Umbrella (48 page)

out of das Grab – so many of them! Lice! Silverfish! They had not known of their own numbers, had not appreciated the greatness of the deliverance afforded beneath no-man’s-land. Up they came from the pits, soak holes, and deep-bore tunnels shaped by their fugitive bodies – the resurrected, the reborn . . . And then the polyglot pack divided, weeping farewell on one another’s shoulders, lovers parted,
brothers separated – and away they went: the Germans tiptoeing
behind the vanquished Kaiserliches Heer, the British, French and Belgians behind the demobilising allies. It was a game of grandmamma’s footsteps played along a three-hundred-mile front: when the topsiders turned round, haunted by this prickling sensation that a multitude of someones thronged at their backs, the underground men stood stock still, counting off the minutes before they could safely move again, while silently singing,
Take me back to dear old Blighty! Put me on the train for London town! Take me over there, Drop me anywhere, Liverpool, Leeds or Birmingham, well, I don’t care!
They commandeered a fishing boat they’d found hauled up for caulking on a shingle bank a few miles down the coast from Nieuport. In that great space of wind, salt spray and the grey-green wave backs, the men were stunned – they stripped off and rolled over and over again across the hot pebbles. Stanley, Huggins, Cummins and Mohan were in the vanguard of the returnees, together with thirteen coolies they brought with them from the bowels of the earth. Already, at the railheads and in the seething tent encampments that flapped across the land, the trogs had sewn their revolutionary seed. It needed no broadcasting: they were the war’s bumper crop, implanted for long years in the ploughed earth of Flanders, Artois, Picardy and Champagne, they had sprung up, white-green from their long inhumation, the inspiring refutation of all the stifling aims promulgated by the cracked brass. So many of them, the arisen, adding soda to the spirits of their war-weary comrades, so that, once merged, the entire moving mass became giddy with a sense of its own transformative power. — They landed in Broadstairs bay and went straight up the hill to the station. The narrow streets of the town were full of newspaper boys crying the latest headlines:
THOUSANDS GIVEN UP
FORFOR DEAD FOUND TO BE LIVING IN EXTENSIVE TUNNELLING BENEATH NO-MAN
’S
-LAND
,
but far more germaine were:
MARY ALLEN ASSUMES
COMMAND OF RESURGENT WSPU
and:
LAID
-OFF MUNITIONETTES ANGRY DEMONSTRATIONS
. Stanley prevailed upon the ticket-office clerk to give them all passes by appealing to his egalitarian nature – and this the clerk did, while looking askance at those he believed to be white slavers, and those he considered to be sickeningly effeminate, what with their blouses, their long hair and their Augustus John hats. Stanley addressed the clerk and his own comrades thus: There’re a million women in this land of ours who’ve been subjected to both the disciplines and the privations of industrial work, work for which they have nothing to show but the loss of their health and the deaths of their loved ones. These, then, are our natural allies, lads – we’ve no need of the broken Tommies, nor of Cummins’s lot – excusing your presence, Horace . . . — In Woolwich, Sidcup, Eltham and Plumstead they went from hostel to hostel, and at all locations they found the green-and-red-striped banners already flying: red for the revolution and green for that scientific cultivation of the land they believed would allow for a New Britain, its well-fed and healthy folk freed from material want not by the machines – which had been engines only for the maceration of bodies and the grinding up of souls – but by the Ardent Spirit of natural increase, chemically assisted. The old order has been buried, Stanley told these rough girls from Silvertown and Mile End, beneath the soil of France and Belgium! And he promised them that from now on their lives would be like hopping or a fruit-picking holiday – albeit without the necessity to fill such and such a number of bushels. The rough girls teased him, saying, My, my, ain’t ’e grown – a bang-up-to-date Burlington Bertie – so that he rejoined: Us all, dallying in the fields, kipping in the haystacks, wandering orchards that belong to us, our aprons filled with ripe pears . . . The trams were so overwhelmed by the revolutionists that they crept along at walking pace, palpitating with the close-packed bodies of young women and men – liberties were undoubtedly taken, yet they were given as well: a paroxysm of free love that sent clergymen scuttling from the streets, convinced the last trumpet had been sounded, when it was only the joyous tootling of ten thousand bugles. And everywhere that Stanley went, while he spoke with all, he sought only one:
I should love to see my best girl, Cuddling up again we soon should be, WHOA!
— From the Queen Mary Hostel in Plumstead he was directed – by a vicious old sot – to the Ministry’s Resettlement House in Pimlico. When he arrived the place was empty but for two dashing young ladies covered in paint and smoking cigarettes in extravagantly long onyx holders. They stood at the open drawers of the steel cabinets and flipped through hundreds of filing cards before finding the correct address. — The centre of the city was in a state of foment, news flew out from the telegraph offices and telephone exchanges of more and more echelons going over to the Red-and-Greens: all forty thousand women of the VAD, a further eighteen from the Land Army, a topping twenty-odd from Queen Mary’s Corps – detachments of Territorials that had arrived double-quick in order to guard Whitehall and Parliament against the insurrectionaries formed up, but then refused to fire upon them, casting aside their weapons and uniting in the giddying dawn of the New Age. With all the excitement – the singing, the chanting, and the motor cars racing through the streets with their horns blaring – he yet saw no real violence. On the embankment by Millbank a few flappers twitted an old gentleman – pulling his swallow-tails, snatching his cigar,
the flash of the monocle across his breast as he swings round
and around
until it flies off into the river
. . .
