‘How’s my invalid?’
Beth Shepherd set the tray down on the floor, then went to the window and pulled back the curtains, letting the summer sunlight spill into the room.
Meg opened her eyes slowly, smiling. ‘I’m fine. Really I am.’
Beth sat on the bed beside her daughter and parted her hair, examining the wound. ‘Hmm. It looks all right. A nice clean cut, anyway.’ For a moment she held her hand to Meg’s brow, then, satisfied that she wasn’t feverish, smiled and began to stroke her daughter’s hair.
‘I’m sorry…’ Meg began, but her mother shook her head.
‘Ben’s told me what happened. It was an accident, that’s all. You’ll know better in future, won’t you?’
‘If it wasn’t for Ben…’
Beth’s fingers hesitated, then continued to comb Meg’s thick, dark hair. ‘I’d say that made you even, wouldn’t you? A life for a life.’
Meg looked up at her. ‘No. It was different. Totally different. He risked himself. He could have died.’
‘Maybe. But would you have done less?’
Meg hesitated, then answered quietly, ‘I guess not.’ She shivered and looked across at the glass case that held her shells. ‘You know, I can’t imagine what it would be like here without Ben.’
‘Nor I. But have your breakfast. That’s if you feel like eating.’
Meg laughed. ‘I’m ravenous, and it smells delicious.’
Beth helped Meg sit up, plumping pillows behind her, then took the tray from the floor and set it down on Meg’s lap. There was grapefruit and pancakes, fresh orange and coffee, two thick slices of buttered toast and a small pot of honey.
Meg tucked in heartily, watched by her mother. When she was done, Beth clapped her hands and laughed. ‘Goodness, Meg! You should fall in the water more often if it gives you an appetite like that!’
Meg sighed and lay back against the pillows, letting her mother take the tray from her and set it aside.
Beth turned back to her, smiling. ‘Well? Are you staying in bed, or do you want to get up?’
Meg looked down, embarrassed. ‘I want to talk.’
‘What about?’
‘About you, and Father. About how you met and fell in love.’
Beth laughed, surprised. ‘Goodness! What brings this on?’
Meg coloured slightly. ‘Nothing. It’s just that I realized I didn’t know.’
‘Well… all right. I’ll tell you.’ She took a deep breath, then began. ‘It was like this. When I was eighteen I was a pianist. I played all the great halls of the world, performing before the very highest of First Level society – the Supernal, as they call themselves. And then, one day, I was asked to play before the T’ang and his court.’
‘That must have been exciting.’
‘Very.’ She took her daughter’s hand and squeezed it gently. ‘Anyway, that night, after the performance, everyone was telling me how well I’d played, but I was angry with myself. I had played badly. Not poorly, but by my own standards I had let myself down. And before the T’ang of all people. It seemed that only your father sensed something was wrong. It was he, I later found out, who had arranged the whole affair. He had seen me perform before and knew what I was capable of.
‘Well. After the reception he took me aside and asked me if I’d been nervous. I had, of course. It’s not every day that an eighteen-year-old is called to perform before one of the Seven. But that wasn’t an excuse. I told him how ashamed I was at having let the T’ang down, and – to my surprise and chagrin – he agreed with me. Right there and then he took me into the T’ang’s own quarters and, craving Li Shai Tung’s forgiveness for intruding, made me sit at the piano again and play. “Your best this time, Elizabeth,” he said. “Show the T’ang why I boasted of you.” And I did, and this time, with just your father and the T’ang listening, I played better than I’d ever played in my life.’
‘What did you play? Can you remember?’
Her mother smiled, looking off into the distance. ‘Yes. It was Beethoven’s Sonata in F Minor, the Appassionata. It was only when I had finished that I realized I had just committed a capital offence.’
Meg’s mouth fell open. ‘Gods! Of course! It’s a prohibited piece, isn’t it? Like all of Beethoven’s work! But what did the T’ang do?’
Beth looked down at her daughter and ruffled her hair. ‘He clapped. He stood up and applauded me. Then he turned to your father and said, “I don’t know what that was, Hal, and I don’t want to know, but you were right to bring the girl back. She’s in a class of her own.”’
