House of Bells Page 13

  This was that sucking solid emptiness she’d seen between the trees, come for her again.

  Waiting for her, perhaps, only that she couldn’t move.

  That was odd, maybe: to be saved by her own terror, if anything could save her. It didn’t seem to be coming any closer. Settling, maybe, like a little boy sitting in the dark to watch his mother while she slept. If she lay here long enough, still enough, perhaps it would go away, like a little boy disappointed.

  She held her breath, not like a mother at all: like a little girl, trying desperately not to be noticed. It was like being underwater again, sinking, helpless. Her wrist ached fiercely, her muscles cramped with the effort of not moving, and she found herself listening for the sound of bells—

  —and almost thought she caught it, that deep-sunk distant tolling, rising from the lake. Her hand spasmed beneath the blankets, and the shadow perhaps drifted closer.

  She didn’t think she’d ever really been bad at heart, not to say evil. Only out of her depth all her life and struggling, snatching for something to hold on to, perhaps not caring too much who she hurt in the process, or how badly. Perhaps not caring enough.

  She might have liked a little boy, she thought. Something to hold on to. She might have made a terrible mother, but she would have liked the chance to try.

  Too late now. You never, ever got the chance to go back and try again.

  What she had was what she’d given herself, what she’d made: a terrible hollow at the heart, absence made flesh, brought here, set now between two beds.

  She probably deserved it. She’d surely never deserved better. What had she ever done that was worthwhile? Maybe she should be sitting up right now, holding her arms out, drawing this close. Making an end of it. Going with grace.

  Poor Georgie. Maybe they’d bury her here and never know, no one would ever know what happened to Grace Harley . . .

  Tony would know. She’d make him one more story, gift him another front page. He’d like that.

  She only needed to sit up. Let it happen. What did she have to lose?

  Only a life she hated every time she stopped to look at it, every time she dared. A life not worth living. It took so much and gave her back so little; it was dreary habit that kept her going. Habit and fear, perhaps. She was deathly afraid of this thing, this nothing at the foot of the bed. Fear was like a weight on her chest, holding her down, keeping her from that one swift move of welcome, of surrender, of . . .

  It wasn’t her who sat up, in the end. It was Kathie.

  There was a moan from the other bed, and then that sudden movement, the girl sitting bolt upright all in a rush. And it wasn’t fair – to either of them, perhaps: she might not have deserved it, but Grace did think she’d earned it, and she’d almost argued Georgie into reaching out for it – but this had happened all her life, that other people paid the price on her account.

  Swiftly now, too swift for interception, that woven, textured shadow went to Kathie.

  Then, safely too late, Georgie sat up and screamed.

  SEVEN

  I thought she was the lucky one.

  People did come, at last, too late, as ever. By then Georgie was on her feet: standing in the doorway, holding on to the open door, bellowing for help.

  She was holding on because standing up was actually quite hard; she was urgent for help to come because – well, because there was nothing she could do herself.

  Grace never had been any good at anything actually useful. Except the swimming, perhaps – and what use had that been, now that she’d actually used it?

  Right now, here and now, the girl she’d saved was doing worse than before, and she could do nothing for her. She had no gifts of healing, no training, no power to save. Here and now, all she had was a voice.

  Even that was weaker than she liked. She who had screamed delight across terraces, through whole sleeping country houses to be sure that every man in hearing would at least know that Grace was at it again, doing what she was known for, what she was invited for: she barely had the wind to rouse a corridor tonight. And even now she wasn’t sure; she harboured some treacherous little Tom-voice that whispered you’re dreaming, you’re delirious, you’re weak from loss of blood. Lake water and shock have poisoned your mind. You see monsters in the fire, remember? You hear bells underwater and think they cut your wrists. And what, you think you should wake the house because you think some horror vampire creature you spun from the dead baby you couldn’t bear is sucking the life out of this other girl instead of you . . .?

  Put like that – well, she didn’t have to put it like that, or like anything. She didn’t have to make sense, only noise.

