The Light Ages (14 page)

A dark green van splashed up the steep way from lowtown to Coney Mound next morning. It was tall-sided and drawn by two huge, shovel-faced drays. The younger children came out from their houses to run beside it and I watched from my tiny attic window as its shining panels halted on Brickyard Row. The man hunched at its reins glanced down at the children then up at rain-threatening skies. As he did so, I saw that it was Master Tatlow. His lips pursed in a whistle, checking a scrap of paper from his pocket, he climbed down. He tied up and patted his drays, then worked open the latch on our gate and knocked briskly on our front door. I heard my father’s steps along the creaky passage, the characteristic nervous clearing of his throat and the sigh of the front door opening across the rush mat. The words were unclear, but the door shut, their voices rolled and shifted, and Beth’s came to join with them. Despite everything, it all sounded so ordinary.

The children outside still circled the tall green van. It bore no markings of any company or guild. That in itself was unusual. Curtains, no doubt, would be twitching along Brickyard Row. Front steps and windows would be absently polished as the faces of our neighbours peered out. I began to drag on my clothes.

Come on. It’s late morning.

I stopped, a sock hanging off my foot, my heart suddenly pounding. I could have sworn that I heard the rumble of the clotheshorse and my mother’s voice as she called up the stairs to me from the kitchen.

We’re going out. You’ll miss breakfast.

I looked at the sloping walls of my attic, half expecting—longing—for that distant Fourshiftday morning at the last edge of summer when we visited the Redhouse to return. But the voices still rose from below.

The night before, huddled back in my bed after Beth had returned,

I had listened to my sister’s gasps as she struggled up and down the stairs with coal and sheets and buckets. The whole house, it seemed to me, stank of smoke. And I could hear as I lay there in the thin darkness the creak of bedsprings, the snap of joints, the sound—AHHH
AHHHGGH
AHHH
AHHHGGH—
of something terrible breathing, and of the scratching and scurrying which now seemed to fill these walls. Here, amid my old coats and blankets, I was separated from it by nothing but plaster and lath.

I wondered as I listened to my sister’s labours if she still kept a remnant of hope, or worked out of blind habit. And I wondered just how much the creature my mother had become had revealed itself to her. Tossing and writhing, I fell into a dream in which, somehow still wearing her apron, still looking as she had once looked, my mother was pinned down by chains and pipes in Mawdingly & Clawtson’s Engine Floor. Then I heard Father’s voice, talking in the suppressed shout which meant he’d been out drinking. And Beth was crying now, in or out of my dreams, saying that this was the end of it, that it couldn’t go on. And I heard the rattle of Father’s toolbox, the musical clatter of planks. The sound of hammering.

In the grey morning I descended the ladder and found that the door to my mother’s bedroom was criss-crossed by lopsidedly nailed bits of old floorboard; the kind of excessively poor workmanship of which Father would normally have been ashamed. Drawn over them, done roughly in brown paint, were protective circles, scrawls; the thin substance of his guild heritage. Tendrils of smoke writhed through the gaps. There was a sense of heat, power.

Robert? Is that you? Is that you? That you … ? You … ?

Shrinking echoes of her voice; nothing more. Barely hesitating, I stumbled downstairs. Three faces—my father, Beth, and Master Tatlow—turned towards me from the parlour as I slumped down at the bottom step.

‘This here’s Master Tatlow,’ my father began, half rising from his chair. ‘He’s—’

‘You think I don’t know who
he is!’

They studied me for a moment. Master Tatlow had a blood-flecked scrap of lint stuck to one of his chins where he’d cut himself shaving.

‘It’s always difficult.
Always
difficult.’ His knees jiggled restlessly. ‘I’ve seen cases, rich and poor, through half Yorkshire. Believe me, Master Borrows, it’s for the best. Her kind, they don’t
know.
It’s just the way she is—and it’s no respecter of guilds, believe you me…

Beth’s hair, I saw, fell in greasy clumps. Her clothes looked slept—in. Father’s face was grey and old and frozen.

Master Tatlow took out a fat notebook. ‘You wife, the client, I understand that she worked in the paintshop down at the big factory?’

‘Yes.’

‘Excuse me for asking. But it is helpful to know these things.’

‘Of course.’

