House of Bells

by Chaz Brenchley

  She was willing enough, more than willing. He was playing faithful lieutenant and no more, bringing her to meet his commander – and she was still scurrying to catch up with him, still leaving her shoes as abandoned as poor Tom at the end of the table there, not a backward or regretful glance.

  He took her across that open space, through the heart of the room, under everyone’s gaze. In her short shift and sheer tights, and never mind that she’d known these clothes were wrong, that she’d planned and worn them deliberately. She still felt like a cow brought to market, exposed to comment and ridicule – except that she glanced from one side to the other and didn’t think that anyone was commenting much, let alone laughing. She couldn’t see that anyone was actually looking at her, much. A curious glance here or there, but that was only the inevitable curiosity of a settled group finding a newcomer in its midst. Nothing judgemental.

  She wasn’t sure that she could be so kind towards a stranger – or so unconcerned, it wasn’t even kindness – being led by the hand to the heart of things, where everyone else had been so bluntly excluded.

  But then, she wasn’t a hippy. She wasn’t signed up for community living. Grace had hated school and left as soon as she could, left home at the same time, dumped flatmates as soon as she thought she could afford to. Georgie’s story wasn’t so different, except for being the one who was dumped and dumped again.

  She was suddenly practising that story in the back of her mind quite urgently as they squeezed between tables and came to those high closed double doors beyond. It wasn’t Webb that she needed to convince here.

  He pulled one door open and handed her through. She felt almost like an actress being brought to the front of the stage for her curtain call, except that this was a beginning and, however it ended, nobody was going to applaud. Nobody was going to applaud her, at least.

  Webb’s fingers slipped away from hers at last, too soon. These next steps she had to take alone, and she was more than sorry about that. She could hear him right behind her, pulling that door closed again; there was small reassurance in that. A man had disappeared here. Maybe. At least one, maybe; maybe more. Something surely had been going on before that, before Tony had sent his man in, or why would he? He hadn’t told her much about it: only that there were rumours, worried parents, disapproving locals. The usual. Good fare for a Sunday morning.

  If it was true, if this wasn’t an elaborate ploy to see her out of London for a while, make her feel differently about herself, better if she could.

  Either way, she needed to stop thinking like Grace for a while. Think like Georgie. Be Georgie, as much as she could manage. That would be nicer, anyway. She was a nice girl, Georgie. A bit of an idiot, but that was all right. Nice girls are allowed to do foolish things, and feel sad after.

  Nice girls are expected to be a little bashful, coming in to face an older man in a position of authority. Father, headmaster, priest, employer. Judge. It was all the same, always. They all judged you. Grace would be defiant, but not Georgie. She didn’t have it in her.

  Georgie would creep forward, uncomfortably alone: eyes on her fingers as they twiddled with each other, as her right hand fussed at the bandage on her left.

  She’d find herself walking over carpets, for the first time in this house: fine Persian carpets, that Grace would have recognized from all those country houses in the days when she was welcomed there, that Georgie would know from the nice homes of her parents’ wealthy friends. There was always a story, if you looked for it.

  Walking into smoke, into the smells of various smokes. Joss, of course, there had to be joss; and a stale background smell of tobacco mixed with something rougher and sweeter, cannabis, of course someone had been smoking joints in here; and more immediately, prominent and demanding, a richer darker tobacco that brought her head up regardless, and there he was.

  Leonard, the captain, master of this house and of her fate, at least for this little moment: sitting on an old worn cat-scratched settee, the kind of furniture that was endlessly familiar to Grace – all those rooms in all those country houses: people with houses like that hold on to everything, and pass it down as it decays through generations of guest-rooms and family rooms and servants’ rooms and dogs’ – and not so much to Georgie, leaning into one corner-cushion while Mother Mary occupied the other.

  He was smoking an Indian cheroot, black and thin and lethal. He gestured with it, that hand that was not stretched out along the sofa-back towards Mary, and tapped ash into a bright jade pot on a trefoil table beside him, and said, ‘I’m sorry about this,’ though he patently wasn’t, it was as much a part of him as the beard on his chin. ‘Old sea-dog habit that I can’t break now – I’d break myself if I tried it. Filthy things, but people put up with me regardless.’

