The Light Ages (38 page)

It really was the most extraordinary day. The sun was invisible, but the sky was white, ablaze, and sparkling drifts of sand pecked at my face as Saul and I carried the crate which contained our portion of the Twelve Demands back towards the relative safety of Black Lucy’s basement. At the corner of Sheep Street, a dislodged door came bouncing down the road. When we dropped the crate to avoid it, several hundred sheets snowstormed into the air. We stood there laughing to watch them fly over the rooftops into the white skies, wiping the tears and grit from our faces.

Back at the tenement, we agreed that Maud, with her sore belly and bad ankles, should stay back in Ashington tomorrow and take care of Black Lucy. Then I set off alone to explore what I fully believed would be the last day of this Age. There was already a holiday air about the Easterlies on this Midsummer Eve. Roads, in preparation for tomorrow’s street parties, were being argumentatively closed. Pub signs flapped. Children skipped and sang in the glittering wind. Down at the ferryport, none of the usual crossings were running, but a citizen, his breath reeking of spirits, was happy to lend me his small boat. We dragged it across the dried mud. I dipped my oars and pushed off, and gave him a cheery wave. When I’d finally fought against the surprisingly strong current and the pressure of the wind and hauled the boat up the far dry bank, World’s End still seemed to be receding. I wiped my face, I dusted myself down, and a layer of sparkling powder almost instantly re-adhered to me. The tops of the hills of engine ice plumed. Everything was glittering, mirror-coated, changed as the hot wind picked up the crests of these white dunes and flung them across London.

The great hall of the exhibition was invisible today as anything but a pale skeleton and the wild gardens were ransacked by the wind. Struggling on, battered by trellises strung with swinging, clanging, sharp-edged tin cans, I finally reached canes and cloches and beds of biliously bright flowers. A thin black line of smoke stretched at right angles from the chimney of Mistress Summerton’s toy house, but there was no response when I banged on the door with its fading, fluttering notice. I tried the handle and the wind almost pushed me inside where the smell of pipe tobacco hung in the air, and that earthy aroma of potting sheds which I would always associate with her. Ducking, peering, calling out her name, I was amused to find a broomstick propped in the room’s far corner. I gave it a few experimental waves, although it had plainly only been used for simple domestic purposes. Beyond the main room there was a small inside privy and up the stairs, where the gables narrowed, was her bedroom. It was austere. I’d expected—I don’t know what I’d expected—but the eyelet window seemed to take out more light than it gave from the howling storm and the bed was brown as a forest shadow. Pillows made from stuffed sacks. The deep scent of leaves. Did she really sleep up here? Did she
ever
sleep? And here was that long leather coat which she often wore, hanging in the near-dark like a discarded skin as the fire spat and leapt. And there were those glasses, set down on an old orange box at the bedside. Perhaps she really did need them to read…

‘Come looking, have you?’

I spun around. ‘I was just—’

‘I can see what you were
just
doing.’ Mistress Summerton stood there.

‘I’m sorry.’ The little room seemed to whirl around me. ‘I should have waited outside.’

‘In this weather? I do understand—who wouldn’t be curious? But I sometimes get lads, unwanted visitors—’ She made a gesture. ‘As you can probably imagine, they trouble me ..

I followed her back down the stairs. She began pumping up the stove, then warming the water in the kettle.

‘You know what’s happening tomorrow?’

She gave a dry chuckle and stirred the pot. ‘Of course. It’s Midsummer.’ She looked far older than I remembered as she gave me the steaming toy cup and saucer. Still hatless, her skull was visible beneath her wispy grey hair and her skin was stretched and gaunt; a withered skeleton. I sipped the scalding liquid as she watched me with her strange bright eyes. The wind boomed. My wicker chair creaked.

‘The thing is,’ I said, ‘there’s much talk that this whole Age will end tomorrow. Not because the guilds will it, but because the people do. And you know how it all began here with this exhibition. So what I was thinking, what I’m saying is, that things might happen here tomorrow, and it might not be entirely safe for you to stay.’

‘Entirely
safe, eh? I don’t think my life’s ever been that .. ‘But you know what I mean.’