Master Tatlow slipped back an elastic band and ran his finger along a spill of pages, then nodded to himself. He licked his pencil. He made a note. ‘Of course, it can happen in almost any kind of work, although I know that’s no comfort to you at the moment. But from what you say, and from what I’ve seen in the report, it sounds to me as though this particular syndrome is more, ah,
singular
than I’d have expected from paintshop work. Could you tell me quite how the client’s changes have manifested themselves?’

‘Best thing is,’ Father said and ran his hands back through his hair, ‘you go up there and take a look yourself.’

Something stirred upstairs, dragging and banging. Master Tatlow glanced out of the window. His lips twitched. ‘I wonder what’s happened to the police? Promised in the telegraph they’d be here bang on nine. I’ve come all the way overnight with this van from our stables at Northallerton, so you’d think they could manage a few yards. So you’ll excuse me for asking if I couldn’t possibly have a cup of tea?’

Beth stood up to boil the kettle. Outside, splattering the parlour window, it had finally began to rain. I glanced up the stairs. At the very top, filling the landing, was horrid darkness, the reek of smoke, the sense and the sound of something waiting. Then, for a long time, until the scream of the kettle, there was only silence and the gathering sound of the rain. Father sat slumped and rigid in his chair. I could see the twitching cables of his muscles, the knotted veins and haft-marks of his workman’s arms. Master Tatlow opened and closed his book, which had a gold C and cross on its front, and glanced out of the window. The spoon rattled in the saucer when Beth handed him his tea.

‘Ah! Most grateful!’ He sipped noisily.

‘Dad? would you like one as well?’

My father shook his head.

Then Beth came over to me. ‘It’s what Mother would have wanted,’ she said, hunching down beside me on the bottom step of the stairs. ‘For someone like Master Tatlow to come when things got … This bad. She needs to be taken care of, and we can’t do that here. I can’t ..

‘Mum’s a troll.’

I felt her stiffen. There were sores around her mouth. ‘You don’t have to use words like that in this house, Robert.’

‘It’s
true—
but it doesn’t have to be bad. Remember Goldenwhite? She drew the changed to her, made an army. She could …’

I looked back up at Beth. In her sleep-bleary eyes, there was no comprehension.

‘I think you should go out for a while now, Robert,’ she said. ‘Go round to Nan Callaghan’s. Knock on her door. She’ll understand. She’ll let you in …’

I barged my way out through the kitchen and splashed down the back alley. Beyond, on the street front, all of Bracebridge had dissolved in greying sheets whilst Master Tatlow’s green wagon sat waiting, its windowless panels shining. The birch trees on the hill bowed and thrashed. Even the strongest, oldest member of this scrawny copse in which many generations of Coney Mound had stuck nails and scarred with their names waved like the mast of a storm-tossed ship as I climbed it.

My boots slipped on the bark as I hauled myself up, working up and along until I attained the loose territory where the marshy ground directly below me was almost lost in the rain. But I could see clearly enough across Brickyard Row and through the window into my mother’s bedroom. I don’t know what I expected, but all I could make out at first was the old wardrobe, which was odd considering that it should have been on the other side of the room, and was blocking the space where the door should have been. Then there came voices and plodding hoofbeats, the grinding crunch of wheels. Another wagon. It was larger and heavier than Master Tatlow’s van, and several of the police who’d come with it had to climb off to help push it up the final rise to our house. They wore shining black oilskin capes and peaked caps. As they trooped through the front gate, they looked like a mobile flock of umbrellas.

The tree creaked beneath me. I clung to whipping armfuls of leaves. It was hard to imagine them all standing inside our house, squashed-up and dripping. Like a jewel glimpsed underwater through a storm, there was a stillness in that lost, familiar bedroom with its big, misplaced wardrobe, which seemed now to be at odds with everything else about this day. Then Master Tatlow re-emerged outside, hunching through the rain to open the back of his van and haul out a weird collection of crowbars, hoops and chains. The front door closed again. The wind swept over me. When I’d regained my grip on the branches I saw that the wardrobe which blocked the door to my mother’s room was quivering. Then it flew asunder in an explosion of thin wood and the bedroom, as the many uniformed figures burst in, was extinguished in their bustle. The rain seemed to thicken. I imagined strong arms lifting my mother, the dragging weight of those chains. My tree was bucking. I was starting to slip—but then I saw movement in the room again.

