by Simon Ings
‘Excuse me, sir,’ he calls out to a passer-by, ‘have you got a light?’
The man bridles. ‘I certainly have not,’ he snaps, in a thick, East European accent. ‘Goodnight.’
Anthony is confused at first, then blushes, mortified. He didn’t mean…
Or did he? What did he want, stood here in the dark? Not a light.
More than a light.
Here are the matches, in his hand.
He finds it so hard to understand himself at times. He lights his cigarette with trembling fingers and heads south.
It takes him no time at all to see why the foreign gentleman reacted so badly to his innocent hello. At this provocative hour of the evening, pansies line the streets. Pansies leer at him from first- and second-floor windows. From high windows, rouged pansies lean, leer and whistle. They loiter at street corners, inflaming his imagination with their narrow ties and narrow suits with narrow trousers and pointy shoes.
Sill blushing, Anthony stares straight ahead and clips smartly along, closed off to every imagined disturbance, spiralling deeper into purblind fantasy. One by one the colours vanish from the scene. Soon all is black and white. Buses, robbed of their red, slink past along Shaftesbury Avenue. Furled umbrellas spasm like jellyfish. In Trafalgar Square the lions are pacing. Nelson on his column teeters and hesitates; is there really no way down from here? The National Gallery steps trill and tinkle like piano keys when Anthony treads on them and threaten to buck him into the street below.
He enters the gallery and follows the attendants’ directions. The walls of the great galleries are bare. According to The Times, their treasures have been borne off for safe-keeping to a disused slate quarry somewhere in North Wales. In each room he passes knots of calm grey figures. Is it his imagination, or are they studying the walls? Are they adopting these contemplative poses out of long habit, or are things hung there that he cannot see?
In the basement room the audience is gathering, grey and silent, everyone exactly like everyone else. Above them, the low ceiling bulges, foams at the corners and rises suddenly to make a vault. The audience make no sign of having seen their surroundings transformed. Are they used to miracles, or blind to them?
Anthony’s heart thunders in his chest. He’d hug every man and woman to his bosom if he could. At times like these the Truth peeks through appearances, illuminating everything. How everyone is exactly alike.
The audience is given very little time to settle before the Budapest Municipal Orchestra enters and launches into its premiere. With the first swoop and tremble of strings, Anthony Burden knows this isn’t going to be his sort of music.
In the days of his mania, as Paradise trundles closer and closer, music fills the space behind Anthony’s eyes with images. Different musics build differently: Benny Goodman and Count Basie string bridges between his ears; Bach and Handel erect Venetian palazzi. From the mushy romanticism and mangled folk idiom of this sorry Budapest Concerto, however, Anthony manages to construct very little: a blasted heath, a couple of tumble-down cottages; a pond; a mill. He is, without thinking about it, constructing a kind of pastiche or portmanteau Constable to put in place of the paintings missing from the walls upstairs. The sight of those bare walls shakes Anthony. He imagines the art of the nation turning troglodyte, as Londoners themselves might, were the Underground left open during air-raids. Hiding there for safety, going mad, refusing to surface.
What will the art be like when it re-emerges? Anthony wonders. If it emerges. He thinks of the mine, so dry, so secure: D. G. Rossetti and John Martin pressed promiscuously up against Turner, Gainsborough, Dadd. What sort of Morlock art will it be when we drag it from the comfortable Celtic twilight of the mine?
Will we even find it?
He is deliberately scaring himself now.
Will it hide?
A delicious shudder…
Applause wakes him – and what on earth is going on? The audience is going wild. The audience is cheering. The audience is leaping to its feet. He folds his arms and keeps his seat, wishing neither to be one of the herd, nor to let his musical standards drop so far. Only then it dawns on him, poor unworldly technician, that he is surrounded by refugees. He looks at them anew. The calm grey figures surrounding him flicker and snap, thick ham hands a-tremble; the glint of tears.
Shamed, Anthony struggles to his feet and joins in their applause, if not for the music, then for the effort, the extraordinary and brave effort of the plucky Jewish people – and a bowler hat, tossed with more energy than circumspection by a jubilant concert-goer, cracks him on the nose.
