Umbrella (51 page)

Tactically, the De’Aths withdraw to the hallway, where Rose the parlour maid stands with handfuls of apron and jaw dropping – others of the domestics have, equally tactically, made themselves scarce. Alone in the tumult of her thoughts and limbs, as she turns this, the most vital fuse cap of the entire never-ending war, Audrey hears these sounds above the screeching of her lathe: a man crying Fre-esh fi-ish! again and again from the road outside, the gentle whinny of his horse, the lifting of the earpiece, the sinisterly abrasive return of the sprung dial, the menacing conformity of her brother’s voice saying, Hello, would you kindly connect me to the R Division station at Blackheath Road? I think you’ll find that the number is two-one-six-nought availeth me, Busner thinks, and then: Misunderstood visions and the faces of clocks. He had left the car at the park gates, intending to take a walk to
clear my mind
. In August the city emptied out a little – but the drive all the way from Friern Barnet through the tail-end of the rush hour was still gruelling – all those
mental patients sitting silently howling in their foam-padded cells
. He had locked his own
a practitioner’s privilege
and, pocketing the keys, escorted its discharged inmate down the avenue that leads to the Observatory, while rolling his head around on his neck, loosening his shoulders and swinging his arms – all of which was what passed for exercise, now that his liaisons with Mimi had been abruptly terminated.
Mi-mi! Mi-mi! Mi-miiii
. . .
!
The siren of an ambulance whipping across the heath behind him is, he realises, what has called this car crash to mind: It wasn’t only her engagement to the squaddy she had wrenched away from, she was
cutting herself free from all bodywork
. . .
At the Observatory, Busner stands, letting his eyeballs shoot down the green slope to the Naval College, volley through the Cutty Sark’s rigging, spin through the tightly packed terraces of Millwall and Cubitt Town – swerving around the pegs of three newish multi-storey council blocks – before cannoning away across Mile End, Hackney, Highbury, Finsbury Park and Crouch End
back to whence I came
. . .
In the mid-distance the dust of demolition lies in filthy rags on the broken bones of dead houses in Limehouse and Poplar. He wonders if the Observatory is still in use – did star-struck boffins sit beneath its cloven copper dome
firing their eyes at the distant past of other worlds?
The city, Busner realises, tires him – already he has no patience with its affectations, its attitudinising, which take on such
permanent and concrete forms
. He sees Mimi
blown thistledown
, rising up from the embankment beside the Isle of Dogs foot tunnel, her body gently clapping inside the gleaming bell of her transparent plastic umbrella. She is, he thinks, a child of the future, not a miserably authoritarian nanny of the past, her bare legs
reaching out
. . .
It is precisely at this moment that he crosses his own
prime meridian
and understands:
My youth is over – and with it any blame that attaches to . . . who, the Luftwaffe? Or to them for trusting to the Anderson and not bothering to take the three hundred and twenty-nine steps down into the underground?
His youth is over, and, while he may go on turning Ronnie’s whirligogs, repeating the same mistakes while expecting different results,
because that’s what people do
, he will not compound these errors any further by typing his patients. Henceforth there will be only
me
and
you
, never again the fraudulence of either
us
or
them
. He’d like to celebrate this by cutting a caper, picking a flower, embracing a child – instead he sinks his hands deeper in his pockets, smells the sticky sap of the limes, and listens as the first heavy drops of rain splatter on their foliage. If I was that dapper chap on the telly, he thinks, I’d’ve brought my umbrella with me. But he is none of these things: dapper, a chap, on the telly – and so arrives jogging back at the Austin, hunched over, his sports coat sodden, his grey flannel trousers greyer. — Standing on the pavement, looking up at the elegant curve of the grand development, with its beautifully four-square brick beads strung along colonnades, Busner notes that for every property that is well maintained there are two more that have tripped up into neglect: jigsaw chunks of stucco have dropped from their entablatures, and behind the elegant pillars are coal sacks and clothes-drying racks, pigeon-manured shrubs have taken root on ledges and in the crooks of walls, television aerials lurch from the chopped-off polyhedrons of their roofs. The address given for Sir Albert De’Ath, KG, KBE, in the 1955 edition of Who’s Who Busner had found in the hospital library – and subsequently confirmed as still being his residence in a current A–D phonebook – is the most rundown of all.
No paragon
. . .
what with its curtained and shuttered windows, and its overgrown front garden wherein the weeds have sprung up around a feature that looks to be a crudely fashioned pair of . . .
Indian clubs?
He wonders if he’s made a mistake and the huge old pile is being squatted – the single bell push
a
nipple, inverted in its plaster aureole
calls forth a disorderly chorus of chimes, buzzes, bongs and rings that sounds away into the distant recesses of the house, and, while Busner is puzzling over the nature of someone who could rig up such a fantastical system,
presumably he’s deaf –
he’s startled by the premature cracking open of the door and the emergence of a sagging and heavily powdered face surrounded by a shockingly luxuriant blue-rinsed perm . . .
almost an Afro!