  Of course they did. She understood it now. Webb’s impact was long-distance, the teacher addressing the hall; it didn’t get stronger close to. The captain’s was immediate, here and now, you and me, not for sharing.

  His beard bristled with iron vigour. His blue eyes were faded, salt-soaked, ironic; his skin had weathered sun and wind, ten thousand days, a thousand thousand miles. His voice still held a Navy crispness, under a roughening of tobacco and hard use. And of course he’d been in the war, so had every man his age, every man worth anything – not half the men she knew in London, those who had fucked her and spurned her and judged her and fucked her anyway – but there was more than that. Something of her own father in him: the last thing she’d have looked for, the last thing she’d have hoped to see, but there it was, clear and authoritative and revelatory.

  She said, ‘Merchant Marine?’ Her father called it the Merchant Navy, with a kind of stubborn pride; when he talked about the king, as often as not he meant George V, who’d given it that title after the first war. The way her father spoke, you’d think he’d been in the service at the time, that the sea was in his blood. In truth he’d signed up in 1939 to avoid conscription, got out as early as he could, and used his wartime contacts shamelessly ever since. She really didn’t want to see a similarity here. And yet, there it was: something about distance, experience, another kind of life. In her father it had touched him, marked him, tattooed his skin perhaps. If you wanted to be clever, if you wanted not to remember that he would be the last man ever to have himself tattooed. In this man it was sunk bone-deep, ocean-deep. She might be willing to bet that he did have tattoos, but only the way a ship had flags: superficial, for the benefit of others. Himself, he didn’t need telling who or what he was, or where he’d been. Or what his service had been worth. The old sailors she’d met, the real sailors, still called it the Merchant Marine.

  He grunted. ‘Clever girl. Sit yourself down.’ Patting the cushion of the settee beside him.

  There was, she supposed, just room enough for three, if she didn’t mind being pinned between him and – what, his partner, his co-host? His first mate in the naval sense? Or in the biological sense, his wife?

  Grace would have sat somewhere else, deliberately at a distance. By nature she didn’t do obedience, or joining. In the war she’d have waited for her call-up and then been the most difficult draftee she could, all lipstick on parade and cigarettes with the quartermaster’s men behind the stores. In a commune – well. It was hard to imagine Grace in a commune, willingly or otherwise.

  Georgie, though: Georgie only wanted to make other people happy, in a way that she couldn’t make herself. She’d sit where she was told to, with never a mulish lip.

  Went to do that, then – and swallowed down her huff of relief as Mother Mary rose up at her approach, shared a private women-only smile with her, said, ‘Sit here, dear,’ in her own place, the far end of the sofa.

  She could do that. Georgie would do that; yes, and curl her legs up and half turn her back to the man at the other end, look at him half over her shoulder, self-protective, harmed.

  ‘Don’t get him going, mind, on his time at sea,’ Mother Mary went on. Standing over her, protective hers
elf. Even Georgie might uncurl, a little, in her shadow. ‘He’ll bore you half to death. And poison you the other half, with those cheroots. Would you like a cup of tea?’

  There was a little spirit-stove in the corner, a kettle already steaming. Adding its fug to the twining smoke of the joss sticks in a brass holder, set on the window sill above. She smiled a nervous thank you, and never mind if she looked a little bewildered; she was a little bewildered. She really didn’t understand this place. Nor Mother Mary. The captain was easier, at least in her imagination. She could piece together a story for him. Not for this woman, busy with pot and kettle and water, with caddy and spoon and leaves. She had been a nurse, she said; she ought to be a matron now, ruling patients and probationers alike with a rod of iron, brisk and brutal and beloved. Instead – well, people here called her Mother, though she didn’t want them to. Presumably she did the same thing: tyrannized and treated hurts, kept good order, walked about in the captain’s shadow and let him take the glory.