‘And?’
‘And for a year nothing. I thought your father had forgotten me, though I often thought of him and of what he had done for me that evening. But then, out of the blue, I received an invitation from him, asking me to come and visit the Domain.’
Meg sat forward eagerly. ‘And that’s when it all happened?’
Beth shook her head. ‘No. Not at all. I was flattered, naturally, but such a request was impossible to comply with. I was only nineteen. It was six years before I would come of age, and my mother and father would have forbidden me to go even if I had asked them.’
‘So what did you do?’
Beth laughed. ‘I did the only thing I could. I sent him an invitation to my next concert.’
‘And he came?’
‘No. What happened next was strange. My father called on me. I hadn’t seen him in over six months, and then, the day after I’d sent the note to Hal, there was my father, larger than life, telling me that he’d arranged a husband for me.’
Meg’s mouth fell open a second time. ‘A husband?’
‘Yes. The son of an old friend of his. A rich young buck with no talent and as little intelligence.’
Meg clutched her mother’s hands tightly. ‘And you said no. You told your father you were in love with Hal Shepherd and wanted to marry him. Is that right?’
Beth laughed. ‘Gods, no. I had no say in it. Anyway, I wasn’t in love with your father then. I quite liked him. He was handsome and intelligent, and I felt a kind of… affinity with him. But beyond that nothing. Not then, anyway. What I didn’t realize, however, was that your father had fallen in love with me. It seems he had spent that whole year trying to forget me, but then, when he heard about my engagement, he went mad and challenged my intended to a duel.’
Meg blinked. ‘He did what?’
‘Yes.’ Beth laughed delightedly. ‘An old-fashioned duel, with swords.’
‘And?’ Meg’s eyes were big and round.
‘Well… My father was horrified, naturally. My fiancé wanted to fight, but Hal had something of a reputation as a swordsman and my father was certain he would kill my future husband. He asked Hal to call on him to try to sort things out.’
‘And they came to an arrangement?’
Beth leaned forward. ‘Not straight away. Though that’s not the story my father told. You see, I listened secretly from the next room when they met. My father was angry at first. “You can’t have her,” he said. “If you kill this man, I’ll arrange a marriage with another.” “Then I’ll kill him, too!” Hal said. My father was taken aback. “And I’ll find another suitor. You can’t kill them all.” But Hal was determined. His voice rang out defiantly. “If I have to, I’ll kill every last man in Chung Kuo! Don’t you see? I want your daughter.”’
Beth laughed, then sat back, her face suddenly more thoughtful, her eyes gazing back in time. Then, more quietly, ‘Gods, Meg. You don’t know how thrilling it is to be wanted like that.’
Meg watched her mother a moment longer, then looked down, giving a small shudder. ‘Yes… And your father gave in to Hal?’
‘Gods, no. He was a stubborn man. And a mercenary one. You see, he’d found out how much Hal was worth by then. All this was a kind of play-acting, you understand, to put up the price.’
Meg frowned, not understanding.
‘He wanted a dowry. Payment for me.’
Meg made a small noise of astonishment.
‘Yes. And he got it, too. He threatened to stop Hal from marrying me until I was twenty-five unless he paid what he asked.’
‘And did he?’
‘Yes. Twice what my father asked, in fact.’
‘Why?’
Beth’s smile widened. ‘Because, Hal said, my father didn’t know the half of what he had given life to.’
Meg was silent for a while, considering. Then she looked up at her mother again. ‘Did you hate your father?’
Beth hesitated, a sadness in her face. ‘I didn’t know him well enough to hate him, Meg. But what I knew of him I didn’t like. He was a little man, for all his talent. Not like Hal.’ She shook her head gently, a faint smile returning to the corners of her mouth. ‘No, not like your father at all.’
‘Where’s Ben?’ Meg asked, interrupting her reverie.
‘Downstairs. He’s been up hours, working. He brought a lot of equipment up from the basement and set it up in the living-room.’
Meg frowned. ‘What’s he up to?’
Beth shook her head. ‘I don’t know. Fulfilling a promise, he said. He said you’d understand.’
‘Ah…’ Shells, she thought. It has to do with shells.
