House of Bells (7 page)

‘Well,' he allowed, ‘not want, no. But you'll change them anyway.'

And then he smiled, pleased with himself, pleased with her for playing along. In honesty, she was pleased with herself too.

She said, ‘They're my best shoes, these,' meaning
my most comfortable
, telling nothing but the truth.

He shrugged. ‘Not to worry. We'll find you something better. Or make them. Or teach you how to make them, that'd be best.'

‘Or you could mend the road,' she said, perhaps a little waspish as her ankle turned on a loose stone and her foot plunged into a hole and she almost lost that shoe in the mud at the bottom.

‘Or that,' he agreed, ‘but I don't think it's a priority. Hardly anyone drives this way, and we're fine on foot. Well, you will be, once you're used to it. Look, would you like me to take your case?'

Yes, of course I would, you oaf, I'd have liked that half a mile ago
– but they were at the top of the slope now, right in the shadow of the house, and she was abruptly daunted again. Wanting something to hold on to.

She shook her head, and turned to walk along the paved terrace to the portico and the high door; and was stopped by his soft laugh, his unexpected hand on her arm.

‘We don't use the front,' he said. ‘We're in the country here. The front door is for strangers and funerals. Family all comes around the back.'

She wasn't family, not yet.
Not ever
, Grace's voice in her head said as a reminder: she was undercover here, working, not joining in. Not signing up. So why did she get a warm feeling just from the way he said it, never mind the way he glanced at her sideways, conspiratorial?

It wasn't as if family had ever meant anything good to her. She and her parents weren't talking any more, and her son—

Well. If she talked to her son, he wasn't talking back.

She remembered an absence in the woods, coming at her. And might have faltered then, might have let the next heavy stroke of the bell stop her dead: only that it didn't come, and she sort of toppled forward into the silence of it and – well, just carried on.

Down the side of the house, then, and around the back: into a broad courtyard made by two long wings and a stable block. The arch through to the stables had a clock tower above; she glanced at the clock with a jaundiced eye but that was stopped at ten to three and surely couldn't have been striking. She couldn't see any other bell tower, any likely place for the kind of bell she'd been hearing.

Something to be grateful for, perhaps. Small mercies, and short-lived for sure. She'd hear it again tomorrow.

If she was still here tomorrow. If she didn't cut her losses and run. She might do that, she was tempted already – except that she had nothing to run to, nothing to go back for. Tony would despise her if she pulled out now, one night in. And she'd stuck worse than this, hadn't she? She'd stuck prison, and the trial. And all the press, before and after. And the funeral, her baby's funeral, she'd stuck that. And every day since, and . . .

And really this was nothing, walking over smooth cobbles to a back door that stood open, wide and welcoming. Parked there beside it was the car she'd seen in town, the Morris Traveller, confirming her suspicions. It still had the ladders lying slant across the roof rack. She wasn't going to ask; she didn't need to.

Tom said, ‘Charlie and Fish. That's their car. We don't have one, else; we don't really have one at all. They come and go. But when they're here, they like to be useful round about. Helping out the neighbours. And we've got these long ladders, and of course nobody in town has any to compare, nobody with sensible houses; so they clean out people's gutters for them, and rescue cats from trees, and stuff like that.'

‘And take people's heads off, near enough, the way they drive that thing,' she said.

‘There is that. They're not very good with knots.' He tugged at the slack of a rope, and tutted, and did nothing to fix it more tightly or to pull the ladders straight. ‘But it saves little old ladies having to call out the roofer or the fire brigade. It's good to have a few voices on our side, to set against the gruff old colonels who all think we should be called up or given six of the best. Or both.'

She had some experience of gruff old colonels, and some sympathy with them, if only because a few had shown her a little disinterested kindness. She thought it might be better if they could walk the streets of their own town without being yelled out of the way by speeding hippies. But this was probably not the time to say so.

