Smoke

by Dan Vyleta

  “And tell me this, Mr. Cooper: what is he to you, this boy next door? How many boys like him have suffered and perished throughout your life without your taking the slightest notice? Back in his jungle, or on one of our royal plantations, picking precious flowers that we import by the ton?”

  Before Charlie can answer, she has bent forward, put her lips to his ear.

  “Talk to my Livia, Charlie. I cannot reach her. Tell her about our conversation. Tell her I am glad she is…But you will know what to say.”

  “I’m afraid your daughter and I no longer speak.”

  “Don’t you? Oh, what a child you are, Mr. Cooper! What a perfectly charming child.”

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  Charlie tells the others about his conversation later, sitting once again in the draughty room he shares with Thomas. It is cold in there, cold enough that his hands and feet grow numb, and their only light is a sliver of silvery sky that outlines the broken shutters. As he tells them of the scar, of his hands on Lady Naylor’s body, he is glad of the dark, glad he cannot see Livia’s expression nor she the rush of blood that momentarily heats his face.

  “Smoke is grown in the dark of our livers,” Thomas sums it up drily once Charlie is finished. “Swinburne would not like it. His lot would be done if it were known.”

  Livia disagrees. “Why? It does not change anything. Smoke is what it always was: the visible manifestation of vice. How stupid to cover up a truth that does not matter.”

  Charlie can hear Thomas shift in response. A shrug, a wave of the arm. How well they know each other, precisely in the dark. For a split second they are back in the dormitory, swapping confidences.

  “In any case we learned one thing today,” Thomas says after a while. “Seventy-two hours. That’s when something starts changing in the boy. Whatever it is, they want it to happen, they need it. Which means we have three days to learn the truth. It’s got to do with the sewers. We must go and have a look.”

  Charlie looks into himself and finds he agrees. Only: “We don’t know where to go. The sewers, yes. But we don’t even know how to get in.”

  “We need the blueprint.”

  “She will notice if we steal it. And the plan is too large to copy.”

  “Not if we only mark the entrances. And the bits where the two plans differ. The secret passages. The bits Sebastian must have built on the sly.”

  “That’s clever!”

  “It was Livia’s idea.”

  In the dark Charlie can hear her rise. It’s like he has caught them at something: putting their heads together. Plotting the future.

  “Good night,” she calls from the door, sounding agitated, enraged.

  “Good night,” they answer, then huddle close against the cold.

  When sleep comes, it comes with dreams. A black-clad figure, shadowed by a dog.

  Charlie never learns whether it is Julius or Renfrew.

  LADY NAYLOR

  Livia storms in as I am getting ready for bed. I have loosened my hair and sit, on the room’s one rickety chair, combing it. Our hosts have no mirror and it is odd that I should feel the loss of my reflection so keenly. The hair is tangled, greasy with city Soot; the brush soon bristling like a cat in a storm. It would be nice to take a bath before Sebastian and I set off to change the world.

  Livia, I am pleased to say, is in a temper. Oh, there remain signs of the nun poking through her demeanour. My long-suffering daughter shouldering the burden of her needling mother. Mostly though she is fuming, stands with her fists buried in her hips.

  “You look,” I say into the breathlessness of her anger, “ridiculous in trousers. Here, I had Sebastian buy me some dresses. You can have the green one. It is a little short on me.”

  She ignores my words entirely, snorts back the Smoke that’s crept out of one nostril.

  “You talked to Charlie,” she manages at last. “You took your clothes off!”

  “Is it that which brings you here? You are upset about my lack of decorum. But there is more to it, isn’t there? You are jealous. Jealous of your poor spent mother. It is as bad as that, then.”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

  I study her, feel the urge to touch her, offer peace. But it does not belong to the vocabulary of our relationship, and at any rate I am rather enjoying her loss of control. She has been prim with me for far too long.

