An hour later Greatgrandmistress-Commander Alice Meynell emerged along the dank corridors. There were some advantages, she thought as she entered the briefing room, to living in this military way. The frank nearness of death, for example; the unflinching acknowledgement that it was a sacrifice which it sometimes became necessary for certain people to make. Killing people here was almost easier than keeping them alive. She listened to the wearying reports of divisional commanders or their deputies, and read the printouts and studied the arid insides of numberbeads. She touched her lips to the disastrous coffee.
She’s wearing odd earrings …
Her hair’s astray …
Why is she asking all this again, when we told her yesterday … ?
See, how her hands tremble in those gloves …
Mere wafts of thought from these sour-smelling men, kept well in check as they unrolled the maps and talked of the details of emplacements, and why should she care as long as they feared her? Outside in her car, doubly gloved and hated and blanketed, she acknowledged the troops as she was jolted painfully around potholes and the craters of mines. A pity, really, that the title greatgrandmistress didn’t convert into a chant as easily as the name of that shoregirl, who had recently taken the clever step of disappearing, and had thus removed herself entirely from the awkward businesses of being real. And this certainly wasn’t yet the world of blissfully glowing telephone lines and endless fields of bittersweet she’d always imagined she was creating. But England, for her, was a work in progress. Soon, everything would change.
After the desultory queues along the muddy, half-frozen roads and the confusions of engineering work, she found herself elated as she drew closer to the very westernmost edge of the East’s defence. Here, where the big guns waited, and the raveners were fed and the ammunition pointed its steel tips and the very earth remained unsafe, lay a refreshing sense of discovery and danger. Purpose, even—or the closest one got to it in wartime, and as she was led along duckboards to tents and temporary shelters, as she spoke to the gatherings of men, Alice could feel the rain-bowed spells of all this aethered machinery fountaining around her. They called and crooned.
The power was still down back at the damp house that evening, and the shadows stalked her as she hunched to her room, and opened her portmanteau, and undressed in the starlight cast by her aether chalice. After she had removed her un-matching earrings, and Jackie Brumby’s teardrop chain, and Cheryl Kettlethorpe’s thin silver bracelet, and the silver-threaded button from the shirt Tom had been wearing on the night of his death, she unstoppered the chalice and dabbed a little aether on her wrist where her Mark had been. Then, to the other wrist, and on her palms and neck, and the tip of her tongue and behind each ear, she dabbed some more, and felt it roar into her blood. The huge, red shadow of the four-poster bed leapt in the wyrelight. Smiling, humming, glowing, she returned to her portmanteau and lifted out the black, wyrebright pages of her greatest spell, and danced with them as they shone and slipped and slid. Then the light changed. At last, the electricity had come on, although the single bulb was more wan than today’s sunlight, and equally unwanted. She extinguished it with an easy glance, as, in a long, slow roar, her gramophone returned to life. Its song possessed nothing of the beauty of that which she was already singing, but she let the record play until the needle crackled and swished into the run-out groove. Yes, that was more like it. The music, the swish and sigh. Tides of light. Something vast breathing. Oceans and caverns. Lost summers reclaimed. Yes, Invercombe; or whatever lay beyond it. Alice Meynell laid herself down amid the sheets of her spell and the shadows of her presence, and fell smilingly towards sleep.
XI
THE PROCESSION, THE GATHERING, the snake of hunched backs and hats and heads to which now had been added varieties of wagon and handcart, along with drays and ponies in various states of malnutrition, now snaked back across the horizons of the West. Steaming and stinking, it broke into knots of arguments, surprised clusters of greeting. Flags and banners, and sheets and poles, umbrellas, even, danced aloft. There were spontaneous outbursts of sobbing and song. Most often, the Beetle Lady scampered at its front, calling and beckoning with increasing excitement that yes, this, listen, this really was the way. Some part of her, or the person she had once been, truly did recognise these roads.
