The Light Ages (22 page)

Beyond, lustrous in the thin light, lay endless rails of clothing. They whispered and jingled on their hangings as Annalise walked between them. ‘I’m just a guest here. We’re never supposed to get to see all of this. But
feel
them, Robbie. Watered silk, Dutch lace, finest cambric, aethered linen, sequins, buttons of cedarstone, crystal beads from Thule and Cathay …’ Shifting waterfalls of cloth danced before me, and Annalise danced amid them, too, smiling, turning, making mock curtsies. ‘They keep it this way down here-neither hot nor cold, dark nor light—so that nothing fades …’ She lifted handfuls to her face, inhaling deeply. ‘Go on—try. This is what
wealth
smells like Robbie. This
is power.
This
is money …’
I took a sequinned sleeve and sniffed. But I must have made a poor choice, for there was only soured wine and sweat, stale perfume, tobacco. Behind, along other rails, men’s suits were lined like soldiers. Annalise swooped one out and held it appraisingly against me, tilting her head, stroking the cloth, smoothing it across my shoulders with lovely persistence until I thought my heart would stop beating. ‘No, not at all … Definitely not the fashion …’ She tried another. ‘We’ll need a shirt for you, a tie, shoes …

Annalise waltzed amid the hissing masses of evening gowns as I struggled to find my size in patent shoe, keeping up a non-stop commentary about hems and darts and braidings. She found a dress which was pale blue, a shade like the sky at early morning, and strung with pearls at the shoulder like the last stars, and tight at the waist, then spilling out like a waterfall. She looked truly glorious as she held it up to herself, her golden hair awry.

‘What do you think, Robbie? Do you think some sad old dowager will ever miss this?’

We tunnelled back up through the hotel, armfuls of silk billowing and squealing. Annalise checked that the coast was clear on the floor of her room. We swept in.

‘This is a guest bathroom. You can get changed in here.’

‘What should I do with my—’

But already she’d pushed me into a place of gleaming spigots, white porcelain, snowdrifts of towel. Everything I touched seemed to grow dirty and the clothes I’d been wearing, my best by far, flaked and crackled as I removed them. But, much as you do in a dream, I decided to make the most of this situation, stuffing my old things into what looked like a laundry basket, discovering the knobs which caused hot and cold water to gush from the mouths of dolphins. Soon, I was wreathed in scent and steam. My naked body floated in the foamy water, deeply tanned in the places where it had been exposed to the sun, alarmingly white elsewhere, and surprisingly fully muscled. Eventually, I climbed out, and, puzzling over buttons and catches and hopping from leg to leg, pulled on my new clothes and padded down the sweltering corridor to the door of Annalise’s room.

‘Come in! It’s unlocked …’ Her voice was faint. Inside, I didn’t find the expected bedroom, but a sunlit parlour filled with gilt chairs. I couldn’t see Annalise.
‘That
was quick Robbie.’ Her voice drifted through a double doorway. ‘You’ll have to wait for me, I’m afraid …’ I peered towards what did look like a bedroom, in that there was a bed large enough to sleep several families, and heard the faint hiss of pipes from further beyond. I sat down, then stood up, and studied my changed self in one of the mirrors. Annalise had been right in her choice—the suit definitely fitted. But every bit of it was awry. The shirt, the cuffs, the buttons. And my hair was sticking up, my face was flushed. I looked like a servant trying on his master’s clothes.

As I puzzled over the bow tie, there came a knock at the door.

‘Are you
in
there, Anna?’ A woman’s voice, strangely accented. ‘Where have you
been?
Everyone’s looking for you—’ The handle turned. Someone rustled in.

‘Oh!’ The girl’s hand went up to her throat as we regarded each other and the studs and cuffs I’d been struggling with patted to the floor. ‘I’m so
terribly
sorry …’ She glanced at the number on the door. ‘But this is Anna Winters’ room, isn’t it—so what on earth … ?’

‘It’s all right, Sadie,’ Annalise’s voice wafted in. ‘It’s Robert … ah,

Borrows. He’s an old family friend.’

I offered Sadie my hand, on the offchance that this was what you did in these situations. She gave a charming curtsy in return. ‘Guildmaster Borrows …’

‘Pleased to meet you. And you must call me Robbie.’ The phrases came out easily, stilted though they seemed.