  “Poor Livia,” I say. “I saw it the moment Charlie greeted you and Thomas at the door: your whole little romance. You had convinced yourself that you had betrayed him, or some such thing. That you had shifted allegiances, once and for all, to your eternal shame. And how you scowled at him: like a fishwife at a customer. But all the same your heart leapt at the sight. Charlie—alive and in one piece! Or perhaps it wasn’t your heart so much as another organ.”

  My daughter flushes, underlines her words with Smoke.

  “Don’t be common, Mother!”

  “Common? What do you think love is? Sonnets and a wedding ring? Perhaps it is time we had a conversation about flowers and bees.”

  She flinches, seems ready to launch herself at me, this jeering heckler of her heartache. It shames me, her pain, and it occurs to me that I am afraid of my daughter, afraid of her disapproval of my choices and plans; that I’d rather have her hate me for my coldness than judge my motives and find them wanting. “I have lost my conscience,” I once wrote to Sebastian in one of those letters that prepared the way to our partnership. But it appears I have merely sent it off to boarding school. Now it has come to call in dirty trousers.

  I try an approach. Rise from the chair, take a step, careful and measured, and watch her withdraw. Another pair of steps—first mine, then hers—press her up against the wall. She has changed during the week and a half I have feared for her, grown prettier, both more confident and more vulnerable. I see my own face in hers, just a few years older, the day my father told me that I was to wed. It softens me.

  “Poor Livia,” I say, no longer mocking. “Do you think you are the first girl to ask herself whether she should be happy with a nice boy or unhappy with a cad? It is perfectly natural.”

  For a moment she seems ready to accept my wisdom; to sit with me atop my bed and share her heartache. Then she remembers herself and slips on that mask of meekness that has separated us ever since my husband lost his wits. She speaks calmly, her face a foot away from mine, the voice demure.

  “Charlie says that Father cut you open. From the hip to the ribs. It must be quite a scar.”

  And just like that our roles are inverted and heckler has become heckled. She is ready to continue, twist the knife. But I do what she found impossible to do. I start crying.

  It takes her a minute before she wraps me in her arms.

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  So we end up on the bed after all. Her clothes are so dirty she leaves stains on the bedding. She smells, too, of sweat and the street. I cling to her all the same, elbow hooked into elbow. It is well when emotion aligns with strategy. I wish to secure her loyalty. Her cheek rests an inch from mine. She is scrupulous about avoiding its touch.

  “How is Father?” she asks, not shifting. “How is his health?”

  “As ever, I hope. Thorpe is looking after him. You see, a search was made of our house. By now, the whole of England will be talking about him, poor soul. ‘Mad Baron Naylor.’ How he would have detested such gossip!” I pause, allow my emotions to sweep me from anger to nostalgia. “Do you remember, Livia? How he used to be?”

  “Of course I do. He was righteous and gentle. Almost a holy man. Like that famous count in Russia, the one who walks around in peasant smock.”

  “Tolstoy? What a funny thing to say! But no. I mean before all that. When you were young.”

  “Before? He was—busy. Frantic, even. I remember him sitting in his study with so many papers around him they covered the floor. Always reading and scribbling. Talking over dinner. One month it was the Greeks, then a trip he was planning to the antipodes. He got so very excit
ed, I thought he would start smoking, right in front of the servants.”

  “He never made that trip. The antipodes.” It is funny that it should make me smile. “He went to the Argentines instead. Four months and one letter home. The vagabond!”

  Livia is quiet at this, caught up in the past. Her head slides towards mine. She remembers herself just in time.

  “Why did he go mad, Mother?”

  “You know why he did.”

  “The Smoke overcame him, and he got lost.”

  “No. He had given up smoking. Quite successfully it must be said.”

  “Why then?”

  “Just that. He had given up and decided to become a saint. It put a strain on him, a terrible strain.”

  I want to say more, explain it to her: how he foreswore his experiments and tried to conquer Smoke through a sheer act of will; how he changed week by week until it was too late, driven mad by the effort to be sinless; how he abandoned me and our love. But there are things too private for one’s child. Livia sees my hesitation, slides her feet off the bed and sits up.

  “I don’t know when you are lying, Mother, and when you are telling the truth. That’s the whole problem.”