There was a figure, tall, swaying like smoke, rising from everything which tried to enclose it. I don’t know what else; there seemed to be a thundercrack which could have been the whipping wind, perhaps genuine thunder, or the splitting wood of the sash-framed bedroom window as it began to bulge under some inward pressure. Then the panes shattered. From the height of my tree, it and I were almost level, and it seemed for a moment as if the shape which emerged on swirls of glass and white bed linen was flying right towards me. There was a momentary vision, not of some aether-changed monster, but of my mother, her smiling face and outstretched arms as she flew to embrace me. Then the vision faded, and the tangled shape fell, glittering sheets trailing behind from the window, to land unravelled on the stone front step with an audible
snap.

SHOOM
BOOM
SHOOM
BOOM.

The rain came more strongly. The shouts. The struggles to open the front door. The scurryings of the police and the somewhat calmer voice of Master Tatlow. The pale-pink runnels which snaked down our path and swirled into the gutter. The tentative prodding and lifting. The gathering arms folded, weeping, curious, impassive neighbours. My mother’s changed limbs dragging from a makeshift stretcher, and the horns which protruded from it. These are all things I saw and didn’t see as I scrambled back down the tree and blundered through the rank undergrowth. A final drop, and then from here all of lowtown was spread below me in the glittering rain, with Rainharrow beyond, the stones of its peak somehow caught in a mocking fall of sunlight. The wind regathered itself, grey on grey; the foaming edges of spring breaking against the walls of winter. Then I heard another sound, an anguished howling from the valley beneath me, which was joined by another, and then another. Today being Halfshiftday, the shift sirens were going off at midday.

‘Robert!’ Cravat, dressing gown and cigarette holder in place,

Grandmaster Harrat filled the open doorway of his house as the rain clattered around me. ‘Come in! Quickly, quickly! A rotten day like this, I was worried you’d decided not to bother …’

I stood dripping in the hall, breathing in the flowery scent of gas mantles entwined with eau de cologne, floor-polish, pot pourri.

‘Here we are!’ A large white towel, Grandmaster Harrat scurrying in its wake. ‘Dry yourself off …’ Feathery warmth enfolded me. ‘You look absolutely sodden. You really
should
get straight out of those things. I’m sure we could find something …’

But the look in my eyes made him grow silent and I waited in the parlour, still seeping rainwater as he bore in the tiered trays of cakes which the ever-absent maids had prepared. Then he sat in his usual chair and I sat on the edge of mine. The fire crackled. I caught glimpses of myself, mirrored in the glass of the streaming windows, wrapped in this white towel amid the glint of wood and brass. I surprised myself by grabbing more handfuls than ever of sweet, ludicrously decorated cakes and stuffing them into my mouth until my cheeks hurt. Then came the time to light the lamps, with the squeak of each finely knurled tap bringing a hissing intensification of the smell of gas like ruined flowers.

Other Grandmaster Harrats and Roberts seemed to stretch behind us as we walked through the house—the lost shadows of our past Halfshiftdays—and the light in the long workroom had the texture of sodden wool. But he desisted from lighting the lamps there, clattering his trays and bales of wire, and the whole place seemed emptier than usual. The desks where he usually conducted his experiments were clear. What had happened to the wires and the acids, those fireflies of electricity?

‘Oh, I’m finished with all
that
for now, Robert,’ he said with a forced gaiety. ‘Yesterday, all of last night, I was in here labouring. But nothing seemed right …’ He paused. ‘Odd thoughts, odd problems—and real ones, obstacles that I’d never considered before-suddenly assailed me. I couldn’t get any of it to work, and I finally realised why, which was the most obvious reason of any imaginable.’ A smile creased his face. ‘The idea, you see, Robert, is impossible. There will never be electric light—at least not in England … That was the message of that experiment we conducted here last Halfshiftday. All we have is aether ..

He trailed off, still looking at me. An inner struggle went on in his throat and jaw. Finally, he asked a question he hadn’t asked me in many terms, although I’d often felt that he was on the brink of it.

‘And how’s your mother, these days?’

‘She died this morning. She threw herself from the window when the trollman came.’