House of Bells (10 page)

She wasn't even trying to catch this man's eye, not pushing herself forward, not in the race any more.

And yet he was looking right at her now, his bright gaze snaring her through the shadows as he said, ‘As usual, Mary and the captain ask us to leave them alone this hour, to let them have some quiet time together. It's not so much to ask, people, is it?'

It didn't seem like anything at all. Who would worry about letting the old ones go off to bed, while this golden man remained to them?

But Tom touched her hand and said, ‘Don't worry, Leonard will see you,' even while a murmur of agreement was still rolling along the tables:

No, not so much, we'll let them be, of course we will, don't we always?

She just shrugged at him heedlessly, her eyes still fixed on that man as he made his way between two tables into the open arena of the floor, as he walked unhurriedly in her direction, as he came directly and indisputably to her.

Training held good; she knew how to stand up gracefully, even from the floor with nothing to hold on to. She was on her feet before his offered hand could be any use to her. On her stockinged feet, because she'd slipped her shoes off when she sat down; her head barely reached to his shoulder, though his own feet were bare. Tall as well as golden, then. And very much a man – nothing of the boy about him, nothing to prove. Not likely to be a disappointment, this one. It was probably just as well that she didn't want anything from him.

He took her hand anyway, although she was up already and didn't need the help: not to shake, apparently, just to hold it as he smiled down at her. Warmth and strength in his silky fingers, warmth and strength in his honey voice as he said, ‘I'm Webb. They tell me you're called Georgie?'

She nodded, slightly unhappy at even that fractional lie. She'd never been a natural liar. She'd had to learn the art of it in bed, even, to boost the frail egos of the men who took her there. They only liked to be laughed at with their clothes on. In court she'd told the pure simple truths of all she'd done and everything she'd taken, the men and the money, the advantage and the risks. To the papers, too: nothing but the truth. It had done her little good. If honesty was the best policy, she had yet to be shown any good reason for it. It was just easier, that was all.

She was sorry suddenly to be entering this house on a lie, even such a small one. People changed their names for all sorts of reasons, all the time: for politics, for safety, for escape, for sex, for fun. What kind of name was Webb, anyway? Not the kind you found on a birth certificate, unless it was a surname, and he wasn't the kind of man in the kind of place to be going by his surname. No. He'd just chosen what he wanted people to call him, and so had she, and—

And she was still sorry to be telling him a lie, even if it didn't really matter. Even if he knew it and didn't care. Perhaps it was only her guilty conscience, but she had a feeling that he could see right through her.

He said, ‘Well, if you're ready now, Georgie –'
if you've got your story all prepared
was what she heard, though the tilt of his head towards the table seemed to say
if you've finished your supper
– ‘why don't you come on through and meet the captain?'

‘I, um, thought you said he wouldn't want to be disturbed . . .?'

‘He's not generally available after dinner. If he was, he'd never have a moment to himself, or for Mary. He does always like to meet newcomers, though, as soon as may be. This is the best time, when you can sit and talk and not be interrupted a dozen times an hour.'

‘Wouldn't Mary rather . . .?'

‘I expect she would, yes – but she won't say so. She learned long since that there's no point arguing with Leonard, for his good or your own, when the good running of the house is an issue. That's why we had to learn to keep away in the evenings, to stop him wearing himself ragged; it's our own decision, not his. I'm not sure he even knows. Come on, now. An invitation to the captain's cabin is a privilege, and no one here disdains it.'

‘Oh, I wasn't—!'

But he was teasing her. She realized it too slow, smiled to acknowledge it too late. By then he was already walking, still keeping that loose grip on her hand so that she had to stumble after him or look absurd, tug herself free like a child not willing to be led.

She was willing enough, more than willing. He was playing faithful lieutenant and no more, bringing her to meet his commander – and she was still scurrying to catch up with him, still leaving her shoes as abandoned as poor Tom at the end of the table there, not a backward or regretful glance.

