Metro Winds (14 page)

In Dusty Town, I noted the confused, lumbering movements of the velvet men clad in the ungainly attire of the clay folk, whose steps drew no music from the land. Was it the clothes they wore that stopped them from finding the music, or an inability to find music that made them don the clothes and ape the ways of the clay people? Perhaps in building their great untidy settlement, the clay folk had made it impossible for the velvet people, who had once passed over this place, to walk where they used to walk, so that the music had been irrevocably broken. I had noticed that the same velvet people passed our house, though sometimes there were a few extra people, or one or two fewer. Perhaps the impossibility of walking their own ancient songlines had destroyed those velvet people whose song paths had been built over, trapping them within Dusty Town to wither like leaves caught in a grate. In any case, they seemed to me as different from the wild velvet people as a separate race.

One morning when we had come to the wharves very early so that Mama could supervise the unloading of some hundred-year-old eggs to be served at the ball, I elected to stay in the carriage. I had been sitting for a time, wondering at the fact that even now, when there was no one in the street, the dust hung suspended in the air. A wind blew up. I was startled because I had never known a breeze to blow here, and had supposed that there was something about the shape of the hills surrounding the town on three sides, and the closed nature of the harbour, that prevented the wind from entering. I turned to look in the direction from which it was blowing, and was astonished to see a group of wild velvet men and women and a few children walking down the centre of the street. I could see them quite clearly because the wind had blown a clear passage for them through the haze of dust. Then I heard the sound of music. It was more hesitant than at any other time I had heard it, with unusual dissonances, and the velvet people moved very slowly, almost carefully, though no less gracefully than usual. Listening to the music they were making, I felt instinctively that the discordances I heard were not mistakes but part of the music, and that it was being delicately and intricately shaped around the obstructions that were the clay people's buildings. It reminded me of trying to play a piece on a piano that had several broken keys, so that you must quickly find alternate keys. It was as if these wild velvet people were striving to create a music that would encompass the obstructions and barriers thrown up by the clay people.

I had never seen nomadic velvet people in the town before, and I wondered if this walk was an attempt to heal the people who had once made music here, by creating new lines of song that might be walked. Two young velvet women appeared in a street ahead of the walkers, clad in the slovenly cast-off shifts of the clay folk. One walked a little ahead of the other, inclining her head as if to listen to something she could barely hear, and the second came behind her, plucking at her dress fretfully. Both stopped and gaped at the sight of the wild velvet people, and after a moment the first girl kicked off her shoes impatiently. Her face was trans-figured by wonder but the other girl merely stared at her in stupid amazement.

The song walkers arrived at the intersection where I sat, and as I looked at them, the oldest of the velvet men looked up and met my gaze, without breaking his slow stride or interrupting the song. He showed no surprise to find me sitting there watching, which gave me the queer feeling that he had known all along that I was there and could see him and the others. The look he gave me was long and searching, as if my face were a book he was reading, then his eyes widened and he smiled, a startling crescent moon of white. He took several swift steps towards me and then away, which gave a peculiar thrilling trill to the song he was walking, and made the other walkers look at him. I held my breath, for it seemed to me that I had just been woven into their music.

The velvet man smiled at me, and pointed to my feet. I looked down at them, clad in their neat, white leather, buttoned boots, and noted the stain of red on them though I had not taken a single step. I thought of the velvet girl who had taken off her shoes, and wondered what I would hear if I took off my boots and stockings and stood barefoot in the dust. But when I looked up, the man and the other velvet people had vanished, and even as I watched, the wind erased their path and whirled away, leaving only the hot, sticky red stillness.

Mama came out then, and I forgot what I had seen in the business of getting the crates of black, gelid eggs into the back of the carriage.

