Once Again Assembled Here

by Sean O'Brien

  I had not done this, but I made no objection. ‘Thank you, Claes. What do I owe you?’

  ‘Think of it as a gift. A bond of friendship.’

  ‘This is very kind of you.’

  ‘You have the language?’

  ‘Enough, I think.’

  ‘You must tell me what you make of the book.’

  ‘I’ll be sure to do that.’

  ‘It is a work of vision.’ He nodded as though to persuade me to do likewise.

  ‘What will you drink?’ I asked.

  ‘Please, a Snowball.’

  ‘An unusual choice, if you don’t mind me saying so.’

  ‘Refreshing, I find.’

  I ordered another pint for myself. Stan Pitt was serving.

  ‘Don’t normally see you over on this side,’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps he is feeling adventurous,’ said Claes. ‘Perhaps, as you English say, he fancies a change.’ Stan gave an unreadable nod, served the drinks and moved out of sight.

  ‘I see that Sir Lewis Allingham will be addressing a meeting next week,’ I said.

  ‘The prophet returns,’ said Claes, nodding once more, sipping his drink. His grey tongue was yellow now. ‘The exile comes home.’

  ‘And do you think you’ll be attending?’

  ‘Naturally. All the comrades will be there to pledge themselves to the renewed struggle.’

  ‘Struggle? I thought Allingham was standing for election.’

  ‘The struggle takes many forms.’

  ‘I was wondering about going along. As a historian I am interested in Allingham’s writings, in an objective sense.’

  ‘I’m delighted to hear it, my friend. Of course you must attend. How better to develop a sense of the fateful days that lie ahead? Of course you must come.’ He was terribly excited, as though injected with amphetamines, or somehow drunk on Snowballs. ‘The movement flourishes quietly, awaiting the moment when we will rise up and take back what is ours. We prepare, we sow the seeds, we educate, we train. That is for the future.’

  ‘Some way off as yet, then.’ I tried to look slightly unimpressed at this news.

  Claes raised a hand and shook his grey jowls.

  ‘But for here and now – well, my friend, I cannot tell you precisely.’ There was a click as the door behind me closed. I turned to find Lurch there. ‘We put down a marker. A warning. A manifestation of the will. An act which will show our true intent.’

  I waited. Let him tell you, I thought. Claes has the vanity of the grandiose and impotent. Let him tell you. Be patient.

  ‘I understand, of course,’ I said. ‘These things are necessarily confidential. They cannot be my concern. You scarcely know me. But thank you. For now I will read the book and look forward to the meeting.’ I made as if to leave.

  ‘It is closer than you think, in all senses,’ Claes said. ‘I can promise you that. Very close now.’

  ‘Then I shall await developments.’

  Claes drained his glass.

  ‘Anyway, my friend,’ he went on, ‘this happy encounter calls for another drink. What will you have?’

  ‘I would very much like to stay,’ I said, ‘but I have work to do for school.’

  ‘Of course. We must earn our daily bread. Alas. But I understand. You have made a wise decision about the meeting, my friend. We will talk again soon. And for the other matter, only be patient for a little while.’

  Lurch stood aside to let me past. Once out on the chilly street, at a loss, I broke the habit of the a lifetime and crossed the road to the grim and violent Botanical Hotel, where I ordered a whisky and sat watching an elderly woman who came in wearing a Salvation Army bonnet and carrying a collection tin. She took off the bonnet and emptied the tin on to the bar. Clucking her tongue at the tight-fistedness of the infidel, she ordered a port and lemon. I raised my glass to her. We were all at it tonight.

  When I left the Botanical there was a Rover drawing up under a streetlight across the road. Claes came out of the pub. The uniformed driver got out and opened the rear door of the car for Claes to get in. I stepped back into the pub entrance. Lurch stood in attendance on the pavement. When the car pulled away I saw for a moment that Claes had turned to talk to another passenger. I recognized Rackham. The car turned the corner and disappeared northwards towards the Plain of Axness. Lurch looked up and down the street and across the road at the Botanical. I moved further back. Seemingly satisfied, he went back into the Narwhal. The fake Salvation Army lady pushed past me into the street.

