by Adam Thorpe
The Colonial Office gave Father a back windowless room with a brown carpet, a dismal fireplace and a tower of old maps to colour and update by hand. It was useful for me as a base in the day, now and again. His maps were beautiful: stretches of the White Volta, the hills of Adamawa, the estuary of Rio del Rey, that sort of thing. He had to colour in the tin workings, banana plantations, groundnut farms, fisheries, railway depots, roads. I think, Mother, he was happy in his way. As long as he had a clean collar and a tie, and his beard was not too sprawling, the Colonial Office put up with him. He was not the only broken man there. But he didn’t talk. Not even to me. He grunted and whispered when he had to, but he had no conversation. He showed me a map of our old area, that he’d coloured recently; it was mostly green bush with a lot of blue squiggles, but a careful scarlet thread marked his road between Bamakum and Ikasa. I knew it was a lie, that what stretches he had laid were mostly swept away or tangled over, but I didn’t say anything. He looked at it very proudly, with tears in his eyes. I asked to see a section that included the crater lake. The map wasn’t where it should have been, in the big wooden cupboard, but in his personal drawer along with his lunch and biscuits and keys. He unfolded it as if it was Flint’s map, looking shifty, saying how he had the right, he had the right. The lake was like a pool of bluebells in a wash of beechen green. Its name was in meticulous white italics, an inch above. Charlotte’s Lake, it read. I squeezed his shoulder, but neither of us could say anything.
I spent as much time out as possible, exploring galleries and bookshops and museums. Rachael worked her long hours in the HMSO and looked tired, less fresh and vivid than she had done in Ulverton. But she was still the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. She took me to the Harem club, or the Wheatsheaf next door, places like that, full of chattering poets. We saw Dame Edith Sitwell at the Sesame Club, Mother, rustling about in black satin, her face even whiter, her fingers encrusted with rings. This sight made me tell Rachael a bit more about you. That was on my birthday. We drank champagne. I momentarily forgot that I was not nineteen.
She said I would meet Augustus John at the Wheatsheaf. Augustus John flirted with her madly, she claimed. It was a scream. Instead, we spent a smoky evening with Elizabeth Smart, Tambimuttu and Charles Gray, ending up in Gray’s rooms in Howland Street. He always had these long ribbons of red cloth dangling from his overcoat, symbolising some sort of saving fire – they were infamous, anyway. He noticed my bandaged finger in its splint and wrote a poem on the wounded hero, while the doe-eyed Tambi flirted with Rachael, and promised her the next cover for Poetry London.
‘The trouble is,’ I said to her, afterwards, a little worse for wear, ‘I’m looking for something more than nicer, lonelier versions of my uncle’s friends.’
‘Why don’t you like him, Hugh?’
‘Who? Tambi?’
‘Your uncle.’
‘Don’t I?’
I was leaning on her arm as we turned into a side alley, and she fell against a coaly brick wall, laughing.
‘What’s funny?’
‘You’ll spend your life looking, won’t you? With your funny little searchlight.’
‘So much for Augustus John. Anyway, he’s a dreadful old flirt, like Bluebeard. I don’t want to meet Bluebeard. I don’t even want to meet Tom Eliot.’
‘Kiss me again.’
I kissed her for a long time. She no longer tasted of violet drops! Eventually she separated my lips from hers and wiped her mouth, the dark eyes shining.
‘Rachael Katzen,’ I murmured.
‘Rachael Katzenellenbogen, originally.’
‘That’s better. It lasts longer.’
She laughed, holding my face in her hands. ‘The Katzenellenbogens were fine shoemakers in Danzig. I still have family.’
‘Haven’t they left?’
‘No. I expect they’ll all be killed. Then it’ll be our turn.’
I didn’t know what to say to this, because things did look grim that spring: we were all expecting a mass gas attack at any moment. But the odd thing is, I felt very well and happy, Mother. Mam Tor had frozen me, then revived me into a different person. This person made witty remarks in pubs and clubs, had Rachael Katzen as his sweetheart, and didn’t care about the morrow. This person was no longer a boy.
