Touchstone (24 page)

However, the Project’s frustrations had mounted when they found that using a machine to measure human truth was far, far more complicated than they had originally suspected. And because this was not mere scientific pursuit, but a project with not only the Major, but the military itself looking on, the option of failure was unacceptable.

That was when the underlying question had changed from, How do we create a machine with the abilities of Bennett Grey? to, How can we use Bennett Grey? His role changed from paradigm to participant.

And then the question changed again, when the Major brought the nurse before him, and Grey saw the speculation in those black eyes: How can we create
more
Bennett Greys?

For years afterwards, his nights had been haunted by a dream that jerked him upright and sent him out into the Cornish night: He was walking down a cold, bright corridor, straight and endless, with doors on either side. The corridor was empty, but he became aware of a murmur of voices, and so he stopped and looked through the small window in the door to his right.

The room contained three people. One had his back to the door. The other two looked up at him: Major Carstairs, and a blond man with green eyes.

Sometimes, this was enough to startle him awake. Other nights he would go on to the next door, and then the next, and the next, and in every room, the faces looking back at him belonged to Major Carstairs and Bennett Grey, and he would wake not with surprise, but with horror.

Once he’d discovered the safety of Cornwall and burrowed into his hillside, Grey tried to convince himself that, without him, the Project had withered and died. In the early months he had been unable to think about it at all; later, time and distance had reassured him that his absence had robbed the Major of any authority, and if the man had turned to some other dark form of governmental manipulation, well, that was hardly Grey’s responsibility.

Now it looked as if it wasn’t that simple. The Major wanted him back, that much was clear. Which could only mean that the Project had survived. In fact, the Major’s aura of confidence and hidden authority had grown even stronger, suggesting that the Project not only survived, but was thriving. Perhaps he’d convinced his masters—military or civilian—that another war was coming, for which they would need the machinery of truth-telling.

And if that war were to be on Britain’s own soil, against Britain’s own citizens? Wasn’t a domestic enemy still an enemy?

In fact, if the enemy were one of Britain’s own, so much the better. The Major and his Project did not exist, so what could be easier than to drop a troublemaker in and have him disappear for a while?

And with Bennett Grey to help identify precisely where a man’s weaknesses lay, the Major would have the troublemaker in pieces in no time at all.

In Cornwall, Grey had been far enough away, the Major would have needed to mount a campaign to extract him. Now, thanks to Sarah’s dangerous closeness to Richard Bunsen, he could feel the Major’s gloved fingers insinuating themselves down the back of his collar.

Lying there in the still dawn, the thud of his heartbeat grew faster and harder, until he could feel the throb of pulse within his ears. Then the raw taste of brass crept onto his tongue, and he really couldn’t bear to start the day with that.

So Bennett Grey, too, threw off his bed-clothes, dressed, and left the barn, although he walked in the opposite direction from Stuyvesant and the Duke, down the road to the ford. As Stuyvesant, up on the Peak, was being startled by the unheralded approach of the older man, Grey was leaning over the side of the foot-bridge, mesmerized by the water that teased and smoothed the mossy paving-stones of the ford, feeling it smooth his mind.

Bennett,
he addressed himself,
why the hell did you come here?

He could have written his sister a letter warning her away from Bunsen and gone back to his potatoes, doing his best to dismiss Harris Stuyvesant from his mind. He could have sent a telegram, even ridden his bicycle into Penzance and used the telephone. Instead, he’d returned to the one truly happy place of his childhood, knowing that he would come face to face with the woman he had loved and treated abominably. Knowing that the scent of her would make his skin rouse from its long slumber, that one gesture of her fingers would send a shudder down his spine, that the sound of her voice would make him want to seize her hair and cover her supple body and velvet skin with kisses. He wanted to drown in her, wanted to walk across to the house and climb into her bed and never come out, wanted to admit that he could not possibly continue to live without her.

He came here knowing that he would not do that, that he could not do that to her, not again.

He came knowing that laying eyes on her might make it impossible to resume his life in Cornwall, a satisfying life that had, overnight and with not a word of warning, become stifling.

He’d come up from Cornwall because Major Carstairs had stepped out of the car into his yard with the force of a howitzer, and blown him into the realization that he was sick unto death of being a slave to his nerves. He’d come with Harris Stuyvesant because the man’s honest strength shamed him, made him decide that, like an amputee sweating every prosthetic step, it was time to pretend normality. Even if he had to use the crutch of drink to get over the worst of it, he would learn to face the world. His world.

