Umbrella (42 page)

rid of the mustard smell, the burnt-garlic reek, the ground horseradishes
. . .
Not that these were any more than approximations: the odour of the Buildings was indefinable, you had to be there — not here, where paper flowers tickle your nose and where Adeline is: raised up on the fresh white beech of her stair, her hemline high enough to show plenty of fresh white silk stocking, and her neckline low enough to reveal the whiteness of her bosom. Between these whitenesses there floats a Japanese kimono, its pattern of heavy blue and magenta lotus flowers
nodding her head
. . .
At least she has the decency not to affect mourning – the only black thing hung about Adeline is the velvet ribbon –
dévoré?
– criss-crossing into the beaver’s tail of dark hair that rests upon her too-wan neck. She resumes her descent and her speech: I–I was unsure about contacting you, Miss De’Ath . . . In truth, I didn’t know precisely where to find you . . . Audrey supposes another might locate in Adeline’s hesitancy the sincerity she has precisely placed there – however, Audrey is not to be seduced. Death, she says plainly, as Adeline is led across the hall by her own outstretched hand. Death, she says again, rising from the absurd chair. Free from personal vanity as she tries to be, Audrey cannot help seeing herself in the kohl-edged cameo of Adeline’s eyes, floating there . . .
Nobody’s dream
, her grey alpaca skirt’s brush braid adjusted several times over, the dyed straw of her hat retouched with a sixpenny bottle from Woolworth’s, the faded raptures and plushette roses on her jacket collar crushed by the rain, her boots oft-mended on a Sunday – the only religious rite ever observed in the Death household. To forestall any pity, to compel this moneyed sensualist’s attention to the true nature of things, Audrey strips off her glove so that they meet skin to skin, chipped nails sliding past manicured ones. The back of Audrey’s hand is uppermost, a freckled and oleum-pitted garnet in the fine lady’s clasp. Adeline’s palm is passionately hot, and beneath the brittle pad of her thumb Audrey detects a strong and rapid pulse. Ah, yes, Death, says Adeline. I knew, of course, that Stanley had enlisted under that name. Audrey, wishing within the confines of manners to be without pity, says, It is our name – when I went for factory work it was the name I had to give. She requires that this coldness between them be retained – that the chatelaine of Norr’s class position be sharply defined. Adeline frustrates this by refusing to let go of Audrey’s hand, drawing her instead towards another door off the hall, then through this into a cosy chamber – the walls brightly papered, many-branched candelabras set either end of a mantelpiece, below which
honeycombs incandesce
. . .
Pine cones, Adeline says, a silly affectation, I daresay, but I collect them every year to burn – the candlelight is also perhaps an affectation, but I find it more aesthetical than the electric, besides, we think it incumbent on us to save fuel oil for . . . she falters . . . for the effort, and so do not have the generator except when people are down at the weekend. Adeline has manoeuvred them on to a small settee, where they are perfectly snug and still linked – she must have rung the bell because a very young girl enters, not in uniform but in a simple blue cotton frock gathered at her waist, and with her ash-blonde hair loose about her shoulders. Another affectation? Audrey says tartly once Adeline has given an order for tea, tea cakes and some of that fruit cake if Cook has any left? Yes, I suppose it is one, she replies easily, but I don’t see why they should have to be in black at all times. I give them an allowance – a generous one I believe – and they’re at liberty to get such clothes as are suitable. My own dressmaker will run them something up – like that, and almost at no profit to herself. Of course, Adeline sighs, at weekends it needs to be different – my husband takes the conventional view on staff. Audrey is unimpressed by
Marie Antoinette playing with her domestics
– more so by her casualness in speaking of
the cuckold
. She would like to look down on Adeline – her hostess has forestalled this by
hanging on to me:
they remain intimate in the complexity of their bones, the stretched coverings of their skins’ overlay.

