Umbrella (15 page)

lack of charm
, Marcus’s abruptness, a stop-and-start that recalls the paradoxical condition of
those others
with their
veined, dry-leaf skin . . . who blow in drifts along the endless corridor, for the end of time has come . . . and the campanile has collapsed . . . rain falls through the broken ceiling of the pharmacy . . . blue-and-yellow capsules swirl in a clear glass bowl, schizophrenics bob for them – dipping birds . . .
—
They must have reached
some sort of conclusion
, risen from their
burled walnut caskets
and got out
from under that harsh white light
, for here they are: the old man standing erect in the hallway, Busner already outside the heavy front door and embarrassed for the Marcuses, whose
Jewfoody stench
can still be detected a floor down from their flat, and which seems to him to sully the deep-piled purple carpets and smirch the brass nameplate of the mansion block. Busner cannot contain his thoughts — they fly to be with
squatters sitting grouped on
tea chests
, one of whom
licks a Rizla and attaches it to two others
. . .
and in
another place there are disco lights making thighs blood-red
. . .
the horror
, the horror is that this, of all the possible times and places, feels willed. His hand ivy on the doorjamb, his carpet slippers mossy on the mat, Marcus says: I enlisted as a general physician, but when they discovered I was a psychiatrist I was seconded at once to the field hospitals set up in the beachhead immediately after the landings. It was very abrupt – one week the dark corridors of Colney Hatch, the next these equally oppressive Normandy hedgerows, and pitched right beside them army canvas tents . . . When I’d first been at the Hatch inmates who repeatedly soiled themselves, or those put in the padded cells, were forced into canvas tunics . . . Every time there was a show more and more boys were brought into the tents, white as . . . white as . . . They’d never seen action before – their training had consisted only of robotic drills. They’d soiled themselves – plenty had thrown away their rifles . . . by far the majority hadn’t fired a shot. They sat in their own mess ticcing, and we shrinks joked – gallows humour, d’you see – that it was a busman’s holiday. Chap I knew – before the war he’d been at Napsbury – he went over with the Yanks and they did some sort of a study, very hush-hush. Turned out only one in ten of their infantry ever shot with lethal intent and I can’t imagine it was any different with our boys.
Where’s he going on his busman’s holiday?
Odd, isn’t it, to think of all that mayhem, all that killing – now too in Pakistan – and yet the vast bulk of it is perpetrated by a mere handful of psychopathic personalities, the rest being there to, euch-euch, make up the numbers. They have been standing like this for so long that it would seem appropriate for Marcus to invite Busner back in, but instead he looks critically at the younger man’s fat knot of woolly tie and the plump hand that fidgets with it, and says, I’ve enjoyed talking at you – will you come again? Busner laughs, I’d like to – and I’d like to come with news of a . . . positive nature. I mean to say, if this is Parkinsonian . . . well, there’re terrific strides being made just now with chemical therapies, I’ve read an article in the Lancet –. The Lancet! the old man yelps, How very quaint!

Busner thinks: I’m disarmed by the feint and lunge of his repartee. He tries another tack: Did you . . . had you at any point considered if – well, it seems to me, having observed Miss Dearth, that her higher functions may be . . . intact – that she may be quite conscious of what goes on around her, although powerless to . . . intervene. He falls silent, wondering how it is possible to be regarded simultaneously with affection and derision. Marcus
quacks
more ruminatively: Forty years ago those were my own fanciful thoughts precisely, we are all too conscious – he pokes an admonitory finger up to where
Hot Love gushes
from some parental stereo system
turned up
far too loudly!
– of what goes on around here, but quite without the means to intervene. Busner wonders, Is it an indulgence to feel his padded-out hips with my hands? Is it flirting with psychosis – as in the mad, bad old days – to relax inside Marcus’s tinged old skin and peer down over the furred curve of his belly at the polished brass boot-scraper
and my own feet? . . . and there’s no messing.