And memory.
Ben sat in a harness at the piano, the dummy cage behind him, its morph mimicking his stance. A single thin cord of conduit linked him to the morph. Across the room, a trivee spider crouched, its programme searching for discrepancies of movement between Ben and the morph. Meg sat down beside the spider, silent, watching.
A transparent casing covered the back of Ben’s head, attached to the narrow, horseshoe collar about his neck. Within the casing a web of fine cilia made it seem that Ben’s blond hair was streaked with silver. These were direct implants, more than sixty in all, monitoring brain activity.
Two further cords, finer than the link, led down from the ends of the collar to Ben’s hands, taped to his arms every few inches. Further hair-fine wires covered Ben’s semi-naked body, but the eye was drawn to the hands.
Fine, flexible links of ice formed crystalline gloves that fitted like a second skin about his hands. Sensors on their inner surfaces registered muscular movement and temperature changes.
Tiny pads were placed all over Ben’s body, measuring his responses and feeding the information back into the collar.
As he turned to face Meg, the morph turned, faceless and yet familiar in its gestures, its left hand, like Ben’s, upon its thigh, the fingers splayed slightly.
Meg found the duplication frightening – deeply threatening – but said nothing. The piano keyboard, she noted, was normal except in one respect. Every key was black.
‘Call Mother in, Meg. She’d like to hear this.’
The morph was faceless, dumb, but in a transparent box at its feet was a separate facial unit – no more than the unfleshed suggestion of a face, the musculature replaced by fine wiring. As Ben spoke, so the half-formed face made the ghost-movements of speech, its lips and eyes a perfect copy of Ben’s own.
Meg did as she was told, bringing her mother from the sunlight of the kitchen into the shadows of the living-room. Beth Shepherd sat beside her daughter, wiping her hands on her apron, attentive to her son.
He began.
His hands flashed over the keys, his fingers living jewels, coaxing a strange, wistful, complex music from the ancient instrument. A new sound from the old keys.
When he had done, there was a moment’s intense silence, then his mother stood and went across to him. ‘What was that, Ben? I’ve never heard its like. It was…’ She laughed, incredulous, delighted. ‘And I presumed to think that I could teach you something!’
‘I wrote it,’ he said simply. ‘Last night, while you were all asleep.’
Ben closed his eyes, letting the dissonances form again in his memory. Long chordal structures of complex dissonances, overlapping and repeating, twisting about each other like the intricate threads of life, the long chains of deoxyribonucleic acid. It was how he saw it. Not A and C and G Minor, but Adenine and Cytosine and Guanine. A complex, living structure.
A perfect mimicry of life.
The morph sat back, relaxing after its efforts, its chest rising and falling, its hands resting on its knees. In the box by its feet the eyes in the face were closed, the lips barely parted, only a slight flaring of the nostrils indicating life.
Meg shuddered. She had never heard anything so beautiful, or seen anything so horrible. It was as if Ben were being played. The morph, at its dummy keyboard, seemed far from being the passive recipient of instructions. A strange power emanated from the lifeless thing, making Ben’s control of things seem suddenly illusory: the game of some greater, more powerful being, standing unseen behind the painted props.
So this was what Ben had been working on. A shiver of revulsion passed through her. And yet the beauty – the strange, overwhelming beauty of it. She shook her head, not understanding, then stood and went out into the kitchen, afraid for him.
Ben found her in the rose garden, her back to him, staring out across the bay. He went across and stood there, close by her, conscious more than ever of the naked form of her beneath the soft gauze dress she wore. Her legs were bare, her hair unbraided. The faintest scent of lavender hung about her.
‘What’s up?’ he asked softly. ‘Didn’t you like it?’
She turned her head and gave a tight smile, then looked back. It was answer enough. It had offended her somehow.
He walked past her slowly, then stopped, his back to her, his left hand on his hip, his head tilted slightly to the left, his right hand at his neck, his whole body mimicking her stance. ‘What didn’t you like?’
Normally she would have laughed, knowing he was ragging her, but this time it was different. He heard her sigh and turn away, and wondered, for a moment, if it was to do with what had happened in the night.
