Umbrella

by Will Self

  Busner thinks: I’m disarmed by the feint and lunge of his repartee. He tries another tack: Did you . . . had you at any point considered if – well, it seems to me, having observed Miss Dearth, that her higher functions may be . . . intact – that she may be quite conscious of what goes on around her, although powerless to . . . intervene. He falls silent, wondering how it is possible to be regarded simultaneously with affection and derision. Marcus quacks more ruminatively: Forty years ago those were my own fanciful thoughts precisely, we are all too conscious – he pokes an admonitory finger up to where Hot Love gushes from some parental stereo system turned up far too loudly! – of what goes on around here, but quite without the means to intervene. Busner wonders, Is it an indulgence to feel his padded-out hips with my hands? Is it flirting with psychosis – as in the mad, bad old days – to relax inside Marcus’s tinged old skin and peer down over the furred curve of his belly at the polished brass boot-scraper and my own feet? . . . and there’s no messing.

  He does not discover himself in the blowy street, nor recover himself in rhyme, Rain, rain go away, come again another day. The consideration that Lords is over there evades him, as will the coming cricket season. He doesn’t clamber into the Austin’s metal belly and drive up Abbey Road — he remains there, curled in the old man’s caul and waiting for his own senescence to come of age, which it does after a protracted labour, long-drawn-out clenchings of that fulcrum, the prostate, upon which the ageing man tries to balance, inclining one way for a dull ache, the other for relief . . . Outside there is the musical whine, the quasi-rhythmic bash – all the airy clangour of scaffolding being taken down, while below on the pavement stands a conductor in a leather apron. La Cadenga is the name of an African woman, her hips gripped by . . . batik? a calabash jumbled with fruit set on her stately head. He must have rolled over in his sleep, for now Busner lies on his back, his bladder puddling and these orange boxes full of his office things clearly in view. 10.22. He has slept for another full hour and now he really must rise and to prevent himself from heading back to bed plunges instead towards the kitchenette – Whoa! How did that happen, that tuck in time? Although Busner is by no means a valetudinarian, it is still due to little incidents of this kind that he learns he must correctly calculate all trajectories in advance, as course adjustments are no longer possible – even in domestic space. Until touched-down by a dusty heap of muesli, his brain floats inside his skull, cutting capers for his camera I. Sitting at a counter inset with earth-toned tiles, he pours the milk, plants his spoon in the heap and paddles through the cereal — to all the desolation of station hotels, where films of milky slurry mask haddock. His uncle Maurice sits opposite, over his shoulder in a glass darkly a china figurine of a Foo dog, of which Busner learns, much later, that they can eat as much as they like without ever shitting . . . like the English upper middle classes. Maurice has the long, carefully rolled baton of Reynolds News tucked under the edge of his plate, where could we have been going on a weekend? He knew. Now, Maurice says, after the visit, have you any other plans for the day? He dabs at his moustache with his napkin, drops it to the table and slaps his thigh with an attempt at merriment so desperately at odds with his discreet character – writing cases inside hatboxes inside portmanteaus inside steamer trunks – that they both laugh, and Zack thinks then of James Robertson Justice and now: When did I first know Maurice was homosexual? Always. His uncle: discreet, clever, careful, meticulous – but mostly clever, in a way that Jews of his generation might try to hide, although for Maurice this was unnecessary since he passed in all respects as an Englishman, who, if not heterosexual, was certainly nothing else. There were more like that then, to appear neutered was socially acceptable – enjoined, almost. Hymens hardening into old age, prepuces never pulled, we are speaking of the deathly respectable here, not anyone . . . alive. Maurice had been too clever to need to pretend to anything he didn’t feel – too clever and too kind. An interest in music but no passion, some golf – always powerful and impressive cars such as Bristols, Rovers and Rolls-Royces. A little fly-fishing – I went with him once, somewhere in Scotland . . . rhododendrons everywhere, the sea a fallen sky. Some shooting . . . there was a gun cabinet at Redington Road – gone before Henry got ill. But never too much of any one thing – just as in his portfolio there was some of Cunard, a little of Trusthouse Forte – did