Ralph did so, although this felt nothing like stripping before the gaze of nurses and physicians.
‘This is an ideal place to get you started. The currents out in the channel can be strong.’
Ralph had never seen anything more beautiful than Marion as she pushed back her hair and slipped one foot and then the other into the pool’s surface. There were submarine steps, which she slowly descended, meeting more and more of her reflection, knees, then thighs, then back, until the water covered to her shoulders and she merged, arms wavering outstretched, into the flickering moon.
‘Is it cold?’
She laughed, turned. ‘You’ll have to find out… ’
Soft weeds nudged his toes. It was cold, but at least it gave an excuse for his shivering. He descended until he felt a wintry compression against his ribs. ‘What do I do now?’
She swam towards him, hovered tantalisingly beyond the steps.
‘Just push out as hard as you can. I’ll catch you.’
Ralph barely hesitated—she made it look and sound so perfectly easy—but water instantly boomed into his ears and rushed into his nose and mouth. Then he felt her hands on his arms, and stars and the indigo night burst around him.
Marion nudged him back. He scrabbled back to the steps and gulped and coughed.
She floated away. ‘That was good.’
‘Good … ?’
‘Now. Let’s try again. Try kicking harder with your legs and feet.’
This time, she was further away. He was certain he’d drown long before he reached her, but she looked so impossibly lovely, her hair wet and the water lapping her shoulders, that Ralph wondered briefly if mankind didn’t have an aquatic origin. But the thought was too complex for him to deal with. He kicked out instead.
Once more, the surface closed over him. Once more, and just as he was certain that he would never breathe again, Marion’s hands drew him back to the surface.
‘Better still.’
His coughing subsided.
‘And again.’
Marion, this beautiful sea-creature, this siren, this lovely mermaid, was taunting him. But he was determined not to give in. Time and again he pushed towards her. Time and again he sank. But the process got no worse and she, after a while, stopped retreating and hovered near the middle of the pool. After pushing off, he sometimes began to get glimpses of her from above the surface as his arms and feet crashed around him, and even a vague sense of movement. He was making progress, he was sure of it, and the more he believed, the longer he seemed to be able to keep his hands doing something which approximated to swimming. It was as if he was being borne up in this element more by the power of thought than anything he was actually doing. There was, Ralph decided, a spiritual element to the art of swimming. But a more straightforward problem was starting to worry him.
He didn’t know about Marion’s underwear, but the Jermyn Street outfitters who’d made his had clearly never envisaged that he would wear it whilst attempting to swim. The cotton flapped and chafed. More alarming still, and midway out on a journey towards Marion, the rubber waistband slid abruptly from his buttocks. Reaching to grab it, he instantly sank.
‘What happened?’ Marion asked when she’d finally hauled him to the surface. ‘You were doing so much better.’
‘It’s these underpants.’ Even as he gasped, they were making further progress down his thighs.
She smiled. The moon smiled with her. ‘I rather lied to you, Ralph, about shorepeople wearing underwear to go swimming. Most of the time, we don’t wear anything.’
‘But… ?’
In truth, Marion could have informed Ralph that adults and older children rarely swam at all unless it was necessary to prevent themselves from drowning, but instead, she slipped the translucent straps of her chemise from her shoulders and gave a downward wiggle. Ralph’s underpants, which were already at half-mast, descended in sympathy and he liberated them with a final kick. He gave a laugh. He hadn’t even realised until that moment that he was floating unaided. This really is a matter of belief, he thought as his underpants went wavering and darkening towards submarine caverns. Marion, more prudent than he was with valuable clothing, swam to the edge of the pool and slapped a wet heap of cotton on its edge. Ralph, by raising his chin and kicking hard, found that he was still afloat. People could fly like this as well, he thought, glimpsing her breasts as she turned and swam back towards him.
The underpants had obviously been the problem. Now, by aiming at a particular part of the seapool’s stone lip and pushing out hard from the steps, Ralph found that he really could swim. Relishing his new freedom, he crashed to and fro for a while, but he was conscious that the night had thinned overhead and that the moon was dimming; conscious, too, how noisy and clumsy his efforts still were. Paddling back to the steps, he crouched half-submerged and caught his breath and watched Marion swimming.