She took a step away, then turned back. He had turned to follow her. Now they stood there, face to face, a body’s length separating them.
‘It was…’
She dropped her eyes, as if embarrassed.
He caught his breath, moved by the sight of her. She might have died. And then he would never have known. He spoke softly, coaxingly; the way she so often spoke to him, drawing him out. ‘It was what?’
She met his eyes. ‘It was frightening.’ He saw her shiver. ‘I felt…’ She hesitated, as if brought up against the edge of what she could freely say to him. This reticence was something new in her and unexpected, a result of the change in their relationship. Like something physical in the air between them.
‘Shall we walk? Along the shore?’
She hesitated, then smiled faintly. ‘Okay.’
He looked up. The sky was clouding over. ‘Come. Let’s get our boots and coats. It looks like it might rain.’
An hour later they were down at the high-water level, their heavy boots sinking into the mud, the sky overcast above them, the creek and the distant water meadows to their left. It was low tide and the mud stretched out to a central channel that meandered like an open vein cut into a dark cheek, glistening like oil whenever the sun broke through the clouds.
For a time they walked in silence, hand in hand, conscious of their new relationship. It felt strange, almost like waking to self-consciousness. Before there had been an intimacy, almost a singularity about them – a seamless continuity of shared experience. They had been a single cell, unbreached. But now? Now it was different. It was as if this new, purely physical intimacy had split that cell, beginning some ancient, inexorable process of division.
Perhaps it was unavoidable. Perhaps, being who they were, they had been fated to come to this. And yet…
It remained unstated, yet both felt an acute sense of loss. It was there, implicit in the silence, in the sighs each gave as they walked the shoreline.
Where the beach narrowed, they stopped and sat on a low, gently sloping table of grey rock, side by side, facing back towards the cottage. The flat expanse of mud lay to their right now, while to their left, no more than ten paces away, the steep, packed earth bank was almost twice their height, the thickly interwoven branches of the overhanging trees throwing the foot of the bank into an intense shade. It could not be seen from where they sat, but this stretch of the bank was partly bricked, the rotting timbers of an old construction poking here and there from the weathered surface. Here, four centuries before, French prisoners from the Napoleonic Wars had ended their days, some in moored hulks, some in the makeshift gaols that had lined this side of the creek.
Ben thought of those men now. Tried to imagine their suffering, the feeling of homesickness they must have felt, abandoned in a foreign land. But there was something missing in him – some lack of pure experience – that made it hard for him to put himself in their place. He did not know how it felt to be away from home. Here was home and he had always been here. And there, in that lack of knowledge, lay the weakness in his art.
It had begun long before last night. Long before Meg had come to him. And yet last night had been a catalyst – a clarification of all he had been feeling.
He thought of the words his father had quoted back at him and knew they were right.
Ultimately, no one can extract from things, books included, more than he already knows. What one has no access to through experience one has no ear for.
It was so. For him, at least, what Nietzsche had said was true. And he had no access. Not here.
He was restless. He had been restless for the past twelve months. He realized that now. It had needed something like this to bring it into focus for him. But now he knew. He had to get out.
Even before last night he had been thinking of going to college in the City. To Oxford, maybe, or the Technical School at Strasburg Canton. But he had been thinking of it only as the natural path for such as he; as a mere furthering of his education. Now, however, he knew there was more to it than that. He needed to see life. To experience life fully, at all its levels. Here he had come so far, but the valley had grown too small for him, too confined. He needed something more – something other – than what was here in the Domain.
‘If I were to…’ he began, turning to face Meg, then fell silent, for at the same time she had turned her head and begun to speak to him.
They laughed, embarrassed. It had never happened before. They had always known instinctively when the other was about to speak. But this… it was like being strangers.
Meg shivered, then bowed her head slightly, signalling he should speak, afraid to repeat that moment of awkwardness.
Ben watched her a moment. Abruptly, he stood and took three paces from her, then turned and looked back at her. She was looking up at him from beneath the dark fall of her hair.
‘I’ve got to leave here, Meg.’
He saw at once how surprised she was. There was a widening of her eyes, the slightest parting of her lips, then she lowered her head. ‘Ah…’
He was silent, watching her. But as he made to speak again, she looked up suddenly, the hurt and anger in her eyes unexpected.