Adeline sops up Audrey’s face – her eyes swell, cheeks plump up, lips thicken, as she absorbs pert nose, trowel chin, flaming auburn hair. An Ophelia, she thinks, of a Pre-Raph’ sort, lying on her back not in water – but in the effluvium of manufacture, her madness – a sort of palsy – obscured by this murk. She says, I confess, I cannot see much of Stanley in you, my dear – nor of your elder brother. Audrey is dismayed – a reagent that converts most of her ire to raging curiosity, and she effervesces: Have you met him? Adeline smiles and says, No, though I’ve read enough about the phenomenon that is Albert De’Ath in the newspapers to feel as if I have –. The girl returns with a trestle that she kicks open beside them, then goes out and comes back again with a laden tray of tea things that she sets down on it, Chinese or Indian, Miss? she asks, but Adeline says: That won’t be necessary, Flossie, we can manage for ourselves. Once the girl has gone, Audrey, rubbing freed hand with gloved one, says caustically, It’d be no affectation at all, Missus Cameron, if you were to ask Flossie to take some tea with us – I hardly think she’s any more socially inferior than I. Adeline laughs unaffectedly – nor does she commit the crime of saying anything at all. Settling back in the settee, Audrey feels her wet petticoat chafe against her calves. Adeline inquires after preferences: Milk, lemon, sugar? – The tea has a perfumed aroma and a mildly brackish taste: Oolong, Audrey observes, Gilbert used to have it all the time before the war. Now he blames the Kaiser’s submariners for upsetting his beverage habits. Adeline raises one perfectly plucked eyebrow. Is that all he blames them for? she says, and this is evidence of a sympathy that has flared up between them, here, beside a tall vase of late-flowering hydrangeas, here, where a volume is laid casually on a window seat, The Forsyte Saga on its spine, here, next to diamond panes rattled by the October storm. — Night has arrived expectedly, and Adeline rises to draw the curtains – which are cambric and decorated with diamond patterns of tiny yellow flowers to match the yellow-grained wallpaper. I might roll my dampness across them, Audrey thinks, impress myself upon them – repeat the pattern of me: I-am, I-am, I-am. Adeline says, I thought that I’d enjoy the house far more than I have. I take the blame for all the wood panelling, the shutters and the frankly rather . . . asinine furnishings. I’d thought – well, what? I suppose that by allowing the medieval inclinations of our celebrated architect full reign he’d create for us a paradisical setting within which the old ways might be re-established . . . old honesties . . . the barriers between man and woman, mistress and servant, might . . . dissolve –. She interrupts herself with more laughter: Utter bosh, naturally – worse than bosh, a species of cant. Two years ago I had a local joiner come and cover the panelling in here, then I had it papered as you see. It’s here that I spend almost all my time – it’s a pleasant enough room, gay and bright, yet no sooner did your brother go to France that it became . . . well, a sort of tomb for me. Oh, a flowery enough bower round it – she stabs with her teacake to the right, the left – I’ll grant you, but still a tomb and moreover one that’s inside of this tomb of a house, which in turn is lodged inside another sort of grave altogether. Please – please don’t think I ask for your sympathy, M-Miss D-Death – Audrey?
Still, she has it: the squirming of her on the settee, the grabbing and twisting of a small cushion in her strong hands, is
far from refined – not pretty at all
. The pine cones spit a resinous scent that should be pleasing – especially when mingled with the fresh flowers and the butter liquefying on Audrey’s teacake
.
It matters, Audrey sees, that as Adeline manipulates so is she manipulated by those vast and impersonal forces that hold all small beings in thrall. She has not only Audrey’s sympathy but her pity as well –
which would surely push her further down into the bloody mud. Poor, poor privilege that availeth you nought . . . Such good causes . . . the clamour of which presumably once filled your echoing time, are now those that augment the power that has robbed you of your lover – a loss that has, if it is possible, parted you still further from your kowtowing husband, who sits in the echoing House, raising his topper when instinct moves him to baaa more platitudes – while you . . . you are like Gilman, with time enough on your soft hands to be tormented by your wallpaper . . .
Adeline is convulsed by the giant’s fingers pressing into her breasts, her sides, the softly vulnerable pit of her – they poke her unfeelingly – she is nothing, Audrey thinks, but an instrument with which to communicate the trivial nature of human sentiment, a telegraph key repetitively jabbed dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, or a Hello Girl’s switchboard into which are thrust the hard points of connection, when all the giant wishes to convey is
goodbye-goodbye-goodbye
. . .