Then she said:
‘What do you want?’
‘Apart from spending the rest of my life with you?’
She nodded, grinning. There was a gaslight burning softly over our heads. Even then, this was unusual – it reminded me of Ilythia. Searching for a clever answer to her question, this picture came into my head, of a lonely moorland path. I was stumbling on it, in pursuit of someone always just where the mist began to thicken. I won’t say who that someone was. You know who it was. I wanted to cry – it was the alcohol, really – and I scratched the mark on my nape, fiercely, so that my collar popped open under my tie. How could I be so miserable, with Rachael so close? I thought: if she vanishes – run over by a bus, stolen by some tangle-headed poet, killed by a German – what would I do? Kill myself, of course.
‘Hugh?’
Tears were gleaming on my hands; it wasn’t the rain, because it wasn’t raining. A late bus chugged past, a couple of men in Homburgs wheeled their stretched shadows over us, someone cried out from a window, there was a waft of gravy smells from a vent near us. Near the vent was a high-heeled shoe, very white, the heel sticking up like a nose. I couldn’t stop myself crying. Yet I’d just kissed the girl I loved, whose face I saw in the heavens whenever I searched them for the enemy. Her hand, rather cold in the night air, was on the back of my neck, stroking me, a cigarette in its fingers. I could feel the filtered end of the cigarette rubbing my mark. Ash, I thought. If she turned the cigarette round, and laid its burnt end on my nape, she might destroy my mark. I might begin again, from the ruins, with her as my angel.
I was abandoning you, Mother, for a girl I scarcely knew! I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry!
Let’s call that a day.
Your ever-loving son, your only
Huggins
Hot wafts of air from down there, where Victoria lies. Birds very noisy. Also cicadas. Tss tss tss. Very disapproving little creatures. I love the waiters here, their gloves as white as Edith Sitwell’s skin.
Dear Mother,
I reached back and gripped her hand with the cigarette in it, tried to turn it round. In the confusion I smelt that foul smell of singed hair, and felt a brief pain near my jugular. The cigarette landed in a puddle.
‘What are you doing? You’ve hurt my fingers. You’re drunk.’
‘I’m going to be an actor.’
‘What?’
‘I’m sorry I hurt you, darling. I’m going to go into the theatre.’
‘What are you gabbling about? It’s after midnight, they’re all closed by now! Why are you crying?’
She was holding her hand, looking perplexed. Then she began to smile. She was used to people behaving oddly. She liked it. I think she liked to be tested: she was adored by all her father’s artistic friends, and by her own chums, and she wanted something more. She liked me, in the end, because I was not easy; because I came from somewhere else. I wasn’t difficult in the way a lot of Bohemia was difficult, deliberately exaggerating their despair, their little ecstasies around pots of bitter beer and bad wine. I didn’t pose, I didn’t exaggerate, for all my faults. My eye-patch was real, not rakish.
‘It’s what I’m going to do. Because it’s so incredibly hopeless.’
She frowned, her face pale under the gaslight. I thought of Private Chamberlain in his metal drum, rehearsing for hours until he could spin it, and started laughing.
‘It’s so incredibly hopeless, I can’t fail!’
‘What’s hopeless?’
‘My chances of being something, in theatre. Who’ll take a one-eyed actor?’
She understood, I think, and held me. I buried my face in her thick hair. It smelt of coal. The city mumbled around us. It
was quite intact, then. The gas-flare chuckled above us. I watched it chuckling and fluttering in its glass like a little imp beyond her hair. I wanted to show her my country haunts. Somewhere in one of my haunts, we would do It together, I knew. Not before, not here, where gas might drop on one. There was something dirty about doing It here, in London.