He came here because it was unfair to his sister, to be burdened with the constant ache of a mentally crippled brother down at the far reaches of the land. He’d come because he was abruptly homesick, tired of the primitive starkness of Cornwall, longing for the rich midlands of his country, its summer smells and the embrace of its history. He came, he supposed, on a whim as impulsive as anything Sarah would do, when the American’s request slid so neatly into the possibilities. He’d come—

Oh,
Christ,
Bennett: Stop lying to yourself.

You came in a moment’s impulse worthy of Sarah, because you wanted to lay eyes on this new man of Laura’s, the man who had taken your place in her life.

Underneath that, you came because you wanted to see Laura.

And what, now that you’ve seen her?

Only now does it occur to you that Laura might not wish to see you.

Chapter Thirty

I
N THE ROOM BELOW
Bennett Grey’s empty bed, his sister’s dreaming mind had been weaving together a convoluted tale of responsibility and friendship. There was a man in the dream, although when she half woke, Sarah could not be certain if it had been her brother or Richard Bunsen. The uncertainty troubled her, and brought her closer to wakefulness. The two were nothing alike, in looks or nature, so why confuse them? They said that dreams Meant Something. Perhaps this one was simply about a person who did not interest her as a man, and both Bennett and Richard fit that description.

So, a friend or brother. And one for whom she felt some degree of responsibility. That, too, was both of them.

No matter how much she read about shell shock, she came no closer to understanding Bennett’s mental state than the week he’d come out of hospital. They’d always been close, as children, but after the War it seemed he could see things about her that no one else could, her doubts and worries and secret pleasures. Take today: It was almost as if he could feel the remnants of shakiness from the train incident in her body. And more than that—he’d known she didn’t want to talk about it in front of the servants, and waited until they were alone—alone with that American friend of his, which itself had somehow been all right.

Although that was another oddity, Bennett asking a perfect stranger to a Hurleigh week-end. And he called her impetuous! Ridiculous, really, how what others called her
whims
and her
rash acts
always made perfect sense to Sarah, even if they were hard to explain. Maybe that was the same with Bennett, when it just seemed right to him to bring the American along.

Certainly, Mr. Stuyvesant had fit in better than she’d feared. She should have known it would be all right. Whatever else the War had done to Bennett, it had made him enormously sensitive. He’d know in an instant if the Hurleighs were put off by his friend, and he’d have invented an instantaneous excuse and made off.

It couldn’t be easy, to be so sensitive to glances and minute raises of the eyebrow. And that was the word,
sensitive
—poor Bennett couldn’t even bear it when too many things were going on at once. She’d been so proud of him today, seeing the enormous effort he was making to act sociable, this man who could go for days without speaking to anyone but the cow leaning across the wall. He’d once been the life of any party, before the War—she’d been old enough back then to remember that. But if it was now so distasteful to him, why do it?

And what about him and Laura? The tension between them had positively
crackled
last night, the moment they laid eyes on each other, but precisely what it stemmed from she could not be sure. She’d never known exactly what happened to push them apart, although she’d put together hints both had let drop over the years. She was only seventeen when Bennett went to war, but he had told her of the secret wartime engagement; she’d known that Laura had taken rooms near his sanitarium (a place that had struck Sarah like an upscale loony bin, the two times Mother had let her go there) and that Laura bought a motorcar to take him on outings; everyone had assumed the engagement was going ahead.

And then
blooey,
it was raining down on their heads: Laura was back in London and Bennett gone completely, and neither of them would talk about it. She’d thought the break was temporary—the War had changed everyone, after all; it was to be expected that the nature of love would change, as well.

But before they could heal the rift, the Margolin baby died, and although his death was neither the first nor the last, that failure was personal, and had shaken everyone, badly. To distract Laura, as much as anything, Sarah had introduced her to Richard. Before the evening was over, she’d fervently wished that she’d never brought them together.

With Richard, Laura hardened. Or was it just being without Bennett? In any case, the spark of fun had gone out of Laura—and that was five years ago, long before the recent spats she’d had with Richard. Before Richard, Laura had been able to set work aside, have a good time, go to a party. Now, she was impatient with anyone unconnected with Look Forward or the clinics. She could occasionally be almost rigid, as if she’d grown a steel spine.

