House of Bells (11 page)

She said, ‘I'd love to hear about your travels, uh, Captain . . .?'

‘You call me Leonard,' he said. ‘To my face, at least. I know everyone calls me the captain behind my back, but I don't have to hear it. I had forty years at sea, from deck boy to master, and no one using my own name all that time. It's enough. I'm ashore now, and not even the Royal Navy would call this house a ship. We'll have no titles here.'

‘Hear, hear,' came devoutly from the corner. From Mary that would be, then, not Mother Mary. She would try to remember. People should be allowed to choose what people called them.

That was a very Georgie thought. She was almost proud of herself. Of both her selves.

Webb was laughing at them all. Settling on the floor, not far away, where a long-armed stretch would let him drop his ash into the same pot that Leonard used; lighting a long neat joint that he'd had ready, just to be sure that he had some ash to drop. Another candidate for first mate, was he? That was how it looked to jaundiced Grace.

Someone else who took the name he wanted. Fair enough. She wouldn't challenge that, but she did say, ‘What's funny?' – and that was all Grace, and she was almost ashamed of herself. Of just the one self, Grace, because of course Georgie wouldn't stand up to her for a moment and couldn't be expected to.

He said, ‘You'll learn. But truly, Leonard, you can't go laying down the law and then complain when people salute you for it. Any more than Mary can embrace four dozen folk at once, remember all their birthdays, and still resent it when they call her Mother. Some titles just . . . accrue. You can't choose not to be what you are.'

‘Of course you can,' Mary said. ‘You can choose to be Webb, plain and simple.'

Which confirmed a lot of her suspicions and underlined, she thought, what everyone was saying here, and even more what they were thinking. But Webb said, ‘Oh, that, of course – but I can't choose not to
be
me. I can only choose what you
call
me. A Webb by any other name would smell as sweet. And if you will stalk around insisting that everything be shipshape, you can't complain when people call you captain, because you are; and if you will insist on mothering everyone, Mary dear – including slapping us down when we're naughty – then, you know . . .'

‘Oh, be quiet and smoke your nasty thing. Why you insist on that grim resin when we have perfectly good home-grown weed I cannot imagine, but—'

‘You see?' Webb pulled a whimsical face and shrugged extravagantly. ‘Even when we're arguing about it, she can't help doing what she does. Give it up, Mother. Some fights are lost before they even begin.'

Some fights are fought over and over again as demonstrations, for other people's benefit. She understood that. She'd seen it happen in the grandest houses in the land, between the highest ranks of people; and all for her own benefit, or at least to impress young Grace Harley, born of Billericay. That wouldn't happen now, but she didn't want it. She never had.

She didn't want it here either, even if it was done with better humour. She said, ‘So it's not a ship. That's good, I didn't think that I was coming to a ship – but I'm sorry, I'm still all at sea here. Actually, what is this? What are you all doing here?'

‘Waiting,' Webb said, with another snort of private laughter.

‘Growing,' Mary said, bringing her a mug of tea.

The mug was roughly thrown and coarsely glazed, and she didn't think it would be very steady if she had a table to set it on; she wrapped both hands around it, in lieu of steadiness, and waited to be enlightened.

‘Being ready. Getting ready,' Leonard said – which seemed to be the same things in the same order, but . . .

‘Isn't that the wrong way round?' she said, because the only other thing to say would have been
ready for what?
, and she wasn't ready for that. ‘Don't you have to get ready before you are?'

‘No. You need to be in a state of readiness first, before you can begin to prepare.' His cheroot had gone out. He frowned at it distractedly, fussed a little with matches and flame, puffed out thin clouds of evil-smelling smoke until it was drawing again to his satisfaction. Ready then, he went on – or else he started again, or else changed the subject entirely. Or, possibly, answered her original question.