Almost dawn now. As on the days of his earliest risings, he noticed how the world seemed to hang there half-formed, greyed and misted as if it were being rethreaded by swirling invisible hands. The light grew milky soft. The stars hazed and retreated. Water sluiced Marion’s shoulders and feathered her fingers. The surface twisted and rippled about her, but scarcely ever broke. Ralph was reminded of steel, then of mercury. And she was all of these things. Liquid and solid. Real and unreal. As she dived down with a mere flicker of her feet and the elements joined, it seemed likely that she would never return. When, a long time later, she did, her eyes grazed him, the rocks, the dim shapes around him, all in calm and equal measure. I’m part of this as well, Ralph thought, as she shook back her hair in a burst of droplets, and the thought was a joy to him.
He heard a sound. It was watery and clattery, and he imagined at first that it was the day’s first bird. But it was no song he recognised, and it seemed to come from the pool itself. His eyes were drawn to its source just as Marion swam to it. One of Gardenmaster Wyatt’s buzzbugs, it must have alighted here under the impression that the seapool was as solid as it had briefly seemed. Marion cupped the creature in her hands and bore it towards the steps. Limb by limb, she emerged. Ralph, when he thought back at this moment, could honestly say that he’d somehow managed not to consider how the difficult business of their both getting out of the pool naked might be achieved. But as he climbed from the shallows and crouched down beside her as she laid the half-drowned creature on the grass, it turned out to be this simple.
‘You sometimes find them on the shore. The children like to collect their wings.’
This one’s were yellow, flecked with brilliant greens towards the apex and spur. Its compound eyes were lapis. Its antennae were hanks of ostrich feather. Large and intricate as a tin toy car, all it needed was a windup key, but it was bedraggled. For a while, Ralph regarded the buzzbug with fellow-feeling. Then he looked at Marion. Her right knee was raised, and the other pressed into the grass as she supported herself against her heels and on the bend of her toes. Everywhere, she was beaded with streaming droplets of water. He studied the changing textures of her skin. Olive-coloured and dotted with small hard-to-see freckles across her arms and neck from all these sunlit days. The rest of her body was far paler, almost translucent, as if she was also being formed out of the same tremulous grey stuff as the morning. Water broke from her hair. Pausing to join with other droplets, it traced the shape of her back, or trickled forward more quickly down the incline of her right breast towards where the skin of her nipple darkened and puckered to fall in small, precise drips. Ralph’s view of Marion as the pinnacle of creation was entirely reaffirmed as he gazed at her and she gazed at the buzzbug. Nature, science, survival—whatever it was that governed this world—had invested so much in the shape of the human female.
Ralph kept his thoughts on these somewhat abstract planes partly because it was the way his mind usually worked, and partly because he was uncomfortably conscious that his penis was exerting a strong upwards pressure as it tried to escape from beneath his left thigh.
Concentrating on willing the thing down didn’t help. Neither, after a while, did science.
Marion gave a shiver, and a droplet of water scurried down her forehead and broke from the tip of her nose. Soon, another would break from her right nipple, then shudder and regather according to the laws of surface tension, friction and gravity. The drips were a little slower now, and the widening spaces on her skin between the droplets had the look of being almost dry. Marion sniffed. She turned to him and smiled, and Ralph knew from that smile that she’d known, had always known, that he was watching.
‘You’re beautiful,’ he murmured.
‘No,’ she said. ‘You are.’
Once again, Ralph was amazed. She shifted her stance and touched him on the chest, drawing a small cold shape, a hidden hieroglyph, through the droplets there. Ralph shivered. He could scarcely breathe, and his penis, giving up patience, finally leaped up jollily between his legs, but she smiled at that as well, and then laid her hands against his waist as if they were still swimming, and drew him to stand, and stood herself. They were so close that the water which broke from the hollow of her neck trickled across his toes. Then her breasts nudged him and her arms closed around his back. They were both trembling almost uncontrollably as he felt the full long shape of her body, and then her mouth, against his. For a moment, she tasted like the seapool, and was cold as the morning, then she was warm, human and alive. Their teeth clashed. Their breath shuddered. He felt the rumble of her laugh.
