Umbrella (8 page)

Is she able –? the psychiatrist asks, and Mboya waves the clipboard wearily. Obviously, he says, it’s impossible for us to get her up on the off-chance – there’s many more like this and we’re short-staffed as it is, but luckily Miss Dearth has her ways . . .
Miss Dearth? Can I have heard him rightly?
wears a bulky nappy held in place by plastic bloomers. It is these the two men have avoided looking at – nakedness would be less obscene. Mboya continues: I cannot be altogether sure, but I think she may be our longest-term patient – and she does indeed have her ways. The nurse, who is a head and a-half taller than his colleague, now does a wholly unexpected thing by squatting down neatly on his haunches. Busner goes more awkwardly after him, and then they are looking at a great oddity, a phenomenon so unaccountable that, until Mboya starts to explain it, he cannot properly see what it is that’s before him. She gets hold of all sorts of things, Mboya says. There’s old shoes she’s found on the bottom layer, on top of them maybe some soap dishes she takes from the bathroom recess – yes, and on top of those saucers . . . I think she has a special liking for the saucers, some years – if she can get enough she’ll use just them. But this year you can see she’s brought some stones in from the grounds – flat stones, and there’s bits of roof slate she’s put on top of those . . . The result was roughly conical and about two feet high, its apex almost meeting the coiled springs of the bed. The two men peer – one from the foot, the other from the side – at this
what? Shrine – or grotto?
Beside Busner’s splayed fingers sandy soil scatter-trails to where the roots, stems and heads of two or three shredded daffodils lie in an opening neatly contrived in the structure. There is also a nightlight, the tiny flame of which kindles a homely glow on a pile of crumpled paper inside the arch. Oh, he says, is that –? I mean . . . Mboya is conciliatory: It does no harm, Doctor, we make sure of that, and, like I say, Miss Dearth – Audrey – she’s been here . . . well, when I started she’d already been here many, many years . . . Mistaking Busner’s silence for disapproval, when it’s only that he finds the scene surpassing strange, Mboya hurries on: She’s a sort of institution, you see, and her little spring shrine is, well, other patients – staff as well – they like to . . . He points and Busner now notices coins lying among the
quick green fuses
, shiny new nickel-alloy five- and ten-pence pieces, together with a few tarnished tanners and chunky thruppenny bits,
how soon they’ve come to seem of another age
. . .
He reaches for one of little dodecahedrons and presses it hard between his fingers, so hard that when he parts them it sticks to his forefinger and he sees the portcullis impressed in the pad of his thumb. He lifts it to his nostrils and smells its cold taint of old blood. For quite a while Busner takes the little voice
Pliz remembah ve gro’o, onlee wunce a year
for thought –
a colleague?
recalled droning on in a case meeting.
Pliz remembah ve gro’o, onlee wunce –
next he thinks it comes from the over-tranquillised patient on the far side of the ward
– a year, Farver’s gonter sea,
Muvver’s gonter bringim back . . . finally he realises it is right in his ear,
but
micro-phonic
, and, straightening up, he leans back in to hear this: the utterances of some still smaller and more warped old woman vibrating in the larynx of this one. He tunes in to the friction of the parched
lips: A penny won’t urtyer, a ha’penny won’t brayk yer, A farving won’t putyer in ve work’uss . . . Now the cold dial of his sphygmomanometer lies cold against her neck and smells still
fishy
– she had found it together with plenty of others underneath the fishmonger’s cart and there were more in the gutter in front of the Leg of Lamb,
a mean little gaff
, her father said of it,
a grog shop for the navvies and shonks
, but Audrey thought the low weatherboard building – little more than a shack – had a
romantic air
, not that she altogether understood what this was, saving that sometimes when Mother left her and her sisters with Missus Worth she would put the three small girls in a row, admonish them to be still and, opening the lid of her cottage piano, send silvery sound bubbles floating up in the stuffy parlour to kiss their reflections in the mirror, then die. When Missus Worth shut the lid, she said, Girls, that is a very romantic air what I have played you. – Then is it that same romantic air that hovers around the Leg of Lamb, or is it the carolling blue tit come down for a milk churn? Audrey is a little feart of the dark outline left on the old boards by a mulberry tree that her mother said used to grow there – maybe that too has a romantic air? The oyster shells smell fishy and they’ve got weedy beards, but there’s a horse trough by the pub and Audrey scrubs them until
vey cummup luvlee
and Bert comes by with Mother, who cuffs her while Bert laughs: You don’t do no grottoing ’til July, Or-dree, an you does it wiv fresh shells, not manky ones. Alluv ve uvver girls is doin’ spring gardens now, you ain’t gotta be different. She does have to be different, though, so she bundles the shells up in her pinny and Mary Jane drags her back to Waldemar Avenue, where Audrey makes her grotto by the front railings, ordering Vi and Olive to get pebbles
like vese – not vose
,
and boxing their ears in turn. Three or four Sally Army oafs come by, just loafing, not marching, one lugging a big bass drum, the others
larkin’ abaht
with their horns, squelching and parping. They’re pulled up short by the unseasonable grotto – and by Vi, who’s cried so much she has smutty rings round her eyes. They give the little girls a penny and Audrey sends Vi to get a candle from Curtis’s on the corner, then she sneaks it alight from the range and afterwards is content to sit at the kerbside holding the toes of her boots
warm puppies
, what with it being a fine evening and the sunset catching the
swags ’n’ roses
so sharp, the swags and roses Mary Jane pointed to proudly,
See, proper stukko
. . .