  It’s her sadness that impresses me, the sense of loss.

  “You won’t tell us what you are up to, will you?” she continues. “This grand plan of yours.”

  I shake my head. “I am just like you, Livia. I don’t know if I can trust you.”

  She bristles at this. “I took you here, Mother. I found you shelter! I pulled Thomas aside when he wanted to stop you from infecting the child. I did all this because you promised me answers.”

  “Yes, you did all this. But will you tell me who hid you after Julius shot at you? Where those clothes come from?”

  My daughter stands silent, head bowed.

  “You see, my dear, we really are much the same.”

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  I don’t want to let her go. She has turned around twice now, and each time I have called her back with a question, something stupid, aimless, asked only to force another moment of her time. It is the first time in years we have attempted any sort of exchange, beyond trading hurtful nothings across the dinner table. But in this specialised skill of talking to one’s daughter I feel utterly inept.

  “Tell me,” I try again, inching forward onto more treacherous conversational ground. “What do you want, out of all this?”

  When she looks at me in puzzlement, I make a gesture that is meant to encompass the enterprise in which we find ourselves grudging partners, but largely seems directed at the bed. It is fitting enough: not an hour ago found me flat on my knees and fumbling underneath the bed frame, hiding my secrets like some old woman afraid of being robbed. There is not a piece of furniture in the whole room that could be locked.

  “Sebastian and I are changing the world,” I add. “There must be something that you want.”

  To her credit I see her struggle with it. She is about to give me something pat and worthy, a nunnish answer long-rehearsed. But I have asked her earnestly and earnestness is one thing she finds hard to resist.

  “I want to be certain again,” she says at length, “of who I am and what is truth. I want to be inscrutable, immovable, safe in myself. Can you do this, Mother?”

  She says it softly, because she knows the answer.

  “No, I cannot.”

  “What, then, will you do?”

  I repeat what I told her before. “I will give the world justice.”

  “Virtue?”

  “Justice is virtue,” I say, quoting someone my husband was fond of, one of his Greeks.

  My daughter wrinkles her nose at this, turns around and leaves.

  I retrieve the brush and finish with my hair.

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  I am about to extinguish the lamp when there is a knock on my door. A soft knock, one that is careful not to be heard throughout the flat. Bemused by this string of visitors, half hoping for, half dreading Livia’s return, I open the door. Mr. Grendel is in his nightshirt and flustered; he wrings his cotton sleeping cap between work-hard hands. A strange man, shy and cringing in his movements; so diffident that I have yet to see him smoke. There are not many who would have stood at the threshold of my boudoir without giving my figure a passing glance.

  “Mr. Grendel. This is hardly appropriate.”

  “I am sorry,” he says, abject and whispering, his head tilted to one side. “May I…? I saw your light was on and there is something…You see, it’s rather important.”

  “Oh, out with it!” I laugh, usher him in by his elbow, and sit him down on his own rickety chair. “Go on, speak, Mr. Grendel. It is late and I am in need of my sleep.”

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  We talk for a full hour. As it turns out, I was wrong about Grendel. He is not diffident nor shy but that rarest of creatures: a man touched by fate who lacks a purpose. His wife has sent him to me to provide him with one.

  I do my best to oblige.

  PENCIL AND PAPER

  Livia sleeps late, her mother’s words refracting in her dreams. By the time she emerges from her room, Sebastian is in the house and there is a new arrangement. Grendel has been made nursemaid to the child. The smokeless man smiles when he emerges from the nursery-prison, and continues smiling when, under Sebastian’s watchful eye, he turns the key in the lock. Then he notices Livia—and starts.

  “Caught in the act!” he blushes then adds, as though in apology: “Mrs. Grendel and I, we were not blessed ourselves, you see.”

  Grendel flashes her a smile, habitual and fleeting, and runs to do the dishes in the kitchen.

  Sebastian stays, studying Livia.

  “You disapprove, Miss Naylor.”

  Livia shakes her head, wondering what emotion her face has betrayed.

