Umbrella (3 page)

Stuck in the present’s flesh are the looking-glass fragments of a devastating explosion: a time bomb was primed in the future and planted in the past. The debris includes the row of houses along Novello Street towards Eel Brook Common, their top two storeys weatherboarded and bowing over the roadway under widows’ peaks of rumpled tiling. There’s the fat-bellied kiln of the pottery in the crook of the King’s Road and the ragged patterning of the yews in the misty grounds of Carnwath House. Old Father Thames sucking on weedy-greasy piles stuck in the mud all along the riverside from the bridge to the station. Her own father sucking
on a hazel twig he’s cut and whittled with his pocket knife to slide in and out of his muddy mouth, in between his remaining weedy-greasy teeth. — Audrey’s father, Sam Death: not De’Ath, not lar-de-dar, not like some uz thinks they’re better than they should be. Namely, Sam’s brother Henry, who styles himself like that and resides in a new villa somewhere called Muswell Hill. They have their own general, the De’Aths. Audrey has heard this said so many times that even now, a big girl of ten, she cannot forestall this vision: a rotund man in a scarlet jacket hung all over with gold braid, and sitting on a kitchen chair in a scullery. His white mutton chops creamy on the rim of his high collar, his red cheek pressed against the limewashed wall. Not that Audrey’s mother speaks of the De’Aths’ general enviously – there has always been a niceness to this understanding: while the Deaths are not the sort to have servants, neither are they those
what serve
. And while the Deaths are no better than they should be, neither are they worse than they might. Whispering in the parlour before the new bracket was put in, before the cottage piano arrived – whisperings when Mary Jane put a solar lamp on the table at dusk and it rounded off the corners of the room with its golden globe of light. Guttersnipes, they hissed, urchins, street arabs – different ones came on several occasions to say, If it please you, sir, ma’am, I bin by the line-up fer the Lambeth spike, anna bloke wot wuz innit said if’n I wuz to cummover west an’ tell iz people there’d be a tanner innit. But Sam Death is not the whispering sort: A tanner! A tanner for a windy nag stuffed with skilly! You’ll count yerself bloody lucky t’cummaway frummeer wiv a thru’pence – now fuck off, or I’ll call fer the blue boys! The arabs aren’t down – thru’pence is
a
good dip
, so they skip from the avenue into the Fulham Road, tossing their caps up as Audrey’s father buttons
the long skirts of his rabbit-skin coat, saying, There’s one as won’t be dining wiv Duke ’Umphrey t’night. Audrey never sees
ve windy nag
, knows only of her father’s other brother from these evening sallies – Sam heading off to head him off, muttering that: It’s a crying shame Honest John Phelps the ferryman is no more, so cannot take him across to the Surrey side. So, James Death the pauper uncle becomes all paupers for Audrey – when she’s sent to fetch her father from the Rose & Crown for his tea
Jim’s
is the shadow that capers beside the trapdoor dancers. In the flare of a naptha lamp, she sees him, grovelling beneath one of the coster’s stalls in Monmouth Street market – cowering there, picking up orange peel and
pressin’ its smile to ’is ol’ man’s mouf
. . .
Then there’s the screever kneeling on the pavement outside the ironmonger’s on King Street, where Audrey waits while her mother goes in to buy a tin of Zebra grate polish. This rat-man scratches a gibbet on the granite with charcoal, not chalk – a fraying hank of marks from which hangs Uncle Jim, who sings:
Je-sus’ blood ne-ver failed me ye-et
. . .
his cap in hand.

Stanley, his blazer hung from the privy’s latch, feeds the chalky inner tubing into the steel groove –
Gilbert, Gilbert Cook
. . .
does something similar so that Audrey
bites
my lip –
. But not yet – before then, when Albert sits at the kitchen table, his shirtsleeves cinched by
fascinating
bands, their parents are already styling themselves Deeth, to rhyme with teeth Sam picks, his face
swellin’ beet-red
. You’ll have an apoplexy, guv’nor, says Albert, dipping his nib and filling in Olive’s line of the census form with quick, clever, cursive, clerkish writing. Don’t guv’nor me, you jack-gentleman, Sam growls, what matter if we change an a to an e? Whose business but our own? Albert has his father’s hand-me-down face, which would be handsome enough
onna a fat man
, although it appears queer on their tapered heads – the smooth flesh
bunching up
at their brows and along their jawlines. It’d be the Ministry’s business, I’d say, t’would be better if you left off – and as he speaks Albert continues to write, Death, Violet May, daughter, —, — — — —, — —, Secondary, his pen
morsing
from box to box, the dashes indicating further shared characteristics – ’til at least I’ve gone into rooms, I’ve no wish to speak for the others . . . who, despite having grown up with Albert always before them, are still agog when he does two things at once,
both perfectly
: piano playing and reading the evening paper, timing an egg while totting up the household accounts – no alternation between hand and foot, or coordination between eye and hand faults him, no variability of scales confounds him. ’E’s twins inna single skin, said a local wag, seeing Bert unerringly volley a football even as he was marking possibles for the guv’nor in the Pink ’Un with a stub of pencil – this when father and son were still close, down at Craven Cottage, the playing field all round kicked and stamped into a happily tortured morass. Audrey thought: if we’re Death, then Uncle James must be dearth – this a word gleaned from Bible and Bunyan at school, for the Deaths are not regular attendees, let alone communicants.