Not that Laura wasn’t as friendly as ever, or didn’t care about the families they served (if anything, she cared more than ever—although one couldn’t say the same about her own family, to whom she was polite in public and impatient when outside their hearing). And it wasn’t that she didn’t go to parties, because she did, but no matter where she was, Laura always seemed to be working. She was competent and cheerful, passionate and calm, but at odd moments, Sarah caught brief glimpses of something cold, even desolate, underneath. Something sad.

Oh, Sarah, she told herself, Laura just grew up. Go back to sleep.

But she knew it was more than just growing up.

She knew it was losing Bennett, and the life Laura thought she had. Oh,
why
hadn’t they managed to patch it together? There was still a powerful connection there—that crackle of tension she’d seen could almost have been the electricity of attraction. Or animosity, but that couldn’t be, because afterwards they’d been easy and affectionate, like two old friends who had just grown apart. But if it wasn’t attraction and it wasn’t remembered dislike, what could it have been? Fear?

Fear made even less sense.

Oh, sometimes psychology could be so irritating.

However, she had all week-end to figure it out. And all week-end to see more of that nice American friend of Bennett’s.

Beauty sleep might be a good idea.

Sarah turned on her side and pulled the bed-clothes up around her ears; soon, her breathing slowed.

Chapter Thirty-One

L
AURA
H
URLEIGH DID NOT WAKE
before dawn, as the others had. She had not even got into bed until nearly four
A.M.
, having sat before the low-burning fire smoking one cigarette after another. It wasn’t so much the effort of keeping the gathering amicable, as she’d promised her mother—although she often had trouble sleeping after that sort of tense balancing act. It was the unexpected reverberations of seeing Bennett after all these years that kept her up, listening to the quiet.

Hurleigh House was good for that. She couldn’t think how many times she had retreated to this room, wounded and fighting tears, to feel soothed by the very stones around her. Her family seemed to her increasingly foreign, brittle and irrelevant, but the house itself was another matter entirely. It listened, it nurtured, it spoke to her bones.

Once upon a time, she had thought she loved Bennett—

No: Be honest. She
had
loved him. She’d been primed to love him before she met him, come to that, having overheard the adults talking about this poor lad with a sick mother and a drunk of a father. Then he came and he was fun, and the age difference was too slight to matter, because he understood her the way no one else did. And then came the War, and the hospital, and that bloody clinic run by that dark-eyed snake who had done something to change Bennett, what she’d never known. Until his letter had arrived, out of the blue, she’d believed that she could put him together again, bring him out of the state the War left him in, make him whole.

Her life had turned completely upside-down, five years ago—almost exactly five years, come to think of it. She’d been traveling along, secure in her path, and then the path had fallen out from under her: Bennett’s letter and the frantic telegrams and telephone calls to his mother, followed three days later by the Margolin child’s death and the uproar and self recriminations and a vision of dead children pouring unheeded through an hour-glass. A handful of days that had ripped away all of Laura’s illusions, made her see once and for all that her world was built not of stone, but of the loosest, most flammable straw. She’d crept home to Hurleigh after that devastation, too, and sat here smoking and staring out of the window.

Then a few days later, shaky and without hope but back in London—which had been torn by strikes then, too—she had looked up to see Richard Bunsen standing before her, and the previous ten days, even the previous ten years, might have been arranged to aim her at that moment. She’d seen Richard, and known him instantly as someone she could use—no, not use, he was much more than a tool—someone she could influence and shape and work with, to stop up that endless stream of dying poor. Richard, who had clasped her hand and given her that crooked grin, and shown her the way to rebuild.

(She paused to wonder how things had gone during the day, Richard’s meeting with Matthew Ruddle, a man she didn’t much like, not least because following a meeting with his Union mentor, Richard always seemed to take on a degree of coarseness she found…unnecessary. Like those trips he took with his other friends to places like Paris and Monte Carlo, that always turned him into a seventeen-year-old again. Infuriating.)

What if she’d managed to cling to Bennett? What if the door to marriage and children had not been slammed in her face? She might have been happy, but would she have moved into the world she inhabited now? Would she have found purpose and meaning, have been in a position to change so many lives, if not for Richard? She had been born for what she would do in these next few weeks, as if her role had been scripted before her conception by some all-seeing Playwright: This is what we need, this is when we need her, precisely this and no other.

It was strange, but sometimes she felt very close to her mad, trouble-making old grandmother. In her final years, Grandmamma had adopted a fervent and probably heretical Christian doctrine based on the unshakable belief that All Things Were Ordained To Be. The belief had covered anything from Connie’s broken engagement (“He’d have proved a bad ’un in the end, you mark my words.”) to the teapot one of the dogs had knocked onto the small Turkey carpet (“I’m so glad we have to take that up for cleaning, I felt the other day that it was going to trip me.”).

