The Light Ages (30 page)

I drank a pot tea in a cafe along the seafront, and studied today’s
Guild Times.
At long last, a major strike had been reported in its pages, albeit with gross inaccuracy. It had been over the introduction of a cut in pay for the steamasters who maintained the engine houses which drove London’s trams. For a whole three days, the tramtracks had stood silent and the song of London had changed. The strike had been broken by the expedient of offering the steamasters a small rise on their old wages if they went back to work for longer hours, and by firing and expelling those who didn’t. As always, divide and rule. Once again, the trams were running back in London, but those three days had been a glimpse of something better and I almost regretted leaving London, if only for a couple of days.

But what time to arrive at Walcote House? And how to get there? The cafe waitress gave me vague directions and I headed west along the shining sand, past the squat liveiron pier and the families with their hired deckchairs and windbreaks. The men, barefoot, their cheeks holiday-unshaven, struggled with their newspapers. The children paddled in the foam. The beach grew quieter as I walked on and the coastline rose in cliffs of wedding-cake white. The morning sun turned hotter. Here, where the tide mirrored the towers of the increasingly extraordinary dwellings which peered over the cliff face, there were no whelk vendors or donkey droppings. The sand was white. The sky was blazing. Sweating, squinting, I climbed the steps to Marine Drive. The sea below seemed lost and distant. The houses vanished behind their walls. Footsore, I continued walking. Walcote House—I’d pictured it on the seafront, tall and wide; an elegant boarding house. But the trams didn’t run this far out from Saltfleetby and the passage of each private carriage was a separate event, signalled by a lacquered flash and the slow appearance of darkened windows.

Summer really had arrived at last. It was hot up here, and noonday quiet. Looking back along the shimmering road, I saw the glint of another carriage. It gained on me with slow ease, then drew to a halt just ahead at the roadside. The creatures which pulled it were too fine to be called merely horses. Their white coats were the same shade as the sand and seafoam. Their breathing made an edgy whistling, punctuated by snorts and the creak of harnesses as they rolled their ruby eyes. A liveried carriageman clicked his tongue and ran his gloved hand across their flanks, then, nodding in reply to a voice which came from inside the carriage, opened its door for me.

‘Well, Master Robert,’ a female voice came from inside. ‘Aren’t you getting in?’

After the brilliance of the day, all I could see at first, shining out like a porcelain mask dropped into the depths of a well, was Grandmistress Sarah Passington’s face. I sat down opposite her, as, with a queasy motion, the carriage rolled on.

‘You really should have told me. I could have got you a lift … You didn’t come on that
train,
did you? Stuffed with malodorous day-trippers?’ Everything that I had done to get to Saltfleetby surprised her. ‘And what are you coming as for tomorrow’s ball? What secrets have you got tucked in that—that case of yours … ?’

The carriage interior was large enough to accommodate six people but Sadie’s dress took up more than half. It was blue-grey, touched with green. There was lace at the hem and around the dark scoop of her bosom. It shimmered and rustled with the rocking of the carriage.

‘Ever been to Saltfleetby before?’

‘I’ve never even been to the seaside.’

‘The
seaside!
Robbie, you’re
such
an innocent. I bet I’ve done every single thing you’ve never done. And that you’ve done every thing I haven’t.’

‘We both live, eat, breathe ..

She smiled. ‘Well, we’ll have to see about that, won’t we?’

The angle of the sun changed. We were passing through gardens, then beside a lake. Beams of sunlight moved across the leather. One caught on Sadie’s sleeve, then the velvet choker which surrounded her neck, which had the same sheen as the pelts of the fine horses.

‘I so envy you, coming here to Walcote for the first time ..

The place which came into view certainly wasn’t a house. In fact, it was so large that there was an odd, extended impression as the carriage clopped and rocked towards it that we were getting no closer. Walcote House was white, with fluted pillars, and extended two arms like a giant marble crab to embrace a fountain considerably bigger than London’s Grand Opera House which frothed and sparkled at the centre of the oval drive.

‘Here we are,’ trilled Sadie. ‘Home!’

