The Immortals Read online

  THE

  IMMORTALS

  S.E. Lister

  To the Shortman son

  who is twin to this book

  with love

  wherever your journeys take you.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part One

  1 1945

  2 Arline

  3 To the Journeys

  4 Old Acquaintance

  5 The Fabulist

  6 Seysair

  7 Your Ain Countrie

  Part Two

  8 All in Gold

  9 The Holy Fool

  10 Come Away

  11 Black Wave

  12 The Museum

  13 God’s-Eye

  Part Three

  14 Red Letter

  15 Long Fall

  16 Hiroshima

  17 The Soldier

  18 A Thousand Years

  19 Weep for Us

  20 Almonds

  21 The Most Beautiful Place

  22 ’Til Death

  Part Four

  23 No City of That Name

  24 The Allotment

  25 Marble Halls

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

  To the holy city of Byzantium.

  O sages standing in God’s holy fire

  As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

  Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

  And be the singing-masters of my soul.

  Consume my heart away; sick with desire

  And fastened to a dying animal

  It knows not what it is; and gather me

  Into the artifice of eternity.

  Once out of nature I shall never take

  My bodily form from any natural thing,

  But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

  Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

  To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

  Or set upon a golden bough to sing

  To lords and ladies of Byzantium

  Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

  W. B. Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium

  Part One

  1

  1945

  Rosa came home after seven years, in the same year she had left. It was the beginning of the wet spring she knew so well. She found their cottage on the edge of a village, the latest Hyde home in a string of many, tucked out of the way behind a disused cattle barn. There were sandbags stacked against the steps, blackout curtains in every window. Bindweed framed the doorway. Beyond the fields a church spire rose into the dusky sky, lashed by rain, its chimes silenced.

  A glossy blackbird shook its wings in a tree above her head, its liquid song filling the evening air. Everything was green, fat raindrops sliding from oak leaves and splashing onto the newly sprouted daffodils on the side of the road. There was a bicycle leaning against a silver birch. The grass at her feet was thick with snails.

  She knocked, and after a few moments the door clicked open. A fair-haired girl blinked up at her politely. Rosa stared at her sister, now ten years old and tall for it, and felt the whole breadth of her own absence.

  Bella ducked halfway back into the hallway. She peered out from behind her hair, plainly confused as to why this ragged stranger was familiar. Rosa’s words, rehearsed across many miles and decades, caught in her throat. She had nothing to say.

  “Who is it?”

  Footsteps, and then Bella had been pulled aside, making way for an apron-clad woman with her hair in curlers. She had a tea-towel in one hand and a mug in the other. Her mouth grew small and tight. The mug began to shake, spilling a slick of coffee onto the floor.

  “Come in. Hurry! Come in…” Her mother’s hands did not touch her, but beckoned urgently. The door was pulled closed. In the hallway Rosa looked at Harriet Hyde, who had grown thinner, her face lined and her fiery hair dulled with grey. The softness around her edges had been replaced by a strained, brittle look. She bent to dab at the stain on the floor, shooing Rosa away when she tried to help. Bella clung to her apron.

  “Did you walk through the village dressed like that?” Harriet asked at last, straightening up. Rosa nodded. “Were you seen by anyone?”

  “I don’t think so. It’s dark, mother.”

  “Yes, yes, I know. But busybodies at their windows…” Harriet’s eyes were bulging.

  “Nobody looks out of their window at this hour.” Rosa lowered the pack from her shoulders. She peeled off her raincoat, and untied the scarf from around her hair.

  “You might at least have changed your clothes.”

  Rosa felt her jaw clench. “That wouldn’t have been easy.”

  The whitewashed hallway was lit by a single bulb, umbrellas stacked beside the door, shoes in a neat line. No pictures on the walls, no peg for visitors’ coats. She had forgotten that they always had this feel, the Hyde homes, this stale, unloved impermanence. The carpets were worn only by other peoples’ footsteps, the pencil-scratches by the door marking the heights of other peoples’ children. Occupants long-gone, each place a borrowed shell.