Several hours earlier, that same evening – and in the Lyons corner house on the Strand, Rachel Causley sips delicately at her hot chocolate, looks at her watch and says: ‘I can’t be long, Mummy will be waiting for me. Is it done or not?’
Her Major would pull his hair, if he had any. He beats his skull instead – muted little punches to the frontal lobes. ‘Have you any idea,’ he says, ‘what this involves?’
Rachel sits in silence. They both know the answer to this question. Twenty years old, Rachel already knows her business.
‘I could get myself shot!’ the Major declares in a non-too-subtle stage whisper. Rachel glances to their left, to the gawky, pretty waitress standing there – but she is like the rest of them, asleep on her feet. She has not overheard.
The Major waits for a response. Rachel says nothing. Her eyes drill into him. She is waiting for her answer. God, but the bitch is beautiful! He fumbles a cigarette into his mouth. How wise she is, in return for his services, to offer what she offers without love. The unaffectionate kiss. The indolent and bored caress. He knows that at the slightest show of affection from her he would ruin everything: his marriage, his son at Sandhurst, his dear sister, his savings, the whole petty, cherished edifice of his life. She is wise, his Rachel, his blackout girl, to show no chink of light.
‘Is it done?’
He stubs out his cigarette, bites his lip, irritated, and snaps at the waitress, standing gormlessly there: ‘Please may we have a clean ashtray?’
‘Of course,’ says the waitress, shaking herself free of her waking dream. ‘I won’t be a moment.’
He watches her go.
‘I’ve diverted the shipment through Alexandria,’ he says. ‘I can’t do anything about the ammunition, it’s already been dispatched, you’ll have to look elsewhere for that. Much good may it do you. Do you really think your people… Where are you going?’
Rachel Causley – Clausen as was, in her family’s way-back-when – uses a napkin to wipe the chocolate from her lips. She is a creature of extreme times, party to great plans and terrible intelligence, balanced on a knife-edge between promises of promised land and rumours of extermination, emptied of hope, wired with determination, but when the city’s cocoa supply runs out – next week or the week after – she will take to her bed and cry like a baby.
She gives the Major what he wants – Tomorrow? Very well – and gets out of there as quickly as she can.
Tomorrow.
The truth is, the Major frightens her. He is one of those well-meaning bumblers whose frustration with life has never found its proper outlet. Tomorrow in that little rented room, alone with her, an unexploded bomb. In his bluster and abjection she has diagnosed a sentimentalist who, given the right sort of encouragement, might just break a bottle in her face.
She wishes that she did not have this power that is not even hers, but belongs to her body so that, as she steers her way to advantage through the infantile expectations of this or that fellow traveller – Oh, Princess! Let me kiss it! Oh, go on! Let me hold ’em! – she is no more in control of the process of seduction than if she were put behind the wheel of a racing car. Sometimes, in her darker moments, she even wonders whether the politics in which she has become embroiled is not a sand-trap or thicket into which she has instinctively swerved in order to slow her body’s uncontrollable sexual career.
There is something puritan
growing within her; it will not leave her sex alone, but must always be pressing the roses in her cheeks into service for the common good. The truth is, Rachel Causley – Clausen as she will be again, entering Zion – is not the Mata Hari she imagines herself to be. She puts herself in the way of these helpful War Office types – communists, closet and not-so-closet; men whose parentage or upbringing enables them to identify, or at least sympathize, with the Zionist cause. Still, the favours she bestows are not much. Every kiss she blows, every glimpse of knee, every button on her blouse, earns the cause another gun; she herself remains unmoved. Undiminished, unenlightened, she still imagines that love – true love – is something unconnected with erotica, something cuddly and vaguely parental. When she imagines her future husband, she imagines a creature not unlike Flopsy, the rabbit she had as a child and petted through a long and terminal illness.
On the steps of the National Gallery, her mother is waiting for her. This benefit is her doing, her bit for a cause of whose deep dark criminality she is merrily unaware. ‘My dear! You are so late!’
