House of Bells

by Chaz Brenchley

  ‘You’re the one who doesn’t get it. You need to sell it to people who don’t understand, who haven’t learned about it, who don’t dig languages or hippies or communes or peace or politics. It needs to have a name.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Talk to Webb.’

  She didn’t want to talk to Webb. Nor did Tom want her to, she thought. He was happy enough to talk about Webb, but not to hand her over; he wanted to have her to himself. It was quite sweet, and obligingly obvious.

  In perfect accord, then, they came out of the house and crossed the yard behind. Here was the arch through to the stable yard, below the stopped clock; she suppressed a shudder and tried not to cradle her wrist. No bells rang out, nothing happened, she didn’t start to bleed.

  ‘Welcome to the Museum of Failed Endeavour,’ Tom said as they came out into enclosed sunshine on cobbles.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ She was being idiotic herself, she knew, looking about for curious horses and a dungheap. She’d stayed in too many great houses, swept through too many stable yards in too many sports cars; expensive motors and expensive beasts were still what she expected, even while her head knew perfectly well that there were no horses here, and no sports cars either.

  Even so: she was being idiotic, but he was incomprehensible.

  He grinned. ‘That’s what Webb calls it.’ So naturally it was what he called it too. ‘Well, he uses our own word; that’s a translation, but it’s close enough. We’re all interested in self-sufficiency here. A place this large, it has to feed itself and more, better. It needs to contribute to the wider community. We need to earn our place. We do voluntary work in the neighbourhood, and we make things for sale or to give away. Simple, wholesome things. Craft things. At least, we try. People have ideas, and this is where they come to try them out. Oftentimes, this is where they stay . . .’

  Proper stable doors led to workrooms, rather than proper stable stalls. No straw on the floor, no tack hung on nails on the walls. Instead, old reclaimed machinery stood on bare and dusty stone. She stood looking at a giant wooden corkscrew, and knew that it couldn’t possibly actually be a giant wooden corkscrew, and said, ‘What is it?’

  He was almost laughing now, but not at her. At his friends, his housemates, his community: almost at himself. ‘It’s a cider press.’

  ‘Is it?’ She thought about that for a moment, and found an obvious other question. ‘Where do you get the apples from?’ As far as she knew, apple country was the other end of England. She’d walked in orchards with lordlings and generals’ sons and eager politicians, she’d watched young men gather windfalls and seen urchins scrumping in the trees and scrambling over walls to get away; but those had been all in Devon and Somerset and Dorset.

  Now he was laughing aloud. ‘Quick, aren’t you? Yeah, we had to buy the apples in. Even if we could grow them here, if we planted an orchard, it’d be years before we had fruit. Decades, maybe. And I don’t think the ones we bought were the right sort. Anyway, the cider tasted foul. If you want to try it, there are bottles and bottles in the old still-room, back in the house. We can’t throw it away, but we sure can’t sell it. We keep trying to hide it in the dinner. If there’s a nasty aftertaste one night, that’s because another bottle’s gone into the stew.’

  The next door down stood wide, and the space inside was occupied. She didn’t go in, only peered from the doorway: shifting lights and busy shadows; an old tin bath raised up on bricks over a trough of flame. The smell of paraffin, and – ‘Oh! Candles!’

  Long dipped tapers hung in pairs, in colourful tangles on the walls.

  ‘It’s almost our only successful industry,’ Tom said. ‘One of these days they’ll burn down the stable block, but in the meantime we have light for ourselves and more that we can sell at market. It pays for itself, at least. I don’t think it actually makes a profit, but it keeps the electricity bill down.’

  And they enjoyed it, clearly, those people in there: felt themselves useful, doing their bit. She remembered what Leonard had said about that, and she still thought they were like children, playing with wax and string and fire. They wanted her to come in; they wanted to show her what they did; they wanted her to join them. She backed away from their welcome, not what I’m looking for, no.

  The next stable held woodturning tools, lathes and chisels and mallets in racks. No people.