The snow had vanished, but the cold had deepened. Every footstep on the sharded mud was loud, and every wheel rumble and drag of possessions rang taut over the hedgerows. If the procession moved most obviously through any element in this serely greyed winter landscape, it moved through the element of sound.
Boom-ba-boom…
Ma-ri-on …
Along its way, the followers had gathered musicians, or at least those who imagined themselves capable of making music, and each of the endlessly circling syllables was given a toot and a shriek of emphasis, and the rattle-bang of drums. The effect was hypnotic, especially now that the procession had grown so long that its rhythm staggered along the lines in echoes and decays. More than the Beetle Lady’s shrill shrieks, more than the many individual sounds which mingled into frosty distance with a chilly rumble, like a shudder of the very earth across which they were travelling, it predominated.
The woman who shared her name with this sound had hacked off her hair, and wore a thick felt cap, loose trousers bagged at the waist, collapsing boots which hurt her feet, and a split overcoat. None of it was quite enough to keep her warm even in the stumbling midst of the procession, and she would have given much she didn’t have for a decent pair of gloves, but it did mean that she was most often thought of as a man—or, when anyone made the effort to speak to her and she actually replied, as a lad. In that she radiated anything at all, it was a desire to be left alone.
Ralph Meynell, or the scraggily bearded invalid Ralph Meynell had seemingly become, was walking with her now, and she supposed it was part of the madness of the war and this procession, or perhaps merely an expression of their weariness, that neither of them had seemed that surprised to find each other. After all, this procession of followers resounded day and night to losses, reunions, loves and animosities forsaken or renewed …
‘I’ve seen so many things since I fled Bristol,’ she told him. ‘Before that, I could still pretend that there was order. I could pretend that there was some purpose and the hope of saving lives.’
‘This war…’ Ralph spluttered and put his hand to his mouth, and the grumbling, tooting, thumping crowd elbowed around them as he spasmed into a fit of coughing and Marion waited beside him for it to stop. She had seen this hot brightness, this thin and cheery sense of purpose, many times with tubercular patients, and knew that it normally presaged the final crisis. ‘It’s like a drug, an addiction,’ he said eventually. ‘It led me so far. I even thought I could end it all by Christmas—I mean, the war. Take Hereford, at least. But all I’ve done was cause more and more death …’
The coughing subsided. He still wore, Marion noticed, the remains of a senior Eastern officer’s uniform, but no one here took that as any indication of who he really was any more than it might have occurred to them that the figure, possibly male or female, who hunched beside him was the physical incarnation of Marion Price.
‘Is that why you left Hereford?’ she asked as they moved on. ‘Deserted—whatever it was that you did?’
‘I was arrested. I’d tried to make contact with the West by relinking a telephone connection. I thought I could talk to them about peace.’
Marion almost smiled. Perhaps some part of the invalid who limped beside her really was the old Ralph Meynell. Still ridiculously idealistic—still imagining there was reason and logic in the world.
‘And then?’
He coughed again. ‘There was an ambush. I think the Beetle Lady wanted me as much as she still wants you.’
‘What for?’
‘I do think she really remembers us from Invercombe, or imagines that she does. In another life, she was a guildslady called Doctress Foot
. We met at her Hotwells. Do you remember, that time we went to Bristol?’
Marion nodded. Previously, it would have been hard to imagine that anyone could change that much. But now, confronted by the evidence of what had happened to Ralph, and to herself …
‘It all goes back to Invercombe,’ he sighed. ‘Everything does.’
‘But why? Why us?’
‘We’re nothing. It’s all of this’—he gestured around him at the followers—‘that counts.’
‘But this is madness.’
‘And you’re walking with us, Marion.’ He lowered his voice slightly at the mention of her name, although she doubted if anyone else would ever have heard his wheeze in this stomping, yelling herd. ‘So you must be mad as well.’