No transport to be had, so Stan walks over Vauxhall Bridge and then up the South Lambeth Road: the north side may’ve been in an uproar, but here a nurse strolls behind a perambulator, each tightly laced boot exactly framed by a paving stone – a grocer’s boy wheels a bicycle top-heavy with rhubarb beneath the blue-and-cream-striped awnings of a row of shops, and the horse droppings scattered on the warm setts give off ineffably sweet smells of
hay and happily digested oats
, the flies curling up from them
a healthy part of the whole
that settles once more as soon as Stan has passed by. The London suburbs are, he thinks, far too widespread and full of their own bricky solidity to be blown up by any mere human impact: towards Croydon and Sydenham Hill the revolutionary wave will be dying away in plashes of over-familiarity and small perturbations of unconventionality, such as
the wearing of a cap at a rakish angle
. . .
In the front yard of the long, four-storey apartment building there are piles of sand and broken tiles left behind by the contractors, above these range windows sunk in mock-Tudor half-timbering, while in the very centre of the building a Neoclassical pediment has been placed with a roundel instead of a lunette – the roundel has these figures set into it: 1916.
Apple tree, pear tree, plum tree pie, How many children before I die? One, two, three
— at least five of them, barefoot, in dirty knickerbockers and, despite the September sunshine, all with thick mufflers around their stalk-necks – he supposes to ward off the influenza that must still be hovering here, among the gold medallions scattered between the chestnut boughs. And so they chant: She open ve winder an’ in-flew-enza! She open ve winder an’ in-flew-enza! which draws him towards a raised casement in the sub-basement. That’s it. He understands now: no matter what enlightenment comes with the New Dawn, even when the fever hospitals, gaols and asylums are turned over to the revolutionists to become beacons of free-association and communal living,
still no acts of women or men can ever raise the soil from my back, Our cemetery’s so small there’ll be no room fer ’em all, Our cemetery’s so small there’ll be no room fer ’em all
. . .
The insupportable weight and density of the mud, packed by the pounding of the shells into every nook and cranny of his form – the steel, and the steel that’s made that steel – of all this there will be more: more milled and turned and drilled, the component parts stretching out into the future on a ceaselessly revolving conveyor belt that has no end. He need never have resurfaced at all – his hands shake and twitch, his
back bends . . . bends
. . .
he is seized by impulsiveness in fingers, hands, feet, toes, and in his inclinations also, an irresistible urge to point, poke, touch, lick, want –
this, that, all others
. . .
and yet he cannot, of his own volition, move at all,
Tiddly-iddly-ighty, Hurry me home to Blighty, Blighty is the place for me!
– the bilyati gun
goes off in my face
. . .
The milieu intérieur, a sepulchral Scots voice intones, as described by Claude Bernard – it is, I would say, best understood as a landscape of its own – a habitable terrain, why not? Possessing hills, rivers, lochs – fields and meadows too . . . However, if you take a closer look, you’ll see that the significant features are, aye, well, broad fairways, sand traps and beautiful – mark me, bea-u-tiful – greens. A second voice – weedy, querulous – intervenes: You make it sound like a golf course.
SEPULCHRAL
: Well, indeed – that is its problem in a nutshell. I mean, in so far as the milieu intérieur is a place that can be mapped out within the catatonic’s mind, it’s also most assuredly incapable of sustaining life. It cannot feed its creator – while those others who play round it are ghosts . . . shades –.
WEEDY
: Ghostly fours –.
SEPULCHRAL
: Fours, pairs – she, the catatonic you see before you, she waves them through – that’s precisely what she’s doing right now, waving them through. She cannot play with them because they don’t, rightly speaking, exist, and so she gives them precedence –.
WEEDY
: And what about the treatment, how does that alter things?
SEPULCHRAL
: What we do here? Why, blow it all to smithereens of course – I mean, ideally it would, but perhaps only plough it over for a season or so. The important thing is the dramatics of the procedure – we cannot, at present, know the precise effects on the brain, but the induced coma state, the intensity of the shock itself, and then: hey presto! the reawakening with a jab of glucose. I suppose a fancy way of putting it would be to say that she’ll reach a new psycho-physical accommodation, but I’m a plain-speaking Renfrewshire man, no truck with scientific jargon of any sort – nor am I in thrall to the kirk, still, I’ve seen absolutely astonishing resurrections . . . Nurse Greengage, would you be so good as to shut the door and bolt it?
GREENGAGE
: Certainly, Doctor Cummins.
WEEDY
: What’re they for?
CUMMINS
: The restraints? Surely they took you through the whole drill at Claybury, young man, absolutely standard procedure.
WEEDY
: Oh, I don’t know – can you be certain that –? I mean, I’ve read through her notes quite thoroughly, it doesn’t appear on the face of it that this is schizophrenic catatonia per se – .
CUMMINS
(
laughing, a
dreadful grating sound
): Per se! Oh, do give it a rest, Marcus – it doesn’t matter a fig what’s caused the catatonia, could be syphilis or bloody socialism for that matter . . . (
he hums
) . . . The more we are to-gether the merrier we shall be –! Oh, come on, man, I’m only joshing you, you take everything too damn seriously – it’s not as if I’m advocating the good old English fist, do I look like a New Party man? Y’know, what we damn well do need is some sort of an atom-smasher like they have in Cambridge, smash all the madness to pieces, eh? As things stand we throw the switch on this apparatus here and we short-circuit half the hospital – you must’ve noticed?
MARCUS
: Yes . . . I have, and it’s an eerie sight – if the fuses don’t blow, the bulbs all along the lower corridor go dim, one after another, travelling down that enormous length . . . like a sort of pulse, I s’pose you’d say.
CUMMINS