  ‘I think they’ve given up,’ Tom said. ‘Rick and Paulie thought they could make plates and goblets and candlesticks, but apparently it’s quite hard.’ Indeed, the work gathering dust on the bench bore witness: split and misshapen pieces, bowls and cups that looked more like they’d been hacked with blunt edges from twisted trees. ‘I think it needs a decade of practice, and they didn’t give it a month. They’re off in the woods now, gathering dead timber for Frank.’

  ‘Why does Frank . . .?’ And who is he, and is he who I’m looking for? And will he want to be found?

  ‘Charcoal,’ Tom said. ‘It’s his thing; he makes charcoal. It’s all right, Cookie keeps an eye on him. He won’t let anyone burn down the woods.’

  She had no idea how charcoal was made, or really what it was for. They used to draw with it at school, but she didn’t think he meant those long neat sticks that would snap in a moment in careless childish fingers. People burned it, she did know that, but she wasn’t quite sure why.

  This wasn’t the time to ask. Here was another workshop, where they did basket-weaving and made willow hurdles and wanted to learn how to thatch. She wasn’t sure there was any thatch up here in the north, but that wasn’t going to stop them. An intense man with a pale wispy beard and vivid eyes told her it was the finest way to roof, the only honest way to roof, a tradition that dated back to earliest times. The passion for slate had ruined the countryside, he said, and ruined the villages of England too. The cities could look after themselves, apparently; they were beyond hope and deserved whatever they did to themselves – self-scarring, he called them – but the villages should have been protected and were not, but could still be recovered. If people would only learn to live under thatch . . .

  Tom rescued her, quite bluntly. ‘Sorry about that. People get passionate here. Cob’s safe to be passionate about thatch; nobody’s ever going to let him rip their good weatherproof roof off and sleep under reeds instead.’

  ‘Does he sleep under reeds himself?’

  ‘No, of course not. He sleeps in the dorms with the rest of us. Come on now. I really do want you to see the garden.’

  The garden was his passion. Along with Webb and the logical language, of course: but this was something Tom could show off, legitimately his own. He led her down an unexpected passage in the far corner of the stable yard, and here at the end was a dungheap and a narrow wooden gate in a wall beyond; lift the latch and step through and it was almost like Narnia, almost another world.

  It was a walled kitchen garden, as four-square as the stable yard, but everything there had been messy, dirty, decaying almost as she watched. Here was order, neatness, regularity, success. Cabbages and cauliflowers and leeks marched in regimented rows, vigorous and thriving; the dark soil between was free of weeds, freshly watered, freshly turned. It reminded her of her father’s allotment, her ritual Sunday visits – except that small patch of council land had always been a trial to him, a duty, sheer effort. This was vast in comparison, and a labour of love.

  Tom took her up and down the rows and introduced her to his peas and beans in their pyramids of hazel, his raspberry-canes and strawberry beds, his solid swedes and turnips and his potatoes in their mounds. More and more, celery and salsify and: ‘This will be asparagus, it will, you’ll see. Three years, we’ll have our own asparagus.’

  Three years, she wouldn’t be here. She hoped to God she wouldn’t be here. She didn’t say so.

  After the vegetables came the herb beds, and the same in squads of pots: cuttings of lavender and rosemary and thyme and tarragon, dozens and dozens of them, rank after rank. ‘We sell these too, at the weekly m
arket. They’re really popular.’ And he was really proud.

  Lastly his joy, all along the north wall, where it would catch all the sun that England gave it: ‘We call it the orangery, but it’s not really, it’s a peach house. Frank found the account books somewhere, so we know. There aren’t any peaches yet, I just use it for a greenhouse and a potting shed, but all the pipework’s still here for the steam heat, and Cookie’s checked the boiler out; he says the system’s sound. The stove’s in that hut in the corner there, where I keep my tools. Next year, I’ll plant peach trees . . .’

  This year, he’d spent every moment he could spare in replacing broken panes and repainting the framework, so that the peach house was a gleaming white monument that ran all the length of the wall. It was hot in there under the sun’s hammer, and she wasn’t sure she liked it. She praised it for his sake, but was glad to leave.