He took her across that open space, through the heart of the room, under everyone's gaze. In her short shift and sheer tights, and never mind that she'd known these clothes were wrong, that she'd planned and worn them deliberately. She still felt like a cow brought to market, exposed to comment and ridicule – except that she glanced from one side to the other and didn't think that anyone was commenting much, let alone laughing. She couldn't see that anyone was actually looking at her, much. A curious glance here or there, but that was only the inevitable curiosity of a settled group finding a newcomer in its midst. Nothing judgemental.

She wasn't sure that she could be so kind towards a stranger – or so unconcerned, it wasn't even kindness – being led by the hand to the heart of things, where everyone else had been so bluntly excluded.

But then, she wasn't a hippy. She wasn't signed up for community living. Grace had hated school and left as soon as she could, left home at the same time, dumped flatmates as soon as she thought she could afford to. Georgie's story wasn't so different, except for being the one who was dumped and dumped again.

She was suddenly practising that story in the back of her mind quite urgently as they squeezed between tables and came to those high closed double doors beyond. It wasn't Webb that she needed to convince here.

He pulled one door open and handed her through. She felt almost like an actress being brought to the front of the stage for her curtain call, except that this was a beginning and, however it ended, nobody was going to applaud. Nobody was going to applaud her, at least.

Webb's fingers slipped away from hers at last, too soon. These next steps she had to take alone, and she was more than sorry about that. She could hear him right behind her, pulling that door closed again; there was small reassurance in that. A man had disappeared here. Maybe. At least one, maybe; maybe more. Something surely had been going on before that, before Tony had sent his man in, or why would he? He hadn't told her much about it: only that there were rumours, worried parents, disapproving locals. The usual. Good fare for a Sunday morning.

If it was true,
if
this wasn't an elaborate ploy to see her out of London for a while, make her feel differently about herself, better if she could.

Either way, she needed to stop thinking like Grace for a while. Think like Georgie. Be Georgie, as much as she could manage. That would be nicer, anyway. She was a nice girl, Georgie. A bit of an idiot, but that was all right. Nice girls are allowed to do foolish things, and feel sad after.

Nice girls are expected to be a little bashful, coming in to face an older man in a position of authority. Father, headmaster, priest, employer. Judge. It was all the same, always. They all judged you. Grace would be defiant, but not Georgie. She didn't have it in her.

Georgie would creep forward, uncomfortably alone: eyes on her fingers as they twiddled with each other, as her right hand fussed at the bandage on her left.

She'd find herself walking over carpets, for the first time in this house: fine Persian carpets, that Grace would have recognized from all those country houses in the days when she was welcomed there, that Georgie would know from the nice homes of her parents' wealthy friends. There was always a story, if you looked for it.

Walking into smoke, into the smells of various smokes. Joss, of course, there had to be joss; and a stale background smell of tobacco mixed with something rougher and sweeter, cannabis,
of course
someone had been smoking joints in here; and more immediately, prominent and demanding, a richer darker tobacco that brought her head up regardless, and there he was.

Leonard, the captain, master of this house and of her fate, at least for this little moment: sitting on an old worn cat-scratched settee, the kind of furniture that was endlessly familiar to Grace – all those rooms in all those country houses: people with houses like that hold on to everything, and pass it down as it decays through generations of guest-rooms and family rooms and servants' rooms and dogs' – and not so much to Georgie, leaning into one corner-cushion while Mother Mary occupied the other.

He was smoking an Indian cheroot, black and thin and lethal. He gestured with it, that hand that was not stretched out along the sofa-back towards Mary, and tapped ash into a bright jade pot on a trefoil table beside him, and said, ‘I'm sorry about this,' though he patently wasn't, it was as much a part of him as the beard on his chin. ‘Old sea-dog habit that I can't break now – I'd break myself if I tried it. Filthy things, but people put up with me regardless.'