When four out of the five Death children had left the house on Waldemar Avenue, Death, Samuel A. Theodore, 51, married, 31 years, Night Garage Inspector, Omnibus Coy, Worker, was still known, familiarly, as Rothschild Death, on account of the flutters and the rabbit-skin coat, and the
arf and arfs
he downed in pubs and penny gaffs from King Street to Parsons Green and Mortlake beyond, ales that imparted a jovial gloss to his coating of bombast. Familiarly,
yes
, for
those sort won’t be told
, but formally it was Deeth, and when the three Deeths transplanted themselves from the London clay to the red Devon loam, with Albert’s assistance taking up residence in a cottage at Cheriton Bishop – where Mary Jane had been raised – they became known locally as the Deers. — Sam Deer totters around the small garden, Olive Deer watches him. She has seen pictures in the illustrated weekly and read the accompanying text. The pictures are obscure – the words surpassing allusive. Olive, who knows nothing of adult bodies besides her own, still wonders how it is that they get food into the women in Holloway Prison who won’t eat . . . who keep their jaws clamped shut. She wonders what it might be like to tell someone that a twisting rivulet of ants has leaked into the cottage from the rain-washed garden. Got in, flowed up the stairs, sopped up the grooves of the candlewick and, not unpleasantly, are infesting
me merry bit
. . .

Stanley mends the inner tube, feeding it through the water in the wooden pail, the
kinked eel
sends a
piddle
of bubbles to the surface. He pulls it out, mops it, marks its
gills
with the chalk. Caught in the
kink
, the corridor stretching away in front of her . . .
longer than time
, Audrey
burns
with
covetousness
for that safety bicycle, convinced she can ride it better than him – fix it quicker.
Neat as a pin
in the tailor-made she’s bought with her first week’s wages from Ince’s, she covets it – and resents him. It was one thing to be still soaping Bert’s collars – from when they were nippers his primacy was taken so much for granted that there was no more need to speak of it than
what you got upter in the privy
. But Stanley – her
baby
, her
bumps-a-daisy
, that he should have this and not her, well, she was reft, the suspicion creeping into her that he’s never
given a fig
for her. Playing out, playing Queenie – and
I was Queenie
, and the Wiggins boys all
mocking me
. . .
and that lousy boy, who come up from Sands End – the one Mother said az the stink of gas onnis togs – picks up the ball and dips it inna puddle, then rolls it in some horse shit, and when I turn round he throws it at me so ’ard the string busts and all the soggy, shitty paper wraps round my face and spatters my pinny, an’ Stan leaps on ’im, thumpinim proper, defendin’ his big sis, and the Sands End kid ad vese big obnail boots, no stockings, juss vese boots . . . coming down on Stan’s face . . . a yelp! The Wiggins boys screamin’, turnin’ tail. There mustabin a nail come loose – there was that much blood. When Bert come out of the house and dragimoff, the Sands End kid was spittin’, Garn! Piss up yer leg an play wiv ve steam! Still . . . maybe . . . maybe even then
it was all a bloody show
. . .

Cold meat, mutton pies, Tell me when your mother dies
. . .
November in
Foulham
, the streets greasily damp – the colour of rotten logs. Bad air from the river, bad air from the Works, rotten malt gusting from the Lamb brewery over Chiswick way. In the back bedroom Audrey rubs the soot-stained muslin curtain against her cheek and peers down in the near-darkness at the backyards of their terrace and those of the terraces behind, fret-worked by walls and fences into separate territories, each with its own upright hut . . .
a command post – Ladysmith relieved
.
Come inter the ga-arden, Maude!
And see the raspberry canes
scattered spilikins
, the humpback of an abandoned cask, a pile of bricks, a birdcage
shaped like the Crystal Palace
that
them two doors down adfer a myna
,
which had croaked back at the cat’s-meat-man:
Ca-a-at’s me-eat!
Until
p’raps a cat gotit
. Audrey!
Or-dree!
Cummun get yer tea!
Cat meat, mutton pies, Tell me when your mother dies
. . .
She should have been down there with her sisters, fetching yesterday’s leg of mutton down from the meat safe, peeling and boiling potatoes, scraping dripping from the pale blue enamel basin.
Or-dree!
She can’t be
doin’ wivvit
. Time enough for tasks later – her soda-scraped hands
bloaters
floating in the
scummy
water. Besides, she cannot abide her mother just now – Mary Jane
who stinks of chlorodyne, and slumps narcotised on the horsehair chaise her sons dragged in from the parlour when it split. Her
Ladysmith
, a bell tent of grey woollen shawl and black bombazine, her tired auburn hair down
rusting
on her big shoulders. I can’t be bovvered wiv me stays, she says, not when me mulleygrubs comes upon me. Audrey is repelled by her – disgusted that her mother vouchsafes her
women’s ailment
to her alone – the
sly thing
,
Or-dree!
– where they jumble together in the sewn-in pockets of time swung apart from the
general shindy
of Death family life.