In the middle of the night?’ And out where? and who is Frank, is he Francis, is he the man I’m looking for? But one of those questions was unaskable and the other could wait.

  ‘Yes. He doesn’t sleep much, and he doesn’t like to be alone all night.’

  ‘I thought nobody was ever alone here?’

  ‘Nobody should be. But Frank won’t come into the house. We usually go out to him, one of us or some of us, at some point, just to scare his spooks away; and I wanted to ask him not to ring the bell, if it upsets you.’
>
  ‘Oh, what? But – no, you can’t upset the whole house, just for me . . .’

  ‘Of course we can. We could, if we had to. This is a community; we take care of our people. But it won’t upset anything, not to use the bell. It won’t upset Frank. I’ll take you to him, you’ll see.’

  ‘Can you take me to a bathroom first?’ Even dressed as she was, even knowing there might be men in there, that was suddenly rather urgent. ‘And find me something to wear?’

  Webb says I have to show you everything, but actually that only seemed to mean the things that Tom found interesting, which mostly meant things outside the house. There were dormitories in the attics that she hadn’t seen yet, there was a whole wing she hadn’t even looked in; these people fitted this house about as well as these clothes fitted her. A woollen shirt and a long plain skirt: rough to look at, and rough on her skin. She didn’t quite understand why she couldn’t have pretty Indian cottons, though she was grateful not to have bells on the hem. Shifting her shoulders uncomfortably within the coarse fabric, clenching her toes to keep simple handmade sandals on her feet, she felt as though she’d been swallowed by some over-earnest primitive religion.

  When she asked about the other wing, Tom shrugged. ‘Just rooms we don’t use yet, mostly. We’ll need them when the language spreads, when people want to come here from all over. Leonard thinks they’ll come for other reasons too, but it’ll be the language more than anything. Come on, I want to show you the gardens.’

  ‘It needs a better name,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The language. What’s it actually called? What do you call it?’

  ‘The rational language, the universal language . . .’ He seemed at a loss. ‘It doesn’t have a name. Why would it need a name?’

  ‘Because it’s new, because you need to sell it. You’re excited, I can see that, but it doesn’t sound exciting.’

  He was shaking his head, bewildered. ‘You’re not getting it; it’s not like that. It’s not a commodity that we have to sell. Once people understand, it’ll sell itself.’