‘And I’m Grandmistress Sarah Passington—did I tell you that? But everyone just calls me Sadie. You must think I’m terribly rude, bursting in on you like this.’

I was enjoying this more and more. No one had ever called me guildmaster. It still sounded better than citizen. ‘That was entirely my fault, Sadie. How could I have been expected?’ I ventured a smile.

Sadie smiled back at me. ‘It’s a pleasure, Robbie, at last to meet someone who knew Anna when she was young. I feel as if I’ve known her all my life, but it’s the first time this has ever happened. It’s not as if she’s secretive, but ..

Beyond all those doors, in the distant bathroom, Annalise—or
Anna Winters,
as it seemed she was now—was humming to herself, a soft song which went with the hiss of the pipes and the sound of the trees and the traffic, the distant stirrings of the Midsummer Fair. Warm, benign, her presence washed over Sadie and I.

‘So I suppose you of all people must know what Anna’s like …’ Sadie smiled again, but more wistfully. She had dark hair done up in glossy coils, white skin, shapely black eyebrows. And she was wearing, I slowly realised now that the initial shock of her presence had faded, what was easily the most extravagant dress I had ever seen. Even by the standards of the confections I witnessed in this hotel, it was quite extraordinary. White and gold, half architecture, half wedding cake, it seemed to wash out towards me like a separate presence; yet it stopped so far below her shoulders to have caused, as my mother would have said, a traffic accident back in Bracebridge.

‘You look,’ I said, ‘as if you’re going somewhere.’

‘So do you, Robbie. I mean, I take it Anna’s made sure that you’re coming to tonight’s ball?’ Her eyes travelled up and down me. ‘We’re always short of new men ..

‘I would if I could manage these …’ I lifted the end of my bow tie, one of the cufflinks.

But Sadie was in her element, fussing over me. And so was I—the tie, the room, the mirrored visions of Sadie as she leaned over me in her fine décolletage, Annalise’s—
Anna’s—
occasional calls and questions, this gilt and sunlit room. All of it moved and fitted together. Finally, the door to the bedroom reopened. And there was Annalise at the threshold, her hair done differently, her face in shadow and her green eyes alight, wearing that grey-blue dress which was, for all that it covered her shoulders in silk and pearls, as devastatingly simple as Sadie’s was complex.

‘Are we all ready?’

The hotel entrance hall was now swarming. Trunks and suitcases were being borne back and forth on trolleys by uniformed youths. Lifts pinged and opened. Outside, the lines of London’s other great hotels looked frail as seashells in the pink twilight as Annalise, Sadie and I followed marble steps through illuminated gardens. Soon, I caught the scent of the river. But this wasn’t the Thames which I knew downstream by Tidesmeet, or even further up at Riverside. Here, before all the outflows of the Easterlies had made their contributions, the waters still ran almost clear. Lights fanned along the embankment. A bluish moon hovered close above the river, and music blossomed from a ballroom which glowed above the waters from a pier like a great sea urchin. As if lifted by the breeze, women with bare backs, bare throats, bare arms, bare shoulders and half-bare bosoms floated into the arms of their chaperons and danced along the boards towards it.

Annalise tapped my shoulder.

‘You
do
know how to dance, don’t you Robbie?’

I shrugged and smiled and put out my arms. My hands closed on her back, the fabric, the pearls, and I strained against the conflicting impulses to press tighter, to pull back. I’d never have guessed that dancing, not jumping around in Caris Yard to a shrieking fiddle, but the kind of thing you saw high-born people doing in paintings, was so shockingly intimate.

‘Let go for a minute. Watch my toes …’ Annalise wriggled from my grasp. ‘Shall we show him, Sadie … ?’ Linking arms and turning around the benches across the embankment to demonstrate, these two beautiful women in their whispering dresses made a fine couple as they demonstrated to me how it was done; this business of dancing arm in arm and breast to breast with the moon rising across the river.

‘Now you, Robbie … Try again … You put your hand here.’ Sadie arranged my limbs, placing them around Annalise. ‘No, a little higher ..

Slowly, stumbling at first like a wounded dray, I waltzed my way across the Thames towards the music of the ballroom. I danced first with Annalise, then with Sadie, and for a lovely moment I was somehow dancing with them both. Onlookers laughed and encouraged us. There were scatters of applause, shouted suggestions. They probably thought I was some dull relative from the cold and smoggy depths of the north or west dragged here by these two glittering cousins. But there was never any sense, despite my obvious clumsiness, that I didn’t belong.

