Umbrella (45 page)

Others they dispatch below – they don’t know it yet, but at long last they’ve caught a Blighty one that will make them at home . . .
in France
. The troglodytes carry morphia with them, and when a man is too far gone they give him a dose sufficient unto the end. Michael –
an archangel, and the last presence they see floating before them . . . Warmer, realer, than that of Mons: no churchy phantom, conjured out of hunger, pain, thirst and fear – but a live man whose warm hand grasps torn wrists, rolls back blood-soaked cuffs, lets the needle in
. . .
Once or twice as they go about their business in the short and moonless night, Stan thinks of his section, short two men – maybe more – withdrawn to a reserve trench, their umbrella neatly folded, there to lick their wounds,
swollen tongues clammy on bully beef
. . .
No reflection – in this tortured realm of shadows and shades the underground men needs must be as alert as any raiding party – and some of these they do encounter, whispering: ’Re you the FANY? The topsiders are halting, insensible, hair-trigger alert, bruised, raw, all at once. Observing them, Stanley wonders, Was I like that, shifting in an eye-blink from petrified terror to furious agitation? He watches them go by, feeling their way over the broken ground while fixed on this one prospect: their own deaths, under cover of which they mend their wire and drag back one of their wounded: a junior officer, hung about with stale whisky breath, a grim whiff of things to come – gas gangrene at the dressing station, the stench of his necrotic flesh. The topsiders have only one language at their disposal: the infuriated muttering of the compelled – whereas the troglodytes twist whichever tongue may be required: reassuring whimpering Frontsoldaten that they will not be schaden, calming Tommies with cock-er-ney cheer and
fucking oaths
. . .
From the Germans’ salients on the ridge to the British forward trenches down in the valley, the troglodytes slip back and forth – they recover side arms and rifles, pull potato-mashers from belts, unfired Stokes ones from the very mouths of the newfangled trench mortars: all are spirited down into the underworld and cached in its caverns. Long before dawn flushes the underside of the thick cloud to the east, they have withdrawn, none of the topsiders any the wiser. The tunnel descends from this chaos into an orderly innards of galvanised iron, pit props and efficiently wired lighting – as they are being swallowed up, Michael sticks in the earthen gullet: They muss not know of uz – not now, not ever. Think on’t, Stan, iffen they knew they’d turn their goons on uz, winkle uz aht, drag uz oop. And when they’d every lass wunnuvuz they’d begin again wi’ their slaughter. No . . . he turns and on they go, and they have regained the underground circus and dived inside their burrow before he resumes . . . No, there’s only wun way t’coom dahn: by sheer blüdy chance, like wot you did . . . There is the blackamoor waiting for them with hot tea, and most of the subterraneans cast off their motley kit: the drawling former-subaltern resumes the pomp of his nudity, the ottoman of his groundsheet and the solace of his Pater. I once met –. Stanley stops himself there, for the young man at his feet is looking down at him from below
Schnauzkrampf
. Up above the barrage resumes – one-eighty-league steel-toecaps tramping across the former fields. The electric surges, dims, surges again and goes out. It takes a while for the cook to find his matches and light a lamp – in the utter darkness the sandy trickles, the woody creaks, metallic ticks, all are amplified: the whisper and groan of premature burial. Stanley fears he may lose his sangfroid, but the others simply chatter away:
Worked for a provision merchant ’fore I got the chuck . . . Si vous soulevez un jupon vous ne devez jamais exprimer la surprise à ce que vous trouverez sous ce . . . Went up from Saint-Denis to the Hotel de Ville and she was waiting for me . . . My oooold Dutch
. . .
Stanley’s eardrums, pummelled and stretched by blast after blast, have acquired a traumatised sensitivity, and as he turns his head this way, then that, these voices tickle across them, bristles on bare skin, mixed up with brass-band discordancies
Ooo-eee oom-pah-pah!
speech squeezing into and out of comprehensibility as the needle passes through its arc, sweeping over Luxembourg, Hilversum, Bremen, black bars in the sky that
cut across the puce clouds bleeding mauve rain
. . .
The aesthete on the burrow’s floor has kept ahold of watch and seals. He positions them carelessly around his lower belly, dumpy alpinists chained together for
the ascent of Mount Cock
. The idle yet systematic play of his fingers is
immensely appealing
she thinks as her own twist the dial, her ear pressed against the mesh grille. Erhem! Busner clears his throat, releases Uncle Maurice’s red silk tie, which unfurls over the curve of his belly. Erhem –
Heath as it is spoken –
and he states again: Miss Death, would you like some help with the radio – I could . . . tune it for you? He wants to probe her relentlessly: What does she think of it? Had she been aware of Marconi’s experiments? Could she then – with her Arts & Crafts imagination – have conceived of this hence: the world woven into a tight basketry of voice and music? Desires to – but is wary of her scorn. Besides, she has spotted her visitor, who havers beside Busner, his desert boots and fawn corduroys surely an academic exercise in informality, given his Wilfrid Hyde-White top half: the black suit jacket and
wedge of blacker – what? What’s that garment they wear, a vest . . . A singlet . . . a sleeveless pullover? It seems always to’ve been polyester, but that can’t’ve been true of the Warden-of-bloody-Barchester
. Anyway, it isn’t this that matters, thinks Busner: it’s the dog collar, which, although a simple enough hoop of white celluloid, is yet linked to a leash we all strain against. The Hospital Chaplain is young enough to be a trendy vicar –
and
dishonest to God
. He’s tall enough to have had
extra meat off the ration
, his long thin nose, mild brown eyes and still milky curls suggest the drinking of a lot of weak Nescafé and the leisurely patter-cake of Anglican platitudes – but his hands clutch spasmodically at the front flaps of his jacket to
tug them down
. . .
