The Book of Air Read online

  ‘He wanders alone. He sits in the murk, sometimes for hours.’ I felt bad telling tales of Roland. I know he’s drawn to the murk because of his father. They say his father was seen to sit there all day and all night before he died.

  ‘Roland is disappointing. But what about you?’

  I held my breath, waiting to hear what words he had for me. I waited until I was afraid I would faint.

  He said nothing but breathed out smoke and let it rise between us. Only when he tilted his head and said ‘Well?’ did I know that he meant me to answer. ‘Tell me what I should think of you.’

  I was silent for a moment. Then I knew what I wanted to say. ‘You know there are persons of earth and stone and rock who will be found where you left them, like Rochester?’

  ‘Are there?’

  ‘Yes, and there are persons of air who are as hard to hold as Jane. Well I am a person of air.’

  He looked at me strangely and I felt it was something I shouldn’t have said about myself.

  ‘And Roland?’ the Reader said. ‘What about Roland?’

  I said I didn’t know.

  ‘A person of earth or a person of air? Neither I think. So is he like Rochester’s mad wife, who set fire to his house and died in the flames?’

  I shook my head. I hadn’t thought about this.

  ‘Not a person of fire then. He is cold perhaps and goes where he must go.’

  I thought of our kissing on the backstairs. ‘Not cold,’ I said. ‘Not cold like Sturgeon Rivers.’

  I write the name according to its sound, as we do in the study, because Jane’s spelling of it contains a mystery lost to us. And writing it, I imagine Sarah at my shoulder, hear the smiling voice with which she praises good work. But there is nothing to praise in this. Ink and paper misused in remembering events of significance to no one but me, that I said of Roland that he isn’t cold, and that the Reader agreed and sucked smoke from his pipe and that I was afraid.

  ‘Not yet like Sturgeon Rivers, no,’ he said. ‘He’s only a summer brook, a trickle to dip your foot in.’ He seemed no longer interested in Roland.

  His eyes made me uncomfortable, so I looked away. There were shelves on either side of the fireplace filled with strange and beautiful things – glass bottles of different shapes, some with paper covers printed with words and pictures, delicate pottery in bright colours, metal objects intricately formed. He looked at me still, as if I was a thing he’d never seen before, a flower vase dug up in a field for him to put on his shelf.

  ‘Take something,’ he said.

  I shook my head. What could I take, and what should I do with it? Put it on the cottage mantle for the neighbours to gawp at? Hide it with my father’s knife? Then I saw something I wanted. It was a bottle of plastic from the endtime – white but so thin that when I picked it up the light showed through it. I imagined the ink trickling in at the neck to darken it. I turned the stopper to see that it fitted snuggly. Its sides settled under the pressure of my hand. It had no weight. It was perfect.

  ‘This,’ I said.

  ‘Take it.’

  To stop his looking I named the Book of Windows and asked if I could see it.

  He was silent for a moment and I thought he would rebuke me. Then he said, ‘If you like,’ as if seeing the Book or not seeing it didn’t much matter. He led me to the desk where there was a box about the size of the box Tal carries his tools in. Not wooden, like Tal’s, but metal shiny as moonlight with a black panel on the front. The Reader rested his pipe on the table, and the panel gave back its flame like a mirror. He put his finger to one corner. There was a sharp sound and the front swung open as if pushed from inside, and I saw that the mirror was a pane of glass, dark, smoke stained.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ I said and reached a hand to touch it.

  ‘Oh the box. Yes they loved boxes – black, silver, the colours of the night sky. And to put what in? No one knows. Some so thin they close on nothing, on a breath of air flat as paper. And there, saying nothing, are all the letters of the alphabet tightly packed. But always, outside or in, there’s a window. But to look at what?’

  ‘Doesn’t it say in the book?’

  ‘Somewhere, perhaps.’ He pointed through the open door to the object inside. ‘There it is.’

  It might have been a slab of cheese lying on a plate.

  ‘Tell me, Agnes. What do you know about the Book of Windows?’