  Harriet gestured as though it was the only movement she could remember, and Rosa tugged away her boots, wiping their muddy undersides on the mat. “You missed tea,” Harriet said, as though Rosa had merely been for an afternoon walk, lost track of the time. “We had potato dumplings. I can put together some leftovers if you’d like.”

  “Thank you.”

  Bella peered at Rosa from behind their mother’s apron, biting the end of her thumb. She looked pale, as though she rarely saw sunlight. When Rosa tried smiling at her, she hid herself again.

  “She was only three,” Harriet said. “You can hardly expect her to remember you.” The words pierced Rosa’s numbness. Eyes filling, she turned away towards the wall, but then felt a hand against her cheek. For all her journeying, she had never seen anything so awful or so wonderful as the look her mother now wore. There was a ferocity and force in it she could not comprehend. Nothing on earth could have pulled her away from that terrifying gaze.

  “Rosa,” said Harriet, with a weight of longing. Bella burrowed even deeper beneath her apron. “Rosa.”

  The room splintered and blurred. A deep ache filled Rosa’s throat, and even as she tried to fight it, it broke out into a sob. Her name spoken in her mother’s voice, the rawness of that sound. Over Harriet’s shoulder, she saw somebody come to the top of the stairs. Her father towered, a faceless silhouette. Harriet pulled Bella back, and Robert Hyde came slowly, jerkily down the steps.

  “I didn’t hear,” he said. “I was in the attic. With the trains.”

  Fair, like Bella, Robert had aged even more noticeably than his wife. Rosa remembered him as a tall man, but his back was now bent. There were deep lines around his eyes and mouth. He looked dazed, as though he had just been shaken awake.

  “Has it been…?” His hand made to cover his eyes, but Rosa quickly shook her head to reassure him.

  “Seven years for me, too. You can look. I made sure of it, that I came back to the right place.”

  “How old…?” he asked. His eyes, crinkled against the light of the bare bulb, darted to and fro as he attempted to work it out. He flinched when she provided the answer.

  “I’m twenty-four.”

  Like Harriet, he offered no embrace. In fact he did not reach out to touch her at all. He stopped several paces shy of where she stood, and simply stared. The moment stretched. After a while, he said weakly, “We didn’t expect you.”

  Harriet made an odd, inhuman noise from the corner. Rosa brushed her tears away with the back of her hand. She knew that she ought to fill the silence, to attempt some kind of explanation as to where she had been, what had brought her back after
so long. But it was all mired in confusion. She could barely untangle it in her own head, let alone put it into words for these barely familiar people. There was the humiliation of it, to come knocking at their door like this, after the way she had left. If she had imagined a return at all, it was the triumphant kind that would leave them chastened. Awed by all she had built without them.

  “Do you have space for me?” she asked, as evenly as she could.

  Robert gestured upstairs. “We’ve a spare room.”

  “Daddy!” began Bella. Harriet hushed her with a stern finger.

  Rosa hooked one hand around the strap of her bag. “I’ll go there now, if it’s all right. I’m terribly tired. I came a long way.”

  “Daddy. Who -”

  “It’s your sister, Ladybug.” Robert did not meet Rosa’s eyes. “Do you remember?”

  “She doesn’t,” put in Harriet. Another sharp tug in Rosa’s throat, and Bella retreated behind the apron again.

  Robert came forward. “I’ll help you with your things.”

  “No need.” Rosa pulled the heavy pack back on, tucking her raincoat beneath her arm. Her parents were looking at her as though she had risen from the grave. Harriet’s hands were clasped over her reddening chest. Robert was clinging to the banister.

  “Are you hungry?” asked Harriet. And then, again, “You missed tea.”

  *

  She found that she was trembling. Moving into the spare room, she sat down on the edge of the bed. A blackout curtain covered the window, and all was quiet. The mattress creaked beneath her, and she put her hands on her knees. The space between the walls felt suffocatingly small.

