Weaveworld

VII

THE TALL-BOY

1

ight hours before Mimi’s death in the hospital, Suzanna had returned to the house in Rue Street. Evening was falling, and the building, pierced from front to back with shafts of amber light, was almost redeemed from its dreariness. But the glory didn’t last for long, and when the sun took itself off to another hemisphere she was obliged to light the candles, many of which remained on the sills and the shelves, set in the graves of their predecessors. The illumination they offered was stronger than she’d expected, and more glamorous. She moved from room to room accompanied everywhere by the scent of melting wax, and could almost imagine Mimi might have been happy here, in this cocoon.

Of the design which her grandmother had shown her, she could find no sign. It was not in the grain of the floorboards, nor in the pattern of the wallpaper. Whatever it had been, it was gone now. She didn’t look forward to the melancholy task of breaking that news to the old lady.

What she did find, however, all but concealed behind the stack of furniture at the top of the stairs, was the tall-boy. It took a little time to remove the items piled in front of it, but there was a revelation waiting when she finally set the candle on the floor before it, and opened the doors.

The vultures who’d picked the household clean had forgotten to rifle the contents of the tall-boy. Mimi’s clothes still hung on the rails, coats and furs and ball-gowns, all, most likely, unworn since last Suzanna had opened this treasure trove. Which thought reminded her of what she’d sought on that occasion She went down on her haunches, telling herself that it was folly to think her gift would still be there, and yet knowing indisputably that it was.

She was not disappointed. There, amongst the shoes and tissue, she found a package wrapped in plain brown paper and marked with her name. The gift had been postponed, but not lost.

Her hands had begun to tremble. The knot in the faded ribbon defied her for half a minute, and then came free. She pulled the paper off.

Inside: a book. Not new, to judge by its scuffed corners, but finely bound in leather. She opened it. To her surprise, she found it was in German. Geschichten der Geheimen Orte the title read, which she hesitatingly translated as Stories of the Secret Maces. But even if she hadn’t had a smattering of the language, the illustrations would have given the subject away: it was a book of faery-tales.

She sat down at the top of the stairs, candle at her side, and began to study the volume more closely. The stories were familiar, of course: she’d encountered them, in one form or another, a hundred times. She’d seen them re-interpreted as Hollywood cartoons, as erotic fables, as the subject of learned theses and feminist critiques. But their bewitchment remained undiluted by commerce or academe. Sitting there, the child in her wanted to hear these stories told again, though she knew every twist and turn, and had the end in mind before the first line was spoken. That didn’t matter, of course. Indeed their inevitability was part of their power. Some tales could never be told too often.

Experience had taught her much: and most of the news was bad. But these stories taught different lessons. That sleep resembled death, for instance, was no revelation; but that death might with kisses be healed into mere sleep … that was knowledge of a different order. Mere wish-fulfilment, she chided herself. Real life had no miracles to offer. The devouring beast, if cut open, did not disgorge its victims unharmed. Peasants were not raised overnight to princedom, nor was evil ever vanquished by a union of true hearts. They were the kind of illusions that the pragmatist she’d striven so hard to be had kept at bay.

Yet the stories moved her. She couldn’t deny it. And they moved her in a way only true things could. It wasn’t sentiment that brought tears to her eyes. The stories weren’t sentimental. They were tough, even cruel. No, what made her weep was being reminded of an inner life she’d been so familiar with as a child; a life that was both an escape from, and a revenge upon, the pains and frustrations of childhood; a life that was neither mawkish nor unknowing; a life of mind-places – haunted, soaring – that she’d chosen to forget when she’d took up the cause of adulthood.

More than that; in this reunion with the tales that had given her a mythology, she found images that might help her fathom her present confusion.

The outlandishness of the story she’d entered, coming back to Liverpool, had thrown her assumptions into chaos. But here, in the pages of the book, she found a state of being in which nothing was fixed: where magic ruled, bringing transformations and miracles. She’d walked there once, and far from feeling lost, could have passed for one of its inhabitants. If she could recapture that insolent indifference to reason, and let it lead her through the maze ahead, she might comprehend the forces she knew were waiting to be unleashed around her.

It would be painful to relinquish her pragmatism, however: it had kept her from sinking so often. In the face of waste and sorrow she’d held on by staying cool; rational. Even when her parents had died, separated by some unspoken betrayal which kept them, even at the last, from comforting each other, she’d coped; simply by immersing herself in practicalities until the worst was over.

Now the book beckoned, with its chimeras and its sorceries; all ambiguity; all flux; and her pragmatism would be worthless. No matter. Whatever the years had taught her about loss, and compromise, and defeat she was here invited back into a forest in which maidens tamed dragons; and one of those maidens still had her face.

Having scanned three or four of the stories, she turned to the front of the book, in search of an inscription. It was brief.

‘To Suzanna.’ it read. ‘Love from M.L.’

It shared the page with an odd epigram:

Das, was man sick vorstellt, braucht man nie zu verlieren.

She struggled with this, suspecting that her rusty German might be missing the felicities. The closest approximation she could make was:

That which is imagined need never be lost.

With this oblique wisdom in mind, she returned to the stories, lingering over the illustrations, which had the severity of woodcuts but on closer inspection concealed all manner of subtleties. Fish with human faces gazed up from beneath the pristine surface of a pool; two strangers at a banquet exchanged whispers that had taken solid form in the air above their heads; in the heart of a wild wood figures all but hidden amongst the trees showed pale, expectant faces.