  She screamed, she bellowed, and people came. Mary came, and the captain and Webb came together; and behind them more people, people she couldn’t name, she hadn’t met them yet.

  Something at least was obviously wrong, beyond this new girl shrieking blue murder in the corridor. Kathie was lying sprawled half across her pallet and half on the bare floor. Someone knocked the light on and she looked appalling, pale and gone, worse than she had in the ruddy firelight below when she was half burned and the other half drowned.

  Georgie hadn’t been wrong, then, to rouse people. Any more than Mary had been wrong to set a watch; any more than Tom had been right to abandon it. He was here too, running in, squeezing through: too late, and desperately guilty.

  It was what happened. Other people suffered, for her fault.

  Mary and the captain bent over Kathie, lifted her back into bed, tried to rouse her. Webb was awkward, uncertain, trying to help and only getting in the way: which was unfamiliar ground for him, emphasizing his uncertainty, making things worse. Eventually, Mary snapped at him; the captain spoke more solicitously.

  Webb grunted and came away. Came to her instead: blocking her view into the room, turning her around with irresistible hands on her shoulders, drawing her down the corridor.

  ‘Come on, you come with me. Poor Georgie, you are having a bad time of it, aren’t you, since you came to us . . .?’

  I was having a bad time before this. She didn’t say it. There wasn’t any need; he knew already. Why would she have come here, else? And the last thing she wanted was to start, even to start to explain how everything bad that happened here was all her own fault, it had to be, everything stemmed from her.

  She believed it, because it was true, but even so.

  Webb took her through a door she’d never have found by herself, hidden in the panelling; down a narrow stair to another floor, and along to another room.

  This was his room. She knew it the moment she walked in. Indeed, she knew it beforehand, just from the way he opened the door for her. There had been a hundred men or more – well, boys, a lot of them, but still – and a hundred rooms, and every one of them was different, a new occasion, but even so . . . They might be shy or anxious or embarrassed about showing her their room, they might be proud or excited, they might be utterly offhand; it didn’t matter. There was still that sense of a passport issued and a boundary crossed. It might be by invitation rather than invasion, she might be utterly and thrillingly welcome there, and even so. She was a female entering male territory, his. It was always an occasion.

  Even here, even in the middle of the night, in crisis. He opened the door for her; the light was already burning. She stepped inside.

  And stood looking for a moment, as she always did, just to see what she could learn. What his room had to say about him. It was often more revealing than what a man would say about himself.

  She used to use that information for herself, what little benefit – less and less, these days – she could scrape up. Mostly that used to mean money. It still did, she supposed, even here. Money’s not an issue, but of course it was for her, and she was doing a job of work for Tony. This was what she’d be paid for if she got it right. It was quite hard to remember that in all the dizzy strangeness of the place; she felt more like a supplicant than a spy, when she didn’t
feel like a victim or a heroine, both.

  And when she thought about making Tony happy, it wasn’t about the money, much.

  Right now she wasn’t thinking about Tony much at all. Webb’s room, and Webb himself standing right behind her, above her, as he drew the door closed at their backs; and there was his bed under the window, a mattress on the floor like her own, with the covers thrown back as he must have scrambled out of it, some of yesterday’s clothes still scattered where he hadn’t scrambled into them. He was wearing jeans and nothing, bare-chested and barefoot with his hair caught back in a ponytail for the night, and she said, ‘I thought you weren’t supposed to sleep alone?’

  He looked down at her and laughed and said, ‘You know, most girls would blush when they said that. Or a second later, more likely, when they realized what they’d said.’

  ‘I . . . don’t blush much.’ But that was Grace, not Georgie talking. It was wrong; of course Georgie was a blusher. Nice English girl in trouble, of course she was. But she couldn’t fake that, and she couldn’t make it true: only hang her head and hope he’d hear it as a lie and take the blush itself for granted.

  She wasn’t sure that Webb took much for granted. He was too careful.