There was nobody about in the courtyard, presumably because they had all been called to dinner. Where Tom was now taking her. This would be her last minute alone with him, then: she really ought to be using it to learn more about this place, or Leonard, who was apparently leader here, or—

He must be hungry, or in a hurry to find his friends, or else in a hurry to hand her over to someone else. Down below, he had given her all the time she needed; up here, he gave her no time at all. Across the courtyard and in at the door, no time to linger and ask questions now, and that was suddenly almost a relief. Even though it meant, it must mean, that the next thing would be a roomful of strangers.

In at the door, then, and through a cloakroom, a chaotic jumble of discarded shoes and boots and coats and jackets and, yes, at least one actual cloak on a hook there; and into a corridor beyond, long bare boards underfoot and doors leading off on either side. Really, it was all very normal for a country house and not at all hippyish, except that there was a little table just at the side there as they came through, hung with a bright cotton tasselled cloth embroidered with tiny mirrors. It shrieked India at her, the hippy trail, girls come back with long loose hair and swinging skirts and cheesecloth shirts and gurus. Gurus above all, preaching meditation and peace and rebirth, ancient foreign wisdoms that sat impossibly awkward in an English landscape, as their clothes really didn't suit the weather.

Was that what she'd come to: a transplanted ashram, a little man with a vast beard teaching scriptures in an alien chant?

But on the table, on the cloth stood something else. No bizarre idol with too many limbs, no smoking incense, no sanctity. Just a polished wooden stand, a high frame with a bell hanging from it. Too big for a hall decoration, practical bronze: it was as out of place as the cloth it stood on, jarring both with that and the house around. Her mind labelled it a ship's bell straight off. She ought not to know that, unless she'd picked it up from those black-and-white war films her father used to take her to. She was still certain, though. Of course, it was possible to be certain and still wrong – oh, she knew: who better? – but she really didn't think so this time. If she looked more closely, that engraving around the bell's shoulder would no doubt tell her which ship it had come from.

But it was a bell, and she wasn't going anywhere near it.

But Tom was reaching out casually, unthinkingly, meaninglessly; gripping the white rope that hung below the mouth of the bell; swinging it once, twice and again.

Striking the unseen clapper against the inside rim: once, twice and again.

Making it sound, high and stern and penetrating.

Once, twice and again.

Only perhaps realizing that he'd done it after the thing was done, it was so unthinking an action. Turning then to her with a wry smile and a shrug, saying, ‘We always do that to announce our arrival in the house. Leonard likes it. Once for each of us, twice for a visitor. First time, you count as a visitor, so— Hey. Are you all right?'

No. No, she really was not all right. She had dropped her case, just there by her foot, where she stood shaking.

Her wrist throbbed, in time with the hurried beating of her heart. It didn't seem enough to explain why she'd let go so suddenly, but that hand just felt too heavy and too remote; it couldn't hold on any longer.

Perhaps it was her who couldn't hold on, against the relentless resonance of the bell as it sounded through her skull like a knife; but really she thought it was her hand, all independent of her will.

She still hadn't taken her gloves off. They were fawn in colour, nylon, and she could see that one – the left, it was – darkening as she stood there, as it hung slack at her side.

Darkening all the way down, in a line from the invisible wrist towards the fingers' ends.

Darkening, filling.

Starting to drip.

She watched that first drip fall, straight down on to the clasp of her suitcase, where it lay splattered across the brass: not that dark after all, brightly red.

And another.

Once, twice and again.

‘Here, let me see . . .'

Apparently, she was going to do nothing but stand there and watch it happen.

She needed Tom to take charge, as he did: gripping her arm and lifting it, tugging back the sleeve of her coat. Her dress beneath was sleeveless. There was just the glove, with that dark stain showing from the wrist down to the fingers.

Starting to spread the other way now, as he raised her hand. Little dribbles, rivulets of blood running down towards her elbow, tickling.