  ‘That aside from the Book of Death, about which nothing can be said, it is the deepest of all the books, the most difficult to master. And that only the Reader – ’

  He waited for me to find the words and the courage to speak them.

  ‘That only you, sir, among the people of the village now living can read it.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘That it contains the highest wisdom of the endtime, all Jane’s knowledge boiled and rendered to its essence. That its pages come loose in the hand like summer pears.’

  ‘You know what everyone knows.’

  ‘I know what the Mistress taught us.’

  ‘And it’s true enough for the schoolroom.’

  I felt I had disappointed him.

  ‘There are things, Agnes, that the Book of Air can’t tell us.’ He closed the box with a click, and stood for a moment in silence. Then he looked into my face. ‘Tell me, Agnes, do we believe that the endtimers solved the mystery of Calling?’

  I could barely answer.

  ‘That they had learned to speak at a distance, to cry out to one another and be heard, to assert a presence, as Jane wrote, independent of the cumbrous body?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Jane promises us that knowledge. She teaches us to ache for it.’ The words were no more than a rattle in the Reader’s throat. ‘But she nowhere tells us how it might be done.’

  ‘Sarah says – ’

  ‘That we contain Air and are contained by Air?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘That nothing is or can be in the world that the Book of Air leaves out?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But not this. For this we have to search in other places.’

  ‘In the Book of Windows.’

  He looked at the silver box, then at the trees away beyond the lawn. ‘Perhaps.’

  A simple word. My father would say it if I asked him to carve me a finger doll or take me with him to count the sheep. A shrug. An opening and closing of the lips. A falling note straddling promise and disappointment.

  And the Reader said it no less lightly, as if the outcome was nothing to him, while I gaped, breathless and unbalanced.

  Because if not in the Book of Windows, where did he mean?

  When they brought me back from my outing on the moor, the Reeds told me book learning isn’t everything, old women muttering in the shadows who would make a mystery of ringing a chicken’s neck if it was all the mystery they had. But for the Reader who has read the books all through to say this filled me with fear, to leave this possibility that the highest knowledge of the endtime was to be searched for elsewhere.

  Our conversation was over. I was back in the kitchen with some unwashed dishes in my hand, having drifted like a sleepwalker along the corridor and down the stairs.

  Fear, yes, but excitement also. He said ‘perhaps’ and I don’t know what he meant by it.

  The fire needed lighting, so I went in the yard to fetch wood. Passing the shaded corner where the woodshed joins the back wall of the house, I thought of the secret the old women showed me after my time on the moor. It was to this place they brought me. It was the dead time of the night, and I was so tired and hungry I could no longer be sure whether I was awake or dreaming. There is an ancient pot, blue and yellow with painted flowers, big enough for a child to hide in. They dragged the pot to one side and uncovered a flagstone browner than the others with shapes and letters on it. They lifted the stone, and it was not a stone but a rusting block of metal. Underneath was a space, four brick walls going down into darkness, the size of t
he pit we dug last winter for Annie’s baby sister. We lay on our bellies on the ground and looked down into the darkness, and I saw our own faces staring back at us. One of the women lowered a lighted candle on a dish until it touched the water where my face had been, and the other dropped sage and flower petals. I lay between them, staring down at the flame until the smoke stung my eyes. There were holes in two of the walls, black circles as big as saucers. I imagined myself the size of a thumb and wondered where those holes would take me.

  When I spoke, my voice whispered back at me. ‘What is it?’

  The Reeds took it in turns to answer, and the echoes were more voices.

  ‘A place of reflection.’

  ‘A place where fire and water meet.’

  ‘The Grace Pool.’

  The candle floated to one side and I saw my own face again, not as steady as at first. ‘Is it a secret?’

  ‘From men and children, yes.’

  ‘Does Sarah know?’

  ‘Sarah knows book learning but book learning isn’t everything.’

  ‘Will I see it again?’

  ‘When you must.’

  ‘When your thoughts rise up in your throat.’