  ‘They’re all liars and bastards,’ she said, turning to peer at me. ‘Liars and bastards.’

  ‘Looks like it,’ I said. ‘Here.’ I gave her a half-crown. She peered at the coin, unimpressed.

  ‘You don’t fool me,’ she said. ‘You’re another one, aren’t you?’

  ‘Looks like it,’ I said. I thought for a moment she was going to throw her tin at me.

  Still unable to face going home, I set off for Shirley’s. When I went to ring the bell I found the front door was slightly ajar. I stepped into the hall. There was very faint music from upstairs. If someone was expected, it wasn’t me. It would have been easy enough to leave again, but I went quietly up the dark stairs to the top landing. Light was cast by the half-open door of her Shirley’s flat. The song was ‘Time of the Season’. I’d never thought it was sinister before.

  I knocked.

  ‘It’s open,’ she said. The lamps were covered in silk scarves. Shirley was at the dressing table, leaning towards the mirror as she applied mascara. She turned, alarmed.

  ‘You can’t be here, Stevie. You’ve got to go.’ She stood up and her dressing gown fell open to reveal an expensive-looking black bra and knickers. She went over and lifted the needle from the record.

  ‘You shouldn’t leave the front door open, Shirley. It’s not a very respectable part of town. Anyone might turn up. But I take it you’re expecting someone.’

  ‘I’m sorry about the other night, Stevie.’ She drew her dressing gown closed and stood with her arms folded. ‘But d’you mind if we talk about it later?’

  ‘No, Shirley. I’m here now.’

  ‘No, you’ve got to leave. I mean, I don’t mind if you, you know, while I was asleep.’

  ‘I didn’t. Of course not. What do you take me for?’

  ‘Well, that’s good.’

  ‘Anyway, Shirley, Rackham won’t be coming, not tonight.’

  ‘How do you know? You don’t know that.’ She went to the window and looked down into the street.

  ‘I saw him being chauffeured away from the Narwhal earlier. He was with Claes.’ At this she sat down at the dressing table and tears began to run down her face, smudging the careful mascara. She fumbled to light a cigarette. I looked around and found a bottle of gin, poured some in a glass and handed it to her. She nodded, took a sip and dabbed at her face with a tissue.

  ‘He told me he’d be here,’ she said.

  ‘Men were deceivers ever,’ I said, bringing over another chair.

  ‘Maybe he’s just late.’

  ‘No, he’s not. Why does it matter, Shirley?’

  ‘Oh, you know. It’s just what happens with me and fellers, as usual, ’cause I’m a daft cow. I’m fookin’ soft.’

  ‘Rackham’s not usual. Is he?’

  ‘He’s not like you. I can tell you that.’

  ‘I hope not.’

  Now she was shredding a Kleenex with her fingers. ‘He said he’d be here.’

  ‘And did you believe him?’

  ‘Got no choice, have I?’ she said in a small voice. ‘Look, you ought to go really. Please.’ She took a new tissue and went on dabbing at her face.

  ‘Why have you no choice?’

  ‘Never mind. Nothing.’

  ‘Has he let you run out?’

  ‘What are you talking about? Run out of what?’

  ‘Whatever you’ve been taking.’

  ‘Who says I have?’

  ‘I found the works when
I was here the other night, Shirley. After I put you to bed.’

  ‘You had no business looking. It’s just occasional. Just for a change. We do it together, me and Charles.’ I filed this fact away with the Aleister Crowley book and the grimoire. Worse and worse.

  ‘And then there are those photographs.’ For a moment I felt like being cruel. ‘I didn’t know you were that kind of girl, Shirley.’

  ‘There’s a lot you don’t know. Anyway, that’s all private and personal. Nobody’s business.’

  ‘I wonder if Rackham thinks about them in the same way. He took them. He’s not in them, is he? What do the other participants think, for that matter? Have you got the negatives? You haven’t, have you?’

  ‘It was a mistake. It was supposed to be a bit of fun. It’s all a mistake. Stop it, Stevie. Can you just get out?’

  ‘And so here you are, waiting for him.’

  ‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’ She poured more gin. I poured myself some.