At least blood didn't make her faint. Not the sight of it, at least. If she felt abruptly giddy and sick, it wasn't girlish idiocy. Though she would quite like to sit down now, as that throbbing sharpened to quite a fierce ache as Tom struggled to peel the glove away from her forearm, trying to roll it back on itself like a stocking, not getting very far, so that in the end she did have to help him after all, showing him how to tug the fingers loose one by one.

They were quite wet now, the fingers. She watched them stain the fingertips of the other glove as she tugged, and made a little exasperated noise and wanted to tug that one off too, only she couldn't because Tom still had hold of that arm – and actually it was hurting quite a bit now, and she really did want to sit down even before he finally worked the glove away and there was her hand exposed, with its two cuts almost parallel across the inside of the wrist.

‘Good grief, girl. Did you do that on the brambles? Why in the world didn't you say?'

No
, she thought.
No, I did do that, but not on the brambles, no. And not today. Not recently. I thought that was all healed up now.

That was a lie, of course, but she was quite used to lying to herself, silently, in the privacy of her head. She'd been caught out, apparently, by this one.

‘I'm sorry,' she said, ‘but I really do . . .'

And she really did. Right then, right there: she sat down on that convenient solid suitcase and watched blood drip on to the bare wood of the floor.

‘Yes. Yes, of course.' When he was flustered, when she wasn't looking at him, Tom didn't sound anything like the hippy that he looked, hairy and mystical and remote. Just a nice English middle-class boy: the kind that she'd tried to overleap entirely, from Billericay to Cliveden in a single bound.

He had no idea, of course, of his significance. No notion of being a symbol for anything. His hair was just in the way suddenly, needing to be swept back – with the inside of his wrist, an oddly feminine gesture, as he had blood on his own hands now – while he crouched beside her to look more closely.

‘Oh,' he said, ‘I don't think it's that bad, actually. They're not deep. Only bramble scratches. Just, I suppose it will bleed if you cut yourself just there. Try to hold the hand up if you can, don't encourage it. Gravity's not your friend at the moment. Look, will you be all right if I leave you, just for a minute? Only, I think Mother Mary ought to have a gander at this . . .'

Of course she'd be all right. She didn't know who Mother Mary was, she hadn't thought she was coming to a nunnery, but she supposed it didn't really matter. Mother Mary and Father Leonard, ruling their community with a rod of iron and the stroke of a bell. Two bells. Two strokes, sharp as a razor. Singing through her brain, singing through her wrist . . .

This little piggy had none.

She didn't want anything, really. She never had, not really. Even Grace at her greediest, her most immediately grasping: even then, it had all been a cover story. Only that she was too late, too slow to see through it. If she'd really cared about the money and the status and the glamour, she'd have taken better care of them.

That was what the unkind people had said about her poor baby. Almost word for word, again and again, in print and in her hearing:
if she really cared, she'd have taken better care.
They didn't even think they were unkind. On the contrary, it was the kindest thing they could think of to say, which was why they didn't care if she read it, if she overheard it. Some of them would say it to her face. Thinking themselves oh so kind, not to accuse her of worse. Being generous, making allowances. Digging in their wilful stilettos, needle blades that cut and cut, that made her bleed and bleed.

Not like this. When she bled like this, it was because she did it to herself. After she'd stood over her baby's little grave in the parish churchyard with the great bell tolling above her head, after she'd realized once and for all that she never really did want anything else: then, well, why not? It had seemed the least she could do.

She watched it come, this little blood, this gesture. Watched it spatter on the floorboards. Didn't cry. Not any more, not now. There had been too much crying already. Grace was tougher than that, and Georgie was – well, too bewildered. Out of her depth. You needed to know what you'd lost, before you could weep for it.

Or bleed for it.

It was odd, to find herself sitting here bleeding. She really hadn't expected this. Hadn't anticipated it, in all her many imaginings. Well, how could she?

Here came footsteps. From inside the house, blessedly, not from the outside door and the cloakroom. Nobody else would be coming in to ring the bell while she sat here waiting, while she bled.