He said, ‘When I was a young man, I was all over the show. All at sea, yes. Hong Kong to Honolulu, Surabaya to San Francisco to St John's. Then the war . . . happened. I was on the Arctic convoys, Archangel, Murmansk. I saw . . . No, never mind what I saw. Things I wouldn't tell a lady. I survived, though half my crew mates didn't. I swore I would never go into the cold again. I went back to the tropics, worked tramp steamers around the Philippines for a while, then found my way to India.

‘Where I stayed. For a while. I left the sea. Yes, it was a surprise to me too – but I wanted something I couldn't find on shipboard. I wanted horizons beyond a metal hull and the companionship of a dozen men just like me, war-scarred and closed in, locked down. Every ship I served on was like a can of damage, brewing in the heat. It might be the first smart move I ever made, getting out while I could.

‘And then – well, there was India. Before the rush, before the hippy trail brought us half the youth of Europe and the States too. Hell, I practically built the hippy trail. All too literally, some stretches: the road from Hussainiwala down into the Punjab, I worked my way across that land. It was unheard-of, a white man labouring alongside the natives, but they were very good for the most part. They allowed it. I had no caste, do you see? So people could be outraged, but no one was offended.

‘And I learned. I visited ashrams in the Deccan and monasteries in the hills; I talked to holy men on the road. I think I met Kim, though he was an old man who'd almost forgotten that he'd ever been white. I found my way up into the Himalaya, inevitably, and over the border to Tibet. The people there were careful of me, so that I didn't run into trouble with the authorities. I was there a while – they are a remarkable people – but I couldn't stay. My simple presence put my hosts in danger. They went to extraordinary lengths to keep me safe, but I couldn't do the same for them.

‘With their help, I came down over the mountains into Nepal. Even that time was a revelation to me: long nights under the stars, talking and walking and being silent. I had finally turned around and was starting to head home, and I hadn't realized till then quite what I was taking with me. In Kathmandu, I met my first Western longhairs. It was too soon to call them hippies, for we didn't have the word yet. I called them beatniks, I think, though that was really the culture they'd come away from, looking for something else.

‘It had taken me years to go as far as I did; it took me years longer to come back. By then they were everywhere. I watched them and envied them – they were young, for the most part, they hadn't had the war as I had – and I seemed to spend half my time helping them out of trouble. They were . . . spectacularly naive. And irresistibly attractive, despite that or else because of it. Those that I helped mostly headed home after, determined to echo the kind of life they'd glimpsed or dreamed of, somewhere they had better hopes of making it happen and getting it right. It's always easier to rebuild Eden in your own backyard, when the original is full of other people who are not at all like you.

‘You could say that having taken a hand in building the hippie trail, now I was doing the same for the commune movement, sending kids back to the land, back in their own land. At least this time I knew more or less what I was doing. I'd watched these kids trying to live together in ashrams or villages or improvised communities, I'd listened to them building dreams of how they could live together back home; I already had my own ideas how well that would work, and how I could make it better. Which was the first inkling I had, that I wanted to make it better: which would mean coming home, and then finding a space, and then . . . well, this.'

A gesture of his hands in the soft light and the smoke, to encompass the house and the woods around and everyone who dwelt there.

And her, apparently, presumptively.

She said, ‘What makes this better?'

‘Discipline.' That didn't come from Leonard, it came from Webb: puffing at his joint, still laughing. Not stoned, she thought, not yet. Just amused.

‘Rules,' Leonard said. ‘Oh, don't worry: this isn't shipboard, and I'm really not captain. We don't run everything to the clock. But we do have rules. Everyone eats together, and everyone sleeps together. Not in the orgy sense, unless you really want to, but communally. Nobody sleeps alone. There are rooms for those who want to couple up and those who want to play, for a night or a week or a lifetime; otherwise, we all doss down in dormitories. Walls between us cause more problems than they solve. I won't have them.'