  Whatever glory there was, guiding a group of long-haired hippies from one day to the next, in chase of something unknown. Perhaps she didn’t understand him either. Grace would challenge him about that, ask him straight out: what are you here for?

  Georgie wouldn’t. She’d be too afraid of having the question bounced straight back at her.

  She said, ‘I’d love to hear about your travels, uh, Captain . . .?’

  ‘You call me Leonard,’ he said. ‘To my face, at least. I know everyone calls me the captain behind my back, but I don’t have to hear it. I had forty years at sea, from deck boy to master, and no one using my own name all that time. It’s enough. I’m ashore now, and not even the Royal Navy would call this house a ship. We’ll have no titles here.’

  ‘Hear, hear,’ came devoutly from the corner. From Mary that would be, then, not Mother Mary. She would try to remember. People should be allowed to choose what people called them.

  That was a very Georgie thought. She was almost proud of herself. Of both her selves.

  Webb was laughing at them all. Settling on the floor, not far away, where a long-armed stretch would let him drop his ash into the same pot that Leonard used; lighting a long neat joint that he’d had ready, just to be sure that he had some ash to drop. Another candidate for first mate, was he? That was how it looked to jaundiced Grace.

  Someone else who took the name he wanted. Fair enough. She wouldn’t challenge that, but she did say, ‘What’s funny?’ – and that was all Grace, and she was almost ashamed of herself. Of just the one self, Grace, because of course Georgie wouldn’t stand up to her for a moment and couldn’t be expected to.

  He said, ‘You’ll learn. But truly, Leonard, you can’t go laying down the law and then complain when people salute you for it. Any more than Mary can embrace four dozen folk at once, remember all their birthdays, and still resent it when they call her Mother. Some titles just . . . accrue. You can’t choose not to be what you are.’

  ‘Of course you can,’ Mary said. ‘You can choose to be Webb, plain and simple.’

  Which confirmed a lot of her suspicions and underlined, she thought, what everyone was saying here, and even more what they were thinking. But Webb said, ‘Oh, that, of course – but I can’t choose not to be me. I can only choose what you call me. A Webb by any other name would smell as sweet. And if you will stalk around insisting that everything be shipshape, you can’t complain when people call you captain, because you are; and if you will insist on mothering everyone, Mary dear – including slapping us down when we’re naughty – then, you know . . .’

  ‘Oh, be quiet and smoke your nasty thing. Why you insist on that grim resin when we have perfectly good home-grown weed I cannot imagine, but—’

  ‘You see?’ Webb pulled a whimsical face and shrugged extravagantly. ‘Even when we’re arguing about it, she can’t help doing what she does. Give it up, Mother. Some fights are lost before they even begin.’

  Some fights are fought over and over again as demonstrations, for other people’s benefit. She understood that. She’d seen it happen in the grandest houses in the land, between the highest ranks of people; and all for her own benefit, or at least to impress young Grace Harley, born of Billericay. That wouldn’t happen now, but she didn’t want it. She never had.

  She didn’t want it here either, even if it was done with better humour. She said, ‘So it’s not a ship. That’s good, I didn’t think that I was coming to a ship – but I’m sorry, I’m still all at sea here. Actually, what is this? What are you all doing here?’

  ‘Waiting,’ Webb said, with another snort of private laughter.

  ‘Growing,’ Mary said, bringing her a mug of tea.

  The mug was roughly thrown and coarsely glazed, and she didn’t think it would be very steady if she had a table to set it on; she wrapped both hands around it, in lieu of steadiness, and waited to be enlightened.

  ‘Being ready. Getting ready,’ Leonard said – which seemed to be the same things in the same order, but . . .

  ‘Isn’t that the wrong way round?’ she said, because the only other thing to say would have been ready for what?, and she wasn’t ready for that. ‘Don’t you have to get ready before you are?’

  ‘No. You need to be in a state of readiness first, before you can begin to prepare.’ His cheroot had gone out. He frowned at it distractedly, fussed a little with matches and flame, puffed out thin clouds of evil-smelling smoke until it was drawing again to his satisfaction. Ready then, he went on – or else he started again, or else changed the subject entirely. Or, possibly, answered her original question.