The hours came and went, and when, having been through the book from cover to cover, she briefly closed her eyes to rest them, sleep overcame her.

When she woke she found her watch had stopped a little after two. The wick at her side flickered in a pool of wax, close to drowning. She got to her feet, limping around the landing until the pins and needles had left her foot, and then went into the back bedroom in search of a fresh candle.

There was one on the window ledge. As she picked it up, her eye caught a movement in the yard below. Her heart jumped; but she stood absolutely still so as not to draw attention to herself, and watched. The figure was in shadow, and it wasn’t until he forsook the corner of the yard that the starlight showed her the young man she’d seen here the day before.

She started downstairs, picking up a fresh flame on the way. She wanted to speak to the man; wanted to quiz him on the reasons for his flight, and the identity of his pursuers.

As she stepped out into the yard he rose from his hiding place and made a dash for the back gate.

‘Wait!’ she called after him. ‘It’s Suzanna.’

The name could mean little to him, but he halted nevertheless.

‘Who?’ he said.

‘I saw you yesterday. You were running –’

The girl in the hall, Cal realized. The one who’d come between him and the Salesman.

‘What happened to you?’ she said.

He looked terrible. His clothes were ripped, his face dirtied; and, though she couldn’t be sure, bloodied too.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, his voice scraping gravel. ‘I don’t know anything any longer.’

‘Why don’t you come inside?’

He didn’t move.

‘How long have you been here?’ he said.

‘Hours.’

‘And the house is empty?’

‘Except for me, yes.’

With this ascertained, he followed her through the back door. She lit several more candles. The light confirmed her suspicions. There was blood on him; and a cess-pit smell.

‘Is there any running water?’ he said.

‘I don’t know; we can try.’

They were in luck; the Water Board had not turned off the supply. The kitchen tap rattled and the pipes roared but finally a stream of icy water was spat forth. Cal slung off his jacket and doused his face and arms.

‘I’ll see if I can find a towel,’ said Suzanna. ‘What’s your name, by the way?’

‘Cal.’

She left him to his ablutions. With her gone he stripped off his shirt and sluiced down his chest, neck and back with chilly water. She was back before he was done, with a pillow-slip.

‘Nearest thing I can find to a towel,’ she said.

She had set two chairs in the lower front room, and lit several candles there. They sat together, and talked.

‘Why did you come back?’ she wanted to know. ‘After yesterday.’

‘I saw something here.’ he said, cautiously. ‘And you? Why are you here?’

‘This is my grandmother’s house. She’s in hospital. Dying. I came back to look around.’

‘The two I saw yesterday,’ Cal said. ‘Were they friends of your grandmother’s?’

‘I doubt it. What did they want with you?’

Here Cal knew he got into sticky ground. How could he begin to tell her what joys and fears the last few days had brought?

‘It’s difficult …’ he said. ‘I mean, I’m not sure anything that’s happened to me recently makes much sense.’

‘That makes two of us,’ she replied.

He was looking at his hands, like a palmist in search of a future. She studied him; his torso was covered in scratches, as though he’d been wrestling wolves.

When he looked up his pale blue eyes, fringed with black lashes, caught her scrutiny. He blushed slightly.

‘You said you saw something here,’ she said. ‘Can you tell me what?’

It was a simple question, and he saw no reason not to tell her. If she disbelieved him, that was her problem, not his. But she didn’t. Indeed, as soon as he described the carpet her eyes grew wide and wild.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘A carpet. Of course.’

‘You know about it?’ he said.

She told him what had happened at the hospital; the design Mimi had tried to show her.

Now any lingering doubts about telling the whole story were forgotten. He gave her the adventure from the day the bird had escaped. His vision of the Fugue; Shadwell and his coat; Immacolata; the by-blows; their mother and the midwife; events at the wedding, and after. She punctuated his narrative with insights of her own, about Mimi’s life here in the house, the doors bolted, the windows nailed down, living in a fortress as if awaiting siege.

‘She must have known somebody would come for the carpet sooner or later.’

‘Not for the carpet,’ said Cal. ‘For the Fugue.’

She saw his eyes grow dreamy at the word, and envied him his glimpse of the place: its hills, its lakes, its wild woods. And were there maidens amongst those trees, she wanted to ask, who tamed dragons with their song? That was something she would have to discover for herself.

‘So the carpet’s a doorway, is it?’ she said.

‘I don’t know.’ he replied.

‘I wish we could ask Mimi. Maybe she –’

Before the sentence was out, Cal was on his feet.

‘Oh my God.’ Only now did he recall Shadwell’s words on the rubbish tip, about going to speak to the old woman.

He’d meant Mimi, who else? As he pulled on his shirt he told Suzanna what he’d heard.

‘We have to go to her,’ he said. ‘Christ! Why didn’t I think?’

His agitation was infectious. Suzanna blew out the candles, and was at the front door before him.

‘Surely Mimi’ll be safe in a hospital,’ she said.

‘Nobody’s safe,’ he replied, and she knew it was true.

On the step, she about-faced and disappeared into the house again, returning seconds later with a battered book in her hands.

‘Diary?’ he said.

‘Map,’ she replied.