There is nothing in her mother’s appearance to betray the cruel exigencies this war has put her to. She wears the family’s recent internment lightly, as though it were a joke at her captors’ expense. Neither is there any sign of the punishing hours she keeps now, fire-watching in the dead of night. Tonight she is dashing as ever in a borrowed evening gown and paste jewels. Though bankrupted at home, yet she walks this foreign soil full of happy expectation. Face to face with her, Rachel feels none of the contempt towards the older generation felt by the other members of her cell. It seems cheap to her, to sneer at her parents’ lives. It is not hard for her to imagine why her father, awarded the Iron Cross First Class in the last war, should view the idea of Palestine with incredulity. It is not difficult to see why her mother, with her childhood memories of Johann Strauss and concerts in the Vienna Volksgarten, should treasure the culture of Schiller and Schopenhauer above the socialist experiments of the East.
Come the revolution, it will be up to the young to re-educate their parents.
Rachel takes her mother’s arm and walks her back inside. She is overcome with affection for her poor parents; the pride they take, even now, in their assimilation; their innocent reverence for Bildung. When the revolution comes, she will be able to make everything clear to them. With humour and compassion, she will show them, step by step, why she is right and they are wrong.
The stiff hat-brim cracks Anthony’s nose and somewhere behind his eyes, a tap turns. His nose will not stop bleeding. Blood gathers in his moustache as though it were a sponge. His handkerchief is sodden. He is going to faint.
Through his dizziness he feels sympathetic hands upon him, propelling him across the hall, through a door and along an unlit corridor, to where the musicians of the Budapest Municipal Orchestra have retired to smoke, talk and loosen their ties.
‘Come over here to the sink.’
He did not expect a woman here among these heavy, sweaty men. He receives a muddled impression that she is familiar to them. Is she a theatrical agent? She is wearing a pale, figure-hugging dress, the colour indeterminate under the weak light. Her skin is the colour of Greek honey. She beckons him. Her arm is like a polished branch.
His heart tilts. O my America. He shies away, afraid that he might bloody her clothing.
‘Come on.’
She sits him down by a small china sink and tilts his head back. She pinches his septum. Her fingers are strong and capable. Her hand at his temple reminds him of his mother. He closes his eyes. ‘What’s your name?’ he says. He could hug the whole world.
‘Rachel,’ she says – and seeing something in him she misses, some childhood thing she has lost – strokes him absent-mindedly behind his ears.
They wake just before dawn the next day, naked, spooned under a blanket of leaves in a hollow hidden by thick undergrowth in a little-frequented corner of Regent’s Park.
Rachel shimmies against Anthony’s warmth. His arms are curled about her. She takes hold of them, tightening his embrace.
Bliss.
She closes her eyes against the colours of the waking world, trying to hold on to last night’s vivid dream. Boulevards and squares, great houses, courtyards – all built of space and light.
The city Anthony showed her as they walked had form but no colour. There was a cloistered air to it, as though every street and channel and staircase, followed far enough, would lead inexorably back into itself. Even the distinction between day and night seemed to be a function of perspective. And all the while, slowly, confidently, his hand was stealing across her back to clinch her waist.
They kissed. His moustache tickled her. She ran her hands through his hair, his widow’s peak which made him appear so devilish somehow, his rough cheeks, his slim, hard body. He led her on…
Anthony stirs. He wakes. With a little cry, he lets go of her. He sits up.
Rachel, exposed, wraps her arms around herself and shivers.
‘What?’ says Anthony.
She turns over, chilled through. Still, in one languorous corner of her mind, she is enjoying the feel and rustle of mould and leaf. She smiles up at her seducer, delivers a chipper ‘good morning’.
‘Where—?’ says Anthony.
He smells of leaf and mushroom, of earth and sweat. She lies back into his lap, braving the morning cold to stretch, lifting her little breasts for him. ‘Mmmm,’ she says.
Anthony casts around. ‘Where are our clothes?’
She gazes round their dell, eyes lazy, slitted with sleep. ‘Dunno.’