Of course they did. She understood it now. Webb's impact was long-distance, the teacher addressing the hall; it didn't get stronger close to. The captain's was immediate, here and now, you and me, not for sharing.

His beard bristled with iron vigour. His blue eyes were faded, salt-soaked, ironic; his skin had weathered sun and wind, ten thousand days, a thousand thousand miles. His voice still held a Navy crispness, under a roughening of tobacco and hard use. And of course he'd been in the war, so had every man his age, every man worth anything – not half the men she knew in London, those who had fucked her and spurned her and judged her and fucked her anyway – but there was more than that. Something of her own father in him: the last thing she'd have looked for, the last thing she'd have hoped to see, but there it was, clear and authoritative and revelatory.

She said, ‘Merchant Marine?' Her father called it the Merchant Navy, with a kind of stubborn pride; when he talked about the king, as often as not he meant George V, who'd given it that title after the first war. The way her father spoke, you'd think he'd been in the service at the time, that the sea was in his blood. In truth he'd signed up in 1939 to avoid conscription, got out as early as he could, and used his wartime contacts shamelessly ever since. She really didn't want to see a similarity here. And yet, there it was: something about distance, experience, another kind of life. In her father it had touched him, marked him, tattooed his skin perhaps. If you wanted to be clever, if you wanted not to remember that he would be the last man ever to have himself tattooed. In this man it was sunk bone-deep, ocean-deep. She might be willing to bet that he did have tattoos, but only the way a ship had flags: superficial, for the benefit of others. Himself, he didn't need telling who or what he was, or where he'd been. Or what his service had been worth. The old sailors she'd met, the real sailors, still called it the Merchant Marine.

He grunted. ‘Clever girl. Sit yourself down.' Patting the cushion of the settee beside him.

There was, she supposed, just room enough for three, if she didn't mind being pinned between him and – what, his partner, his co-host? His first mate in the naval sense? Or in the biological sense, his wife?

Grace would have sat somewhere else, deliberately at a distance. By nature she didn't do obedience, or joining. In the war she'd have waited for her call-up and then been the most difficult draftee she could, all lipstick on parade and cigarettes with the quartermaster's men behind the stores. In a commune – well. It was hard to imagine Grace in a commune, willingly or otherwise.

Georgie, though: Georgie only wanted to make other people happy, in a way that she couldn't make herself. She'd sit where she was told to, with never a mulish lip.

Went to do that, then – and swallowed down her huff of relief as Mother Mary rose up at her approach, shared a private women-only smile with her, said, ‘Sit here, dear,' in her own place, the far end of the sofa.

She could do that. Georgie would do that; yes, and curl her legs up and half turn her back to the man at the other end, look at him half over her shoulder, self-protective, harmed.

‘Don't get him going, mind, on his time at sea,' Mother Mary went on. Standing over her, protective herself. Even Georgie might uncurl, a little, in her shadow. ‘He'll bore you half to death. And poison you the other half, with those cheroots. Would you like a cup of tea?'

There was a little spirit-stove in the corner, a kettle already steaming. Adding its fug to the twining smoke of the joss sticks in a brass holder, set on the window sill above. She smiled a nervous thank you, and never mind if she looked a little bewildered; she was a little bewildered. She really didn't understand this place. Nor Mother Mary. The captain was easier, at least in her imagination. She could piece together a story for him. Not for this woman, busy with pot and kettle and water, with caddy and spoon and leaves. She had been a nurse, she said; she ought to be a matron now, ruling patients and probationers alike with a rod of iron, brisk and brutal and beloved. Instead – well, people here called her Mother, though she didn't want them to. Presumably she did the same thing: tyrannized and treated hurts, kept good order, walked about in the captain's shadow and let him take the glory.

Whatever glory there was, guiding a group of long-haired hippies from one day to the next, in chase of something unknown. Perhaps she didn't understand him either. Grace would challenge him about that, ask him straight out:
what are you here for?

Georgie wouldn't. She'd be too afraid of having the question bounced straight back at her.