You must, Adeline sobs, forgive me, I do miss him so awfully badly . . . She takes a handkerchief from her sleeve, presses it to one coon eye, then the other, staunching her uselessness, her passivity. Audrey, whose own hands fret with the myriad shocks following on from her work, has at least this consolation: that she is a part of the giant – an infinitesimally small part,
perhaps a hair twisting on the muscled expanse of his back
, but, for all that, a part – whereas
this
fine lady is
nothing at all
. Audrey bites into her teacake, savours its warmth and delicacy – bread is at tenpence a loaf, and its price rises more and more, leavened by the blockade of Canadian wheat. Her hostess should be out there in the wind and the rain and the darkness withal,
sowing the winter seed and clad in travesty: a kirtle gathered at the waist by a plaited cord of sisal
. There – not in here, in her
gay tomb
, bemoaning the days when the goings on of the SPR or the anti-vivisectionists were enough to
fill her empty life with meaning
. . .
Did you, Adeline asks plaintively, have much news from him – any letters? Audrey is angrily piteous – not dishonest. No, she says, Stan was never a writer – a reader, yes, when we were kids we all read, but before we little ones could he went to the library, read the latest scientific romances, then told ’em to us – that’s me and our sisters –. She stops, then resumes: But not writing, not even when he fell under the sway of your friend Willis, no . . . especially not then. And you, Adeline, did he write to you?

They sit there watching the fresh batch of pine cones Adeline has thrown on the fire go up in smoke, and Audrey muses, Are we parties to the same eldritch vision? A Zeppelin downed by the guns that subsides, all its fiery cathedral of buttresses, arches and beams burning in the night sky – then: the dull ashy corpse of it scattered across the furrows of an Essex field, the ruination of flight
– Icarus, raped and defiled
for the readers of the much attenuated pages of the picture papers
. . .
I have, Adeline says, one or two of the models that he made – of flying machines. Willie wants very desperately to play with them but I shan’t allow it. I have these too. She rises abruptly, crosses her candlelit tomb. Opening the lid of a writing case, she withdraws a package of postcards tied up with black ribbons
like her hair that he loosed
. Audrey knows what they are – she does not bother to feign interest when Adeline unties the bundle and passes them across, only flips through them as she might a novelty flicker book, engineering not movement but this stasis: I-am, I-am, I-am, I-am — for what Stanley Death had done with these Field Service postcards was the same as he had with those sent to his sister, and doubtless to Samuel and Mary Jane Deer as well. Whereas the authorities had enjoined the writer to cross out one phrase or the other to create the semblance of a missive, Stanley had scored them all through except for this essential declaration: I am
quite well, I have been admitted to the hospital sick/wounded, and am going on well/and hope to be discharged soon
, I am
being sent down to the base, I have received your letter dated/telegram/parcel, Letter follows at first opportunity, I have received no letter from you lately/for a long time
. The command
Signature Only
had been deleted as well, as had the stentorian
If You Make Any Other Mark on this Card it will be Destroyed
. When Audrey received the first of many such as these, she had wondered at the response of the military censor to her brother’s furious effacements of all but the fact of his existence
.
Packet after packet full of men dispatched across the Channel, wave upon wave of them sent over the top, bag after bag of these pathetic cards posted back to Blighty, it was all, surely, a product of the same narrow-mindedness: no order had been disobeyed, so Stanley’s cards might be passed. Or perhaps the censor – who Audrey envisaged sat in a safe bureau, miles from the Front, beside a warm stove, a glass of something to hand and a Froggy doxy too – was amused by initialling these crazy ragtime communiqués, so scrawled PFL – it was always the same man – laughingly. I-am, I-am, I-am, – two I-ams per card, scores of them sent to her, to Adeline – and no other words from him in the ten interminably lengthening months since he had returned to France. I-am, I-am, I-am – a magic spell, chanted by a terrified child in the drained-out nothingness before dawn, I-am, I-am, I-am – Audrey sighs dispiritedly, aware suddenly of her own flickering existence and deathly fatigue. They both know that only one product derives from these formulae: that . . .
he is not
. – You don’t imagine –. Adeline cannot continue. She tries again: They say missing and presumed . . . so you don’t think –. And once more fails. Neither of them is a believer – in Jesus or Pan.