Anyway, Nuncle had insisted I see him in my month’s leave. I told him about Rachael, rather triumphantly. Despite the various meetings and seminars and ‘ritual celebrations’ he organised, he was lonely. The German mystics of the Thule Society had mostly turned into Nazi sympathisers. His old friend Rudolf von Sebottendorff, founder of the Thule Society, had raised funds for the fledgling National Socialist Party back in the twenties. He was a jolly, elegant man with a pendulum just like Nuncle’s; I’d been on a long scramble with him in and out of the vast ditches at Avebury, years before. He and Nuncle never stopped discussing astrology, numerology, and Jewish mysticism. Without von Sebottendorfl’s money, without the early help of that large, elegant fellow laughing among the standing stones, the Party might never have grown and the Holocaust might never have happened. Do you remember him, Mother? One thing leads to another.
So Nuncle looked worn and lonely and rather old, when we arrived. That soon changed. It changed, I think, within minutes of Rachael arriving. Blood returned to his cheeks. He plumped up. Then he shot off to lead a dowsers’ walk until nightfall, leaving us sipping our tea in the kitchen.
‘Fascinating man,’ said Rachael.
What had he said?
We went for a walk ourselves. I wanted to show her my haunts. I taught her to make a walking stick out of buckthorn, showed her badger runs and badger latrines, crouched to the stink of a foxhole. She was suitably appalled at Jed’s gibbeted crows and stoats. I prepared a picnic around Mrs Stump’s immobile groans (her arthritis, my uncle, the shortages – you know old Stumpy-Grump, Mother) while Rachael licked precious butter off her fingers and tried not to giggle. I rescued my aunt’s bicycle from its crotchety rustiness so that we could wobble out together on to Furzecombe Down and touch the Kissing Stone on its tumulus – that worn old cross supposed to bring luck in love. I told her that somewhere around here, perhaps where we were standing on the open downs, the Danes had fought the Saxons of Alfred’s army all day long around a lone thorn bush. We found a suitable clump of gorse and tussled. This could be It, I was thinking. But she flopped out of my arms and rolled on the ground and asked why there was always war. ‘Ask my uncle,’ I said. ‘He blames the farmers.’
‘Oh, that,’ she said, chewing a stalk. ‘Poppa goes on about that, too. He’s a very clever man, is your uncle.’
We spotted sparrow-hawks, surprised rabbits, chased early burnets and pretended to be the swallows we saw swooping out of a barn, swooping out and over the lovely and lonely sky-naked downs. I was glad they weren’t forest any more. We could run down and over them for ages, as if completely free.
I lay flat out on my belly, watching her chase the butterflies with my boyhood net: each detail of sheep-nibbled grass, of stitchwort and tangled vetch and a stumbling ladybird on a fernleaf beyond my chin, seemed blessed and vivid, as if everything pig-headed and stiff-necked in the world had been dashed to pieces by Rachael’s litheness and laughter and dark-eyed beauty. When I raised my head the sward swept away into fold upon fold of open curves covetous only of the sky’s blueness – as blue as the hedge-sparrow’s egg we found in its little nest and kissed for luck as we wended our way back to the village, but paler than the blue-violet drifts of bluebells in the woods and copses.
Each copse looked so inviting. These might do for It, I was thinking. But none of them was quite right. We’d leave our bicycles on the chalky verge and penetrate the copse almost on tiptoe; the trees were still so tender in their new leaves that any sound might scatter that cloudy light, those malachite necklaces of shadow – and there was always a jay that clattered and screamed and made her jump, however quietly we went in. None of them would do. I even secretly tested certain spots for softness by walking on them in a little circle, while she was picking bluebells, but either they were soggy or rather open to the open downs. The copses were too small. Someone might peep.
We came out of Swilly Copse with her arms full of bluebells. ‘Ugh,’ she said, ‘my hands are all sticky –’ ‘Sssh,’ I interrupted, ‘look up and shut up.’
I wasn’t being rude: it was what we’d say on Mam Tor. Look up and Shut up. But she was confused for a moment. Then I pointed, all my nerves on alert, despite myself. My hairs bristling.
A white vapour trail left by a scintillating speck, a far-off drone more like a motor-boat on a lake than a plane; I checked it through my old bird-watching binoculars. Then I laughed – laughing so helplessly I rolled on the grass while Rachael crawled around me.
‘What’s so funny?’ she pleaded.