  ‘When you have to speak but are afraid to speak.’

  ‘And will I hear an answer?’

  They said nothing, but lifted out the candle, put the cover back, and dragged the pot back into its place.

  And there’s another secret told. All these secrets inside one great secret. Until someone reads what I write and I am taken in front of the Mistress and all the secrets are out.

  The Grace Pool is the proper place for secrets.

  So today, with my head full of the Reader and my first sight of the Book of Windows, I stopped with my kindling to see if the pot had been moved. Looking at it, I felt my thoughts rise up in my throat and wondered if I should go back tonight with a candle and sage. Would I have the strength to move the pot and the metal flagstone under it? I was lost in these thoughts and didn’t hear the others until Megan spoke.

  ‘We missed you.’

  I turned, and they were all there, just come from the house into the yard, Megan and Roland and cousin Annie. I know not to trust Megan’s smile and I thought, of all of them, she was the least likely to miss me. With one hand she touched Roland’s arm. Not even a hand, just three fingers tapping lightly on his shirt. But I saw then that she would tie a rope round him if she could and drag him after her.

  Annie, who has light skin and hair the colour of wheat, looked paler than ever and hollow in the face as though some worry gnawed at her.

  ‘Sarah has been asking after you,’ she said. ‘I told her you had a fever.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And you’re well now?’

  ‘Much better.’

  ‘You look better,’ Roland said, ‘and you’ve been to see the man.’

  I knew he meant it as a question, but I didn’t know how to answer him. Why the Reader had sent for me was partly a secret between us, that he had caught me spying, and otherwise a mystery to me.

  The geese came waddling towards us over the cobbles.

  ‘I’ve been shutting them up at night,’ Annie said, ‘and letting them out in the morning, but they’re glad to see you back, I think. Look how they come to you.’

  It was true, they gathered close about me, treading on my feet and twining their necks over each other.

  ‘They like you best.’

  ‘They do,’ Megan said. ‘They treat you like a sister. Don’t you think they do, Roland?’ She poked his arm to get him to respond. ‘Don’t you think they treat her like a sister? You don’t suppose some gander flapped in at her mother’s window one night?’

  Roland smiled though I could see he tried not to. ‘They like Agnes best because she’s the kindest of us, and the cleverest.’ He looked at me when he said this and then at the ground, and the smile had gone from his face.

  I would have said that geese know enough to care more for kindness than for cleverness. But just then Peter came in at the yard end leading the horse and cart with Tal’s son Daniel trailing after, and we went our different ways, me towards the kitchen, Megan and Annie to the fields, and Roland to skulk somewhere out of sight. From the kitchen door, I saw Daniel blush when the girls passed him and turn after them to say something, but no sound came except a kind of grunting. He’s clever with his hands, Daniel, just like his father, and more than twenty years old, but he can’t look one of us girls in the eye, and it’s a torment to him to speak, though he talks easily enough to the horses.

  I looked again at the blue and yellow pot. The stones around it were green with moss. It might have stood there growing roots since the endtime. Even if I had the strength to move it, would I find the Grace Pool, or nothing but a patch of ground with worms wriggling?

  Jason

  Sometimes I check out without warning. Time passes and I can’t quite put my finger on what I’ve been doing. I sit in a field to shake a stone from my boot and find myself in an empty cottage sorting through a drawer of kitchen knives. I stoop for the log basket, stand with the water slopping at my feet and see I’ve lifted a bucket from the spring. I have vivid moments when I reel from the smell of the earth on my spade, the smell of midday warmth on cobwebs and tomato plants gone to seed, or dazzled by moonlight on wet leaves. Other times the world is a blur. Objects lose their edges. Colours wash into one another.

  Last night I found myself on my knees staring down into the inspection chamber in the yard. I must have only just dragged the cover off because it was still rocking beside me on the flagstones, and I felt the memory of its weight in my arms and shoulders. That huge Italian pot you liked so much – I’d moved that too. There was nothing to see, but I found myself weeping for the whole intricate system of waste pipes and soil pipes that used to rush our used water through the building’s secret cavities to gather here and be funnelled away into the septic tank – all abandoned now to mice and spiders.