  Isn’t this necessary, Rosa? Isn’t it why you found them again? To be back in a place which helps you hold your shape. Better to be pressed in on all sides, compacted and diminished. The alternative was to drift apart from herself. She had sensed it beginning to happen on the frozen beach, and the horror of it had not yet left her. The only thing worse than being back among the Hydes was to be too far from them, to have forgotten her own name altogether.

  She had pictured this moment of return so many times along the journey that, now it had finally come, she had no feeling left to spare for it. Lately she could hardly bear company, and yet grew fretful when alone. To occupy her hands, she began to unpack her bag, heaping filthy clothes and worn-through shoes onto the floor. At the bottom, wrapped in newspapers from ten different decades, were her trinkets. She did not collect anywhere near as prodigiously as others she’d met, but was unable to resist the odd trophy. She lined them up on the windowsill.

  A battery-operated watch with a face that had once lit up at the press of a button. A tin train painted postbox-red. From the court of a long dead lord, a small dagger in a snake-shaped sheath. And then a square gold coin and a carnival mask, from cities and years she could barely recall. A conch shell from the shore of the frozen sea. Smuggled out of the Museum’s cretaceous hall, a flat stone bearing the fossilized imprint of a feathered wing.

  The door creaked, and she glimpsed a shape which ducked back into the shadow. A slippered foot slid across the carpet.

  “Bella?” said Rosa softly.

  Brown eyes blinked back at her. The girl moved into the doorway, wearing too-short striped pyjamas. Her hair had been plaited, and she carried a toothbrush in her hand. She squirmed shyly.

  “It’s all right. You can come in.”

  Bella was looking at the objects arranged on the sill. “What’s that?”

  “Which one?”

  Bella pointed indistinctly again, and Rosa stepped aside to give her a better view. She shuffled across the carpet and stood on tiptoe. One fingertip gingerly prodded the spiked conch, and a palm tested the weight of the stone. She didn’t know what to do with the watch until Rosa showed her, slipping it around her wrist. “It’s broken now. But that used to work the light.”

  Soberly the little girl pressed the button, pressed it again. Rosa watched her face, but saw little curiosity there. Bella turned to her with the same passive expression, and Rosa wondered whether anything in her sister’s world made the remotest bit of sense.

  “It’s an electric watch, Bella. From the twenty-first. The numbers would appear there, so you could see what the time was, in the dark.”

  It was impossible to know whether she had understood. Bella put the watch down again, and fixed Rosa with her blank-eyed look. “I’m not allowed to tell you,” she said.

  “Tell me what?”

  “Where we’ve been. Or where we’re going next. It’s a secret. I shan’t tell you if you ask me.”

  “I won’t ask,” said Rosa. She remembered Bella at three, round-cheeked, not quite yet steady on her feet. “But it’s all right. Ask Mother. It’s all right for me to know.”

  Bella chewed at the head of her toothbrush. This idea seemed new to her. Rosa had a brief flash of how the last seven years might have played out for her sister: an unending succession of cautions and closed doors. Feet kicking through empty rooms, elbows on the windowsill, chin in her hands as the world went by outside. Rosa suppressed a shudder. And then there was something else, something unexpected and unwelcome; the creeping beginnings of guilt.

  “Come on, now. I said bed.” Harriet had appeared in the doorway, wrapped in a dressing gown and with smudges of cold cream above her eyes. She beckoned sharply to Bella, who pattered away without protest. Rosa heard her thumping down the stairs, one at a time, to brush her teeth at the kitchen sink.

  Harriet was carrying a tray which bore a steaming bowl and a slice of bread. She pushed the door closed with her foot, and Rosa’s stomach sank.

  “I warmed this from the larder for you. Make sure you blow on it first, it’s very hot. And try not to spill on the bedclothes.”