while the flakes of dead white scalp on his shoulders imply
awful things about his underwear –
. Who’s this fellow? Audrey prompts, then countermands herself: Let him step forward and say. Busner admires her:
Ooh, she’s fierce!
as the Chaplain sidles in and, grasping the back of a chair, says, D’you mind? Audrey replies, Not at all. She has half risen from her own and juts out her hand – a strong gesture brutally undermined by the frailty of all the rest: the weedy hair and the cadaverous face, the insult to her ideals of Little Red Riding Hood’s cast-off cardigan. Still, frail as she may be, and with a fearful asymmetry, she’s managed to bring the old wireless across to this table –
she’s interested in what lies beyond, if not above
. Poised on the plastic laminate: a plastic water jug, a plastic beaker, an aluminium kettle. The radio whistles until Busner turns it off. Thank you, croaks an effaced figure hidden in one of the chairs facing the television, and now they can all hear the raucous singing inside the simulacrum of the Moulin Rouge, inside the Warner Brothers’ lot, inside the set – and this Busner finds obscurely cheering: Nostalgia, he thinks, more and more of it will be needed to tranquillise the collective psychosis of a steadily ageing population. And he would’ve reached for the appropriate Biro were he not having such
a bad day
. A cavity
big enough to stuff my tongue inside
has appeared magically overnight, together with its twingeing sequel: a note from Whitcomb stuffed in his pigeonhole requesting a meeting fairly urgently,
to talk some matters over . . . matters – that’ll make martyrs . . . martyrs/schmatte
which is what Busner wants of the Chaplain: just possibly he can discover more about Audrey’s family where all the other staff have failed? Busner thinks it unlikely she’s a believer, yet a woman of her era will, he suspects, retain a certain respect for
a man of the nylon.
Without funds Busner cannot get Miss Death anything better to wear than this rubbish bag of a dress, but where there are relatives there may be funds – or a nest egg, put aside by her and swelled by compounding interest into a Roc’s one: an Arabian fortune. Besides, Busner wonders, what are the clergy for if not the conjuring up of blood out of tepid institutional tea? Not that it was he who called for spiritual assistance, he’d scarcely been aware there was a hospital chaplain. A rabbi came alternate Saturdays:
Grossman
. Busner had seen the
big pallid gingernut
laying tefelin on some of the twitchers – binding their palsy with the leather bands – or muttering a prayer over a schizoid, the slushy regurgitation of Hebrew –
chicken shoup with bitsh in it
– mingling with the psychotic drone. No: the Chaplain had
trumped himself
– he had, he said, heard certain rumours of extraordinary awakenings among the catatonic patients in Busner’s care, and resurrection being – as it were – his business, he’d come to visit the Gethsemane of Ward 20. — So the psychiatrist leaves them together in the day-room with its soiled floral-pattern curtains, surrounded by its undergrowth of easy chairs and right next to
a stony radiator
that no christly superstar – however omnipotent – could roll away since it was
locked inside a fucking cage!
He abandons the odd couple sitting either side of the silenced radio
news from nowhere
, and, as he tacks his way
chubby Chay Blyth
through the reefs of tables and iron-pillar narrows, sees only this: the ashy smears left after bodies have been vaporised by a flash
brighter than ten thousand suns . . . All my life . . . crouching under desks . . . only the klaxon’s wail cannot fail
. . .
He is bitterly aware that no matter how diligently he and his ilk peruse the New Left Review, they will never put a stop to it:
no happening could ever prevent it from . . . happening
. The hospital flattened – surrounding it, stretching away over the low Middlesex hills and down into the re-exposed valleys, a burnt tracery of closes, avenues and cul-de-sacs lined with neat, ashy plots, within each of which sits a semi-detached pile of rubble accessible via a cinder pathway.
And what is left standing?
Helene Yudkin with a hairdryer in one shaky hand, its flex scribbling up from a socket – he watches
more than her I long for a simple past
. . .
as she toggles the switch and basks in its warm whirring, turning her shrunken girl’s head this way and that as it shoots over her ski-jump nose. Lovely, she says, and then, marvellous – isn’t it, Doctor, isn’t it marvellous – so lulling . . . snug as a . . . woolly hat – a tam, a tam that haint there, no, it haint, a phantom tam, a phantam . . . She giggles – Busner, intent on the nurses’ cigarettes
where have they hidden them?
and the view they’ll afford through prettifying swirls at the tangle of his emotional life – Mimi has dropped her own bombshell – stops:
a phantam!
Witty-ticcy Yudkin is three weeks into the new regime and receiving two grammes of L-DOPA a day – as he wishes it, she’s an exemplary picture of improved wellbeing and energy, her voice stronger, her movements fluid, and with only the occasional jamming, she walks stably and without assistance – and she feels
marvellous
. That she will stand for hour upon hour at light switch, kettle, hairdryer – any appliance she can lay her
hot little hands on –
is, he has decided, only
a
reasonable response
to the electro-age she finds zapping around her. He chooses to ignore the forced reminiscences she reports – the past driving a coach and four through the present. According to Helene