man he’d known. Was the old Brendan still in hiding somewhere, behind those addled eyes?, or had he been an illusion all along, a son’s dream of his father’s permanence which, like the letter from Eileen, had simply evaporated? Perhaps it was for the best, he thought, that Brendan was shielded from his pain, then drew himself up short at such a thought. Wasn’t that what they said as the coffin was marched past: it was all for the best? Brendan wasn’t dead yet.
As time went by, Geraldine’s presence began to prove as comforting to Cal as to the old man. Her smiles were the brightest thing those dismal months could boast. She came and went, more indispensable by the day, until, in the first week of December, she suggested it might be more convenient all round if she slept at the house. It was a perfectly natural progression.
‘I don’t want to marry you,’ she told him quite plainly. The sorry spectacle of Theresa’s marriage – five months old and already rocky – had confirmed her worst suspicions of matrimony. ‘I did want to marry you once,’ she said. ‘But now I’m happy just to be with you.’
She proved easy company; down-to-earth, unsentimental: as much companion as lover. She it was who made certain the bills were paid on time, and saw that there was tea in the caddy. She it was too who suggested that Cal sell the pigeons.
‘Your father doesn’t show any interest in them any longer,’ she said on more than one occasion. ‘He wouldn’t even notice if they were gone.’
That was certainly true. But Cal refused to contemplate the sale. Come spring and the fine weather his father might well show fresh interest in the birds.
‘You know that’s not true,’ she’d tell him when he put this point. ‘Why do you want to keep them so much? They’re just a burden.’ Then she’d let the subject drop for a few days, only to raise it again when a cue was presented.
History was repeating itself. Often in the course of these exchanges, which gradually became more heated. Cal could hear echoes of his mother and father: the same routes were being trodden afresh. And, like his father, Cal – though malleable on almost every other issue – was immovable on this. He would not sell the birds.
The real reason for his bullishness was not, of course, hope of Brendan’s rehabilitation, but the fact that the birds were his last concrete link with the events of the previous summer.
In the weeks after Suzanna’s disappearance he’d bought a dozen newspapers a day, scanning each page for some report of her, or the carpet, or Shadwell. But there was nothing, and eventually – unable to bear the daily disappointment – he’d stopped looking. Nor was there any further visit from Hobart or his men – which was in its way bad news. He, Cal, had become an irrelevancy. The story, if it was still being written, was running on without him.
He became so frightened he’d forget the Fugue that he took the risk of writing down all that he could remember of the night there, which, when he set himself to the task, was depressingly little. He wrote the names down too: Lemuel Lo; Apolline Dubois; Frederick Cammell …; set them all down at the back of his diary, in the section reserved for telephone numbers, except that there were no numbers for these people; nor addresses either. Just uncommon names to which he was less and less able to attach faces.
3
On some nights he had dreams, from which he would wake with tears on his face.
Geraldine consoled him as best she could, given that he claimed not to recall these dreams when he woke. That was in a sense true. He brought nothing into consciousness that words could encapsulate: only an aching sadness. She would lie beside him then, and stroke his hair, and tell him that though these were difficult times things could be much worse. She was right, of course. And by and by the dreams dwindled, until they finally ceased altogether.
4
In the last week of January, with Christmas bills still outstanding and too little money to pay them with, he sold the pigeons, with the exception of 33 and his mate. This pair he kept, though the reason why was harder and harder to remember; and by the end of the following month had been forgotten entirely.
IV
THE NOMADS
1
he passage of winter was certainly weary for Cal, but for Suzanna it held perils far worse than boredom and bad dreams.
Those perils had begun the day after the night of the Fugue, when she and the Peverelli brothers had so narrowly escaped capture by Shadwell. Her life, and Jerichau’s, with whom she’d been re-united in the street beyond Shearman’s estate, had scarcely been out of danger since.
She had been warned of this at Capra’s House, and a good deal else beside. But of all she’d learned, the subject that had left the deepest impression was the Scourge. The Councillors had grown pale talking of how close to extinction the Families had come. And though the enemies now snapping at her heels – Shadwell and Hobart – were of a different order entirely, she could not help but believe they and the Scourge sprang from the same poisonous earth. They were all, in their way, enemies of life.
And they were equally relentless. Staying one step ahead of the Salesman and his new ally was exhausting. She and Jerichau had been granted a few hours’ grace on that first day, when a false trail laid by the brothers had successfully confused the hounds, but Hobart had picked up the scent again by noon. She’d had no choice but to leave the city that afternoon, in a second-hand car she’d bought to replace the police vehicle they’d stolen. Using her own car, she knew, would be like sending up smoke signals.
One fact surprised her: there was no sign, either on the day of re-weaving, or subsequently, of Immacolata. Was it possible that the Incantatrix and her sisters had elected to stay in the carpet; or even become trapped there against their will? Perhaps that was too much to hope for. Yet the menstruum – which she was increasingly able to control and use – never carried a tremor of Immacolata’s presence.
Jerichau kept a respectful distance in those early weeks; made uneasy, perhaps, by her preoccupation with the menstruum. He could be of no use in her learning process: the force she owned was a mystery to him; his maleness feared it. But by degrees she convinced him that neither it nor she (if they could be defined as separate entities) bore him the slightest ill-will, and he grew a little easier with her powers. She was even able to talk with him about how she’d first gained access to the menstruum, and how it had subsequently delved into Cal. She was grateful for the chance to talk about these events – they’d remained locked up in her for too long, fretted over. He had few answers for her, but the very telling seemed to heal her anxieties. And the less anxious she became, the more the menstruum showed its worth. It gave her a power that proved invaluable in those weeks: a premonitory skill that showed her ghost-forms of the future. She’d see Hobart’s face on the stairs outside the room where they were hiding, and know that he’d be standing in that very spot before too long. Sometimes she saw Shadwell too, but mostly it was Hobart, his eyes desperate, his thin mouth shaping her name. That was the signal to move on, of course, whatever the time of day or night. Pack up their bags, and the carpet, and go.
She had other talents too, all rooted in the menstruum. She could see the lights Jerichau had first shown her on Lord Street; and after a surprisingly short space they became quite unremarkable to her: merely another piece of information – like the expression on a face, or the tone of a voice – that she used to read a stranger’s temperament. And there was another visionary skill she now possessed, somewhere between the premonitions and the haloes: that is, she could see the consequence of natural processes. It wasn’t just the bud she saw, but the blossom it would become in spring, and if she stretched her sight a little further, the fruit that would come after it. This grasp of