The countryside through which they were passing had been saved from the destruction of battle. Those residents who had stayed on watched warily from upstairs windows or from around doors, whilst the few soldiers and police had made the obvious calculation of numbers and vanished when they heard of the procession’s approach. Still, as they thumped and steamed and the pipes piped and the earth trembled, there was none of the pillage which Marion might have expected. And still the Beetle Lady shouted and beckoned and waved in her mad raiment, No, no, this was not the place—Listen! You must move on … as they passed farm gates and post boxes and waymarks. It was bizarre, to witness the followers passing through this ordinary Western winter landscape; the untouching of two realities. In their wake they drew the curious, barking dogs, children, the mad. Some hung back or vanished. Many, many others joined with the shuddering march.
Ma-ri-on…
Boom-ba-boom …
Marion wondered just how long this blurred sense of order would last. When would hunger and frustration break out—in the next town, at the next farmhouse, the next village? And once that line had been crossed, what of sanity would remain? She was worried as well because of the gathering ranks of deserters who had been drawn to this procession. Word of their passage would certainly have swept along the telephone lines which hung dark across these fields. It could surely only be a matter of time before a regular army was mustered to see they were bloodily dispersed. The whole situation was hopeless, and yet she was marching towards Einfell and Invercombe to the rhythm of her stolen name in the hope of finding her lost son. She supposed that Ralph was right; she probably had grown a little mad herself …
The landscape dimmed. Earlier and earlier now as the year turned towards its close, it was growing dark. Flares were lit, the flaming crowns of dead branches. As sparks drifted and the chanting grew ever louder, it seemed that they could see further and further ahead over the unrolling hills. What was that light at the edge of the horizon? A signpost flickered in the passing flames, and Marion was sure she recognised the name. Not that she’d been to Edingale, but hadn’t Dad once bought a pig from a man who’d lived there? It was all so impossibly strange … The followers spread out from the road to rest amid a mixture of copse and pasture. Fires were started. The stranger creatures which had been part of the procession, those which hid from daylight, emerged shyly to crouch before the singing heat. Food was thin, and there was scarcely any water. For all the Beetle Lady’s encouraging words, there were mumbles of disappointment. Where, indeed, was the manna? Where were the pillars of smoke and fire? Where was this happy place called Invercombe, Avalon, Paradise, Eden, Einfell—whatever was its name? But the songs were a help, and the bodies and fires provided some shelter in the closeness of their gathering.
She found Ralph some dirtied hunks of bread and a few capfuls of watery milk. What he proved incapable of eating, she gave to the old man who was hugging himself beside them. She even allowed a little for herself, for she, as well, was some ailing creature, and since leaving Bristol she’d come to treat this husk of Marion Price with something resembling her old beside manner. She’d been kindly, but remote. The begging, the cutting of her hair, the swapping of clothes, the asking of favours, the sleeping and eating as winter set in, the shedding of what seemed to be left of her identity, had all been accomplished by looking down on herself with distant, clinical sympathy. After all, she came to realise, Marion Price had never belonged in only one time or one place. She had always borrowed identities and purposes. Shoregirl, maid, penitent mother-to-be, riverperson, nurse, administrator, figurehead, lover; none of them had ever really been her.
And this war. The guns, the madness, the gleefully organised brutality. How could wrong and right matter so much that bones poked from the mud and skin hung from the trees? What exactly were these armies defending? Ways of living? Preferences in food or religion? She didn’t believe in bonding, but now it seemed to her that, one way or another, most of the population of England was enslaved. Since fleeing Bristol and trying to find her way towards Einfell in the teeth of a fresh enemy advance, she’d witnessed a war which even the unsanitary chaos of her hospitals had kept at bay. Boom-ba-boom… Ma-ri-on … As if the Marion Price she’d discarded had grown into the spirit of all the destruction she saw around her as some final conflict gathered and the guns of both sides came to taunt her in their distant rage. Her name shook the air. It was scrawled on walls. She found it carved in the grinning ribs of a corpse. And then she had encountered other followers who had grown in number and had joined in turn with this vast procession which now bickered and coughed and sang and dreamed. And then she had met Ralph Meynell—or whatever he’d become.