and the balustrades that ran along the first floor of the terrace, their pillars plump and squared off. In the gathering darkness Audrey croons the rhyme:
Pliz remembah ve gro’o, onlee wunce a year
, or possibly only thinks she does in the hope that it will ward off Strewel Peter, whose cloud of orange hair rises above the
chimblies
opposite. How could her mother say that? When all the swags ’n’ roses were the same, all the houses were the same? How can anything be beautiful or noble or romantic when it’s the same? Farver’s gonter sea,
Muvver’s gonter bringim back — She’s beef to the heels, that one! cries Arnold Collins, who works on the ’buses with Audrey’s father –
eez iz conductah
– and who comes along the road fulfilling the same role after hours, because Sam Death looks
quite tight
. The two men are carrying their work satchels and Rothschild still has his gauntlets on – he tousles her hair with his sweated-leather-and-horse smell, then cups her cheek to pull her other one up to his
wet scrubbing brush
. As her father bends over, his waistcoat bunches up, and his watch flops from its pocket, so that for an instant it lies
cold
against her clenched face. Collins stands a few feet away, thumbs in his own waistcoat pockets, cap at a jaunty angle. ’E finks isself a reg’lar masher, ’e duzz, Audrey has heard her father tell her mother, the two of them taking their ease over a glass of port wine. – There’s a marshyuness over ’Ammersmiff, a shop girl up in ve Bush. He belches, laughs, wipes his moustache. I dunno, some chap is gonna givim a pasting one of vese days – all of this said with indulgence bordering on respect. But Audrey never likes the way that Arnold Collins looks at her, his hard black eyes rolling over her hair, her chest, her ankles. Getting ready for bed in the front bedroom with the little girls, Audrey still feels those black marbles upon her – and, as the boys join them and all five Death children kneel to murmur perfunctorily, Godless Muvver, Godless Farver, Collins’s eyes are on her yet. In bed, she huddles up against Violet to avoid them while concentrating on the lantern show behind her own eyelids: dark processional shapes moving through riverside mist that are at once
the marshyuness, the shop girl
and also stately ladies with extravagant bonnets, bustles and parasols that transform into Just So elephants,
how-dee-how-dahs
waggling on their backs to a brass-band accompaniment,
Oo-rum-pum-pah! Oo-rum-pum-pah!
magically transmitted from the bandstand in South Park,
goldschein
, the world sucked gurgling into the
fiery trumpet
, then blown out again,
when all it was, when all it was
. . .
was a line of cows being herded by a farmer’s boy across the scrublands of Barnes Common on that
ripping
day
when Bert played truant and took her with him over to the Surrey Side – ’
Ow we caught it! –
Singaht, girl, singaht! His watch is cold against her cheek, his leather fingers twist her chin. – Singaht! Singaht! She quavers . . . A penny won’t urtyer, A ha’penny won’t braykyer, A farving won’t putyer in ve work’uss . . . and Sam Death exults: Ahh, gerron! She’s a precious little goose, ain’t she, Arnold? She must avvit. He pulls the other man to him by the lip of his satchel, then sifts through the pouch, selecting, then tossing one coin after the other into the opening of Audrey’s grotto. – There’s a penny anna ha’penny anna farving – an yer know what, girlie, it won’t break me never, coz I’m the fellow az once divvied up a shilling – a whole shilling, mind – to set wiv the Tichborne claimant over at Leadenhall Market. Did I ever tellya that, Arnold . . . Did I not? And the two men are up the front steps and into the house, from where Audrey hears her father calling mockingly, Mary Jane, you’ll av some fine gal-an-tine for Mister Collins, willyer not?

