Young Adolf

by Beryl Bainbridge

  By the end of the afternoon Adolf was worn out. He had tried to restore a little cleanliness and order to the basement. Several times he had brushed the floor clear of debris only to have Mary O’Leary wantonly fling down potato peelings and leftovers. He fitted a piece of muslin over the jug of buttermilk and gathered up the newspapers in an attempt to wash down the table.

  Pat howled so much at the removal of the sausages that Bridget made Adolf put them back. ‘He’s doing no harm,’ she said. ‘Let him batter them with his old spoon.’

  When Adolf protested that they wouldn’t be fit to eat, she tossed her head and told him that until such time as he paid for the food Pat could put them through the mangle for all she cared. Angrily he stalked out of the kitchen and went upstairs to lie on the couch.

  When he woke it was dark and Bridget was preparing the child for bed.

  ‘Are you coming to midnight mass later?’ she asked. ‘Or will you stay home with Pat?’

  ‘I will rest here,’ he decided.

  ‘Here, take him,’ she said, and dumping Pat on to the sofa she struggled through into the bedroom carrying the bottom drawer of the wardrobe. The baby was tired. He keeled over and lay with his cheek resting trustingly on Adolf’s shoulder. They yawned together, lying there with the lamp hissing on the table. When Bridget came and took him away, Adolf missed him.

  ‘I have a cousin,’ said Bridget, some minutes later when she was tidying the table. ‘She’s younger than me. I was thinking you should meet her.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Adolf said, peering over the edge of the plaid blanket.

  ‘My cousin,’ she repeated. ‘A young lady. I thought it would be nice for you to meet her.’

  ‘I am too busy to meet young ladies,’ he said.

  ‘I can see that,’ said Bridget tartly. The nerve of him, lying there like Lord Muck, pretending he was a working man.

  She took her coat down from the peg of the hat-stand, preferring to sit downstairs with Mary O’Leary until it was time to go round the corner to the church. Meyer and Alois wouldn’t be back until the small hours of the morning; Christmas Eve was a good night for picking up tips, and the management always sent them home with an extra three shillings in their wages. When the last of the residents had retired to bed, the staff usually had a knees-up in the store room. She was about to march out without a word when something in Adolf’s expression made her hesitate. He looked haughty and yet bereft. Was he blinking his eyelids to hold back tears?

  ‘Do you need anything to eat?’ she asked.

  ‘No, thank you,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t care much for Christmas, do you?’

  He shook his head. Sitting up and throwing off the rug, he began to put on his old boots.

  ‘I don’t suppose you like dancing either?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not a man for dancing.’

  ‘Alois loves dancing. He likes parties and people. Sometimes I think the razor blades will be the ruin of him. He’d be better off sticking with the catering business. He likes nothing better than to inspect the tables and hear the band strike up.’

  ‘At Christmas,’ said Adolf awkwardly, ‘my mother died.’

  ‘Ah God!’ cried Bridget. ‘I didn’t know that. Alois never said.’

  ‘She was not his mother.’

  ‘He was very fond of her,’ protested Bridget. ‘He always said she was a good mother to him. Between you, me and the gatepost, for all he goes on about the old fella I think he liked her best.’

  ‘When we were small,’ confided Adolf, ‘my mother called my father Uncle.’

  ‘That’s queer,’ said Bridget.

  ‘She was young,’ Adolf said. ‘Also she was his niece.’

  ‘Get away,’ cried Bridget. ‘The priest would never have allowed it.’

  Adolf’s English wasn’t sufficient for him to explain that his father had obtained a dispensation from the Pope. Besides, Bridget was looking longingly at the door, anxious to be gone. He would have liked to have given her the drawing of Pat – now, with Alois out of the way – but he supposed she was in too much of a hurry. Perhaps he would never show it to her. Already her hand was on the latch of the door.

  ‘It’s a grand time of the year, isn’t it?’ she said, trying to cover her escape with words. ‘Everyone’s in a fine humour and the men are falling over themselves to be nice.’

  Adolf managed a bleak smile. Then she was on to the landing and running down the stairs as if the place was on fire. I haven’t always been a wet blanket, he thought. There had been moments, certainly as a boy, when he had made his mother smile.