‘I was wrong, you know,’ he said as he shivered inside the blanket she’d found for him. ‘When you walked out—what I said to you that day in Sunshine Lodge.’
‘What did you say?’
He gave a wheezy laugh. ‘I can’t remember. And we never did get to the Fortunate Isles, did we? Either of us? Or find a better name for Habitual Adaptation. And I’ve seen Owen. Did I tell you that, Marion?’
‘How is he? Is he still… ?’
‘He’s fine—or as well as anyone can be in this war. The work he’s doing isn’t particularly dangerous, although it hasn’t been easy for him, being the brother of Marion Price.’ Dim redness and light pooled and went from Ralph’s eyes. ‘But he told me the truth, Marion. Before that, I never knew. He told me about the baby that died …’
As instantly as the striking of a match, she felt her old angers and disbeliefs flare inside her. ‘Your mother knew—your so-called greatgrandmistress. It was she who persuaded me to go to Saint Alphage’s. She was the one who stopped me coming back to you that day in Bristol.’
‘I know about that now, Marion… But the money had vanished from that account my father created for me. Did you know that? All of it?’
‘And you thought that I… ?’
Ralph nodded, coughed. ‘I didn’t know what to think. Forgetting was like falling, and there are other things as well. Things I can’t… It suited my mother to keep me in the dark.’
‘All these years, and you call it the dark! What do you know about darkness?’
But Ralph said nothing as he shuffled on, and she sensed that, for all his chains of command and his fine houses and his stupid Eastern ignorance and everything that his war had brought down on him, he had perhaps glimpsed some deeper kind of darkness in the life he’d been living, even if it was something he could still scarcely barely bring himself to face. He’d stopped shivering, but his breath remained an agitated wheeze. It occurred to Marion that, like many of the patients she’d sat with as they began to sense the nearness of death, he was asking her for absolution. But she couldn’t give that to him. The girl, or the young woman, who could had long gone from this earth, and so had the arrogant young man. Instead, perhaps, she owed this new Ralph the truth. But that was the hardest thing; the truth always was. Einfell, for all her wanderings against the teeth of this winter war, had been the one direction towards which she’d found it hardest to draw her own thoughts. Cradle memories, creased limbs, the downy scent of hair—all the things she’d striven to forget in the years since she’d walked from Bris
tol along the Avon Cut and decided to head up the river—had returned to her that night as she gazed at the records in Saint Alphage’s. Her baby hadn’t died. But with that knowledge had come all the old stories of aether-twisted monsters. And then there was Dad, the blue glass, Mam’s scarred fingers …
With something akin to her old bedside manner, Marion wondered whether Ralph’s mind and body were capable of coping with what she’d discovered about their son. In a way, it was like the decision whether to move someone for better treatment when the journey itself might kill them, or whether to tell a solider that all his mates were dead, or that the letter he’d sent to his fiancée had come back not known at this address. But this pain, if pain was what it was, was at least at much hers as it was his. Wasn’t there still hope and purpose? And if it turned out that there wasn’t, perhaps she and Ralph would be better off leaving this world.
‘Look, Ralph …’ she began. She’d thought, inasmuch as she’d ever thought of a moment such as this, that these events and feelings would be difficult, if not impossible, to express. Instead, the words rushed out. And not just about the baby she’d lost so many times and in so many ways that the truth about his seeming survival was just another form of separation, but about her family and the river and the lost village of Clyst and the dreams of the shore, and yes, goddamit, about Ralph and Invercombe and what had been done to her by his own bloody mother and all the broken certainties and happinesses of that summer that some part of her mind was still stupidly trying to reconstruct.
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