  And today I’m alerted by the sound of someone else’s weeping, and find I’m at the top end of the yard, working in the old outhouse, the one with the broken wall and the rotten roof timbers, sorting bricks, tossing the cleanest into the wheelbarrow in the doorway.

  I imagine for a moment that it’s you, Caroline, up in the house. You’re alive and I’m dead and you’re weeping over me.

  These bricks are beautiful. The old lime mortar crumbles off them and they’re good as new, grained with soft colours and warm in the hand. I’m working on a composting toilet. It’s my project and I’m going to do it right, with a ventilator shaft and an insect filter, enough capacity that it won’t need digging out all the time, boxes for ash and sawdust – all that, and sweet-scented flowers under a skylight – a palace of a latrine.

  I should be working on the house. It’s drizzling. I remember now the heavy rain in the night, and the steady dripping somewhere along the top corridor. I took a candle and put a pot down to catch the water, an old pillowcase inside to deaden the splash. Later I put a ladder up to the trapdoor and got as far as poking my head inside, but found I’ve lost my sense of balance – had to get back to floor level again until the spinning stopped. I need to get up on the roof, though, or the place will rot from the inside.

  She hasn’t stopped weeping. It’s Deirdre. Who else would make so much noise over a bit of grief, an average day’s hopelessness?

  She’s up in her bedroom, wailing at the open window. It’s like a drill in my head.

  I leave the outhouse, toppling the barrow out of my way, step across the spilled bricks and cross the stable yard to the kitchen door. Aleksy comes in from the fields with a spade over his shoulder. He hurries to catch up with me, his weight barrelling from side to side as he walks. The monkey appears on the roof of the stable and chatters down to meet him. ‘Onions must be planted,’ Aleksy says. ‘Also beets.’

  ‘Good of you to take the time.’

  He raises his free arm in an expansive gesture.
‘And why not?’

  ‘Because you’re on your way to Ireland.’

  ‘Like you said, a pipe dream. You know she was born there. But if Django stays, Deirdre will stay also. She’s fallen for Django, which is too bad.’

  From somewhere inside comes the sound of the clarinet. The monkey clambers back on to the roof and finds an open window.

  ‘You see. Even Rasputin has fallen for Django.’

  ‘So you plan to stay.’

  ‘With your permission.’ He makes a gesture of old world gratitude, which is overtaken by a spasm before I can work out whether the politeness was meant ironically or not.

  Deirdre arrives in the kitchen from the hallway as we’re coming in through the back door. Her eyes are red and she’s chewing on a finger. She isn’t smoking, so I assume she’s worked through her stash. I expect a revelation, an unmasking. That Simon – she’ll say – I’ve just worked it out, he’s the boy who was on the news, I knew I’d seen that face before. So her words take me by surprise. ‘We’ve had a break-in.’

  ‘What do you mean, a break-in?’ I ask her. ‘There’s no one for miles.’

  ‘We don’t know that.’

  Abigail’s on her knees at the stove, sweeping out the ash. She doesn’t stop working.

  ‘And why you say break? Break what?’ Aleksy’s question is just a pointless quibble, but it echoes mine, so we seem to be ganging up on her. ‘What’s to break? Who now locks doors at night?’

  ‘Everybody.’ Deirdre looks at me and at Abigail. ‘Don’t they?’

  Aleksy shrugs. ‘Sometimes people must go out to piss.’

  ‘Then they should lock the door afterwards. We could all have our throats cut.’

  ‘And you go at night sometimes down the back stairs and out into the stable to talk to your horses. I hear you telling them secrets about your lovers.’

  ‘No you don’t, Aleksy. You’re disgusting, making things up like that.’

  Abigail rises, tucking some lose strands of hair under her scarf. ‘What’s missing, Deirdre?’