  He spent his evening lying on the couch, propped on pillows, watching the couples in the dance hall opposite. Now and then a rumpus broke out. Some word or foot out of place and a tornado of figures, arms flailing beneath the drifting streamers, whirled up suddenly from the centre of the throng. The dancers, shrieking, scattered to the walls. Shoulder to shoulder the bouncers charged. Grappling with the troublemakers, they partnered them one by one in a spirited polka to the doors. The combatants, booted into the night, continued to lash out at one another until someone called from a doorway that the scuffers were coming.

  Shortly before midnight, a woman pushing a handcart hurled a three-legged stool through the glass panel of the saloon door.

  20

  On Christmas morning, Bridget gave Adolf a handkerchief made out of the same material as his brown shirt. At one corner she had embroidered his initials in white thread.

  Hastily he pushed the drawing into her hand.

  ‘It’s him,’ she cried, impressed by his cleverness.

  ‘Let’s see,’ Alois demanded, snatching the card from her. Liverish from the previous night’s excesses, he slumped over the table in vest and braces. He examined the drawing carefully.

  ‘More than anything else,’ he said at last, ‘it resembles a potato.’

  The Christmas dinner began at five o’clock. During the earlier part of the afternoon Alois and Kephalus sat with Meyer in his room and drank cherry brandy. Adolf stayed downstairs with the women. Since dawn, Mary O’Leary had been cooking the goose. The basement was now in a fair state of order with the table laid and the floor swept. Bridget had hung the remainder of the brown cloth over the worst of the vegetable growths by the door. The candles were lit on the Christmas tree. Mrs Prentice’s children, dressed in various articles of clothing, some too small and some too large for them, stood overwhelmed at the far end of the table. The landlord of the public house, made contrary by the wrecking of his door, had changed his mind about loaning the barrels. Adolf had retrieved the three-legged stool abandoned in the gutter.

  ‘They don’t need nothing to park on,’ said Mrs Prentice, gaudy in a sateen jacket of shot purple. ‘The meat will go down safer if they’se stand up.’

  When the men were called for the meal, it seemed there were a hundred people in the kitchen, barging into chairs and upsetting buckets, littering the table with glasses and bottles. A great deal of kissing and playful slapping was indulged in by Kephalus when greeting the children. They accepted his attentions without flinching, eyes unwaveringly and hopelessly fixed on the spitting goose, bursting with stuffing, being lifted from the smoke-filled oven by Mary O’Leary.

  The doctor wanted to separate the children and string them like beads among the company, but Meyer said it would spoil their appetites; he settled them cross-legged on the stone floor with their backs to the wall and gave the eldest boy, Gordon, a cup of beer. Everyone agreed the young had an astonishing time of it now, what with health and public education and generally being treated as persons of some importance. The boy sipping his drink, who was nearly thirteen, had been employed for two years, according to Mrs Prentice, in the soap works in Blundell Street and wasn’t allowed to work after seven o’clock at night. When she thought of her own brother at half Gordon’s age, ferreting up and down chimneys and having the brine rubbed into his knees so that he wouldn’t bleed too
much when climbing between the bricks, she thanked God for the decent times they were living in.

  Mary O’Leary had set an extra place next to her own. When Meyer asked her to pass the plate, she said dismally, ‘No need. It’s an empty gesture.’ Overwhelmed, she bowed her head in its withered bonnet.

  ‘There, there,’ cried Meyer, putting down his knife and going to her. Gently he patted her shoulder.

  After a moment Mary O’Leary recovered and wiped her perspiring face with the edge of the tablecloth. When the wine was poured, Adolf held up his glass, determined to be congenial. Seated as he was beside the sickening Kephalus, he felt he would need something to blur his sensibilities. The doctor, garbed like a cockroach in a black frock-coat glazed with age, ate as if he was at the horse-trough. Mrs Prentice sought a diagnosis of her Elsie’s delicate condition. Pinned between Kephalus’s elbows and Mrs Prentice’s purple bosom, Adolf was unable to detach himself altogether from the medical details. He drank as much as he was able in as short a time as possible.

  When most of the eating was done, Mrs Prentice’s girl, Dolly, was called upon to sing.