I lost track of her as her luggage, trunks which had the polish and substance of coffins, was lifted from the carriage and borne up the steps. Not that it mattered. The guildsmen and women who served here were used to receiving guests.
This way, Master …
Light though it was, my case was carried for me, and I was asked twice if I had any others.
And do mind the step …
I was ushered across a huge hall and up stairways and along corridors. There were flowers everywhere, giant blooms in vases and growing in pots and billowing across the walls in plaster and tapestry. There were refreshments on trays. Today truly was the start of something grand at Walcote House.

I was left in a sunlit room filled with the scent of new-laundered towels and sheets; my own personal suite. Sipping the fizzy wine which I discovered on my dresser, I prepared myself a bath. Easing myself into the scented water, I could feel years dissolving as easily as the fragrant salts which fizzed around my flesh. I was older, it was true. There was a dark flat chevron of hair now on my chest, and a white scar on my left arm where I had been slashed in a territorial brawl with the sellers of the
Socialist Nation.
But as I gazed at the stained-glass diamonds which poured through the steam from the window, I was back in that London hotel, with Sadie and with Annalise, preparing for the dancing which would soon begin on the pier …

Wrapped in towels, I opened windows to let out the steam. I was at the opposite side of Walcote House to the frontage, and several stories up. The gardens fanned in shaded avenues of metallic-shaded perilinden trees along which many figures were strolling. I flopped my case onto my four-poster bed. It looked far smaller and cheaper now than when I had bought it at a hardware shop. My father had had such a thing, I remembered now, which he kept for his rare trips to the Toolmakers’ Academy in York. The scent of London inside it hung in the air for a moment until it was threaded away by coloured breezes. I’d packed a new jacket, plain black after my experience of the shiftend before, along with my two best pairs of trousers, three shirts, several collars of various styles and a re-heeled pair of shoes. Now, it didn’t seem like much. On that near and distant Midsummer, Annalise had found me fresh clothes of the finest styling. Had I been expecting that, too, just as I was expecting her?

Dressed in my best trousers and new jacket, I set out to explore Walcote House. This clearly wasn’t a hotel. Nothing was properly marked or numbered, although there were clues I began to notice. Every segment of corridor had its own colour scheme. Pale blue, green, many shades of red and pink. Everything matched. Even the flowers and the fruit laid in bowls. But the main public rooms, the vast hall through which I had entered, even my bedroom, remained elusive. I was lost in that particularly infuriating way which involves passing the same places time and again. There was a painting of a classical-seeming landscape which I grew to hate. Back in the Easterlies, I’d have easily re-found my way from glimpsed spires, the different stenches and changing customs of the street …

Finally, when I was certain that I was heading in a completely pointless direction, I found myself walking along a carpet which was so thick as to retain the footprints of someone with the same stride and shoe-size as me who had passed lately. I made a fresh impression beside them; it was the same. Following my footprints like a child through snow, I came to a door which looked promisingly like mine. I was about try it when Sadie came bustling around the turn in the corridor bearing an expression which changed a little too rapidly when she saw me.

‘Master
Robert!
I’m glad they’ve found you a nice room.’ Her hair was pinned up in silver combs. Her face was differently made.

‘I think this room is mine. But how do you tell?’

She chuckled. ‘Oh, I’m sure it is. Every door on this wing is made from the wood of a different tree. It used to be a passion of one of the past greatgrandmasters.’ She laid her hand on the swirling surface, more like marble than grain. ‘I think this one grows in Thule.’ Then she said something, a sound like which, odd though it was from her lips, I recognised as a simple guildsman’s chant. Although she hadn’t touched it, the brass handle turned, the door swung open.

‘You
did that?’

‘I’m absolutely full of useless knowledge.’ Sadie was ahead of me into my room. ‘It’s the
useful
stuff you’ll have to go elsewhere for.’ From a pocket near her waist she produced a steel case and a lighter. She wafted the smoke towards the windows like someone shooing birds. ‘I’ve been
dying
for a fag. It’s something Daddy’s dead against. Says it’s unladylike and ugly …’

She offered me one. Smiling it away, closing my cardboard case and moving it from sight, I sat down on the edge of my bed and studied Sadie as she bustled around the room. I wondered if they really always lived like this—these rich, high-guilded people; clouded in restless smoke, sunlight, mystery. This place, I had to remind myself, was the very heart of all that was wrong with England. This strawberry wallpaper, that marquetry cabinet. All useless extravagance, laboured over by the masses.