  Still glad when he took her at last out of his wonderland, through a gate of open ironwork on to a path that led up into the woods. Now she was working for Tony, going to find Frank.

  A stream ran across the path, a narrow freshet with bare mud banks, too small to bridge and too steep-sided to allow stepping stones. Tom leaped across, barefoot and casual; then he turned back, held a hand out. ‘Can you jump?’

  Obviously, jumping was what people did; the mud bore many proofs. If she tried it in these sandals, she’d lose them and probably slip backward down the bank and into the water, flailing for his helpless hand. On another day in other company, Grace would have done that regardless, gone with a shriek and risen up dripping, cackling with laughter like a child, deliberately childish to amuse the man she was with.

  Here, today, she slipped off the sandals and hooked the fingers of one hand through the woven straps, tested the mud cautiously beneath her feet, tensed, and leaped.

  And landed, cool damp mud absorbing the shock of it, oozing between her toes as they dug for grip. Tom’s hand was there but she didn’t take it, didn’t need it. She found her own balance, lifted her face triumphantly, smiling, happy – and the phrase was there in her head already, like a child, and it turned itself unexpectedly into a question.

  ‘Why aren’t there any children here, Tom?’ There should have been small bare footprints among the adults’, rocks and branches in the water from where muddy hands had tried to dam the flow. A rope swing hanging from a tree. There really should be a pack of giggling, chasing children, here and everywhere: all over the house, heedless and hungry and beloved, cared for by everyone indiscriminately. That was her notion of a hippy ideal, and she couldn’t believe she was alone in that. Not here, of all places. She was just as glad not to have children about her, but she didn’t understand it.

  ‘Cookie won’t have them on the property. That’s about the only rule he has.’

  ‘Cookie won’t have them?’

  ‘That’s right. He says this would be a bad house for children, and that’s that.’

  She wanted to ask why the janitor got to make the rules, but there was a smell of smoke in the air, sudden distraction. And the path turned, and here was a clearing, with more than a swirling smoke to surprise her. There was a great turfed mound leaking smoke here and there between the turfs, like a man leaking smoke between his teeth. The smoke rose white and thin, drawing her eyes up to where an old stone tower reached higher than the trees. It looked like a church tower in miniature, plain and strong, only that the church was in ruins now and only its tower was left to point like an accusing finger at an abandoning god.

  Among the half-fallen walls and heaped rubble of its ruin, someone had built himself a home. It looked half like yesterday’s bonfire before the flame: a shapeless structure of salvaged planks and doors, covered over in places with tarpaulin and in places with more turfs, a green and growing roof.

  ‘Hey, Frank! Are you in?’

  ‘And where else would I be?’

  Tom’s call produced first a sour response, a voice that seemed almost to rise from the earth itself, and then a figure that did the same. He emerged like something dark and dangerous from an unexpected hole between one door and the next, which startled her almost more than anything: if a man built his house with doors, surely one of them should open?

  But these doors were walls, apparently, and this man was as mad as his house, or looked it. Grimy and wild-eyed, he wore a suit that Grace could recognize as Savile Row, though it was caked in mud; his feet beneath it were as bare as theirs, as bare as his chest where the jacket hung open because the buttons were long gone.

  The trouser buttons too – the fly was gaping wide. She did try not to look.

  ‘Frank, this is Georgie. She’s our new arrival.’

  ‘Oh, aye. The girl who can’t hear bells, or else they make her bleed.’

  Now she sounded mad, and she hadn’t even said anything yet. She glowered at Tom for giving away her secrets, but he didn’t get the message; he was most likely pleased with himself for being so thoughtful, bringing the problem to the source.

  The source was looking at her almost hungrily; she couldn’t meet his eyes. Instead, her gaze slid back to that sudden tower, and she said, almost without meaning to, ‘Is that where the bell is?’

  ‘That’s right, aye. It’s not the original, mind; that went when the chapel went, fire and fury. Story says the old bell’s at the bottom of the lake.’

  Heavy sonorous striking through the water, cutting and cutting. Making her bleed. She believed it immediately, and wanted to know the story without actually wanting to hear it, for fear that simple talk of bells might open up her hurts again.