Scant light from Waldemar Avenue’s newly planted lamps casts the shadow of the balustrade into iron
Bedlam bars
that fall across the two beds and clash with the bars of Olive’s cot. Violet has kicked the coverlet away – her skinny legs lash about
beef to the heels. Spring-heeled Arnold
is poised on the window ledge and Audrey thinks:
I’ll never ever sleep, I’ll never ever sleep
. . .
that she’ll go mad with not sleeping, mad with the
pissmist
from the potty in her nostrils, mad from the counting up of her two pennies, her ha’penny and her farthing, then dividing this sum into eleven farthings, then adding them together again. Coins on the blackboard, coins on the slates, fingers in the inkwells,
Two-times-six-is-twelve, three-times-six-is-ay-teen, four-times-six-is-twenny-four
, an entire classroom of Audreys and Stans in their drab clothes and their cracked boots, their plaintive treble voices plaiting, then unravelling into two sound-streams that flow out through girls and boys into afternoon streets to twine once more – dirty boys’ hands grabbing pigtails to
straitjacket
the girls in the
booby-hatch
, until someone comes to release them,
D’you wanter claht in ve jaw! Coz you never did touch my ed, so there
. . .
the Wiggins boys dancing round her – then little Stan caught as well and flung in there with her, howling, his shirt torn. — No wonder we called the game Bedlam, thinks Audrey, a big girl of fourteen now, walking back from Shorrold’s Road Baths on a Saturday afternoon and seeing a load of kids mafficking. We called it that – not that we knew what Bedlam was. It had been mixed up in Audrey’s six-year-old mind with the Cyprian Orphanage and the Gunnersbury Isolation Hospital – places to which children were
removed
, leaving a hurting gap behind for days or weeks that soon enough their siblings grew into. She turns the corner into the Fulham Road thinking that cherry blossom is frogspawn in the pond-green sky, and looking forward to the slow stroll past Anderson’s Tea Rooms, savouring the cakes surrounded by fancies, until she sees her father with his foot up on a shoeblack’s box and wishes she hadn’t — because nowadays Audrey believes that if she sees him he can spy her
at once
. He has become
a stage magician
, the smoke from
the seegar stuck in
’
is face lime-lit green an’ fleein’ to reveal
. . .
Arnold Collins.
Go which way you will, you will run up against them
, and it makes it worse that, as her father swaps feet, Collins doffs his hat and says: She’s gainin’ flesh, guv’nor, an’ it ain’t all rare meat neevah. Sam grunts, Well, why shouldn’t she? She’s not some bantin’ flapper! Now, Or-dree,
I’ve a co-mission that Mister Collins ’ere az hentrusted me wiv –. He breaks off to snap at the boots: Givvit some elbow-grease, boy! Then resumes, We’ll be headin’ up West, you and I, time a farver showed iz dotter ve runuv ve place, ain’t it so, Arnold? Collins only twitches his tight lips, fiddles with the brim of his boater, pats the lush brown wings of his pomaded hair. Audrey feels the dampness of her shift at the backs of her thighs and sighs. – But, Father, Mother’ll be wantin’ –. A chop of the smoky hand: Yer mother’s always wantin’, Audrey – allus will be. He fiddles out a coin and drops it on the paving stone – anticipating this, the boots is there, grubby face ruffed with white-blond curls pushing up from beneath his corduroy cap, a single tooth questing from his bottom lip. Givovah, yer worship, he says scrabbling for his penny. Dob uss two more like vat an I can make me passage fer Noo Yawk. Death’s sardonic smile snips him a pair of jowls he wags at the boots. They ain’t letting your sort in juss now, he says, you’re best off sticking it out ’ere on ha’pence a boot! Uneasily, Audrey takes in piece by piece how Collins dresses
much snappier
than he did when he was with London General: a swallow collar clips his plump neck, his boater has a blue-and-purple-striped ribbon, his patent-leather boots have cunning suede darting, his tongue darts from side to side in his mouth each time he opens it to speak: And, ah, the, ah, goods, guv’nor? Death slowly transfers his contempt from the boy to the man: Whatever you say, Arnold – shall I cable to you at your a-part-ments to arrange our ren-dez-vous, or have they by any chance a telephone appliance at that sixpenny ding-dong of yours over Marylebone way? After all, this is a new century now, ain’t it – no need to wait any more is there? Time, distance . . . our wizard mechanical contrivances have them altogether ee-lim-ee-nated. Collins is
throttled
, his cheeks flush. Ah, he says, ah-ah, his tongue
darting
until Death relieves him: Givovah, Fred, I’ll see you at the Magpie like always, and now – good-byee! Taking Audrey by the arm, he propels her ahead of him off along the road at
such a lick
that for the first hundred paces she has the disturbing image of herself
hooping-the-hoop
, her skirts flaring, then falling to expose her bloomers. She looks back just the once to see Arnold Collins arranging his boater on his springy hair, the boots still supplicant at his feet.