House of Bells (18 page)

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 her 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.

She might be grateful. Kick a bit, struggle a bit, sink in the end.

She didn't really understand what she was here for herself, why Tony would really have sent someone so obviously unready for the task. Untrained, untalented. Here she was, making her first clumsy attempt at spying for him, trying to work Webb out; and here she was, getting caught already.

Hearing the door open behind her, when she was leaning over the desk trying to make sense of it all; and Webb was the only one who ever came in here when the door was closed. He'd said that as if it was a guarantee and not a trap. This would be him, then: and apparently she could blush after all as she straightened abruptly, as she turned around to face him, as—

Oh.

Not Webb.

‘Hullo, Tom.'

‘Hi.' He almost sidled into the room; she couldn't tell behind his hair and beard, but she thought he might be blushing as fiercely as herself. He couldn't be embarrassed, could he, catching her with her legs bare, obviously nothing on under the hem of the shirt? Surely not: it was decent enough, as long on her as her dress of yesterday. And this was a commune, for crying out loud. They shared bathrooms and bedrooms without a second thought. He must be used to nudity; he should be utterly casual about it. So not that, then. But something was making him awkward, coming between them, keeping his eyes from meeting hers . . .

Oh. Yes.

‘Are you in trouble,' she asked bluntly – anything to distract him from what she'd been doing, how he'd caught her spying – ‘over leaving us last night?'

‘Webb had a word with me, yes.' He sounded like a schoolboy, after an unpleasant encounter with a prefect. Those were always worse than teachers. So Grace had been told, at least, time and again, by rich old men nostalgic for their days at public school. At least only a couple of them had been nostalgic for the cane that apparently came part and parcel with such encounters.

Georgie would know all about prefects, from her own experience rather than billiard-room reminiscences and bedroom favours. She smiled sympathetically. ‘Poor Tom.'

He shivered, crossed his arms over his chest and rubbed his hands up and down his shoulders. ‘Poor Tom's a-cold.'

He was being deliberately theatrical, his turn to offer her distraction. She did at least know that much. Georgie would know what he actually meant, most likely. Grace not, but she bluffed it anyway: changing her smile to a laugh of recognition and then allowing him a change of subject as he clearly didn't want to linger on that one. She turned boldly back to Webb's desk and the wall behind it, and said, ‘What is all this?'

If Webb had been as nasty as she guessed, Tom shouldn't mind betraying a few of his secrets. Maybe she was cut out to be a spy after all; maybe she had a natural gift for it, turning one man against another . . .

‘That's Webb's web,' he said, coming to stand beside her. ‘He says it helps him keep track of all the connections in his head, if he has it spread out on the wall like that. Me, I reckon he just thinks maps are cool.'

‘I'm sure you're right. And I expect he is, too. Both ways. But what
is
it? What does that mean, Webb's web?'

‘He has this network, places like us all across the world. Well, not like us, exactly. People who think like us – except not that, either. People like the captain, who'll play host to people like us. It's how we're going to change the world.'

‘Is it? How's that, then?'

He pulled a face. ‘It's really hard to explain to people outside the web. Which is the point, really. You have to be able to think like us, before you can think like us; you have to learn how. And then you can't think any other way, and then it doesn't need explaining.'

‘Try anyway. Because, you know. I don't think like you.'
And I don't think you think like Webb either, but if you want to tell me different, go ahead.

‘Right. Webb does this better, because . . . Well, because it's his idea. And because he's Webb, y'know? But he says that if you only think rationally, then war is impossible. Not just wrong, it's
impossible
. You're not a pacifist if you
can't
fight, you're something else, something higher . . . you've evolved. That's what Webb is all about: helping us to think rationally. Which means writing a new language to think in and teaching us how to use it.'

‘What, you mean like
1984
?' Grace couldn't often bring books to the conversation, but here she could: memories of school time, where hers must overlap for once with Georgie's, because everybody did Orwell. Days and days of sitting in the back of the class and being bored, but still something seemed to have sunk in. ‘Doublethink, and “Peace is War” only the other way around, and stuff like that?'

‘No, not like that. Almost exactly not like that.' He shrugged helplessly, then apparently decided that was feeble and tried again. ‘In Orwell's book, everything is a lie. Big Brother is lying to the people, and the people are lying to each other, they're lying to themselves. Newspeak is an instrument of lies: that's what it's for, that's all it's capable of. Webb's universal language will be an instrument of truth. It won't be possible to lie. That's the point. If you can't even think a lie, if you can't express it, then how can you conceivably go to war to defend it?'

‘What, are all wars started over a lie? Is that what you think?'

‘It's what Webb thinks.'

He spoke with all the passion of the convert. Grace had met young men fresh from a Billy Graham crusade, high on Jesus; they had that kind of fervour. It was like a fever; she didn't trust it.

She thought she was starting to get the measure of this place, maybe. It wasn't the captain who'd be the guru here, that wasn't what he was after. He just did what he said: he kept the place ready. Waiting. For Webb, or people like him. Leonard and Mary were the housekeepers, not the guiding lights. They laid the fire and stood back, waited for someone else to set the blaze.