  ‘You need to stop,’ I said.

  ‘I know that, don’t I?’

  ‘It’s not too late. You should get help.’

  ‘It’s illegal now. Doctors can’t prescribe it.’

  ‘You said you weren’t using regularly.’

  ‘I’m not, not really.’

  ‘You could go away and sort yourself out.’

  ‘Where to? What would I live on? I barely earn washers as it is. That’s why I started modelling.’

  ‘Yes, I saw you. You were being Olympia.’

  ‘I started at life classes at the art college. Then whatserface, Maggie Rowan, she turned up and asked if I would model for her. She was offering OK money, so why not? Where’s the harm? It’s art, isn’t it. Stephen? What we’re all supposed to aspire to. And by the way, yes, I do know what Olympia in the real painting did for a living. And Mrs bloody Rowan got me to make her a dress and then never paid for it, so serve me right, I suppose. And now she’s got you too.’

  I ignored the last barb. ‘And what about Charles Rackham?’

  ‘He turned up at the studio. He was really charming. She put him into the picture too.’

  ‘I’ve noticed.’

  ‘He was just really interesting. This was in the spring sometime, before you came back.’

  ‘Perhaps I should have come back sooner.’

  She shrugged, finished her drink and poured another. ‘Charles wrote me a poem. You never did that, did you, Stevie?’

  ‘I’m not a poet.’

  ‘The accomplishments of a gentleman, Charles said, should include the ability to turn a sonnet for his mistress.’ She smiled at the phrasing. ‘Though what he wrote wasn’t actually a sonnet.’

  ‘Was it any good?’

  ‘I’ve no fookin idea. I couldn’t tell what it was about. But it was flattering, like someone buying me flowers.’

  ‘I never did that, either.’

  ‘Nobody did, not till Charles came on the scene. And there was the underwear. Made me feel desirable.’

  ‘I must have bought you something,’ I said.

  She laughed. ‘There was the crab sandwich that time at the seaside.’

  ‘You’re saying I gave you food poisoning, then.’

  ‘It’s the thought that counts.’ She came and sat on my knee and wrapped her arms around my neck.

  ‘You can’t carry on like this, love,’ I said.

  ‘I know. I know. But there’s something about him. I think I’m in love with him.’

  ‘Oh, Shirley. Well, you can bet he doesn’t feel the same way.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘He’s just using you. Then he’ll get bored.’

  ‘Like you did.’ She rose and went to the window again.

  ‘I’m sorry. We were kids then. I’m trying to help you now.’

  ‘Well, you’re talking about trying.’

  ‘I can give you some money to get away for a while.’

  ‘Some bedsit in Leeds? No, thanks.’

  ‘But you’re hurting yourself. You’re allowing Rackham to hurt you. He likes hurting people.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s why we’re suited.’

  ‘There’s no future in it.’

  ‘Compared to what? At least when he’s here I feel alive.’ She lit a cigarette and sat on the edge of the bed. Her mascara was still smeared. She reached for an ashtray resting on a pile of Sven Hassel books.

  ‘Maybe not for long.’

  ‘That’s up to me. Are you going to tell anyone about the gear?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Then, please, can you go? I know you want to help, but we both know there’s nothing you can do. Go back to Mrs fucking Rowan. Tell her I want paying for the dress. It’s too young for her anyway.’

  ‘I’m trying to finish with her, Shirley.’

  ‘Makes no odds to me.’

  ‘What’s Rackham up to?’

  ‘Well, why don’t you ask him? You see him more often than I do.’

  ‘Does he talk about his plans? Does he mention any names?’

  ‘No. Claes is the talker. He can’t shut up. He’s getting worse. Signs. Destiny. Decisive action. I don’t think Charles takes him seriously. He uses him and Lurch.’

  ‘Like he uses you.’

  ‘You can’t make me stop seeing him, Stephen.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I can’t, can I?’

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I was going to say that the city was a place where nothing happened. That’s how the residents would describe it to this day, with resentful satisfaction, as a place dozing among the heavy incurious dullness that Bennett, himself no Wittgenstein, found so widespread among the English. But were these people even English, or some further torpid distillation of it, a tribe remote and foreign even where most at home?