He does not discover himself in the blowy street, nor recover himself in rhyme,
Rain, rain go away, come again another day
. The consideration that
Lords is over there
evades
him, as will the coming cricket season. He doesn’t clamber into the Austin’s metal belly and drive up Abbey Road — he remains there, curled in the old man’s caul and waiting for his own senescence to come of age, which it does after a protracted labour, long-drawn-out clenchings of that fulcrum, the prostate, upon which the ageing man tries to balance, inclining one way for a dull ache,
the other for relief
. . .
Outside there is the musical whine, the quasi-rhythmic bash – all the airy clangour of scaffolding being taken down, while below on the pavement stands a conductor in a leather apron.
La Cadenga
is the name of an African woman, her hips gripped by . . .
batik?
a calabash jumbled with fruit set on her stately head. He must have rolled over in his sleep, for now Busner lies on his back, his bladder puddling and these orange boxes full of his office things clearly in view. 10.22. He has slept for another full hour and now he really must rise and to prevent himself from heading back to bed plunges instead towards the kitchenette –
Whoa! How did that happen,
that tuck in time?
Although Busner is by no means a valetudinarian, it is still due to little incidents of this kind that he learns he must correctly calculate all trajectories in advance, as course adjustments are no longer possible – even in domestic space. Until touched-down by a dusty heap of muesli, his brain floats inside his skull, cutting capers for his camera I. Sitting at a counter inset with earth-toned tiles, he pours the milk, plants his spoon in the heap and paddles through the cereal — to all the desolation of station hotels, where films of milky slurry mask haddock. His uncle Maurice sits opposite, over his shoulder
in a glass darkly
a china figurine of a Foo dog, of which Busner learns, much later, that they can eat as much as they like without ever shitting . . .
like the English upper middle classes
. Maurice has the long, carefully rolled baton of Reynolds News tucked under the edge of his plate,
where could we have been going on a weekend?
He knew. Now, Maurice says, after the visit, have you any other plans for the day? He dabs at his moustache with his napkin, drops it to the table and slaps his thigh with an attempt at merriment so desperately at odds with his discreet character –
writing cases inside hatboxes inside portmanteaus inside steamer trunks
– that they both laugh, and Zack thinks then of
James Robertson Justice
and now: When did I first know Maurice was homosexual?
Always
. His uncle: discreet, clever, careful, meticulous – but mostly clever, in a way that Jews of his generation might
try to hide
, although for Maurice this was unnecessary since he passed in all respects as an Englishman, who, if not heterosexual, was certainly nothing else
. There were more like that then
,
to appear neutered was
socially acceptable – enjoined, almost
.
Hymens hardening into old age, prepuces
never pulled, we are speaking of the deathly respectable here, not anyone
. . .
alive
. Maurice had been too clever to need to pretend to anything he didn’t feel – too clever and
too kind
.
An interest in music
but
no passion
, some golf – always powerful and impressive cars such as Bristols, Rovers and Rolls-Royces. A little fly-fishing –
I went with him once
,
somewhere in Scotland
. . .
rhododendrons everywhere, the sea a fallen sky
.
Some shooting
. . .
there was a gun cabinet at Redington Road –
gone before Henry got ill
. But never too much of any one thing – just as in his portfolio there was some of Cunard, a little of Trusthouse Forte –
did he know Rocco?
– and Imperial Chemicals, quite a lot of Gainsborough Studios because this was an investment that amused him, that Maurice took an active interest in – in as much as such a state of mind could ever be detected, his brownish moustache twitching, two beautifully manicured fingers rotating his signet ring, which was set with a bevelled green stone – an emerald? Hopelessly sclerotic, of course,
his heart
fit to burst – and did!
The Ministry of Defence have confirmed . . .
At least there was none of that pillar-of-the-community shit at the funeral
. . . Sergeant Brian Culcross of the Second Battalion Royal Marines . . .
That actress who read,
what was her name? Minna? Minna . . . Standish?
It was about thrushes, certainly, and spring rain – Browning?
. . .
an improvised explosive device . . .
But this is
purest invention!
After forty-five years only the rubber stamps on their circular stand beside the blotter have any real substance. The blotter on the kneehole desk and the share certificates in its bottom drawers, tied in bundles with different-coloured ribbons like lawyers’ briefs, together with his will in triplicate and an accounts book preprinted for double-entry. How apt! Leapfrogging back another forty-five years, the entries were a comprehensive listing of cocks and arseholes, their sizes, their appearance and those attributes of the men they had belonged to. In the widest column, neatly and legibly, Maurice had set down the facts of what was done, where and with whom – although there were no names, only numbers. From this presumably comprehensive tabulation Maurice’s nephew could deduce very little. Zachary could not say whether his uncle had been a happy bugger or a driven, persecuted and paranoid erotomane – all he could tell was that his uncle had observed the same principle in his sexual practice as he had in his life generally: never too much of any one thing. That Maurice had been cosmopolitan Zachary had always known – but not this cosmopolitan, with a predilection, or so it seemed,
for all ages, races and classes of men
. . . And now Jenni Murray with Woman’s Hour . . . as he had sat leafing through the accounts book, Zack began to understand exactly why it – along with the house and a pleasant but not excessive private income – had been entailed to him: it was the most effective riposte. Sitting at the breakfast bar of his shabby rental flat, old enough now to be
the
uncle to my uncle
, Busner thinks back . . . and back . . . almost enjoying the very feminine blush of shame he feels mounting from his neck to his face, while also considering that no elapsing of time could ever be sufficient, whether biologic – the marching of entire orders and phyla into extinction – or geologic – the shuffling of plates thrusting up mountain ranges – to annul this shameful image:
Me, full of myself
at another breakfast table and
grinding away at my uncle
. . .
believing it clever as well as kind to employ my
newly machined analytic tools
on the basis that
repression
could be reduced to fine
filings
of the
perverse and so
blown away. Preposterous!
to interrogate him concerning his relationship with his mother – and to continue doing so, refusing to take no answer for
a no
. Yet he was so gracious about it –
playful, really
, refolding the Times, tucking it back under the edge of his plate, and warning me of Missus Mac’s proximity by the slightest arching of his
beautifully trimmed eyebrows, while wryly observing, Have you read Bernard Levin’s column this morning? There’s something in what he says, I think, that we can both agree on
. . .
— Some oat flake must have flown off and so provided the necessary bearing, Busner’s hand saunters unthinkingly after it and turns off the radio, so that: Cameron Macintosh’s new –. Silence. And then from the street below rises the unmistakable rattling bash of a flatbed truck’s tailgate being closed, followed by its diesel engine revving,
a deep and throaty fugue.
The scaffolding is down
. . .
and what was the cultivation of memory – through solitude, through reverie – if not the erection of a scaffolding in order to facilitate
the construction of
current behaviours
. Yes, that was it: a behavioural aid, such as the holding and then the letting fall of ping-pong balls so as to stimulate movement, or the wearing of a loudly ticking watch so as to supply a tempo by which to recalibrate the complex motor sequences needed to stand up, that should be automatic, but that needed to be
relearned
. . .
every time
.