  Still: he laid a hand flat against her shoulder and steered her towards the bed, while she felt curiously grateful for the worn cotton grandad shirt she seemed to be wearing for a nightie, which was certainly not her own and she couldn’t quite remember putting on. Mostly, she didn’t bother with nightwear. She liked to be a little shocking, and she didn’t really see the point of clothes in bed. They only got in the way. She liked to feel a man’s bare skin against her own; it told her things, the same way that his room did. Different things from what he said himself.

  ‘It’s true,’ Webb said, ‘we’re really not supposed to have our private spaces – but this is where I work, it’s not a bedroom. Sometimes the work gets on top of me, though, there’s so much to do I can barely take a break; and then it makes sense to have a bed in here that I can crash on for a few hours. Leonard doesn’t mind, so long as I don’t treat it like a privilege. It’s a tool, is all. This is how I contribute best to the family.’

  And, what, you don’t ever share it with anybody else, this tool, this room with a bed and a door and a key in the lock?

  Not that he’d need to, of course. If they wanted to shag, he and Kathie, there were rooms for that. But this was inescapably his own room. Everything here said so: his things on the floor; his papers on the desk; his maps and plans and pictures on the wall.

  She wanted to look at those more closely, but she’d rather he wasn’t watching while she snooped.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I thought you were taking me somewhere I could sleep . . .?’

  ‘I am,’ he said. ‘I have. You can. Oh, not with me, don’t look so wide-eyed awkward.’ He was laughing down at her from only inches, almost an open invitation whatever his words were saying. ‘I’m not about to seduce a girl on a night like this, when she’s been through so much already. Besides, Kathie’s my girl. Didn’t you know? But if you’re not too fussy about the sheets, you can use my bed for the rest of the night. I won’t be needing it any more.’ Whatever had happened to Kathie, he meant to be right there at her side.

  I’m sorry my nightmare came and ate her instead of me. I’m sorry . . .

  She should let him go, then, pronto. Then she’d be free to nose among his things. Only she started shaking, a little, when she only thought about that scene upstairs: the girl fallen back into unconsciousness, fallen half out of bed and utterly into the dark. Her own personal dark, the emptiness of Grace. She really didn’t want to be left alone with that guilt, but she had no way to say so; only, ‘Wouldn’t you be better here, just for a bit? If this is where you work? It’d settle you down, at least . . .’ Sit at the desk there, do whatever it is you do, I’d find that comforting. I could sleep, I think, maybe, if there was just another presence in the room. No doors, no walls between them. She had more sympathy with Leonard than she knew; she almost asked to go up to a dormitory, to sleep in with everyone else, as everyone else was doing.

  She didn’t want to be picked out, set apart. That was the last thing.

  She couldn’t ever have what she actually wanted. That was the first thing, the rule of her life.

  He said, ‘My work is everywhere, love. Wherever I am, there’s work for me. This is where I come when everything else will let me, it’s my refuge; but I’ll watch over Kathie the rest of this night. You can sleep easy, undisturbed. That’s why I want to put you here, because no one’s going to come in looking for either one of us. There aren’t many safe spaces in the house; this is one of the few. When that door’s shut, people steer clear. So go on, get your head down. I’m going to sit right here –’ turning the desk chair around to face her and doing just that, emphatically, just the thing she wanted – ‘and watch until you’re asleep, the way I should have been watching over you upstairs. Whatever’s happened, I ought to have been there, and I’m sorry I wasn’t. I don’t know what happened to Tom; he said he’d sit in for me but obviously he didn’t.’ A distracted frown promised trouble for Tom.

  She was curious herself, what had taken him away, but she didn’t want to see him disciplined. Whatever they had in the way of discipline, these people . . .

  She said, ‘He was there, I remember, I spoke to him – only I fell asleep, and then he wasn’t . . .’ It wasn’t much of a defence, but defence never worked anyway. The prosecution always won; that was how the system worked. How it looked after itself.