  Tom said, ‘Well, you’re the man for stories, Frank. That’s why I brought Georgie to meet you, so that you could tell her about the house.’

  He thought it was a kindness, to both of them. She thought it a cruelty, each to each.

  Frank said, ‘The house? I don’t like to talk about the house. I won’t go in there now, and nor should you. Nor should anyone. There are spirits abroad in that house. I have them bring my meals to me here. You should go home, young lady.’

  ‘I don’t have a home to go to.’ Grace tried to say that as a lie, as part of Georgie’s story: only that it felt suddenly and immediately true. She had a flat to go to, nothing like a home.

  Into the silence that followed, she added, ‘I want to stay here,’ which was a lie pure and simple, just to remind her of her purpose.

  Tom brightened abruptly, and she could have cursed herself, but apparently she didn’t need to. Frank said, ‘That house is cursed,’ and he might sound as mad as he looked but she thought he was right none the less. Except that he thought he could take shelter in the woods, and she remembered last night when she arrived and something – nothing – had been coming for her through the trees, and she thought he wasn’t at all safe out here, on his own in his troglodyte life.

  She said, ‘Cursed how?’ and he shook his head.

  It was Tom who had to answer her, saying, ‘Frank knows more than any of us about the house. More than Cookie, even. He vanished into the library as soon as he arrived, pretty much, and researched all its history. If there are ghosts anywhere, Frank knows where to find them.’

  ‘There are ghosts everywhere,’ Frank said. ‘The house gives them shelter, but they don’t belong there. People fetch them in.’

  The sucking shape that was her own unborn child, dead before he came into the world, growing in the shadows, getting bigger, getting worse. He was right, she was sure.

  A breeze stirred the smoke, wrapped a thin sheet of it around them, made her cough.

  Frank stretched his nostrils and inhaled contentedly. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘That’s a good burn.’

  ‘Is that . . . how you make charcoal?’

  ‘In a clamp, aye. Build the logs around a chimney, high and tidy; turf it over and drop lighted coals down the chimney to make a fire at the bottom, low and slow. Then the collier’s task is to watch it, five days and nights. If the coat cracks, if air gets in, it’ll burn up a
nd all your work is wasted.’ Even as he spoke he was stalking around the mound, slapping fresh damp earth from a bucket wherever he thought too much smoke was oozing out.

  ‘Five days and nights – and just you to watch it?’

  ‘Aye. It’s a lonely life.’ But he relished that, had set himself deliberately apart here. And people came out to talk to him, Tom had said so; he wasn’t really that solitary.

  But: ‘What about sleep, how do you manage?’ No clocks, so he couldn’t have an alarm to wake him up.

  ‘Oh, I don’t. I daren’t. Not during a burn. If a log shifts and tears the turf, it could all be gone in a flare. I’m always here, always watchful.’

  ‘We come out to keep you company, Frank.’ Tom sounded almost indignant. ‘You know you could sleep while we watched . . .’

  ‘You kids? I’ll not trust you. You’ll get high, or get heavy with each other, and not notice when the whole clamp collapses and sets the wood ablaze. No, I’ve learned, it has to be me. You’re welcome to sit with me, help me stay awake, I’m grateful for that – but I’ll watch my own fires every time.’

  Five days, five nights without sleep. Time and time again. No wonder he looked half mad. No wonder if he was half mad. She’d known people do that at weekend house-parties, never go to bed at all between Friday and Monday, but only with the help of pharmaceuticals, and they were mostly incoherent by the end.

  She thought he was Tony’s missing journalist, he must be; she just wasn’t at all sure that he’d remember it.

  Tentatively, she said, ‘So where are you from, Frank, what did you do before—?’

  And wasn’t at all surprised to be cut off, before she’d even found an end to her question: ‘You don’t ask that, lass. Not ever, not of anyone. We’re here now. Someone wants to tell you, fine, but you don’t ever ask.’

  It was like being in prison, then. She’d thought it might be. People might tell you, but you never asked what they’d done to put them there.

  With her, of course, no one had ever had to ask. They all read the papers; they all knew already.