  “It’s a good idea. Grendel is a kind man.”

  “You know yourself he’s quite a lot more than that! He’s a scientific wonder. At another time…but, alas, it isn’t possible just now.” He sighs, points at his prisoner’s door. “As it is, Mr. Grendel can make himself useful. I believe he reminds the child of his people at home. Though the resemblance is superficial. In any case, he will help calm the child. The boy is bewildered by Smoke, and I am afraid we smell of it, even when we are not showing.”

  Livia’s heart sinks. “So you know.”

  “About Grendel’s condition? Oh, yes. He told your mother last night.” Sebastian nods enthusiastically, a man delighted about every scientific riddle on this earth and frustrated only by his own lack of time. “We have given the boy a name. Mowgli. After a recent book, set in the Raj.”

  “Mowgli.” Livia too has read it. A boy raised by wolves. The animals decide to send him to the human village so he will learn to control his Smoke. Her mother had dismissed the book. She thought it sentimental; a lie. “How old is he?”

  “Hard to say. I should think he was malnourished even before he embarked on his journey. Physically he could be as young as six. Eight, nine? A sullen child. Though his disposition is irrelevant for our purpose.”

  Livia takes in the man’s smooth face and clever little hands playing with his umbrella; weighs his accent, the fact that he stole a child and condemned him to live encoffined in a mask. The question comes out before she can think better of it, artless and direct.

  “Who are you exactly, Dr. Aschenstedt?”

  This brings a grin to Sebastian’s face, boyish.

  “Who am I? A scientist.”

  “Mother says you are a genius.”

  “I suppose I am.” He says it lightly, almost modestly. “I am also a criminal. False papers in my pocket, hiding behind an English name. Under my real name I am wanted in much of Europe. A threat to social order! They are not wrong. I’m a revolutionary, Miss Naylor. A terrorist! But I dislike bombs.” He laughs, boyish still, steps closer to Livia, and confides: “Your two gentlemen friends and I have something in common. Our alma mater. For all we know we have slept in the same beds. And listened to the
same sermons. I must ask them some time, trade stories, don’t you think?”

  Livia fights being drawn in by this man. A lifetime of being lied to by her elders. Charlie, chained to his teacher’s bed. A little boy stolen in the name of Theory. Emphatic lessons in suspicion.

  And yet it isn’t easy.

  “What are you up to, Dr. Aschenstedt? Why are you here?”

  “Officially? Officially, I am Sebastian Herbert Ashton, engineer, overseeing the building of the sewers. My papers are British. Of course there is the matter of my accent. But then, the English refuse to believe that anyone can learn their tongue, not fluently, you see, so I must be a native after all, reared in some far-flung colony perhaps.” He gives a giggle, quite literally a giggle, the sort of sound some of the girls at school might make after someone has made a chancy remark. “And of course, half my men are foreign. The beauty of the embargo is that nobody receives adequate training here. It is hard to instruct engineers when the books are all censored. ‘Forbidden science,’ ‘immoral physics’—it really is quite funny! So we have Poles and Italians and Czechs and Russians. And Germans, of course. Grand engineers! Without them, London would sink in its stink. The English gentlemen on the project are largely there to supervise their morals and to make sure they finish on time. Good, earnest Liberals these gentlemen are, one and all. A great deal rides on the project, the whole of the Liberal Party’s reputation. A clean London, a moral London. Oh, it’s very ambitious in its way.” Again he giggles. “There you are. For a decade I was not allowed to enter on threat of death; now I get paid to come. But you must excuse me now, Miss Naylor. I am expected at work. Good-bye. Or rather: Au revoir. Auf Wiedersehen.”

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  Livia watches Sebastian leave and goes looking for Thomas. But it is Charlie she finds, standing by the open window of the room the boys share. She is tempted to leave at once. In the past few days she has come to terms with Thomas’s darkness. It’s Charlie’s kindness, his forgiveness, that are difficult to accept.

  “Auf Wiedersehen,” he says, his eyes on the rain outside.