  He said, ‘When I was a young man, I was all over the show. All at sea, yes. Hong Kong to Honolulu, Surabaya to San Francisco to St John’s. Then the war . . . happened. I was on the Arctic convoys, Archangel, Murmansk. I saw . . . No, never mind what I saw. Things I wouldn’t tell a lady. I survived, though half my crew mates didn’t. I swore I would never go into the cold again. I went back to the tropics, worked tramp steamers around the Philippines for a while, then found my way to India.

  ‘Where I stayed. For a while. I left the sea. Yes, it was a surprise to me too – but I wanted something I couldn’t find on shipboard. I wanted horizons beyond a metal hull and the companionship of a dozen men just like me, war-scarred and closed in, locked down. Every ship I served on was like a can of damage, brewing in the heat. It might be the first smart move I ever made, getting out while I could.

  ‘And then – well, there was India. Before the rush, before the hippy trail brought us half the youth of Europe and the States too. Hell, I practically built the hippy trail. All too literally, some stretches: the road from Hussainiwala down into the Punjab, I worked my way across that land. It was unheard-of, a white man labouring alongside the natives, but they were very good for the most part. They allowed it. I had no caste, do you see? So people could be outraged, but no one was offended.

  ‘And I learned. I visited ashrams in the Deccan and monasteries in the hills; I talked to holy men on the road. I think I met Kim, though he was an old man who’d almost forgotten that he’d ever been white. I found my way up into the Himalaya, inevitably, and over the border to Tibet. The people there were careful of me, so that I didn’t run into trouble with the authorities. I was there a while – they are a remarkable people – but I couldn’t stay. My simple presence put my hosts in danger. They went to extraordinary lengths to keep me safe, but I couldn’t do the same for them.

  ‘With their help, I came down over the mountains into Nepal. Even that time was a revelation to me: long nights under the stars, talking and walking and being silent. I had finally turned around and was starting to head home, and I hadn’t realized till then quite what I was taking with me. In Kathmandu, I met my first Western longhairs. It was too soon to call them hippies, for we didn’t have the word yet. I called them beatniks, I think, though that was really the culture they’d come away from, looking for something else.

  ‘It had taken me years to go
as far as I did; it took me years longer to come back. By then they were everywhere. I watched them and envied them – they were young, for the most part, they hadn’t had the war as I had – and I seemed to spend half my time helping them out of trouble. They were . . . spectacularly naive. And irresistibly attractive, despite that or else because of it. Those that I helped mostly headed home after, determined to echo the kind of life they’d glimpsed or dreamed of, somewhere they had better hopes of making it happen and getting it right. It’s always easier to rebuild Eden in your own backyard, when the original is full of other people who are not at all like you.

  ‘You could say that having taken a hand in building the hippie trail, now I was doing the same for the commune movement, sending kids back to the land, back in their own land. At least this time I knew more or less what I was doing. I’d watched these kids trying to live together in ashrams or villages or improvised communities, I’d listened to them building dreams of how they could live together back home; I already had my own ideas how well that would work, and how I could make it better. Which was the first inkling I had, that I wanted to make it better: which would mean coming home, and then finding a space, and then . . . well, this.’

  A gesture of his hands in the soft light and the smoke, to encompass the house and the woods around and everyone who dwelt there.

  And her, apparently, presumptively.

  She said, ‘What makes this better?’

  ‘Discipline.’ That didn’t come from Leonard, it came from Webb: puffing at his joint, still laughing. Not stoned, she thought, not yet. Just amused.

  ‘Rules,’ Leonard said. ‘Oh, don’t worry: this isn’t shipboard, and I’m really not captain. We don’t run everything to the clock. But we do have rules. Everyone eats together, and everyone sleeps together. Not in the orgy sense, unless you really want to, but communally. Nobody sleeps alone. There are rooms for those who want to couple up and those who want to play, for a night or a week or a lifetime; otherwise, we all doss down in dormitories. Walls between us cause more problems than they solve. I won’t have them.’