House of Bells (6 page)

She might almost open her eyes now. Almost.

One more breath, and she could smell – oh lord, the whole country of England, all the damp dank buried wonder of it, what she went to the city to forget. To escape, along with everyone else.

Nothing coming. No reeking threat, no monster; no mysterious emptiness, vacuum, absence. She wasn't quite sure what that would smell like, but not this.

With an effort, then, she did open her eyes . . .

A man stood in the roadway.

Unless he was a faun, unless he had goat's legs beneath his trousers.

But no, even in this fading light she could see his feet in sandals, no hooves. Dressed all in green else, with long brown hair caught back in a ponytail and as much beard as he could manage: he was, of course, the man they'd passed at the turn-off, sitting on a gatepost keeping watch.

Young man, younger than that beard made him look – or else, now that she was looking properly, it was the straggly sparseness of the beard that emphasized how young he was, despite all his efforts to seem older.

He wanted to be Pan, she thought, in his forest. Playing music to his trees.

It was his flute, of course, that she had heard. Cutting through the bell-strokes, turning away the silence. Like a statement,
I am here
, and so she wasn't alone, and so that absence could not come to haunt her. She kept it at bay with company, always, when she could.

Except that it had never been physical before, never made noises in the world. Never broken a path on its way to reach her.

He lowered the flute from his lips and said, ‘Hullo.'

His voice was as sweet as his music, soft and husky and irredeemably young. She thought he probably practised that. Well, not the young part; that he only had to live with. For a while. It would pass.

What she had to live with was eternal. Still, she could manage this much. She took a breath, licked dry lips and said, ‘Hullo.' And then, because she had to: ‘Did you . . . did you hear anything? Moving, I mean, in the wood just now?'
Not the bell.
She didn't even want to think about the bell.

‘Oh, has Big Bertha been scaring you, crashing about in the undergrowth? I was wondering why you were stood here all alone in the middle of nowhere.'

I'm standing here all alone because your janitor abandoned me. In the middle of nowhere.
Aloud, she only said, ‘Big Bertha?'

‘She's our pig. Well, not ours: she is her own pig. Entirely feral. I suppose she or maybe her mother escaped from a farm hereabouts, and she's been living wild and free ever since. We see her occasionally, but mostly she's just noises off. Just as well, really. You wouldn't want to get too close; she's not safe by any measure. But then she doesn't want to get too close to us either. It works out. Everything does, you'll find, here. Welcome to Hope's Harbour, by the way. My name's Tom.'

Tom, Tom, the piper's son.
That wasn't fair.

Except that it was, of course: more than fair, generous even, against what she deserved. Nothing could ever be punishment enough. If nursery rhymes were going to run through her mind like streams of scalding water, she wouldn't try to dam them up in seething pools, no. Better to let them run, dabble her fingers in the fierce sting of them, take off her shoes and paddle.

She said, ‘Georgie. I'm Georgie Hale.' Nervous and fanciful, standing frozen in the middle of the road because she didn't dare walk on, because she thought their pig was a ghost of absence, a haunting hollow shaped like a boy who never was. That was Georgie all over.

More than once Grace had thought she might run mad. Wished for it, almost. Perhaps it was happening at last. Perhaps this was Tony's last gift to her: to rip her in two and let the two halves torment each other crazy.

Not his plan, though. Not deliberate. Not to say
he wouldn't be that unkind, he didn't think that way
– of course he did, of course he would if it benefited him, his paper, him – but this, out here? No. He wouldn't see the benefit.

He might still make it happen, regardless. Let it be.

He might not care.

She hoped he'd care.

It might be easier to fight, if she thought he was doing it deliberately. She might want to fight it, then.

‘Georgie. Georgie . . .' He rolled the name around his mouth as though trying the taste of it. Then he lifted the flute back to his lips and tried a brief phrase, a sudden trill of notes. Tried it again, seemed to like it; he put more breath behind it, let it dance out into the wood. From his mouth to the pig's ears; she thought about silk purses and sow's ears and grew a little confused, decided she was too tired to reach for a joke. Besides, there had been nothing funny about her mood a minute ago, and there was nothing funny in it now. It was lighter, a little; men did that to her, the company of men, it lifted her. Even hairy young men in the half-dark, whose faces she couldn't really see.

