Advent (47 page)

 
Then Mother England called in her loyalties, and Rufus Uren and his brothers sailed to join the war against the Kaiser. The brothers were dead within weeks. Rufus did not die, but when the end of the slaughter came, he might as well have. He’d left most of his reason and all of his will to live in the trenches when he arrived back in England, shell-shocked, aimless, ruined at the age of twenty-three. His parents hadn’t survived the massacre of their sons. The deferential people took over. They talked discreetly to other deferential people, made enquiries. Rufus Uren was found and told he was now the owner of Pendurra. A telegram was sent to the caretakers, advising that Captain Uren should be met at the station, since his mental capacities had suffered as a consequence of service and he was prone to distractedness. With that, the employees in their tactful suits discharged their duties and withdrew.

 
The utter silence of Pendurra reached inside Rufus, touching the last interested fragments of his thoughts. He shut himself up inside it. The caretaker couple who had been living in the lodge with their daughter were happy to look after him. So few young men had come back, after all. They became fond of the convalescent: he was almost young enough to be their son.

 
Their daughter became fond of him also. As she grew into adulthood, she spent more time with him than anyone else did, bringing him his meals, reading to him, finding him when one of his walking fits took hold and he was still out of doors when darkness fell. Her parents didn’t see that she had become too fond. They were horrified when she became pregnant, but there was nothing to be done about it except keep quiet and hope for the best. Although the boy Tristram was born healthy, his mother suffered so badly that she never recovered.

 
Her dwindling strength seemed to rouse Rufus. Perhaps having people to care for – the woman and the baby – gave him the strength of defiance. Death had turned back into an enemy he could face and fight. When he was certain he was going to lose this battle, he insisted on marrying the dying woman and acknowledging his son. So Tristram Uren became the heir, and his grandparents were named his guardians. After his father died – grief-struck, Rufus outlived his wife less than three years – they brought him up to love the place as they did.

 
Tristram never lost the attachment. His grandparents sent him away for the education they thought proper, but he hurried back whenever he could. He learned how the world worked, and what his place in it was, and so understood while still at school that his home was somewhere not quite real, a relic of a way of life that wasn’t supposed to exist any more. This made it more essential to him, because it reminded him of the parents he had barely known. He thought of himself as the progeny of ghosts.

 
When he was finished with school he joined the navy. His friends all drifted towards the city or the university towns, warrens of brick stranded in green plains. The navy at least kept him by the cliffs and, at first, not more than a hundred miles from the house whose mysteries preoccupied him more and more. Or so it was for a few years, but then, inevitably, it took him far away, off to deserts where (much to his surprise) his ship was called into action, messy and utterly inglorious, and where (to his still greater surprise) he showed exceptional skill and courage.

 
He was on the other side of the globe when his grandmother died, and by the time he arrived in England again his grandfather was dead too: another broken heart. He came back to the estate one windy autumn morning to find it abandoned. Yet as he opened the doors and windows, he knew by some strange instinct that it wasn’t empty.

 
With the thanks and assurances of a grateful nation, he resigned his commission and stayed. Though barely thirty years old, he withdrew inside the house and its grounds, unable (and unwilling) to loosen his entanglement in their secrecy and silence.

 
Like the last ward of a massive lock falling into place, Saturn neared the completion of its sixteenth orbit since the magus wove its influence into his spell. The enchantment began to thaw, its frozen architecture softening as if under a breath of summer air. The prophetess knew it, or it knew her, and a whisper of her existence slipped back into the world. Others felt it too, though they had no idea what it was they were feeling, since in the course of five hundred years the gift they had been born with had ceased to have any meaning or use at all. One was Hester Lightfoot, a clever scholar with a scientific mind that was not the slightest good to her when she caught the echo of the prophetess’s whispers one day and could not shake them off. Another was a teenage runaway in the streets of Bristol who, for no reason that he could articulate to himself, lied and stole his way to the place that was pulling him with a force as certain as gravity and, when he got there, hid in its woods until Tristram found him, recognised the compulsion that had driven him and took him in. There were many others who could only ignore what they obscurely felt, helpless in the presence of something they had no language for.

 
Other kinds of things stirred also. Beings that for centuries had not been
there
, as the empire of reason understood it, began, gradually, to overlap again with the world. Like a reflection in a window, appearing when the light outside dims, they shifted towards presence.

 
The world began to move at the speed of light. Time and distance all but vanished inside the microscopic blur of circuitry, ethereal flickers and pulses and waves of information. Tristram and his property and its phantoms sat among it, archaic and inert as rock.

 
There were no apocalyptic portents when the magus’s spell finally broke. Saturn crossed the sky and one day – an October day in the year 1996, no more obviously remarkable a day than any other – the box was no longer concealed and protected as it had been. Anyone might have found it, or no one. Its wood began to rot in the salt water. It might have decayed. The bag inside might have been caught by a surge of the tide and carried out to sea to decompose. The mirror in its velvet sheath and the ring (neither of which could rot) might have each been lost for another half millennium, or for ever.

 
The person who did find them was the runaway refugee, Caleb, who still had no idea why he had been born the way he was, but had at least learned that Pendurra was the only place he could exist, not least because he felt everything that happened in and on this one small patch of land as if it was part of his own body. He noticed the narrow crack in the cliffs out towards the headland the way you or I might notice an itch. Eventually he gave up trying to forget it, took the dinghy from the cove and rowed out along the rocks until he had come as close as a boat could bring him to the place where the itch appeared to be. When the tide was unusually low he found he could get even closer, scrambling over kelp-matted and barnacled stone. There was a tight cave, three-quarters flooded. He only went in because he knew something was there. He only found it when his waterlogged shoe scraped against something that was softer than rock. He had to plunge down into the absolute blackness of the water before his hands could touch it too. He dug sand away from the tiny silted hollow where the box lay wedged, holding his breath for as long as he could each time, finally prising it out between raw and bloodied fingers.