  He said, ‘Well. I’ll ask. I’d like to know. But it doesn’t matter now. I don’t suppose he could have done anything anyway, except fetch help and save you having to scream your head off. Bed now, you. You look dreadful, all eyes. Like piss-holes in the snow.’

  ‘Oh, thanks . . .’ That was automatic; so was the face she made, little-girl rudeness, sticking her tongue out at him. It was the kind of thing her old men enjoyed, Kensington suits puffing cigars and dressing her up in baby-doll outfits, expecting her to behave to suit. She was too tired and shaken to be right tonight, to be Georgie.

  She didn’t think he’d noticed. He just smiled, a little, and sat waiting, the epitome of patience. After a minute, she slithered obediently into his bed.

  Her body seemed to fit naturally into the dent he’d left. It was still warm, and it smelled pleasantly of male occupation. She pulled his blankets in under her chin and blinked up at him.

  ‘Close your eyes,’ he said.

  She might have been mulish and refused. She might have been foolish, little-girl stubborn, demanding stories; she might have been all Grace, trying to lure him in with her: ‘Just for a while, just for company.’ But she seemed to have rediscovered Georgie; or else she was just glad to give over control for a while, to do as she was told for once; or else she was just too tired to do anything else.

  She closed her eyes and didn’t hear it when he left the room. Her body had remembered just how much it favoured lying still and warm and silent; her conscious mind had left the room already.

  True to Webb’s word, no one came to wake her before the sun did, striking down through a gap between closed shutters, sliding over her face like a hot slow feather.

  She opened her eyes on a sneeze, closed them indignantly, couldn’t recapture either the dream or the sleep that she had lost both together. Accepted reluctantly that she was awake, then, and took a moment to work out where.

  Only a moment: too much had happened, too quickly. She felt already as though she’d been here too long. A sensible girl would be packing already, heading out. Heading home.

  But Tony would be unhappy, and none of her questions would be answered let alone his, and – well, Grace had never been a sensible girl. It was a point of honour, almost.

  And she was alone, in what might or might not be Webb’s bedroom but was most certainly his office; and sooner or later he was going to come and check on her, so he
r best chance for snooping was right now.

  Out of bed, then, and straight over to that desk. Webb had a scarily organized mind; she could tell that just by looking. Box files, folders, a Rolodex – a hippy with a Rolodex! – and ledgers. Accounting ledgers, and a daily diary, and what seemed to be copies of every letter he sent out in response to the letters he’d received, and . . .

  Really, it was easier to look at the wall. And more interesting, unless that only meant less scary. She could look at the wall and not have to think, not have to play detective: though it was still clearly important and probably did still need thinking about. Here was a map of the world, and here all around it and overlying the edges of it were postcards pinned up, and a thread of one colour or another ran from each postcard to a point on the map, where it was twined around a drawing pin. Presumably the pins marked the place the card had come from. It was all very sweet and a little bit obsessive and very male, she thought, boy all through. Only, it seemed too young for Webb, the sort of decoration she’d expect in her twelve-year-old cousin’s bedroom, if he had pen pals across the world. It wasn’t unlikely; the last she heard, he was collecting stamps. But that had been a while ago. Maybe he would have moved on; maybe he was collecting rock and roll albums by now, with girls on the side. Maybe he wasn’t even twelve any more, he might be older. She hadn’t really been paying attention, this last year or two. But then, she’d had no cause to. His mother had made it perfectly clear, publicly clear that Grace was not to see her precious boy again, not corrupt him with gifts, not taint his pure innocence with words or kisses from her sullied mouth.

  It hurt, but she could live with it. Everything hurt, and here she was, still alive. Despite her best efforts.

  Maybe the house would help out there. Webb had saved her, last night, maybe; but Webb wouldn’t always be around.

  Perhaps he wouldn’t always be willing. If he ever understood what she was here for, who had sent her, who she really was – perhaps next time he’d leave her to sink.