‘The first sight of the enemy I’ve ever had,’ I explained, wiping my eyes. ‘The very first sight. The very very first sight.’ I leapt to my feet suddenly and hopped up and down, shouting like a madman: ‘Seen. Bearing 290. South-west. One Heinkel 111k. At 10,000. Expose the beam! Angle 18! Put a beam on her! Engage the fucker! Engage her! Disperse the beam! Dazzle her! Bring her down! It’s my bird! It’s my fucking bird!’
I felt much better, afterwards, as I stood there panting. The speck had disappeared. It was probably packed to the bulkhead with bombs ready to shriek down on the motley patchwork below, so it was just as well it didn’t hang about, I suppose. Rachael had dropped all her bluebells in fright.
We reached the beechwood from the Jennets’ field. In those days there was a hawthorn hedge, remember? Its corymbs were tipped with white, ready to burst into flower against the dark leaves. I told Rachael that the hawthorn is called the may because it flowers on May Day. ‘But how does it know?’ She was serious, I think. I said that we should come back here tomorrow to see if this one had followed tradition – the next day was May Day. We decided to set out just before dawn, to watch the sun rise on the blossom. To go a-Maying, and gather garlands in the old manner. That’s how I put it.
‘What else did they do, Hugh?’
We were right in the beechwood now, near the hollow with the old fungal log. It didn’t feel like a theatre, now. My old hermit’s cell, a little way off, had crumbled to a rotten plank or two and a dark little mound of compost that was once the grass roof. ‘To quote that blind old puritan bore, Milton,’ I replied, ‘Hail! flowery May that dost inspire/Mirth and youth and warm desire.’
She laughed, her eyes twinkling in the dappled light. She had never looked so lovely. We kissed for a long time on my old stage, but there were no rows of faces in the hollow, gawping up. There was no one. No one! The theatre was dark! The beechwood was empty but for the dumb beasts! Let all the woods be empty but for the dumb beasts!
That’s all for now, Mother,
With all my love,
Hugh
Cold.
My dearest Mother,
I can’t always be with you. The people here say that I must go back to England. So here I am again. The spiraea is now in full flower. One can order books. There is a reading group. It’s extremely comfortable. I hope Africa is not too hot, even in Buea. I will join you soon. You are not to go home without me.
For dinner, she changed into an elegant, old-fashioned tube dress of satin. It had probably belonged to her mother. She had never known her mother, which seemed almost ridiculous. One could imagine the mother, though, from the dress: she was thin and boyish and haughty. With Rachael squeezed inside it, the dress looked extremely provocative. Nuncle showed her a special attention that evening, over Mrs Stump’s roast – yes, overdone as ever! He stuck on his bearded wise man look and charmed with the eyes, their two globes as darkly polished as the scarab ring on his finger. They kept settling on Rachael. This young woman by my side, dressed in satin, looked impossibly lovely. She was all, everything to me, every speck of creation from the first star of the first morni
ng to the last flea on the last fleece. Everything was made better by her. Everything sang. Everything.
‘Do you know why the month of May is called May?’
‘I know why the hawthorn is called may, Mr Arnold.’
She looked at me and squeezed my hand under the table. Nuncle took no notice of what she’d said. What an old goat – over forty, for God’s sake!
He told her why May is called May. Ovid says it’s because the Romans sacrificed to Maia on the first day of the month, and I recited the appropriate lines in Latin. Neither of them took any notice. ‘Maia’s the mother of Mercury,’ I added; ‘that’s why the mercury goes up in May.’ I can’t recall whether anyone laughed, but I do know that Rachael asked Nuncle if that’s all the Romans did on the first of May, with a straight face that hid the most delightful squeeze of my fingers. My heart hammered. Why not the beechwood? Yes, why not the darkened stage itself, where so many love scenes had already passed?
Nuncle blinked, unconcernedly, and took a mouthful of Mrs Stump’s succulent bread-and-butter pudding. He spoke with his mouth full. He ate like a peasant.
‘Sacrifice is the most potent practice of all, Rachael.’
