‘A concrete millionaire?’ I said. ‘I’d never have guessed.’
Rhiannon shook her head, as though she too found it hard to believe.
The authorities were always telling Owen that he was helping to create a better world, she said, that his name would go down in history, and so on, but he soon began to feel uncomfortable. He must have noticed how much misery was being caused, and he must also have realised that, for large sections of the population, the most powerful symbol of that misery was the concrete that he had himself supplied. He stopped going in to work, hoping the business would collapse, but it had become so established that it more or less ran itself. There was only one course of action left. He sold everything — the factories, his town house, the lot — and moved to the coast. He went from being a dynamic, glamorous industrialist to a man who grew tomatoes and read books about comparative religion. He still enjoyed company, though. Friends came to stay. Then friends of those friends came. One day he looked around and saw that he was living in a community. It hadn’t been planned, or even thought about. It had happened organically. And, purely by chance, their way of life was perfectly in tune with the phlegmatic temperament. They understood the need for sanctuary, they rejected materialism without being puritanical, and with their emphasis on gratitude and celebration they were able to channel or harness all manner of emotion. People heard about the community, and it spoke to them, and they began to arrive on the doorstep.
‘And they’re still arriving,’ Rhiannon said, ‘even now.’
‘By sea as well as land,’ I said lightly.
‘Actually’ — and she gave me a smile I couldn’t fathom — ‘I think you’d fit in rather well.’
My eyes drifted beyond her. The girls had disappeared, leaving their rackets lying on the grass. The lake beyond was motionless.
‘In the end, there’s something about this place,’ Rhiannon said. ‘I don’t know what it is. An absence of pressure, I suppose. A sense of acceptance.’ She smiled again, more openly this time. ‘A kind of peace.’
The unearthly stillness that had troubled me during my walk turned out to have been the prelude to a change in the weather. That night a storm blew in, gale-force winds rushing through the courtyards and passageways of the house. Sheet lightning lit up the sky every few seconds, making the clouds look like stage scenery, artificial and melodramatic. After dinner I retired to my room with a book I had borrowed from the library, an essay on gardens by someone called Sir William Temple. As I lay on my bed reading, a lamp on beside me and the rest of the room in darkness, the door came open. At first I thought the wind must have forced the latch, but then I saw a figure silhouetted against the steel-grey light in the yard outside.
‘Rhiannon?’
‘It’s not Rhiannon.’
A girl crossed the room with a tray. She had brought me a herbal infusion that smelled a little like warm grass. I didn’t think I’d seen her before — unless, perhaps, she was one of the girls who’d been playing badminton. The silk dress she was wearing came down to her ankles, but it showed off her forearms, which looked slender, almost golden, as she reached into the fall of lamplight to pour the tea. Her dark-brown hair was so long that it hid her shoulderblades. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen.
‘I was the one who saw you first,’ she said.
‘I’d been wondering who it was,’ I said — though, in truth, I had done my best to put the events of that particular day behind me.
She looked away into the room. ‘I’m often out there early. It’s a beautiful time. That morning, though, I saw something on the water, a figure that had arms, a face. Then I saw you crouching on top of it, all huddled up. I ran back to the house. I don’t think I’ve ever run so fast.’
‘I heard a bell tolling as I was drifting in towards the beach,’ I said. ‘I thought it was a funeral. There was a part of me that thought I must have died.’
She glanced at me sideways. What I had just said seemed to disturb her. Outside, the wind swelled, surging against the walls.
‘How long have you been here?’ I asked.
‘About a year.’
‘And will you stay?’
‘I don’t know. I’m happy at the moment.’ She moved her shoulders, as if to rid herself of the burden of having to decide too soon. ‘Would you like to go for a walk?’
She saw me hesitate.
‘It’s not raining,’ she said. ‘It’s not even cold.’
I closed my book and put it down.
She led me through the stable-yard, then along the side of the conservatory whose sheets of glass creaked under the gale’s weight. We crossed the lawn at the back of the house. In Owen’s library, the curtains had been drawn against the storm. After circling the lake, we entered a wood on the edge of the property. Lightning flared. High wrought-iron gates stood on the path ahead of us, forbidding as a row of spears. Any sound they might have made as we hauled them open was drowned by the trees hissing and thrashing all around us. We began to climb upwards, over rugged ground, and soon the house had shrunk to a collection of frail yellow lights afloat in a swirling blackness.
Before long we found ourselves on a headland, its cropped grass the colour of slate when the sky lit up. Only now did the wind reveal its true power, gathering the girl’s long hair and lifting it away from her neck until it flew at right angles to her body. Her exhilarated laughter was snatched from her mouth and carried off into the night. I watched the silk of her dress ripple against her belly and her thighs, and I imagined that, if I kissed her, her breath would taste fresh and slightly bitter, like the petals of chrysanthemums. I remembered the tea that she had served with such care, then carelessly abandoned, tea which would be cold by now, and I thought how young she was, how little lay behind her, how far she had to go.
She had brought me to a part of the cliffs I hadn’t visited before, and I could hear the sea below, boiling and roaring on a steep bank of shingle. The waves didn’t break so much as shatter. We leaned into a wind that seemed to want to fling us to the earth. Once or twice, miles out, sheet lightning flashed, and I could just make out the clouds massed on the horizon, their furious shapes, their ripped and jagged edges, like molten metal left to cool.
The girl linked her arm through mine and pointed to the east.
‘Look that way,’ she shouted.
For a moment, though, I couldn’t take my eyes off her face, which was so eager, so elated. It was one of the purest things I’d ever seen.
She tightened her grip on my arm and pointed again. ‘Keep looking.’
And then it happened. White water came leaping from the ground in front of us, rising high into the air, only for the wind to reach out and bend it sideways. Now I could see the blow-hole in the cliff-top, just a few feet from where we stood.
The girl leaned close to me again. ‘There’s a cave down there. We swim there in the summer. When it’s calm.’
‘I’ll be gone by then,’ I said.
But she had already turned away, and didn’t hear.
My door was open, and a triangle of early morning sunlight stretched out on the floor, as white and pristine as a sail. Since my suit was beyond repair, I was wearing the clothes Rhiannon had found for me, which would in any case be more appropriate for the kind of travelling I had in mind. Before throwing the suit away, I’d checked the jacket collar, but the banknotes had been reduced to a pulp. I was broke. If I was to reach Aquaville, I would either have to walk or hitch.
The room darkened. Rhiannon stood in the doorway, holding a knapsack. ‘You’re leaving,’ she said.
I nodded. ‘I think it’s time.’
‘So you know about our visitors?’