And the sense of imminent danger had receded. The pig in the wood. Yes. She would believe that entirely. She could do that. No little-boy-lost, no sucking shadows, just a feral animal crashing about in the undergrowth.

She was still afraid, but of normal things, what loomed ahead: encounters, people, secrets. Work. Everything had that shadow now, of dread until it happened; nothing was ever quite as bad as it might have been. That was something to hold on to, maybe.

Her case was something to hold on to, something to carry. Tom was walking up the lane, and she was following. Apparently. She had after all found someone to take her in.

He played as they walked – sometimes he skipped, or danced a few steps in the beechmast – so that she felt like a child at the heels of the Pied Piper, following the soft thread of his music through the dark.

It was almost dark enough to be true, under the shadow of the trees. But the trees had to end at last; not even the deepest forest goes on for ever. They stepped out into light again, and here was a dark stretch of water contained between straight lines and stony banks. Beyond that rose a wild tangled garden; above that, the house.

She had seen houses, grand houses, many of them. Seen them, been through their doors and welcomed, slept in four-poster beds as though she belonged there. Played with their luxuries like a little girl dressed up and playing princess.

Learned the truth of them – or no, she had always known the truth of them, had been a part of it herself; only that she had seen it ruthlessly exposed, their truth and her own – and did not ever expect to be invited back.

This wasn't the same, but even so. There was always this moment, where she stood in the shadow and knew that she didn't belong. She used to brazen it by, because that was what a princess would do; now she was daunted, because of course Georgie would be.

Of course she showed it. That was what Georgie would do. She stood here by the lapping water's margin – Tom wanted to walk on the grass now that he'd slipped his sandals off, so she'd gone with him, a few steps to the side of the stony roadway, that much closer to the lake – and stared up at the house where it loured against the darkening sky, and could apparently not move at all.

As soon as he'd caught on, Tom stepped back to stand beside her, with her. Not waiting for her, in any sense she knew – not impatient, not visibly or determinedly or effortfully patient, not mocking, not any kind of manly – but simply there. Keeping her company, until she was ready for the next step and the next and the one after that.

Nice boy. She could draw comfort from that, perhaps, a little. And mock herself, perhaps, a little; be impatient on her own account, with her own anxiety.

Draw a nervous little breath and say, ‘I hadn't . . . I hadn't expected it to be quite so big.'

‘No,' he said. ‘No one does. And it always is that big. You don't get used to it, I mean. Familiarity doesn't shrink it down to any contemptible size. Just as well, really. I mean, you wouldn't want it to, would you? Who'd want to get used to that?'

Tony would.
The thought was immediate, unbidden. It was the scale that he thought in, the sort of house that came naturally to him.

She needed not to be thinking about Tony.

She said, ‘I don't get it. What's it
for
?'

‘Well,' he said, ‘at the moment, it's for us. What comes next, what we build here, what we make of it – that's for the future to show. For us to decide. For you, maybe, if you stay.'

‘I don't belong in a place like this.' That was more than honest, it was absolute. Said in two voices, to contain everything that she was or could be.

‘No one does,' he said again. ‘How could you? But here we are, and I think the house is getting used to us.'

‘How many of you are there?' She wasn't sure if she wanted the house to be full or empty. Two dozen souls, or two hundred. Lose herself in a crowd, or make herself known to a handful.

‘Not enough,' he said. ‘Yet. One more now.'

‘If I stay.'

‘Of course. That's up to you; don't let me bully you into it,' he said with a smile and that little trill on his flute that apparently meant her. Meant Georgie. Meant who she was meant to be.

Meant a lie, then, but she didn't want to think about that either.

‘Is it? Up to me, I mean?'

