The Light Ages (41 page)

I had to shout before he noticed me beyond Oxford Road, and then he cringed against a boarded-up shopfront, sheltering his face in the crook of his arm.

‘Oh! It’s you … Master Robert!’

His shoulders uncringed. He wiped a dewdrop from his long, odd nose.

‘What happened to that cabsman?’

‘He’s still unreliable. Can’t just be the flu, can it?’

I took Mister Snaith’s carpetbag and carried it for him as we walked on.

‘You’ve been inside that house? With the Bowdly-Smarts?’ He nodded. ‘She’s a promising customer. What I mean is, she has a group of friends who, um …’

‘Fellow seekers?’

‘Exactly. It’s this way here. Foul night isn’t it? I do so welcome your presence . . I’d expected us to turn out from Northcentral—perhaps into the Easterlies or to the old wooden buildings which still squatted by Riverside—but instead we then turned left along Linden Avenue, right into the opulent heart of Hyde. Hallam Tower was close here, dissolving into the night clouds. Then, around another turn, the scene grew more familiar. Even Northcentral needed its sewers and gasometers—all the more so, considering the amounts of everything which were consumed here-as well as an engine house to drive the local tramtracks, which was still thumping and smoking, and quite recognisable despite the attempt that had been made to make it look like a Grecian temple. Beside it was a soot-encrusted warehouse. The arch of the main doorway had been half blocked with cruder and more recent bricking.

Mister Snaith fiddled for some time with his keys. Inside, it was somewhat quieter, although the pounding of the engine house remained as he lit a lamp and led me up a series of rough wooden stairs and along corridors lined with boxes and sheeted furniture. This, he explained, was where the guildspeople of Northcentral kept all the things they couldn’t fit in their houses. A smell which I had noticed coming off him was far stronger here. It was essentially dusty, but overlaid with woodpolish and stale mothballs. He reached a crossroads of four-poster bedsteads and led me to door pinned with a browned and illegible notice.

‘Most obliged. You’ll be staying for a while, I hope … ?’

The walls of Mister Snaith’s dwelling in the depths of this warehouse consisted of piled packing cases and the furniture was opulent and old and ugly—unwanted fitments which, he explained, had never been collected at the expiry of their storage contracts. I sneezed from the dust.

‘Now this medal.’ He gave me a lump of brass. ‘It was presented to me on St Barnabus’s day by Greatgrandmaster Penfold, who was then generally reckoned to be the second most prominent guildsman in the realm …’ Then a silver plaque, and a daguerreotype in an otherwise empty book, and a guild medal in an ornate worn velvet box. The dates went back to the start of this Age.
Thump, thump, thump …
The engine house outside must go on all night, providing the power which was needed to bear the last of Northcentral’s errant occupants back to their huge houses. ‘This was painted by Guildsman Phenix. It’s me, of course …’ Mister Snaith sighed. His tiny fingers stroked a trace of cobweb from the miniature frame. ‘You’re familiar with his work? He was the greatest portraitist of his day. Dead now, of course …’ The colours might once have been luminous, but the paint was darkened and crazed. Mister Snaith; standing one-legged in a fake-storybook landscape, dressed in green like a elf, toupee-less, and smiling.

‘How long have you lived here?’

‘Not so long
here.
Perhaps only twenty years. I don’t have to pay rent, and the Gatherers’ Guild has provided me with all the necessary permissory notes. They say my presence helps keep the vandals away. Of course, I’ve always lived in the city. But Northcentral’s not what it used to be.’ He shivered. His toupee slid askew on his head.

‘People like the Bowdly-Smarts live here now, don’t they?’

Mister Snaith rustled and gleamed. ‘Grandmistress Bowdly-Smart may not be the most ah,
cultured
client I’ve ever had, but needs must, as they say.’ A faint green phosphorescence of the kind you might find on bad meat leaked from his sleeves.

‘That bag of yours,’ I said eventually. ‘It must be heavy. And, if that cabsman’s still letting you down, I was thinking …’

‘Oh, but I’d
never
expected ..

I put down Mister Snaith’s carpetbag on the iridescent carpet. ‘We met at Walcote House in the summer, grandmistress. Do you remember?’

‘Of
course
we did!’

The Bowdly-Smarts’ hallway was glittery and dense. I was reminded of Grandmaster Harrat’s long-vanished townhouse back in Bracebridge—but this place was at least twice the size, and stuffed with six times the contents. There was a different odour as well; ripe and damp and fierce and unmistakable, the reek of dog.