  ‘No, no,’ she whined, pressing herself against the mildewed wall.

  Her mother rose from the table and staggering slightly jerked the child to her feet. Dolly was lifted on to the three-legged stool, where she stood with her stubby toes poking out of the worn uppers of her button boots, her cheeks flushing pink from terror and excitement. Not a peep came out of her.

  ‘Leave the poor girl alone,’ cried Bridget, as the men struck the table encouragingly with their pudding spoons.

  But Mrs Prentice wasn’t prepared to let the matter rest. After some whispered words in Dolly’s ear and a somewhat vicious pinching of the meagre flesh on her arm, the child fixed her eyes on some point above the hanging lamp and stretching forth a bony finger sang quaveringly: ‘The boy I love is up in the gallery …’

  When she had finished she jumped from the stool to tumultuous applause and collapsed on the floor among her brothers and sisters like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

  ‘Even as a babby,’ boasted Mrs Prentice, ‘in a gown made out of a sugar bag our Dolly warbled shriller than a nightingale.’

  Alois proposed a series of toasts, first to Dolly for her performance, then to Herr Meyer for making such a feast possible, and lastly to absent and seafaring friends.

  On hearing this last proposal Mary O’Leary heaved herself upright and drained her glass at one gulp.

  Meyer remained seated, eyes gazing sombrely at the debris of his Christmas pudding.

  When the women and children began to clear the pots from the table, the men brought out their cigars and lighting them blew clouds of smoke at the stained ceiling. Adolf slumped sideways in his chair. He couldn’t stop smiling.

  ‘You have thrown off your mantle of gloom,’ observed Meyer. ‘A drink has brought you out of yourself.’

  ‘I’ve been out of myself before now,’ confided Adolf. ‘I could astonish you.’ Laying a hand on Meyer’s arm to steady himself, he asked in a confused and rambling fashion if his friend had seen Wagner’s opera Rienzi.

  ‘Yes,’ said Meyer, ‘I have.’

  ‘I saw it with my friend Gustl,’ said Adolf. ‘I found the story of the rise and fall of a tribune of Rome particularly … particularly …’

  ‘Apt? In a quarter of the city which was inhabited by mechanics and Jews – if I may quote the historian – the marriage of an innkeeper and a washerwoman produced the future deliverer of Rome,’ said Meyer helpfully.

  ‘Hold your tongue,’ Adolf said. ‘Suffocated by the smoke of cigars in the foyer I left the theatre after the performance and climbed a steep hill outside the town. Crouching in the wet grass, I waited.’ He stared thoughtfully at Meyer’s neckcloth.

  ‘For whom?’ asked Meyer.

  At that moment Adolf’s thoughts, which previously had been sluggish and conflicting, became lucid and capable of being expressed in words. Moreover he felt a pressing need to communicate. Pushing back his chair, he rose to his feet.

  ‘Young Adolf’s going to make a speech,’ cried Alois, stamping his boots on the stone floor to attract the attention of the doctor, who was engaged in throwing bonbons at the children.

  ‘Waiting is a tedious business,’ said Adolf, addressing the door of the coal cellar. ‘Long ago I had faced that optical illusion of the looking-glass and seen the ignoble reflection totally at variance with the image of the true, inner self—’

  ‘What’s he talking about?’ demanded Alois.

  ‘Long ago I had dismissed it for the distortion it was. But that night, that night in the grass, shivering with cold and emotion, I made a conscious effort to detach myself from this puny body, these brittle bones, this … this …’ Here Adolf pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose and hesitated.

  ‘Lump,’ suggested Alois.

  ‘Fragile brain,’ continued Adolf, unaware of the interruption. ‘Straining in every fibre I crouched there, panting. I heard the dew sliding down each stalk of grass, felt the motion of the earth as it turned through space. I sought to fuse my spirit with those of the dead tribunes of Rome, with the immortal music of Wagner. I felt at that minute as if the planets changed their courses and the rivers ran with blood.’

  He was extending one arm towards the ceiling now, eyes staring and intent, as though he saw through the plaster and the beams, the rooms above, the roof itself, and gazed upon the stars. Alois, who throughout this tirade had interjected various humorous remarks relating to defecating in the grass and haemorrhoids, fell silent. Bridget, unable to understand one word in ten, trembled as if her life was in danger.