  To return to my point: it would be more accurate to say that anything could be going on and it would seem to bring no alteration in the texture of everyday life. In one of his few references to the city in A Firm Foundation Carson described it as ‘a place of settled habits and steady occupation, content with its maritime tradition and largely unconcerned with the larger dramas conducted elsewhere’. Was this tongue in cheek or despairing?

  And now there was a controversial by-election at hand with an extreme right-wing candidate who had fame of a sort. But the streets and the parks and shops and pubs and buses seemed indifferent to the grim excitement this might have provoked. There seemed to be no public realm, no Speakers’ Corner, no stern editorial in the unreadably parochial local press (the Chronicle was, naturally, edited by an Old Blakean). The election would happen and then it would all go away: after all, everything else had, including the Germans, after they had damaged eighty per cent of the housing stock.

  Given that surely unrepeatable precedent, the exchanges in the corner shop concerned more pressing matters. When Mr Pawson, the proprietor of the shop round the corner from my flat, asked a man who came in for cigarettes while I was there whether he’d been to see City at the weekend, he was offering a familiar cue, and the reply came reliably, patina’d with loving and contemptuous familiarity: ‘They never fookin come to see me when I’m bad.’ And the same exchange occurred a hundred times across the flat and flood-prone city. It was true and not true: you could hear the Saturday roar of the football crowd from miles off, but no one owned up to going to the match. They preferred rugby league, but no one went there either. It was a ghost town whose phantoms appeared in the flesh, seen across wide bombsites and down narrow lanes, greeting one another, calling to their children, standing on the doorstep to watch the rag-and-bone man pass on his horse and cart. Auden wrote of Macao: ‘Nothing serious can happen here,’ and since the Blitz you might have supposed the same had been true hereabouts. No one had quite managed to reawaken themselves or the city from the enchanted dullness. No one wanted to. But really, as I was to learn, anything might happen. It was simply that almost no one would appear to notice.

  By the time we reached Remembrance Day
the school was papered with election posters and repapered as soon as Sergeant Risman had torn them down. Boys went about with lapel badges for the main parties. I had outlawed the red-and-black chevroned armbands of the BPP as soon as they began to appear, but they took on a clandestine currency in the middle school, something to wear, something to be part of, a chance to transgress and yet to be on the winning side, or so the wearers thought. The ban was then promulgated by Gammon in assembly as if it had not previously been in effect, so that my control of events seemed to become even weaker than before, like a puppet government awaiting the inevitable takeover. When I complained to Maggie, she observed that Weimar chancellors must at times have felt the same. I was suitably put down for my presumption.

  The service itself, taking place in the Main Hall, was marked by a very decent rendition of ‘The Last Post’ by a bugler out in the quad, and a reading by Rackham of Binyon’s famous poem. He read it well, understanding the need to understate it. People were moved. I was moved. My loathing of him grew.

  The parties standing in the mock election held their meetings at lunchtimes. It looked as if both the Tories and Labour were bleeding votes to the BPP, with the Liberals, as so often since the war, nowhere. On Friday I made the rounds. Tory and Labour were earnest and colourless, with thinnish audiences of sixth formers occasionally heckling at the gatherings overseen good-humouredly by Major Brand and Tim Connolly. Such Liberals as there were, including the candidate, had evidently gone somewhere else.

  When I arrived at the science lecture room where the BPP were assembled there was a crowd of boys in the corridor unable to get in. The doormen, Arnesen and another boy whose name I didn’t know, both in cadet uniform, removed their chevrons as I approached, but there was a flicker of hesitation about letting me past.

  ‘Why are you two in uniform?’ I asked.

  ‘There’s a CCF parade after school, sir,’ said Arnesen.

  ‘Don’t Queen’s Regulations forbid altering the uniform or wearing it to support a political cause?’ I had no idea if this was true. ‘Give me those chevrons.’ The pair handed them over, abashed, not meeting my gaze. ‘Who would you rather deal with about this? Me or Sergeant Risman?’

  ‘No contest, sir,’ said Arnesen, his grin restored.