‘Of course, Ronald’s not here to see you tonight.’ She gave a protracted sigh and patted her strings of jade and pearl necklace. ‘Out on business, don’t you know. This is
such
a difficult Age.’

Then the other guests began to arrive. Pushing aside maids as she charged through her hallway to greet them, Grandmistress Bowdly-Smart gasped and fluttered her hands whilst Mister Snaith, his carpetbag and I trooped into a long room which was stuffed with more ornaments and artefacts than a well-stocked shop. Figures and figurines and statues and vases, paintings and silhouettes and daguerreotypes, weird relics of other cultures, screen prints and paintings, frame piled upon mirror with rug and lionskin clambering over tapestry and tasselled throw; it looked as if all of the efforts of the recent Age had risen up in one huge tidal wave to beach themselves here. The dusting, the polishing, the rinsing and waxing, simply didn’t bear thinking about. And the guildswomen who had gathered here this winter’s evening, perched on the edges of stools and chairs, were as ornate as their surroundings. Unlike Grandmistress Bowdly-Smart, who had favoured crimson tonight as strongly as she had at other times favoured lime green or canary yellow, most were dressed in iridescent versions of black, like the ornaments of polished coal and jet and iron which surrounded them, and picked out in black pearls and night-sparkling diamonds. They rustled and cawed at Mister Snaith’s entrance. The dog which was the cause of the smell which hung even stronger in this room like an incipient headache was a thing named Trixie, which one or other of the grandmistresses would occasionally scoop up and make cooing, kissing noises into its squashed-up face. Trixie’s fur was pink and turquoise. He had little claws, and a crest along his spine. Less a dog, in fact, than one of the Cathay dragons which guarded the mantelpiece come to life; another tribute to the powers of aethered industry.

The conversation, to begin with, was loud and quick and animated, although Mistress Bowdly-Smart’s vowels didn’t stand out here as strongly as they had at Walcote House. I caught traces of Bristol and the West Country from the other guests, and Preston, even the Easterlies. People
did
rise from humble beginnings in England, difficult though I still found that to believe, and I wondered now if the Bowdly-Smarts’ ascent wasn’t the simple result of hard work and good luck, and if this whole weird enterprise into which I’d dragged myself wasn’t merely an expression of my own stupid envy. At close hand, the life that Mistress Bowdly-Smart had spun for herself was even more complex than I had imagined. There were photographs and miniature portraits on side tables of mutton-chopped high guildsmen whom she claimed to be close relatives. If Mistress Bowdly-Smart, previously Stropcock, was to be believed, she and her husband had, if anything, descended from far greater heights to end up living here in Fitzroy Street. It was clever—to twist the past so far around that even I, who knew the truth of it, found myself lost and wondering in this over-crowded room.

The other guests cast me nibbling glances as they sipped their tea and talked of the evening ahead. A fire raged in the hearth, but a chill fog of anticipation slowly began to gather over the gilt and crystal. Mister Snaith looked weirdly at home. Ever the professional, he shuffled about in his reversed green and orange cloak with his toupee off, his pointed face at almost the same height as those of the seated chattering guildmistresses. He flashed the tattooed patch on his powdered left wrist, then snatched it quickly away. He laid his bird-fingers on the hands of each of them, and made soft murmurings close to their ears. Whatever it was he said to each of them, they all seemed changed by it. Perhaps, I thought, some final mystery really would be revealed tonight just as he always seemed to promise, although, knowing what I now did, I very much doubted it.

‘Well? Shall we begin?’

The maids extinguished the lanterns, and we fellow seekers sat at an empty circular table at the far end the darkened room, away from the glow of the fire which pulsed and glimmered across the glass and metalwork, turning the whole place into a strange, exotic cave. Mister Snaith sat alone at the furthest, darkest end; he was so small on his chair that little more than his head, disembodied, dimly reflected, seemed to hover above its polished surface. The rest of us held hands, which was an odd sensation in itself, to feel the nails and rings tensing, the surges of sweat and chill. I had come here as colluder and sceptic, but the atmosphere in that coalescing darkness was earnest.