There had been, presumably, hammocks swinging below decks, all swinging together, snores harmonized in rhythm. Something to hold on to. And then, presumably, a captain's cabin, isolation, extremity. Something to let go. The loneliness of command, the man on the summit of the mountain: achievement, and what else? A power that he didn't want, that he'd walked away from. A career and a lifetime left behind. Five oceans left behind. He was a long way here from the sea.

He had been further. Literally in the mountains, sleeping in temples and longhouses with warm bodies clustered all around him. She could see how that would influence a man, how he might try to bring something of it back with him. Even so: ‘If you don't want people being private,' she said, ‘if you don't want them going off by themselves, why come here?' This house was too big. She hadn't seen halfway around one wing of it yet, and even so. She could take everybody from the ballroom at her back and isolate them, one in each room that she came to, and there would still be rooms left over. A lot of rooms.

‘So that we can be ready,' he said. ‘As we are. When they come, we'll always have space for them.'

‘When who comes?'

‘Everybody.' Just for a moment then he was mad, or else he was a messiah, both. His smile, his gesture encompassed the world. This was a church, then, after all.

She just looked at him.

He chuckled and drew his hands back together.
Here's a church, here's a steeple
– except that the steeple was a chimney, smoking.

He said, ‘You came. So have all these others. So will others yet, as the word reaches out. Here's a community that
works
, in every sense. That's the other rule, the one we haven't told you yet. Everybody works. What you work at, that's up to you. Inner peace or world peace, waving joss or weaving jute, we don't care. It's not “do what thou wilt”, that's discredited, though it comes from Augustine of Hippo, with love attached. Our rule is “be who you are”. One way or another, that tends to keep people busy.'

And then he looked at her, and puffed on his foul cheroot, and said, ‘So who are you, Georgie Hale?'

This was it, her moment. Tell her story, explain herself. Little bits of truth, like slates nailed on to a frame of solid lies; they might make a roof, to keep the rain off. For a while.

Be who you are.
She opened her mouth to break that first commandment, to be someone utterly other than herself – and back in that corner again, by the shuttered window, Mary lit new joss and rang a little bell.

Just a little brass trill – it was nothing, a mention to the gods, not worth mentioning. But it made the hangings billow all along the wall there, where there must be other windows closed behind them; and there was a shape that formed behind that shifting fabric, small and dire. It might have been a boy just standing there, being there, waiting, ready.

And there was a
drip, drip
between her feet, and that wasn't her cup of tea, no, spilling from her heedless hand. That was her hand, where unheeded blood was dribbling from beneath the bandage and running down her fingers and
drip, drip
dully on to the rug where really she shouldn't have heard it at all because really she should have been screaming.

I
nstead she was crying, just a little: tears
drip, drip
down her face as she stood up, as she stumbled forward, as she went to where that hidden horror waited.

Of course there was nothing there. That was the point. She would pull that vivid cloth aside and there would be a terrible absence waiting for her, the emptiness where her baby grew. It used to lurk inside her, like a hollow in her heart. Now it was here, expressing itself. Taking itself literally. Coming to take her away.

She was terrified, entirely. She could barely bring herself to move. It couldn't call, it had no mouth except the bells' mouths where their clappers swung like knives to cut at her; but it sucked at her, and she tottered towards it because she had no choice. It would swallow her down like a whirlpool, manifest and appalling, and she was doomed and almost glad of it, and—

And there was suddenly a strong stout arm to block her, tangling with her own; and a voice that said, ‘Whoa there, Georgie, where are you going?'

She was lifting her arm, either to point or to appeal –
come and get me, reach out, you can do it, you're a big boy now
– but it was the wrong arm, the one that bled, because Mary was gripping the other.

‘Hullo, have those cuts opened up again? That's nastier than I thought. I'd better put some stitches in there. Come on back to the bathroom, dear, I'll clean it up for you and have a better look . . .'

Almost, she wanted to protest. But when she looked again, the fabric hung down like a curtain over wood and glass and nothing, no movement in it now, no figure hiding, waiting, reaching. She shuddered, and let herself be blindly led away.