All hope is abandoned – all vitality drained away
. . .
the rain that drives against the window is no more than . . .
evaporation
,
condensation
,
caused by fluctuations in temperature, air pressure . . . all eminently, tediously discoverable
. . .
no mystery:
he is not
. Adeline binds the wound, returns it to the writing case. She pulls the plaited cord of sisal and, when Flossie enters, asks for whisky, soda and the cigarette box. When they have come Audrey sips fire and smoke, then rises from the settee to flick brimstone on to the fire and lifts her skirt to dry her petticoat. Adeline says, Forgive me, I should’ve proposed a hot bath and a change of clothes when you arrived, most remiss –. – Thass orlright, Addyline – she slurs and cockneyfies deliberately – you ’as made the hoffer now, an’ I ’umbly accepts. — The bath is over six feet long, with sides so high that as she lies in the puddle of hot water at the bottom of it the enamelled rim gravemouths above her
I fell inter a box of eggs, All the yeller run down me legs, All the white run up me shirt, I fell inter a box of eggs
. . .
She and Adeline are
lodged together in the amber effervescence of the whisky and soda. Looking through steamy zephyrs at the imprint of green willow leaves upon the creamy drapes, Audrey quietly sing-songs, Is it girt or is it sere? Should you be thee and me be thy, or thy be you and me be thee? They had laughed, Gilbert and her, at the daft mummery of the guild socialists, with their
shprat shuppers held to raishe fundsh for their minishcule editionsh of hand-printed booksh
– they had been certain, Cook and Death, that the future belonged solely to those who could not only control the existing engines of production but make new ones. And here she was, utterly
fagged out
in a rich woman’s bathtub, looking up at the motto some
floppy-tied aesthetical craftsman
had chiselled into the wood panelling: When Adam Delved and Eve Span Who was then the Gentleman? In the adjoining dressing room she can hear Adeline
playing at being my maid
– and no doubt
looking out something serviceable that had been obtained ready-made from Liberty’s, worn once for a country walk, mothballed, and is now hatching out again after its long hibernation
. . .
When, however, she is dressed in Adeline’s fine linen underthings and her own dried-out alpaca, when she is seated back down in Adeline’s tomb with another glass of her husband’s whisky and soda, and another of his cigarettes, when she hears the motor car being brought around from the stables, its engine snarling through the storm, Audrey can no longer maintain such disagreeableness in the face of Adeline’s overwhelming grief: she sobs, she laughs hysterically, she makes as if to tear her clothes – for wont of any other course, Audrey takes the other woman in her arms, strokes the hair
that he did
. . .
—
In the gale, under the crazed lamplight, Flossie stands with several parcels in a net. Please do not refuse me, Adeline says, they’re only a few comforts – some brandy and fruitcake, a box of cigarettes . . . My pride, Audrey tells her, runs still and cold and deeper than any patronage. She takes the net from Flossie, who says, Excuse me, miss, but ma’am says that you’re at the Arsenal – is it true, that you’re a munitionette? The girl’s frank face,
yellowed
only by the
lamplight
, slides away into that of her mistress,
addled
and
blotched
. They are not, Audrey says succinctly, hiring – then she allows the chauffeur to hand her up. Everything slides away: the peculiar old–young house, its chatelaine’s teary goodbyes, the sweet-smelling stillness of her flowery tomb. As soon as the motor car picks up speed, Audrey’s ticcing resurges, at first it is only a fidgeting at the stuff of her skirt, soon enough she is typing invisible orders in her lap, and by the time she is handed down on to the rainswept forecourt of the station it is all Audrey can manage not to
circle the wheel, pull the lever and rotate the headstock . . . circle the wheel, pull the lever and rotate the headstock
. . .