‘So—who exactly owns this place?’

‘Owns?’
She caught her cigarette in the corner of her mouth as she turned to look at me and the powder around her eyes flaked in a sudden harshness of the light. After all, I thought, we are simply human. And there was something about Grandmistress Sarah Passington, some knowledge and sadness, which I didn’t understand. Surely, I thought, these people owed it to the millions they exploited to at least be happy. She ground out her cigarette in the pot-pourri. ‘I’ve never really thought of people actually
owning
Walcote.’ She waved away the smoke and thought for a moment, her head bowed. ‘There
has
to be
someone,
doesn’t there? And I suppose you might say that that someone is Daddy, seeing as Walcote is entailed through the Guild of Telegraphers.’

‘Doesn’t that mean that your father’s—’

‘—he’s the greatgrandmaster.’ Sadie flashed another of those looks of hers; full of meanings and contradictions. ‘He’s in charge of the entire guild. Or thinks he is.’

Silence fell between us.

‘We used to have marvellous games of hide-and-seek here,’ Sadie said eventually. ‘Although there’s a sad story of a lad a generation or so ago. They only found him years later, mummified like an old apple in some cupboard. That’s servants for you … But everyone’s
so changed
now. The children I was with, they’re all grown up.’

‘Does Anna Winters come here much?’

‘Not back in the hide-and-seek days. Although, later …’ A puzzled look crossed Sadie’s face. ‘I can almost see her wandering these corridors in tinkly old sandals.’ She shook her head. ‘But Anna was probably never like that. Somebody so poised and elegant. Do tell me, Robbie. What was she
really
like back then?’

‘I think we notice things differently when we’re children.’

‘Hmmm. And that old house by the waterfall. Her poor dead parents. That dreadful aunt.’ Sadie picked up a silver-backed hairbrush which lay on the gleaming dressing table. ‘I remember the first day when Anna came to school at St Jude’s as if out of nowhere. There’s always one in every year. Someone with whom you know you can’t possibly compete. No matter what you wear, no matter what you do or who you are, there’s always … Anna. And she took me as her friend. That was the marvellous thing. Anna chose me as her friend even though I’m clumsy, wealthy Sadie Passington, halfway good at many things but never particularly good at any of them, trailing this whole bloody guild and all these houses around behind me like a huge lead weight … Every night, she let me brush her hair.’ Still carrying the silver-backed brush, Sadie went to the window. ‘When Anna’s around, everything’s always brighter, darker, different … Oh,
you
must have your stories about her too, Robbie … Do have a cigarette ..

I took one from her case. It tasted like the feathers of some perfumed bird. And I did have my stories; the memories of Anna Winters were waiting as if they had always been there. The mint smell of decay and bluebells in the sloping woods of that old aunt’s garden. Me, and Anna Winters. Anna Winters, and me. The two of us exploring the wet-leafed valley and the game we played of racing sticks under a bridge, urging them on until the gong called us back for lunch in that sere house beside the waterfall …

Sadie sat down on the bed beside me, rocking its springs. This, I thought, as Sadie leaned against me, the light from her necklace shuddering sparks with each heartbeat, is a better vision of the past than the truth of Redhouse and Bracebridge and that dreadful accident. I decided Mistress Summerton was right; I’d judged Anna too harshly.

Sadie showed me Walcote House. From the east wing, through state rooms far bigger than the inside of Great Aldgate Station to narrow stairways which contained the inner workings of this great palace, which was at least as complex as the largest factory. Then a balcony which looked down into the steaming crater of the main kitchens. Whole farms serviced Walcote House, set downwind at the edges of the estate, hidden from view by hills which had been raised for that purpose. There was even an underground system of rails. There were telegraphs and tunnels, and honeycomb ducts to provide a clean flow of whatever temperature of air the climate outside was failing to provide. And yet all the while, as she showed me this and this and
this,
Sadie kept pressing me for stories of my life. It made an odd counterpoint.