‘Of course.'

‘Isn't there a – I don't know, a test? Probation, something? Don't you get to watch me for a while, see if I fit in?'

‘What, you think we should take you on approval, like a stamp?' He wasn't faking it, that baffled amusement, scratching at his head with the end of his flute.

‘Yes,' she said, not faking it either. ‘That's exactly what I mean.'

‘Well. Not really how it works here. I mean, if you don't fit in, you're the one who'll know it first, aren't you? You'll feel it. And then I suppose you'll just go. I don't think anyone has, yet. Just gone, I mean, and not come back. Of course, you could, if this didn't feel right to you. But then, if it didn't feel right to you, you wouldn't have come, would you?'

I was desperate
– which was true and not-true, and she didn't need to say it either way, truly or otherwise. She let it lie between them, unspoken, and said instead, ‘I didn't know what I was coming to. Still don't, come to that. Who are you, what are you, why are you here?'

‘I'm Tom,' he said. ‘I grow vegetables and play the flute, and I'm here because I wouldn't be anywhere else right now.'

‘That wasn't what I meant.'

‘No, I know – but it's what
I
meant. What I mean. I can't speak for anyone else. I won't. If you come on up to the house –'
when you're ready
, his body said in its stillness: no gestures, no urgency,
no pressure
– ‘I'll take you to Leonard. Then you'll see.'

‘Leonard?'

A smile, a nod. Unforthcoming.

‘Will he tell me what this place is all about?'

‘You'll see,' he said again; and then: ‘He'll probably want to talk about you.'
Tell you what you're all about
, she heard, unless it was
wait for you to tell him.

She couldn't lose her nerve, even now. Grace had no nerves to lose, and Georgie had lost hers long ago and was here anyway, because a girl had to be somewhere, after all.

She said, ‘Come on, then,' and took that step, one step forward through the tangled grass; and as she started, so she heard that bell again, rolling down the terraces and over the water, slamming into her, slow and sonorous and cruel beyond measure.

‘What's the matter?'

Apparently, she'd gasped aloud. It had to be that. She wasn't crying, and she was still walking, somehow. And the right way, too: along the verge, towards the house. Not into the lake, not back to the woods.

Something was stirring in the lake, she thought: some little hint of whirlpool, bubbles of mud.

Apparently, she could still talk as well as walk, even against the cold dull heavy beat of it. She said, ‘What does it mean, that? That bell?'

He smiled. ‘That means it's dinner time. Good time to turn up, actually. You get a chance to look us over, all together.'

You get a chance to look at me, you mean. All of you, together.

But she was still walking. And not in time with the bell, stubbornly out of step. That felt like a refusal; that was good enough. For now, for her. For here.

Stubbornly taking the lead, that too, positively marching up the road now. Properly on the road now, none of that kicking through the verge like a reluctant child. Let Tom hug the hedge if he wanted to, if the broken stone and gravel was too hard underfoot.

But the hedge was high and wild, throwing out bramble-runners to trip him by the ankle, and more to threaten his Lincoln green, his eyesight and his hair. Soon enough he was pulling his sandals out of his belt, slipping them on again, taking his place beside her on the road.

‘I ought to have soles like leather by now,' he said ruefully, ‘but they keep making me wear shoes and go to town. By the time my feet toughen up, it'll be all mud and frost out here and I'll want boots anyway.'

‘No, you won't.'

‘Well,' he allowed, ‘not want, no. But I'll wear them. Anyone would.'

Inevitably, they were both looking at her own feet now, at the way she was struggling in court shoes that were entirely practical in London, on London streets, but the next worst thing to hopeless here. The roadway sloped steeply and was smooth nowhere: pitted and rutted, surfaced alternately with rough stone and gravel where it was surfaced at all, where it wasn't dried cracked mud with dark puddles lurking in the deepest ruts.

‘You'll want to change those,' he said, brightly helpful.

‘No, I won't,' she replied, immediate. This at least she could do, she was trained for it, bantering with bright boys.