She allows the chauffeur to hand her up and she settles in the seat immediately behind the one she supposes he will sit in – it’s the first vehicle of any description she has been in for half a century but she recognises most of the controls – gear and brake levers, the steering wheel. She wonders – if her recovery continues – whether she’ll be allowed to drive – or at least pretend to do so,
a rusty old Enigmarelle, prompted by pokes in its back to do the trick for the cockney crowd
. . .
Not that there’s much of one, only
the two shonk doctors, Long nose, ugly face, oughta be put under a glass case . . . their two favourite blackies, and four or five of my fellow sleepyheads
. The fat one has been left upstairs, beached,
her crabby little husband scuttling around her
. . .
Helene, who Audrey has always
quite warmed to
, is there, and also the three old
monkey men
, who have to be pushed and pulled up
into the charabanc
. . .
Busner, standing beside Doctor Marcus, watches as Mboya and Inglis coax the enkies into the Ford Strachan, which is parked on the back road alongside the Upholstery Workshop. It’s good of you, he says, to come along. Marcus laughs: The sun has got his hat on, so I’ve come out to play! I mean, an outing – wouldn’t miss it for the world! Busner looks askance at his retired colleague. Marcus is sporting an unexpectedly snazzy short-sleeved shirt, which is vertically striped chocolate and ultramarine,
Granddad takes a trip
. . .
his trendy appearance compromised, though, by
soup stains?
He wonders whether Marcus’s myopia precludes him from seeing the full extent of his ironic stain – irony that’s within irony, which in turn is stranded, this ironic citadel,
rusting in a
desert of dryness
. It took, Busner tells him, an awful lot of pressuring on my part before Whitcomb would allow me to take them out of the hospital at all –. Marcus snorts, Ah, Whitcomb, your bête noire – the Professor Moriarty to your Sherlock Holmes. What d’you imagine, Busner, he’s going to do to frustrate your investigations, when you don’t really know what it is you’re investigating? Busner wants to say something about the micro- and macro-quantal character of the post-encephalitics’ ticcing, about his analyses of their metronomic states, about how he believes the dissolution – and now the reintegration – of their physical wholeness suggests an order within their chaos – wants to, but is leery of Marcus’s contempt – and besides, there’s
plenty of time for that
. For assertiveness, he calls over to Dunphy – the heavyset porter who’s approved to drive the minibus – Are they all aboard? Dunphy sweeps his cap from his
Milo O’Shea
head, gives a mock-bow and twirls his free hand, inviting them to
roll up for the mystery tour
. . .
Bring me sunshine in your smile, Dunphy sing-songs in an undertone, Bring me laugh-ter, all the while . . . The minibus isn’t mini enough, the tiny congregation from Ward 20 is lost in its angled pews – Ostereich sits to attention in the middle row to the left, behind him cluster Voss and McNeil,
scared bunnies
. At the very back Mboya and Inglis are kept apart by a wall of sound: the irrepressible volubility of Helene Yudkin, who, as Busner oofs aboard, is saying, Look at these, what would you call ’em? Sort of nozzle thingies – but nozzles for what, they aren’t going to squirt us with water, are they –? Of all the awakened enkies she’s the least shocked by now – back up on the ward she’ll stand for hours flicking the light switches on and off, unremittingly delighted by the photons’ discharge. It’s magic! she crows, I do honestly believe it to be magic! Everywhere she goes novelty entrances her – now she runs her hands over the electrified checks of the seat cover, Lovely, she coos, such a beautiful fabric . . . Busner sits down beside Miss Death, who perches behind the driver’s seat, and they are joined by Marcus, who, awkwardly folding his drop-leaf body, slots it in behind them. Well, he hales her, good morning to you, madam, and how’re you feeling –. Perfectly all right, she chops him off, and remains with her face averted to the window. Busner thinks: What does she see there, up and to the left? Or is it the onset of an oculogyric crisis? It’s one-two-three . . . ten days since her reawakening, but – he counts on – sixteen since her last, so one is due! Then, as they rock over a pothole, it strikes him: We’re moving, and she sees a vista that’s utterly novel – the long façade of the hospital contracting, the brickwork beneath its dulled windows