  Rosa balanced the tray on her knees. Harriet hovered while she ate – potato dumplings in a thick soup. More than the sight of her family’s faces, the familiar flavours told her she was back. Hungrier than she had realised, she crammed the bread into the sides of her mouth, pausing only when she saw the look on her mother’s face. She wiped her sleeve defensively across her mouth.

  Harriet folded and then unfolded the nightdress she had been carrying under the tray. Her knuckles were white, and the skin of her chest still mottled pink. Either of these things could forecast tears. In the end she said, “You look thin.”

  Rosa lowered her head over the plate, and almost returned the remark. Her mother’s gown hung too loosely. Harriet looked somehow as though she had lost weight from the inside out, as though something deeper than her bones had shrivelled. Yet Rosa’s impulse was contempt, not concern. Unconcealed weakness, more than anything, tried her patience.

  “You’ll have to use some of my clothes, for now,” said Harriet, laying the nightdress down on the bed. “If you’re staying. Are you…?” Her voice cracked. “Are you staying?”

  “Yes, Mother.” Rosa chewed resolutely.

  “For long?”

  “I can’t know that.”

  “Because you can’t choose, you mean?” Harriet’s fingers worried at a loose thread on the bed-cover. “How bad has it been?” She sat down on the edge of the bed, as far from Rosa as was possible. The silence stretched until Rosa felt ill with dread, everything she’d just eaten rising to the back of her throat. Staring at the carpet, she searched for a reply which would close down questions instead of inviting more. Harriet pressed her again. “Did you have to travel far to come back here?”

  “From further ahead than you can probably imagine.” The words were supposed to be dismissive, but they landed heavily, and Harriet seemed to grow yet greyer as she absorbed them. Rosa felt distant from herself, as though she was watching the scene from above. Two red-headed figures sat hunched upon the bed in the small, clean room, blackout curtains holding back the night.

  “I might imagine it,” ventured Harriet. “If you…”

  Rosa lifted the tray from her lap onto the bedside table. “Mother, it’s late. I’m t
ired. Three months, if you want to know, by air and train and on foot and every other which way.”

  “From where?”

  “I was about fifteen years ahead, the wrong side of Russia, and I had to come back through Kiev and Berne and Amiens. Where the right tides were, if that means anything to you. I haven’t slept in a bed in weeks. Let’s not talk now.”

  Harriet’s eyes grew wider. She had not stopped staring at Rosa, as though she might read every answer from her daughter’s unkempt hair, patched clothes, weather-worn face. “I hope to goodness you didn’t cross those miles in nineteen and forty-five.”`

  Rosa shook her head, and could not resist adding, “They don’t say nineteen and forty-five, Mother. Just nineteen forty-five, if you remember from when you were one of them. Eighteen sixty-one. Fifteen thirty-nine.”

  “Oh, they do, do they?”

  “Yes. It’s not difficult, and it makes you sound simple when you get it wrong.” Rosa pounded the pillow with her fist.

  “Have you seen yourself?” said Harriet. “I shall have to cut your hair.”

  “I’ll cut it.”

  “Well, you’ve always done just as you wish. Just make sure you don’t draw any attention. You can’t leave the house again looking like that. We’re hoping to stay here until the end of the year.”

  “And then where?”

  Harriet met her gaze. “Some other town,” she said. “Some other house, and the same months all over again. What did you expect? Our war goes on.” Her eyes ranged over her daughter’s face, and Rosa realised that behind all her questioning, she was starving for reassurance. No rest for the mother of the runaway, not even now that she was returned alive. Harriet wanted to hear that the fears of her night hours had been groundless: that the world beyond nineteen forty-five had surprised with its kindness. Rosa let the silence limp on. Even if she had wanted to, she could have offered no such comfort.

  She could perhaps have lied, but Rosa found that her anger against the Hydes had not yet burned out. Being angry with her father was useless; it simply slid over him. Harriet, less to blame, had always attracted more of Rosa’s anger because she understood it. If her mother had not chosen to resist, Rosa was sure, Harriet’s anger might have eclipsed her own.