‘I’ve never done this before …’
‘No…’
Her hand sluiced water from his back. Then it travelled forwards. So lightly that he almost cried out, she traced the shaft of his penis. Then she drew him down towards the dew-wet grass, and he felt the shape of their meeting hips, for they had both studied nature for too long not to know what they were doing. Of course, it was nothing like either of them had imagined, but still it was far better than anything done for the first time should ever be.
Across Invercombe, different but similar scenes were being enacted. Gardenmaster and Mistress Wyatt were tumbling hungrily amid the heat of a crushed bed of pyrepoppies. Cissy Dunning, after wishing Weatherman Ayres a brisk goodnight, had been halfway down the hill from his weathertop when she’d turned back. She was breathless by the time she’d returned to the iron door and banged hard on it. She still had no idea what it was that she wanted, but Weatherman Ayres did, and he drew her into the humming light, and nested his fingers in the back of her hair and pulled her mouth against his so quickly that her body was pushing back before she could think to say no. Across the shore, and in the Price family cottage, and deep in the dunes, where Owen no longer needed his uniform and Denise had given up saving herself for Bristol, bodies moved together. Shoremen, shorewomen, fisherfolk, masters, mariners, seamstresses, nurses, innkeepers, matrons and marts were all joined in love. Even up in the house, to which they had returned arm in arm and drunk on the day, Greatgrandmistress Alice Meynell was now astride her husband amid the tousled sheets, and her timeless body gleamed as she smilingly urged her husband towards the peak of pleasure for the last time in his life.
Ralph awoke. It was extraordinary, really, that he’d fallen asleep. Daylight was streaming over the specimen trees. He sat up on his elbows. Marion had slept as well. She was sleeping still, her face and hair mingled with the daisies. After a long time of drinking in these moments, he stood up. Looking down at himself, he noticed that a little blood had stuck to his thigh. Nature was so contrary. He padded over to the seapool. He pushed out, swam, trying to break up as little of the mirrored morning sky as possible with his strokes. It was easy now. The water bore him just as her hands had done. He stepped out into a place where the sun already fell and shook the water from his limbs and let the sun warm him. Marion had turned slightly, her left arm moving up across her face to show an uptilted breast and the light nest of hair in the hollow beside it. But she remained asleep.
He noticed something black lying nearby. The buzzbug she’d rescued had died, and its colours had leached. These things never lived for long, but its loss still saddened Ralph as he crouched down beside it. Even in a moment as lovely as this, death was always waiting. In fact, death was essential to everything, and was beautiful in itself if only one could step back far enough from the self-involved process of living. The buzzbug had stood no chance of surviving. It had died because it was too big and blundering …
Ralph stood up. A thought, almost a memory, a recollection solid and yet hard to place, had struck him as he cupped the dead creature in his hand, and was striking him still. He shook his head. He gave a small chuckle. It wouldn’t go away. It was just there—small and large and entirely obvious, but with implications which shot off in so many directions that they left him dizzy. Sacrilegious though the notion was, the thought was as beautiful as Marion as she lay there on the daisied grass, and this seapool and the golden morning captured in it. In fact, it was them, and they were it.
So simply and elegantly that he felt like crying and then physically hitting himself for never having thought of it before, the thought, the idea, the evident fact, explained exactly why all things were as they were. Striding along the lip of the seapool, Ralph leapt down and ran along the path towards the shore where the outward tide was gleaming and the air was vibrant with gulls and salt, sunlight and decay. Arms outstretched, laughing, he danced across the wet sand.
XIV
TRAMS SWEPT IN at the pinkly ovoid entrance of the south side of the Bristol Merchant Venturers’ Halls and trundled out at the north. Mid-building, visitors disembarked from the swaying, sparking carapaces into a cavern of polished marbles, jewels and coralstones which would have appeared cool in any other weather. This morning, though, the gleams were like the sheen of sweat.