She wondered if Webb was what they wanted, what they thought they'd been waiting for.

‘Webb's language,' she said slowly. ‘You said it will be this, it will be that. Isn't it finished yet?'

‘I don't think it'll ever be finished. As we evolve, so will the language. It'll have to. But at the moment – no, it's not ready. In a way it's barely even begun. He's still putting his teams together. All across the world, see?' He took her back to the map, to all those strings and pins and postcards. ‘He's got teams building vocabulary in ashrams in India, grammar in lamaseries in Tibet. Teams in communities in Australia and California and upstate New York. He went all the way around the world, talked to everyone who'd listen, gave them the same basic grounding, all the work he'd done already. Then he left them to it. It's about trust, as much as anything. But if the seeds are right – and they are – there's only one way it can grow. And that's upright, beautiful, incontrovertible . . .

‘Somewhere along the way, he met the captain. Leonard wasn't interested in the language, not to get involved – he says he's too old to learn a new trick, and he's been through war already, he knows what he thinks about that, and sometimes it's necessary. I think he's right, he's too old to reshape his mind to fit a new reality.'

‘Or he just doesn't want to. Maybe he's happy the way he is.' She thought Leonard seemed pretty sussed already, content with himself and what he was doing here. What he was making happen.

‘Maybe. He doesn't know what he's missing. But I suppose no one ever does, do they? Unless they've had it and lost it, I mean. If you haven't tried, you can't know. Like sex, or getting high, or . . . Georgie? Are you OK?'

‘Yes. Yes, sure. I'm fine. I'm sorry, I just . . .'

‘Oh – you had your baby, and you lost it. Him. And I reminded you. It's for me to be sorry; my words run away with me sometimes. I love this thing so much, I forget to think who I'm talking to. That won't be possible either, in the language.' He tried a smile, weakly, hopefully; she gave him one back, a little wetly. Each of them trying as hard as the other. He was nice, and so was Georgie. And he was unexpectedly sensitive, for a young man; he cottoned on quick, to see what had upset her.

That was useful, maybe. She could use it. Professionally. She sniffed and rubbed her cheeks on her sleeve like a little girl – and then cursed herself silently and looked around for a mirror and couldn't see one, and glanced surreptitiously at her sleeve and no, it was fine, no make-up: that was long gone, what little she'd been wearing yesterday – and dragged them both back determinedly to what mattered. ‘So they met in India or wherever, Webb and the captain, and . . .?'

‘Yeah. And they kept in touch, and when he was back in this country, Webb came up here to see what Leonard was doing. It was a promise, you see, that there'd be a space for him. A place to work, where he could pull his own group together, and then send them out to spread the word. Words. Spread the words. That's what we like to say, do you see . . .?'

She did see. She gave him the distracted smile that he was working for, to reassure him that she really was past the tears now; then she peered more closely at the postcards on the wall. If they had pictures, they were pinned up the wrong way round, with the message side facing out into the room; that was what had seemed strange when she'd looked before. That, and perhaps she'd subconsciously recognized from a distance that she didn't recognize the letters they were written in. A close, dense script, angular and regular, exact, nothing like the vague and friendly loops of scribbled English.

‘This is headquarters now,' Tom said quietly behind her. ‘As soon as Webb was settled, he wrote to all his groups. One by one, they've been replying. In the language, in the bare-bones version that we all have. The postcards are just for fun, really. They're a sort of: “Are you receiving me? Report signal, over,” not much more than that. But there are sheafs and sheafs of paper too, going back and forth. Webb pulls it all together. He's brilliant, you know. He's a genius.' It was said very plainly, in that way that hero-worship can be between men. A girl would have been starry-eyed and romantic, not trying to hide it. Tom struggled to be matter-of-fact, and gave himself away completely. ‘And then he teaches us. You should come to class, Georgie.'

‘Me? Don't be daft. I can hardly speak English, and I never got the hang of French. You'll never teach me another language.'

‘Webb could. And the language is . . . natural. Inevitable. It practically teaches itself.'

He was really eager, but she wasn't here to sit in classes all day. Grace had left school behind her, just as soon as she could. Not Georgie, of course, but even so . . .

‘I don't think so, Tom. I'd rather be making myself useful to Leonard and Mary.' And Tony. Using any chance she had to nose around. Ask questions. In a language she understood.

One thing Grace had always had going for her, she understood people too. Better than she did English, sometimes. The silent language of the body: gesture and expression and the way they held themselves. She read Tom's disappointment, and Georgie wanted to be kind to him; she said, ‘Perhaps you can show me the shapes of the letters later, and explain how they work. It looks like code to me. Or maths, or music.' Anything she couldn't read. Signs to tell her future. She didn't have a clue where she was going or what she would do next. Sometimes that terrified her, more than anywhere she'd been already, or the worst thing she had done. Or the way it followed her, sat in her head, curled up beside her in the dark.