Laura’s own convictions had little of the Christian about them, but time and again she had seen events slip into place, watched minor acts coalesce into something important, until eventually she could deny the pattern no longer: Since being driven away from Bennett, she had grown into her own.

But that did not keep the affair from feeling dreadfully…unfinished.

And he felt the same. His face had been an open one even before the War, but afterwards he’d been incapable of hiding anything, especially from her. One glance at him in the solar last night and she’d known he was as much in love with her as ever he had been. She’d also known that he would do nothing about it: If there was a first step to be taken, it was up to her.

As things, large or small, always seemed to be up to her.

And why not? Wasn’t that what Hurleighs did? Wasn’t that what her father meant when he harped on the blood of England? The aristocracy as a whole might have degenerated into a class of economic parasites, but over the centuries, Hurleighs had given (as those early Americans put it) their lives, their fortunes, their sacred honor for their country. Hurleigh ancestors had stood up to kings at Runnymede, generations of Hurleigh sons had given their lives on fields of battle, Hurleighs had beggared their families for a cause.

And now a Hurleigh daughter spent her time in first class compartments, sweet-talked corrupt politicians and newspaper barons, and dutifully kept squabbles from her parents’ drawing rooms.

Irritable, cold despite the fire, she crushed the stub end of the cigarette into the laden ash-tray and went to wipe her make-up, wash her face, brush her teeth, all the comforting rituals. At the end, she sat at her childhood dressing-table and took up her hair-brush.

In the looking-glass was Lady Laura Hurleigh, eldest child of an ancient and powerful family, her name and face instantly recognizable to half the nation, moneyed, respected, and not even hard to look on. Variations of the face before her had appeared in newspapers two or three times a year since the week of her birth: Little Lady Laura riding her pony; Lady Laura and mother with the hunt; the Lady Laura Hurleigh presented at court. Lady Laura, haughty before the Prime Minister.

In the looking-glass was also Laura Hurleigh, lover and partner to Labour’s up-and-coming fair-haired boy, Richard Bunsen. This was the Laura Richard himself would have seen, had he been standing behind her with his hands on her shoulders: helpmeet, bed-mate, sounding-board, as useful at charming Britain’s upper classes as she was with wowing the Americans.

Why were men who publicly espoused the rights of women so willing to overlook the women close to them? Richard had started out seeing her as a person in her own right, she was sure he had; he’d listened to her ideas, supported her proposals, respected her as a colleague. But in a few short years, the brilliant, wild man she’d tumbled into bed and into partnership with had evolved into a different sort of creature, one that ordered his suits from a tailor, knew what kind of wine to drink, and saw her as a highly useful, but necessarily secondary, adjunct to his male ambitions.

Oh,
why
hadn’t she just been born a man? As far back as she could remember, she’d known that she was Not-a-Boy. When she was five and four-year-old Thomas nearly died of pneumonia, it was little Daniel everyone had turned their increased vigilance on, not Laura. Then Thomas did die, in the second year of the War, and she had seen them pat and coddle his new-born son Theodore with that same hunger for reassurance. And in the winter of 1919, when the epidemic took Teddy, yet again they passed over Laura to settle their hopes back on her brothers. Boys mattered: girls were there to bear them.

And unmarried at thirty-three, she hadn’t even managed that.

Was this where her sense of incompleteness came from, the fact that she had no child of her own?

No, she decided; she’d felt that way long before she qualified for the withered identity of Spinster. She’d always felt it. Maybe that was why she always had to outrun her brothers, why she fought harder for what she wanted, why she always made things more difficult for herself than any man she knew. Women were always adjuncts to some man’s ambitions; she should be old enough not to expect anything else from Richard, women’s rights or no.

Things would be better if they could just get away for a while, to crawl into bed for a week and boff themselves limp. They said it was bad for a person accustomed to regular sex to stop suddenly—and God knew, under the current strain she ached for the release—but he’d been so touchy of late, with so much resting on the next days and weeks, that although they had sex, it seemed as mechanical for him as it was unsatisfying for her. No doubt he was just as happy to spend some days away from her, although that left a dangerous door open for other affections. Still, he’d had to deal with Lord Malcolm on his own today, with no one but Matthew Ruddle to smooth the old reprobate’s tongue: Perhaps that would make him appreciate her, just a little.