‘I’m not going anywhere tomorrow,’ she sniffed. ‘There’ll be a lot of my plants to rescue once this weather has settled, apart from anything else. One of my cold frames has already blown clean away.’ Outside, the wind gave an extra-loud howl. Despite the heat, the vision through her window was white and wintry. ‘So I think I’ll stay here, if you don’t mind, Robert, changing Age or no changing Age.’ Her laugh was like snapping branches. ‘But, yes. I suppose I do know what you mean, and I’m touched that you thought of me when there are so many other things you could be doing.’ She stood up, finding her pipe and sucking on the dead dottle. ‘But I too have to work. I have to sell my precious blooms. Why otherwise, do you think the Gatherers’ Guild permits me to live even here, in this abandoned place? You have no idea, for example, just how much it costs me to keep Annalise or Anna whatever she now calls herself in the manner in which she’s become accustomed. Although I suppose that you probably
do
have an idea by now, seeing as you’ve been hanging around in the same kind of company …’ She banged a few tins in search of tobacco. ‘I used to have savings, you know. But not any longer. They’ve all vanished even without my spending them. I don’t know what’s happened to money ..

When my tea was finished I followed her outside into her gardens. She was in a mood I’d never seen her in before.

‘Look at this place.’ The combed beds were flattened, madly waving. ‘All my work. All my efforts …’

‘It’s still beautiful.’

‘You’re going to tell me next I should be proud.’

‘Aren’t you?’

‘It isn’t
mine
to be proud of, is it?’ She was still bare-headed and wearing a sacking apron which snickered about her. ‘Nothing is.’

‘Have you met Anna’s friend, Highermaster George Swalecliffe?’

‘How could Anna share me with someone with a name like that? Still, I suppose he might just think I was that dreadful supposed aunt of hers, if
she
wasn’t supposed to be dead already.’

‘George’s a kind and decent man. He’s not like the rest of them.’

‘And Anna is?’

I shook my head. Her eyes were rheumy, brown as a dog’s, I thought—or tried not. ‘Anna’s unique. And George sees something of that in her. And he, too, sees the need for change. He has a deep sympathy for the downtrodden …’

Another bitter laugh. ‘Well, perhaps he
should
come and meet me.’

We came to an avenue of roses. The bushes bowed and scratched in the moaning wind. ‘All this talk of change,’ she said, ‘and what difference would any of it make to me?’ From one of her pockets, she produced what looked to be the same pair of secateurs which she’d been carrying when she opened the door at Redhouse to my mother. I watched as she grasped the swaying branches and began to snip—this alien creature with hands like twigs, her clothes whipping and smoking about her to reveal a blurring glint of that cross and C on her tiny chest.

‘You should forget about me, Robert, no matter what happens tomorrow. And you should try to let go of Anna, too, or whatever it is of her that you’re holding on to. She could have been many things—she could perhaps have even been the creature of wonder that you wish for and which I’m so plainly not. But she isn’t.’

Briefly, the wind died. In a sudden, ragged flash of sunlight, the river, London, the great falling structure of World’s End, the white hills, swarmed into view.

‘Look at this place …’ She gestured with her secateurs. ‘You can see who this world belongs to, and it’s certainly not my kind, revolution or no revolution. In that house in Oxford, when I was young and I knew no better, I used to dream that there were many others just like me waiting in the world beyond. Like me—but infinitely more powerful. One day, tomorrow, I was sure, the gates would swing open, and I would tumble out, and the world would be more of everything than I had ever imagined. The trees, the very clouds, would shape themselves to the winds of my favour.’

And people would bow down before me—I believed that, too, even as I raved and gnawed …

‘But all I’ve ever seen of my supposed kind is creatures like poor Mister Snaith who cavort and dress up for you humans like tame apes, and the sad monstrosities in places like St Blate’s who don’t even know their own names. Still, I suppose we all need our stories …’ A click of secateurs. ‘Have this.’ She gave me a rose; it was deep red, velvet-petalled. ‘And promise me you’ll be careful tomorrow ..

I wished her goodbye and pinned the flower in my buttonhole. The wind shrieked through the empty panes of World’s End, driving my little boat back towards the north bank. The Thames was skinned with the same sparkling dust of engine ice which twirled over the rooftops and threw incredible shadows like coloured rugs and turned the people into strange harlequins. I caught my breath on the viaduct over Stepney Sidings. The tracks and yards below were silent and empty; it might have already been Midsummer Day. I thought of the time when I had stood on a much smaller bridge, gauging the moment when I might leap. And here I was now, on the eve of the change which I had spent much of my adult life working towards, and still thinking about jumping onto the backs of trains.