‘Is it because of last night?’
He sighed. ‘It has nothing to do with us. It’s me. I feel constrained here. Boxed in. It feels like I’ve outgrown this place. Used it up.’
As he spoke he stared away from her at the creek, the surrounding hills, the small, white-painted cottages scattered amongst the trees. Overhead, the sky was a lid of ashen grey.
‘And I have to grow. It’s how I am.’ He looked at her fiercely, defiantly. ‘I’ll die if I stay here much longer, Meg. Can’t you see that?’
She shook her head, her voice passionate with disagreement. ‘It’s not so, Ben. You’ve said it yourself. It’s a smaller world in there. You talk of feeling boxed in, here, in the Domain. But you’re wrong. That’s where it’s really boxed in. Not here. We’re outside all of that. Free of it.’
He laughed strangely, then turned aside. ‘Maybe. But I have to find that out. For myself.’ He looked back at her. ‘It’s like that business with memory. I thought I knew it all, but I didn’t. I was wrong, Meg. I’d assumed too much. So now I’ve got to find out. Now. While I still can.’
Her eyes had followed every movement in his face, noting the intense restlessness there. Now they looked down, away from his. ‘Then I don’t understand you, Ben. Surely there’s no hurry?’
‘Ah, but there is.’
She looked up in time to see him shrug and turn away, looking out across the mud towards the City.
The City. It was a constant in their lives. Wherever they looked, unless it was to sea, that flat, unfeatured whiteness defined the limits of their world, like a frame about a picture, or the edge of some huge, encroaching glacier. They had schooled themselves not to see it. But today, with the sky pressed low and featureless above them, it was difficult not to see it as Ben saw it – as a box, containing them.
‘Maybe… ’ she said, below her breath. But the very thought of him leaving chilled her to the bone.
He turned, looking back at her. ‘What were you looking for?’
She frowned. ‘I don’t follow you.’
‘Before the wave struck. You were about to tell me something. You’d seen something.’
She felt a sudden coldness on the back of her hand and looked. It was a spot of rain. She brushed at it, then looked back at her brother.
‘It was a shell. One I’d never seen before. It was attached to the rock but I couldn’t free it with my fingers. It was like it was glued there. A strange, ugly-looking shell, hard and ridged, shaped like a nomad’s tent.’
More spots of rain fell, distinct and heavy. Ben looked up at the sky, then back at her. ‘We’d best get back. It’s going to chuck down.’
She went across to him and took his hand.
‘Go,’ she said. ‘But not yet. Not just yet.’
He leaned forward, kissing her brow, then moved back, looking at her, his dark green eyes seeing nothing but her for that brief moment. ‘I love you, Megs. Understand that. But I can’t help what I am. I have to go. If I don’t…’
She gave the smallest nod. ‘I know. Really. I understand.’
‘Good.’ This time his lips touched hers gently, then drew away.
She shivered and leaned forward, wanting to kiss him once again, but just then the clouds burst overhead and the rain began to come down heavily, pocking the mud about their feet, soaking their hair and faces in seconds.
‘Christ!’ he said, raising his voice against the hard, drumming sound of the rain. For a moment neither of them moved, then Meg turned and, pointing to the bank, yelled back at him.
‘There! Under the trees!’
Ben shook his head. ‘No. Come on! There’s half a day of rain up there. Let’s get back!’ He took her hands, tugging at her, then turned and, letting her hands fall from his, began to run back along the shore towards the cottage. She caught up with him and ran beside him, laughing now, sharing his enjoyment of the downpour, knowing – suddenly knowing without doubt – that just as he had to go, so he would be compelled to return. In time. When he had found what he was looking for.
Suddenly he stopped and, laughing, throwing his hands up towards the sky, turned his eyes on her again. ‘It’s beautiful!’ he shouted. ‘It’s bloody beautiful!’
‘I know!’ she answered, looking past him at the bay, the tree-covered hillsides misted by the downpour, the dour-looking cottages on the slope before them.
Yes, she thought. You’ll miss this in the City. There it never rains. Never in ten thousand years.