Doctor Busner? the woman whistles through goofy teeth – and as he confirms this she swings the door right open and ushers him in. I’m Missus Haines, we spoke on the telephone yesterday morning, she says. There’s a hefty Birman cat stalking round and around between her stubby legs, its thick furry tail lashing up her tweed skirt – she pays this no attention. Sir Albert, she continues, is expecting you. Then she does nothing. They stand there facing each other in the hallway, and, as Busner’s eyes adjust to the gloom, he begins to see
how very weird it all is:
not one or two but seven coat trees all hung about with old mackintoshes, mufflers and even Edwardian duster coats are marching along the hallway towards the back of the house. The slope-shoulders of these
headless giants
brush against epidermal Anaglypta that’s sloughing off in strips and patches – the hall runner, of good quality, exhibits the same
punctuation of time
, dashes and commas of wear exposing its underlay. His eyes escape the Birman’s empty, narcissistic ones by rising to take in the hanks of wiring and the thin copper tubing of old gas pipes running along the picture rail, together with a thicker pipe . . .
a speaking tube?
There’s far less dust than Busner would’ve expected – whatever irregular things go on here, hoovering is daily – it’s only that nothing has ever been removed or replaced, simply added to or adapted. From the ceiling hang three different light fitments from three different eras – gas-brackets still crook from the walls,
this must’ve been going on since –
Nineteen eighteen, Missus Haines says, Mister and Missus De’Ath – as they were then – moved in here in the summer of nineteen eighteen, shortly after they were married. I joined the establishment in nineteen twenty, and one of my first tasks was the vacuum cleaning – they’d a machine already, you see, Sir Albert was always bang up to date with such things. At a loss as to where he should go with this information – a perfect synthesis of telepathy and the mundane – Busner asks: Have you always been employed by Sir Albert? She laughs, Oh, no, bless you – I went off, did all sorts . . . married a railway man – we were at Orpington up until the war . . . No, Sir Albert always kept in touch, and when Lady De’Ath passed away three years ago, he wrote asking me to come back and housekeep for him. Well, I’d not long lost my Rodney, so I jumped at the idea . . . It seems most unlikely to Busner that Missus Haines has been able to jump at much for
decades, but her tongue leaps about enough
. . .
He stands there
letting it all lap over me
, while his own tongue circles the
ice rink
of silver amalgam that Missus Uren, the dentist in East Finchley, has implanted in his molar . . . We don’t, as it ’appens, get much in the way of callers, she’s saying when this
vestibular interlude
is abruptly terminated by the unmistakable sound of a saucepan boiling over – and, now he comes to think of it, the pong of fish cooking in milk has been steadily building all this while. – Oh, oh –! Missus Haines does indeed
jump to it
, the cat scats, and Busner is left alone to consider how it’s Albert De’Ath’s way, apparently,
to always keep in touch
– this, and how useful one of the tent-sized macs would’ve been when he was getting soaked in Greenwich Park. When she returns Missus Haines is wrapped up in an apron printed with photographs of the front doors and fanlights of Georgian houses. They’re all from Dublin, she says, pretty, ain’t they? I’ll see to some tea, she goes on, you’ll find Sir Albert in the front room to your left there, and mind –. She stops, and in her expression Busner sees mingled protectiveness and
a sort of outrage?
He waits for her to complete the sentence but she doesn’t, only leaves him to go through the door indicated with the admonition, mind, hanging in his own. It rapidly transpires that
mind is
spot on
– as warning, as description, as mantra, motto and injunction. Emanating from the tall old man seated in the wing armchair in the red-velvet-curtained bay window of the large and fiendishly cluttered room is such a strong sensation of a brain churning through calculations, evaluations, judgements, deductions, inductions and assays, that Busner near-staggers under the impact of this furious concentration: mental activity that’s beamed through large, limpid, protuberant grey eyes either side of a
Palaeolithic flint axe
of a nose, and focused directly on him.
It doesn’t help matters
. . .
that Sir Albert is
Mekon
bald, or that a number of pairs of wire-rimmed spectacles are pushed up on his soaring forehead, their oval lenses shining in the downlight of a standard lamp positioned by his chair. Busner thinks: A shaven and mummified big cat that yet lives! For Sir Albert is wound up to his armpits in a bright red-and-yellow tartan rug, above which rises the corpse-like skin of yet another mackintosh buttoned up high on his columnar neck.
It doesn’t help matters
. . .
that there is nowhere Busner can look to for repose: every surface is piled with books, papers, leather-covered boxes, scientific instruments – he recognises a primitive centrifuge, gramme scales and an astrolabe – framed photographs of power stations and models of electricity generators, Gestetner machines and old upright typewriters, rubber-stamp stands and blotters cluttered with dipping-nib pens, clocks, vases and china figurines, silver trays and salvers piled with foxed visiting cards and golf-tees, presentation model aircraft cast in steel and mounted on wooden plinths – he identifies a Mosquito fighter-bomber – rococo golf trophies with miniature players immortalised on their lids in mid-swing.
It doesn’t help matters
. . .
that all this stuff spreads across a terrain of heavy old Edwardian furniture – settees and tables, desks and revolving bookcases – so that, rather than appearing as inert, it seethes and undulates threateningly. The wall above the fireplace is tiled with framed certificates and photographs of a younger Sir Albert rearing over diminutive delegations of Japanese civil servants, or else intimidating political leaders with his already-bare cranium – registering some satisfaction, Busner spots one in which he’s bearing down on an uneasy-looking John Foster Dulles. However, this