Preparations for the ball had swallowed weeks of time, but suddenly the day dawned and I was watching Mama's maid lace her into her boned petticoat and make up her face, then a hairdresser spend an hour brushing and pinning and winding her mass of pale yellow hair into a delicate tower of tiny curls and ringlets around sprigs of violets and fastening it with amethyst combs. Last, the dress was held out and Mama slipped her arms into its short lace sleeves. It was made of watered silk and silk chiffon in twenty shades of violet, layered like the petals of a vast flower, and as the hundreds of tiny buttons were fastened all down the back of the gown, another maid powdered Mama's bare white shoulders and long swan's neck, and slipped on her jewel-encrusted slippers. Mama permitted me to spray a mist of exotic scent on each slim wrist and on the little pulse that beat in the hollow at the base of her throat and then she let me help her on with her long gloves. Two maids fastened the thirty buttons on each, and she announced that she was ready.

‘Oh madam, you look like a princess!' said the youngest maid, then blushed red as a beet as the others shushed her, but Mama only smiled. Then she dismissed all of them.

When we were alone, she looked into my eyes and said very seriously, ‘It matters, how you look and how you move, Willow. Never forget that. There is a power in such things that can be harnessed to transform a girl into a princess.'

I nodded, for these had been my own thoughts about the song walkers I had seen a few days earlier in the town. I was tempted to speak of their music but held my tongue, remembering how the sight of the velvet people had thrown Mama into despair.

The night of the ball passed swiftly for me, for of course I did not attend. I watched the guests arriving from the top of the stairs, admiring their clothes and imagining lives and personalities for the ones I did not know, but once they passed into the main rooms I could see nothing. I fell asleep listening to the muted music, and dreamed of turning and turning to it in a full-length gown.

I woke early, eagerly, and I was not disappointed for, as we breakfasted, Mama told me a thousand tales of the night. That it had been a dazzling success was no surprise to me, yet Mama seemed elated, almost as if she had doubted it.

One week after the ball, Ernst came to call. He was a tall and handsome man with a bristling black beard and splendid large eyes that shone like black pearls dipped in oil. He was so like Papa at first glance that my mouth dropped open foolishly when he was shown into the parlour. When I said so to Mama after he had departed, too shocked to guard my tongue, Mama merely smiled and reminded me tranquilly that he had come to the ball. She said this with such satisfaction that one might have supposed the sole reason for the ball had been the luring of him to it.

Ernst was gentle and courteous in his manner with me from the first, and as the weeks passed he visited many times, becoming more warm and less formal, until at last I realised that he was courting me as well as Mama. I understood this all of a sudden, and rather later than I ought to have done, when Ernst observed one day to Mama with almost startled pleasure that, in appearance, I could be his own daughter. I am tall and lean and dark like Papa was, but instead of explaining this, Mama only smiled with a sort of pleased satisfaction, as if a difficult puzzle had been solved.

‘Will you marry Mama?' I asked one evening. I had been given some watered wine to try which had made me bold and a little giddy. It was too soon for such a question, of course, for the cadences of courtship are slow and ornate, though far less slow, I came to discover, because Mama was a widow and not a maiden. Instead of being annoyed or affronted by my pert question, Ernst laughed and did not report my indiscretion to Mama, which made me like him even more. They wed a month later. Only then did I learn that Ernst had two wards, both the children of a distant cousin, who had come under his protection when their parents had died in a fire. Like Mama and me they came from abroad, though they had been here for several years.

The younger was a plump boy called Reynaldo and the older a tall, very handsome, long-faced and rather gloomy boy called Silk. They came to live with us, though Silk was mostly away at school, and when at home, he spent time with various friends or with his nose buried in his books. I loved reading too, and spent a good portion of my time in our library, which doubled in size after Ernst married Mama and became my stepfather. I should have liked to be friends with Silk, for it seemed to me that we shared a common love, and I had never had a friend, but he was like a closed door to me, and in time, I ceased to wonder what might lie behind it.

Reynaldo was as loud as his brother was silent, as bullish and stubborn as Silk was elusive, and although I found him tiresome and tiring I could not help but like his rather thick-headed courage, for I had little boldness in me. He ardently claimed me as his property and declared often that he would marry me when he was grown to manhood. He did not doubt that I shared his desire, so it was fortunate for both of us that he had to spend most of each day with tutors or fencing masters. I did care for him, but I did not love him, and this made me wonder uneasily if I had in me the warmth of heart to love properly. Then, nine months after Mama wed Ernst, she gave birth to a daughter.