  ‘During the grub years of my miserable childhood,’ thundered Adolf, ‘and during the miserable caterpillar years of my young manhood when I was repeatedly denied entrance to the Academy, I held fast to the belief that one day I would undergo a metamorphosis of the spirit. On that cold hillside my patience was rewarded. Had I not long since renounced the faith of my boyhood, I would have compared my exalted state to that of Christ’s in the Garden of Gethsemane. It is useless to denounce such an experience as adolescent and commonplace. That night I struggled free from from the dusty membranes of both grub and caterpillar and emerged finally, an airborne creature soaring on iridescent wings above the earth.’

  For several seconds Adolf remained standing, arm raised in that salute to the heavens. Beads of perspiration trickled down his cheeks.

  Then abruptly he sat down. Misjudging the position of his chair he fell to the floor and disappeared under the table.

  ‘That was nice,’ said Mrs Prentice. ‘Is he going to be a priest, then?’ Until hearing the word ‘Christ’ she had been under the impression she was listening to a foreign, more dramatic rendering of ‘The Boy I Love is Up in the Gallery.’

  No one answered her. Mary O’Leary, who had left off stacking the plates, clattered the saucepans into the sink.

  ‘I was right,’ said Kephalus thoughtfully. He leaned across and whispered to Meyer: ‘Undoubtedly an hysteric.’ Leaving the table he went out into the front area for a breath of night air.

  Wearing an expression of mingled admiration and disgust, Alois peered under the cloth at his half-brother, before following the doctor out of the scullery door.

  ‘What was he on about?’ asked Bridget, vexed. ‘He’s put a damper on the proceedings.’

  ‘Bugs,’ said Mary O’Leary. ‘Flying insects and bugs.’

  Recovering, Adolf climbed slowly to his feet and sat down. He sighed once, twice, as if his heart was heavy. Under the gaslight his face was so wan as to appear green.

  ‘Do you often have such experiences?’ asked Meyer.

  ‘No,’ said Adolf. ‘Where is your son?’

  21

  Some time later, after Meyer had helped him into the back yard and encouraged him to vomit down a drain, Adolf apologised for his curiosity.

  ‘The fault is mine,’ said Meyer. ‘Don’t mention it.�
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  ‘Doorman?’ queried Adolf, leaning weakly against the wall of the house. ‘At the theatre?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Meyer. ‘Behind the market.’

  Adolf begged his forgiveness. He hadn’t meant to pry again.

  ‘I should,’ conceded Meyer, ‘have confided in you earlier. But then it is not something to shout from the rooftops.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Adolf. ‘You may rely on me.’

  Escorting him to the kitchen, Meyer went upstairs to find Kephalus. They were taking three of Mrs Prentice’s children home before going on to visit an acquaintance of the doctor. The youngest child, clutching the rag doll, was asleep across two chairs. In a generous moment, already regretted, Alois had said he would stay behind with his wife for an hour or so. She had gone to put darling Pat in his drawer. Alois sat fretting by the fire, a towel draped over his lap to protect his trousers from Mary O’Leary and Mrs Prentice who, in a slap-dash way, were still removing pots from the oven and generally continuing to tidy up the kitchen.

  ‘You made an exhibition of yourself,’ he said crossly to Adolf. ‘I’m tired of your sly innuendoes. It’s not seemly to speak of one’s father in such a manner.’

  ‘What innuendoes?’ asked Adolf, astonished. ‘I never mentioned him.’

  ‘Miserable childhood!’ said Alois. ‘Herr Meyer was scandalised, I could tell.’

  ‘Not by me,’ retorted Adolf. ‘It was your stupid reference to sailors that upset him.’

  Alois looked baffled.

  ‘His son,’ said Adolf. ‘The only one to be saved.’

  ‘What are you talking about now?’ demanded Alois.

  ‘The article in the newspaper. At the very bottom of the column. Dressed in a petticoat and a shawl, he jumped into the lifeboat.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ said Alois. ‘You shouldn’t drink.’

  ‘At least I didn’t remind him of it,’ shouted Adolf. ‘I didn’t propose a toast to absent and seafaring friends.’