Another decision she could feel looming above her: marriage. Even with passion’s waning, she suspected that, before too long, Richard would ask her to marry him. It would have been unthinkable to the young radical she had first met, but Free Love had been buried under the trappings of success and adulation, and a rejection of the political and economic bonds of marriage had turned into an excuse for philandering.

(Why the word
philander,
she mused? Brotherly love of men, the word meant, but really it meant erotic lover of many women. Perhaps men who partner a string of women feel a strong bond with other men? And why, when a woman chose to give herself to a man outside the bonds of marriage, did she become not a
philanderess,
but a
whore
?)

What of Bennett? Which looking-glass Laura would Bennett see if he were the man standing behind her, his light head over her dark one, his hands resting on her shoulders? (Her body stirred inside its heavy silk negligeé, at the image of those hands descending, that mouth meeting her neck, to leisurely explore places where Richard’s fingers ventured only to see if she was ready for him.)

She tore her mind away from the thought of Bennett’s sure mouth and stared at the reflection. The Lady Laura Victoria Anne Christine Hurleigh gazed back at her, slightly flushed, pupils dark, but with all her thoughts and ambitions hidden, those thoughts and ambitions of the other Laura Hurleigh, the true one, the only one who mattered.

She had to remind herself of that fact, often: Only the inner person matters.

Everything but the inner person—everything, everyone—is sacrifice to the Cause.

Her mind had been denied a boy’s formal education? That was no sacrifice at all, when she considered how much easier it made it to speak with the millions who had been offered no such luxury.

She’d been born Not-a-Boy? What did that childhood resentment matter, when she’d come to maturity at a time when men were going to soldier and women were needed to run the machinery of the nation?

Bennett had abandoned her? Yes, she had loved him, loved and pitied and been in awe of his strength, but within days of that devastation, she’d been given Richard Bunsen, a powerful man who both needed her and taught her everything he knew—certainly everything she needed to know, to invent herself anew.

She felt burdened by the unfair privileges of her birth? Yet she had recently begun to see how those very privileges could be a weapon, precisely what was needed to turn the system on its head.

Grandmamma’s belief that All Things Were Ordained To Be had proved true time and again, to an extent that was almost eerie in its perfection.

Of course, she never talked about the idea of pre-ordination—she didn’t want to sound like her sister Connie with her bare feet and her Doctrine of the Nude. Not even with Richard, since he would have thought she meant the will of God, and divine approval did not enter into his vision of their work.

But privately, half ashamedly, she clung to the belief. It was not entirely irrational, for the coincidences of her life were too many to explain as mere luck of the draw: God—whether God was a person or simply a name one gave to the machinery of the Universe—surely must have taken an interest in the life of Laura Hurleigh, to have given her all those nudges? She had even tested her theory once or twice, deliberately trying to perform some wrong act, only to have circumstances turn against her. The theory had come up shining, and left her even more serenely confident in the rightness of her path: If the road is made easy, it is the right one.

Which made Bennett’s sudden re-appearance a puzzle. Why had he come back into her life, just at this crucial point? Clearly, it might simply be coincidence—she wasn’t such a fanatic on the idea of pre-ordination that she would deny random chance outright. But because the structure of her life was such a living thing to her, because the last few years had given her a powerful sense of all the loose threads of her existence weaving together in purpose, she had at least to think about Bennett’s re-appearance, and wonder if it might mean something.

If she’d been a heaven-and-hell Christian—if she’d even been much of a Christian at all—she might have considered his re-appearance some kind of a test, of her faith, her resolve, her understanding. But Laura’s awareness of the Divine was closer to a pagan, bone-deep sense of Purpose than it was to any Christian doctrine, and so she looked for a personal significance in the event, not merely a challenge set by an authority figure: Did Bennett have something to offer the Movement? And if so, was it through her, or through Richard?

Bennett might even be a mere tool of the Fates. Designed perhaps to bring that tall and mysterious American into the mix? It was true, she and Richard had been talking only the week before about the need for another, broader form of contact with the Americans, one that wasn’t limited to the radical minority. Would a man who sold motorcars be sufficiently working class for their needs? Stuyvesant’s leisure for international travel suggested that he would side with owners, yet he acted like a man who had spent years with dirty hands. And his clothes the night before had been what one might expect of a working man who, though he had moved up a notch in the hierarchy, nonetheless retained a certain disdain for the trappings of wealth.