2.

‘But Rose is such an ephemeral name,' Ernst protested. ‘Would it not be prudent to name her Ruby or Adamant, or some such resilient and eternal name?'

A long time later, I remembered those words of his, and wondered if he had some prescient inkling of what was to come.

‘Rose,' Mama only repeated very firmly. ‘The beauty of a rose lasts forever in the mind, long after the petals have fallen.'

I could tell from Ernst's expression that he doted on her too much to insist upon having his way. Besides, he must have known by now that there were certain matters upon which Mama would never give way; naming was one of them, as was the wearing of clothes appropriate to each occasion, the placement of furniture and flowers, and the composition of gardens and meals.

Once Ernst had nodded his surrender, Mama bade me sit in the chair so that I might hold my sister. My stepfather looked worried, but Mama said almost pointedly that it was best we bond as soon as may be.

So Ernst brought Rose to me, ignoring Reynaldo's jealous demand to hold the baby. I looked into Rose's little flower of a face for the first time. Unlike those of other newborn babies I had seen, it was not red and shrivelled but as soft and pink and delicate as a flower, and the fluff of golden hair atop it made me certain she had inherited our mother's indestructible beauty. Her cloudy eyes cleared to a pure light blue and seemed to focus on me. I knew babies that young could not see, and that the seeming colour change must be the result of clouds glooming over the sun, but I felt her look as a hand that reached into me and touched my very essence. When she withdrew her gaze, I felt it still. Was that why I loved her so much? I cannot say. I only know that from the beginning I adored her. Reynaldo was fiercely put out by this, and once tipped Rose from her perambulator in a jealous rage. But instead of screaming, she only looked at him with her big blue eyes until he flung his arms about her, begging her to forgive him. After that he became her devoted defender and often argued with me over who should push the perambulator in the garden. I regarded him more affectionately than I had done hitherto, because he shared my worship of my dainty little sister, though his passions were as violent and brief as rainstorms. Even Silk, who came home for one of his brief visits soon after her birth, smiled at Rose and let her be placed in his arms so that he could admire her. I felt a little stab of surprise to see her lift starfish fingers to his face and touch his lips, for I had never seen her do that to anyone but me.

Rose grew to resemble Mama, just as I had guessed she would. But as well as her pink and gold loveliness, she had a nature that was all her own. She was sunny, sweetly generous and utterly open. When Reynaldo wanted something of hers, she let him take it. When he pushed in front of her, she smiled at him and gave way so willingly that it was as if this was her own desire. Later, when she had friends visit, she allowed them to wear all of her clothes and often gave away her favourite toys and garments because she could not bear for anyone to yearn for something that it was in her power to bestow. I felt shamed by her unselfishness but my stepfather worried aloud that she had no discretion. Of course he feared she might grow to be a sweet-faced fool, but I knew already that she was no more a fool nor foolish than I. She was merely good in so thoughtful and intelligent a way that it was impossible to argue with her. Indeed, there were times I found myself giving some favoured trinket of my own away to a worthy child simply because I could not find an argument in favour of keeping it. In her own way, Rose was as difficult to resist as our Mama, but her power lay in her essential sweetness and I never regretted my obedience.

I did not worry that she was lacking in wit, but there were times when it troubled me that she was unable to conceive that the world might mean her harm or do her mischief. When we walked out, she would run down any dark lane to introduce herself to a cat whose sly twinkling eyes she had spotted, never fearing there might be less savoury things than cats awaiting her. Sometimes, when I read to her, I found myself deliberately exaggerating the monsters and evil characters in her books, in the hope of frightening a little wariness into her. But it did not work. Rose only pitied the monsters their wickedness and wondered if a little kindness or something pretty might not shine a light into the darkness of their souls.