As Mister Snaith’s breathing grew ragged, the questions were of young Master Owen, who’d fallen under the ice whilst skating twenty years before, and of baby Clark, who had lived for six short happy hours. A whispering chorus of lost suitors and dead children, the missing and the stillborn, gathered around these grieving women as they sat around that table with Mister Snaith. I’m not sure quite how he managed on his own when I, or that long-lost cabsman, wasn’t with him, but, even though I understood some of his trickeries, a chill fell upon me and I felt myself thinking of my own losses, and poor Maud, and especially of my mother. I’d placed the carpetbag on the precise spot he’d instructed just beneath the table where he could reach it with his tiny foot. But the cottony stuff which emerged, the tinsel and the phosphorus and the rubber balls you squeezed to make sounds, even the vague words which he spoke in many cracked and croaking voices—I understood now that all of these things were incidental to the real purpose of such gatherings as this. These guildswomen hardly needed Mister Snaith. His tricks and preposterous claims were incidental. They made their own magic, and it came from the loss in their hearts and the want of not knowing; it came from the cheek unkissed and the thing not done or said, or said once and regretted forever.

‘He’ll never leave London, will he?’ Maud had her best hat crammed down on her head as she stood outside our latest tenement. Wiry, mist-beaded spills of her hair stuck out from all sides of it like tangles of spiderweb. She gave me a bright, frail smile. ‘All these years of big talk, those stupid drawings. And look where we still are ..

‘These relatives of yours—are you still sure?’

‘Can’t be any worse than this, can it? I suppose they’re guilty about those years ago when they should have helped my mother.’

Then her carriage arrived, although it was really just a wagon pulled by an elderly dray, and Saul emerged from wherever it was that he’d been pretending to keep busy at and helped Maud stack the few belongings she was taking with her.

‘No, no. Just wait there! Leave it all to me.’

‘I’m not an invalid, Saul. God knows, I’ve lifted enough heavy things in my life.’

But Saul, as ever, was struggling to be the gentleman. He’d even dusted off one of his best waistcoats.

‘And you’ll write as soon as you get there? I mean, Kent’s not so very far?’

But Kent might as well have been on the other side of the moon on that day. Some distant relatives of Maud’s had a farm there, and had written to say they needed help. Maud was taking a risk by going there, but then, as she’d said to Saul often enough in the quiet that had fallen between them now that they’d stopped arguing, she was taking an even bigger one by staying on in London—and, after all, she was sick of the place.

The same faces as ever, the old women, the scabby, furtive children, the distracted mothers who now mostly took care of their own babies, came out into Thripp Street to watch Maud’s departure. Some of them were crying, but that made it easier for me not to, and for Saul to put on a brave face. But for the mist, Maud’s features were dry and distracted as well as she kissed Saul and hugged me. In her mind, I thought as the driver cracked his whip and we watched the tarpaulined rear of the carriage jostle off and disappear into the grey, she left us long ago, on Butterfly Day.

I received a message from Highermaster George a term or so later. It was written in a flowing hand on expensive paper, and contained all the usual
if you don’t minds
and
most exceptionally gratefuls
that his kind have drummed into them at school, although the tone was somehow desperate.

I’d never been to the top of Hallam Tower before. I was a true Londoner by now, and such places were for visitors, although, as the lift clacked me up from the cold and smoke of a London morning into almost-sunlight and the turning, irresistible sweep of the lantern’s wyreglow, the view was certainly well worth the sixpence I’d paid at the turnstile. I’d got there slightly early, but I was even more certain that something was wrong when I wandered the iron gantries with the morning’s first sightseers and found that the perpetually considerate George hadn’t arrived before me.

‘Robbie, Robbie …’ Flushed and apologetic, he appeared a couple of liftloads later, wearing a bobble hat with a hole in it. His coat had seen better days as well. Frayed and with hanging bits of lining, it was almost like the one I was wearing, now that I kept the few decent things I had for my trips out with Mister Snaith.

‘Well …’ We studied each other and smiled in mutual acknowledgement that, like our coats, we had both seen finer days, and winters, than this one.

Irresistibly, though, we talked of politics, just as we had done in the summer on the Kite Hills, although so much had changed since then. It was common wisdom in the Easterlies that the failure of Butterfly Day had come about in large part as a result of the treacherous connivance of the middle guilded of the Westerlies, who had diluted the Twelve Demands in cottony compromise and irrelevant talk about changing the calendar. In a way, in my fondness for George, and my longing for Anna, in the blithely stupid way I had allowed myself to become one of Sadie’s discoveries, I was a textbook example of the case. But I shared with George a nostalgia for a better kind of future, and deep doubts about whether it would ever be achieved.