 
That night he worked the silver clasp loose and opened the box. There was the strangely marked leather pouch still nestling in its padding of wool, and inside it two things: a palm-sized oval of metal in a velvet sheath, and a plain smooth ring. The metal made him feel deeply uneasy, so much so that he would not take it out of the velvet. The ring made him feel sad. And that was all there was to them, as far as he was concerned.

 
The itch, though, had gone.

 
He showed them to Tristram the next day. The two of them stood there, looking at the velvet and the ring and at each other.

 
Caleb’s only ambition in life was for nothing to change. He remembered the misery of being anywhere but where he was, the wrenching, permanent ache of his childhood. All he cared about was that he never suffer it again. That was the full extent of his interest in Pendurra.

 
As for Tristram, he wondered whether Caleb had uncovered the clue to the ghostliness he felt shadowing his whole life, the mystery he’d inherited with the house. But now that it was lying in front of him, he too was thinking that maybe it was better for secrets to stay undisturbed. A velvet mirror-case and a ring, what did that tell him? Nothing at all. They put them back in the pouch, closed the box over them and left it at that.

 
Caleb slept easily. The feeling that had been nagging at him was gone; all was well again. Tristram, however, could not sleep.

 
In the middle of the night he went down through the house and studied the box by the light of a nearly full moon. He thought of his dead parents and grandparents. There was no one to ask, and there would be no one to come after him. He was in his sixties, a recluse. The imperturbable silence of the house stretched back and forward in time. There was just this one moment when perhaps it might speak.

 
He put on the ring. It would only fit on the little finger of his left hand.

 
The first thing that happened was that he saw that the sheathed mirror was alive. Something dwelled in it, something that did not belong; it was out of place and wanted to leave. This unsettled Tristram so much that he had to put it back in the pouch and shut the box over it. Then he saw that everything else was alive too. The box was alive. It was wood, no, two woods, sharing wood’s graceful strength but otherwise with different personalities, one more pliable and patient, the other stubborn, loyal; and it was also silver, which was cunning and secretive and teasing. The table he sat at was alive, and the floor his feet rested on. (He stood up, putting a hand down to steady himself.) The house was alive. It wasn’t just a thing; it had a presence. The moonlight was exquisitely alive, like a rain of bittersweet music flooding in around his feet. Everything was still as it had been, the shabby old room and the shadows and the dust, but everything was also itself, brimming with being: like the difference between a beloved face asleep and awake.

 
Every night after that, when he was sure Caleb was asleep, Tristram went downstairs and put the ring on his finger and walked for as long as he dared, often nearly until dawn. For those hours it was as if he walked inside a symphony. Tristram had found his ghosts. Sometimes he was sure he felt them in the air nearby, just behind him, ready to be glimpsed if only he could turn his head quickly enough. Sometimes he was so sure of it that he thought he saw a face, a solemn, age-worn woman’s face shrouded by curtains of dark hair. Or perhaps that was just the face he imagined when he held the ring itself up to his eyes. It was alive too, of course, alive with unfathomable vertiginous ancientness and a kind of hollow patience, a grief that had worn itself out.

 
When the moon had waned almost to nothing, he walked down one night to the edge of the river. He reached the cove and was standing on the little crooked stretch of sand when someone came out of the water.

 
For all those hundreds of years there had been no such thing as mermaids.
Mythical creatures
, the encyclopaedias said. This was how the world was divided since the last and greatest magus had drowned: facts on one side, legends on the other. In the vicinity of the prophetess’s ring, though, the line was fraying. The sea-creature had seen Tristram when he’d first wandered near the shoreline, wearing on his finger the passage between her world and his. She had fallen in love with him at once, and when he saw her step up out of the water, gleaming as if made of moonlight, how could he not be utterly enchanted, as spellbound as any man who saw a mermaid was fated to be?

 
He gave her the ring as a wedding band. It kept her human, or as close to human as she could come, though she couldn’t go far from the water for long, and she could not pass out of the gates of Pendurra at all: in the world beyond there was no such thing as she was. Tristram didn’t mind. As far as he was concerned she might as well have descended from heaven. He loved her blissfully, passionately. He no longer felt like a hermit sealed in a haunted house. Pendurra became their home: his, Swanny’s (so he called her), Caleb’s and then, two summers on, Marina’s. The baby should not have been possible, but there she was, growing month by month, with a whole future lying in wait. There were things that needed doing and preparing for, everyday things Tristram had not had to think about for many years. So he talked to the friend who knew him best and whom (apart from Caleb) he trusted most, and Owen Jeffrey looked around, and that was how Guinivere Clifton came to be invited to live in the lodge and join the strange family.

 
Five hundred years earlier any village grandfather anywhere in all Europe could have told them it wouldn’t last. You didn’t need to be as wise as the magus to know that human creatures and those other kinds of beings could never pretend they were the same. The tales of their unhappy conjunctions were part of the folk-knowledge of every household where stories had ever been listened to. But in the last decade of the twentieth century there was no one to tell Tristram what was coming. By then it had become a rule that fairy stories always had happy endings. It was part of what made them not true. That was the kind of fantasy Tristram thought he had entered, as if the ring was a magic wishing ring that had granted his desires, and no questions asked.