With anxious, mincing gestures, Anthony slides out from under Rachel. He kneels, hunted, like a dog. ‘I can’t see our clothes anywhere.’
The urgency in his voice wakes her more fully than the cold has done. She sits up. ‘They must be somewhere,’ she says, unhelpfully.
Together they explore their grotto. Through the dense undergrowth, Rachel sees a park gardener already hard at work with his sheers. He is tidying the edges of a path. Clip by clip, he moves towards them.
‘Ah!’ Anthony sighs. Rachel turns to shush him.
He has found her dress and her purse.
‘Is that all?’
He nods.
‘What shall we do?’
Anthony bites his lip. His penis is hard with fear. She wants to hold it. But the moment is gone. ‘Help me on with your dress.’
She blinks at him.
‘Come on.’
‘Why can’t I—?’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ he says, gallantly. He holds up her purse. ‘May I borrow halfpence for the phone?’
He looks funny in the dress. He elbows his way through the undergrowth and onto the path. Lightly he runs, bare hairy feet a blur. Rachel lies down and covers herself with leaves.
The ground is not so comfortable now. There are twigs and thorns and crawling things.
She wonders who he is going to call, and how long he will be.
3
Even through the lenticular grey warp of his mania, Anthony Burden sees that, of all the women he has ever been introduced to – a slew of sex rabbits, neurotic amateur poets and surrogate mamas thrust upon him by ‘understanding’ friends – Rachel alone might serve to draw him into a life that is more keenly felt. Wandering the streets of Paradise with her, he has been struck by her social skill, her appetite for adventures. Waking with her in Regent’s Park, aghast at their animalism, he has expected everything to go sour – but who would not be charmed by her perky ‘good morning’? It gives him the unaccustomed courage, breathless as he is from the sprint from undergrowth to phone box and back again, and half out of his mind with panic, to ask to see her again. And then and there, stood there in their dell, a bare-chested Rosalind, she says yes.
Against all odds, Anthony’s erotic encounter with Rachel leads to another, and another. An understanding blossoms. There is even talk of marriage. When the time comes for Anthony to seek the blessing of Rachel�
�s parents, Rachel takes him home to St John’s Wood. There is her father’s Iron Cross, framed and hung above a bureau designed by Ernst Freud. Beside it hangs the childhood portrait of Rachel painted by Kurt Schwitters. They have arrived to find Rachel’s mother playing four-hand piano with the world-renowned violinist Max Rostal. The polite, strained conversation that ensues is gritted with the names of everyone who is anyone in European music. Lili Kraus, Szymon Goldberg: thanks to Hitler, there’s not one of them lives more than half a mile from Lili Montagu’s new synagogue in Swiss Cottage. For Anthony, this is a different world, impassioned, fiercely intellectual: he longs to be a part of it.
When, alone with her, Anthony speaks of his intentions, Rachel’s mother becomes flustered. She is all too aware, this once, of being in a foreign land, her old rules and niceties swept away. Her first response is to demur to her husband – and this is a complicated business, as Mr Causley – his value to the war effort recognized, at last – has been billetted in some out-of-the-way corner of the West Country, monitoring Nazi broadcasts for the BBC.
Together, Rachel and Anthony board a train for Evesham. There, and greatly to Anthony’s surprise, Rachel’s father responds to news of the match with an enthusiasm that borders on the unseemly.
The men’s conversation, conducted on the lawn of a guest-house in the sleepy hamlet of Wood Norton, is one of the more surreal exchanges thrown up by a surreal time. The business of the wedding quickly packed away, Rachel’s father wants to pick Anthony’s brains. ‘I’d like to know all about matrices,’ he says. ‘Tensors,’ he adds, out of the blue. ‘Projective geometry.’ He has not wasted his internment, his holiday on the Isle of Man. There are some very clever people sitting on their hands in those camps, and giving and attending lectures – on everything from Byzantine art to marine biology – helps them while away the time. ‘So what about this “group theory”, then?’ The breadth, if not the depth, of the man’s recently acquired mathematical knowledge is astounding. Anthony half wonders how he can get interned himself.