Pillars ascended inside the ballroom. Candelabra dripped from the ceiling. The band was playing something faster now and the beat was different, but I could have danced to anything that night. Something had clicked in me—a ridiculous confidence, a sense of
knowing.
Annalise and I were part of the music as we turned on the floor of the ballroom and the dresses changed colour as they swirled about us; pink to green to blue. They pulsed like anemones in a rockpool, and we men darted dark and sleek around them, were drawn and repulsed until, as each melody slowed, we were recaptured breathless and laughing within those crinoline fronds. I was a part of it. I was part of everything. And Annalise’s eyes were shining. Her back and shoulders beneath the silk and pearled substance of the dress she was wearing felt slim and damp and warm. Then came a fresh tilt to the rhythm of the music, and the dancefloor seemed to tilt with it, and sent me spinning.

I wish I could say more about how it felt to be with Annalise that night. But there are some rare moments in life when happiness slips past you so easily that you barely notice it, or ever believe it will end. I was entranced. It seemed as if the great earthly pyramid beneath which I had struggled had suddenly become aether-light. And of course, I was in love as well. In love with the moon and the night and all the other ridiculous things that people sing about in songs and write of in poems out of what I had previously imagined was some stupid high-guilded literary convention. And I was in love with Sadie, too, for the way she laughed at my feeble jokes, and for the deep swell of her bosom and the sweet dark scent of her perspiration as she swept though dance after dance and pressed against me. And I was in love with the people who joined us, and who took to me so readily that I knew instantly that they were my friends. These rare and intricate creatures of the highest guilds were sleek and shy as birds, and prone just as easily to song and laughter. They touched my rough hands and asked me if I’d done much sailing down at Folkestone this summer. They heard I’d come from the north, from Yorkshire, and wondered if I knew so-and-so who had property up there? They poured my wine for me, sympathised at my lack of knowing anyone, and understood how strange and difficult London could be, especially in the dreadful hurly-burly of the summer season. And then there was Annalise, Annalise who was Anna now in her dawn-blue dress, Annalise with her shining eyes, Annalise with her red-golden hair. Every poem, every melody, every flash of starlight, was true. I believed it all. I believed in everything.

There were tables burdened with incredible food which most people were simply ignoring. I presented a plate before every tong-wielding waiter, then retreated outside to the deck which surrounded the ballroom and stuffed myself with oiled handfuls of incomprehensible flavours. Happy, full, giddy, and faintly sick, I leaned against the railing and let the night air cool my face.

‘You’re a bit of a mystery, aren’t you, Robbie?’ Sadie propped her elbows on the railing beside me. ‘Coming here,’ she continued, ‘suddenly appearing. I wouldn’t be surprised if you disappear at the end of this Midsummer night in the same way …’ She glanced down at my feet. ‘At least you’re not wearing glass slippers.’

My head was swimming. I really didn’t know where to begin.

‘But tell me, Robbie, how exactly
do
you know Anna? She’s a bit like you—bit of a mystery … Although I can’t quite say why, seeing as I’ve known her all the time we’ve been at St Jude’s. You’ll have to tell me what it was like for Anna up in cold grey Brownheath, with that dreadful spinster aunt of hers.’

A strange thing happened to me as Sadie spoke those words and I stared down at the moon-glittering water. I could
see
that aunt, and the house where Anna had lived. It was nothing like Redhouse, but dark, small-windowed, rambling. There it was, set in damp woodland, beside a waterfall. The aunt was old and stooped and smelly. She roamed the creaking house, giving the young girl who had come to live with her after her parents had both died in a tragic boating accident her sour toleration. I’d been there myself, a different Robert Borrows, stepping from the carriage in my best sailor suit and looking up at the hunched grey walls. I could hear the waterfall, smell the clogged drains and dripping terraces, and see the aunt herself, her stick tapping as she crawled about in an old shawl. For all her youth and glow, there was something about Annalise that made such a cold and loveless place entirely believable … As I spoke to Sadie of sitting with Anna Winters in the green undecorated room filled with the wardrobe stink of mothballs, the words simply came out from me. Less of a vision than a memory, that old dark house had the feeling of somewhere I had long known.