Then the wind shrilled and the long grey-black furnace of a big express bellowed beneath me, its wagons clattering point over point into the sidings. They were smart, blue-liveried. When the doors were slid back and ramps put out a whinnying herd of horses, huge, black, and almost as beautiful as Sadie’s unicorns, emerged. It seemed like a day for strange sights.

The fountains in Westminster Great Park clattered in wet rainbows across the paving. The perilinden trees tossed their leaves. The revolving doors of the foyers of the big hotels spun emptily. The buildings grew somewhat smaller when I reached Kingsmeet at the edge of the Westerlies, although they still remained grand. Only the numbered bellpulls and the slight wildness of their front gardens betrayed the fact that these apartments were distant relatives of Easterlies tenements. But social distinctions, I knew, were stacked as tightly here as they were anywhere in England. Here-along streets where the windows gave glimpses of rooms filled with too much furniture, or too little-lived the not-quite wealthy, those who were on the rise, or on the fall. The nearly-rich of Kingsmeet clung to Northcentral’s coattails and sometimes even visited its mansions, arriving in hired carriages at least as grand as those their hosts owned, and returning home later on foot, for the sake of economy. Here, too, in top rooms amid unfortunate confluences of plumbing, lived the artists and intellectuals who had enlivened many a greatguildmistress’s afternoon salon. Here, in a small bed-sitting-room on Stoneleigh Road, and at a rent which would have bought you half of Thripp Tenements for a year, lived Anna Winters, guildmistress of no particular guild. And nearby, around the corner and past a bicycle shop, also lived Highermaster George Swalecliffe.

I gazed up at the pebbledash frontage and the third-floor window of Anna’s room. I’d come this far before, but today was a time to move on—a time for change. Still, I had no idea what I would do, what I would say to her, as I pulled open the green wooden gate and tugged at the bellpull beside her name. One of the front door’s loose blue panes rattled in the grainy wind. Then the door drew back and a neighbour peered at me. She had a once-expensive shawl draped around her neck, slippers with holes in their toes.

‘You’re not that guildsman … ?’

‘What guildsman?’

‘Oh …’ She waved it away. ‘Just someone or other who’s been asking after Anna. She’s not in, anyway. You could try the institute around the corner, I suppose ..

The institute was a cheap extension to an ugly church. Posters for cancelled amateur recitals and whist drives flapped on the front notice board and it was stiflingly hot and dark inside. For while I could scarcely see, but I finally discerned that placards were being hammered and painted. And George was everywhere, encouraging and supervising an odd mixture of guild widows, retired highermasters, their sibilant-voiced daughters and sons. He gave me a delighted near-hug when he saw me and instantly set me about sanding the splintered edges from a stack of plywood squares. I gazed about me through the busy gloom, searching for Anna. I still didn’t know whether to feel encouraged or dispirited to think that these people, who raised their little fingers when they drank tea even when it came from chipped enamel mugs, should also want England to change. What New Age could we possibly share? George’s vision of hand-dyed fabrics, well-made dressers, folk dances on the village green? But there she was, in a corner by the rudimentary stage, working at stitching together the strips of the coloured banner which flowed across her lap. Even in this dowdy place, with the doors banging in the wind and people tripping over each other in their hurry to seem busy, a different light fell on her from the wire-threaded window at her back. Remote, cool, heraldic. The needle dipped and rose. The thread gleamed, and it and her hair were the same colour as the gold in the cloth. My heart ached pleasurably as I smoothed the rough wood. I could have stayed doing this charmingly pointless task, and watching her, for a whole Age. This, I thought, is the real Anna Winters. She’s the face you glimpse on a rushing train. She’s the voice you hear from a room next door but never meet. She’s all of those mysterious things, yet even when you stand close by her, or gaze from beside the rattling dustbins at the window of her room, the mystery remains.

She looked over, pulled an exasperated face, then beckoned me over.

‘Will you help me with this, Robbie?’