Weatherman Elijah Ayres—although the Elijah part sounded odd even to his own ears when he presented himself to the duty clerk, and Cissy still called him Weatherman even at the peaks of their passion—was borne towards his meeting by a churning carpet of electric stairs. He whistled to himself. Staunch, red-faced Bristolians glanced at him as they ran fingers around wet collars. No one, really, should look as happy as he did today. But he’d put a chalked board up on Invercombe’s parterre steps, just as he did every morning now, promising Rain at Four, and he’d instructed Marion and Ralph to keep an eye on the instruments until he returned, and he was already looking forward to that cooling downpour, and then, later, to the scented slopes of Cissy’s breasts …
He knocked on the ornate door. A voice, and he entered a long, wide meeting room where dark cedarstone shone in swirls, and the air, stirred by several hopeless fans, smelled of stale eau de cologne. A wilting group of men were alternately studying and wrestling with maps which the fans attempted to lift.
‘I think, Weatherman Ayres,’ said Greatmaster Cheney at the furthest end, ‘that you know most of us here.’
He did, or at least he’d heard of them. Senior-this and grandmaster-that—he wasn’t quite taken in by the nods and smiles, and paused to consider his choice of chair before he sat down. Close enough to contribute, but to remain at the edge of the group; that should do the trick. But still, there was an astonishing mixture of guilds here—even more than he’d have expected. He was intrigued, and a little wary, but these people needed him, otherwise he wouldn’t be here. He gave an easier smile towards Grandmaster Lee-Lawnswood-Taylor, who owned lands which bordered Invercombe, and for whom he’d kept back the hail from his crops.
Greatmaster Cheney was a big man, grey-eyed and bristle-haired, said to be happier supervising the milking of his cattle than the workings of the Actuaries of Guild. ‘The sooner we get this done,’ he sighed, ‘the better …’
Palms were wiped across trousered thighs.
‘From what we’ve all said, I don’t think there’s the remotest disagreement that we’ve all seen a significant downturn of the levels of trade. Of course, we must all deal with losses and crises—even as sad as that which
has afflicted the younger greatmasters Pike over here with their beloved father.’ He nodded towards two similar-looking guildsmen in young middle age whom Weatherman Ayres hadn’t seen before. ‘But what is alarming about this particular downturn is not so much its extent as its universality.’
A pneumatic drill began jammering down towards Saint Stephen’s. For some reason, Weatherman Ayres’s attention was momentarily rooted on a beautiful Cathay vase which sat, gleaming and glowing, on a side table. It seemed like the only cool thing in this room, or city.
‘I know that we’ve probably all taken our own measures. But I put it to you that they’re not enough to save the westerly counties from tipping into recession. We need to do more, gentlemen. Yes, I know we have all in the past found some necessary extra profit—and, indeed, no little comfort…’ He paused to smile. ‘… in the small deliveries with which Weatherman Ayres and his fine device have been able to assist us. But the small trade in anything is no longer enough. We must think large.’
Greatmaster Cheney scattered a handful of neatly holed stones across the table. Normally, numberbeads were strung abacus-like on a rack by which a skilled operator, by whispers and finger-blurring clicks, could still exceed the operation of the fastest reckoning engine. But these were bigger. ‘Our vessel,’ he began, ‘is called the Proserpine …’
The last individual word the weatherman noticed was our. Instantly, as he picked up one of the numberbeads, he was noting the configuration of Proserpine’s sails and the horsepower of her engines and style and manufacture of her weathertop, which was a Woods-Hunter out of Dudley, one of the most venerable makes, if a tad slow in the bidding. High-waisted, narrow-hulled, she was designed for speed and the bearing of light, expensive loads. Beyond the fug of this meeting room, he was sure he could detect harbour smells of bilge and fresh paint. Tuxan was a port he’d never visited, but he knew it lay on the mainland of Central Thule. Not that it was the sort of place which an Englishman, or any white European, would wander too freely. The Mexicans had never forgotten the ravages Cortez had inflicted on them and were proud of their re-gathered empire—proud and protective of their bloody magics, as well. Even now, and although sites like Tenochtitlan had long been dowsed as rich sources of aether, they were reluctant to trade with the rest of the world. In any case, the problems of mining, extraction, distillation and transport had long proved near-insuperable. But money was money. And trade was trade. And aether, above all, was aether.
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