he know Rocco? – and Imperial Chemicals, quite a lot of Gainsborough Studios because this was an investment that amused him, that Maurice took an active interest in – in as much as such a state of mind could ever be detected, his brownish moustache twitching, two beautifully manicured fingers rotating his signet ring, which was set with a bevelled green stone – an emerald? Hopelessly sclerotic, of course, his heart fit to burst – and did! The Ministry of Defence have confirmed . . . At least there was none of that pillar-of-the-community shit at the funeral . . . Sergeant Brian Culcross of the Second Battalion Royal Marines . . . That actress who read, what was her name? Minna? Minna . . . Standish? It was about thrushes, certainly, and spring rain – Browning? . . . an improvised explosive device . . . But this is purest invention! After forty-five years only the rubber stamps on their circular stand beside the blotter have any real substance. The blotter on the kneehole desk and the share certificates in its bottom drawers, tied in bundles with different-coloured ribbons like lawyers’ briefs, together with his will in triplicate and an accounts book preprinted for double-entry. How apt! Leapfrogging back another forty-five years, the entries were a comprehensive listing of cocks and arseholes, their sizes, their appearance and those attributes of the men they had belonged to. In the widest column, neatly and legibly, Maurice had set down the facts of what was done, where and with whom – although there were no names, only numbers. From this presumably comprehensive tabulation Maurice’s nephew could deduce very little. Zachary could not say whether his uncle had been a happy bugger or a driven, persecuted and paranoid erotomane – all he could tell was that his uncle had observed the same principle in his sexual practice as he had in his life generally: never too much of any one thing. That Maurice had been cosmopolitan Zachary had always known – but not this cosmopolitan, with a predilection, or so it seemed, for all ages, races and classes of men . . . And now Jenni Murray with Woman’s Hour . . . as he had sat leafing through the accounts book, Zack began to understand exactly why it – along with the house and a pleasant but not excessive private income – had been entailed to him: it was the most effective riposte. Sitting at the breakfast bar of his shabby rental flat, old enough now to be the uncle to my uncle, Busner thinks back . . . and back . . . almost enjoying the very feminine blush of shame he feels mounting from his neck to his face, while also considering that no elapsing of time could ever be sufficient, whether biologic – the marching of entire orders and phyla into extinction – or geologic – the shuffling of plates thrusting up mountain ranges – to annul this shameful image: Me, full of myself at another breakfast table and grinding away at my uncle . . . believing it clever as well as kind to employ my newly machined analytic tools on the basis that repression could be reduced to fine filings of the perverse and so blown away. Preposterous! to interrogate him concerning his relationship with his mother – and to continue doing so, refusing to take no answer for a no. Yet he was so gracious about it – playful, really, refolding the Times, tucking it back under the edge of his plate, and warning me of Missus Mac’s proximity by the slightest arching of his beautifully trimmed eyebrows, while wryly observing, Have you read Bernard Levin’s column this morning? There’s something in what he says, I think, that we can both agree on . . . — Some oat flake must have flown off and so provided the necessary bearing, Busner’s hand saunters unthinkingly after it and turns off the radio, so that: Cameron Macintosh’s new –. Silence. And then from the street below rises the unmistakable rattling bash of a flatbed truck’s tailgate being closed, followed by its diesel engine revving, a deep and throaty fugue. The scaffolding is down . . . and what was the cultivation
of memory – through solitude, through reverie – if not the erection of a scaffolding in order to facilitate the construction of current behaviours. Yes, that was it: a behavioural aid, such as the holding and then the letting fall of ping-pong balls so as to stimulate movement, or the wearing of a loudly ticking watch so as to supply a tempo by which to recalibrate the complex motor sequences needed to stand up, that should be automatic, but that needed to be relearned . . . every time.

  Busner stands up. For a while he had thought that when he had more leisure he might do something with Maurice’s homolog, which was surely a sexual self-interrogation to rival the broader surveys of Havelock-Ellis and Kinsey. He supposed it might be in one of the orange boxes under the window, or in the attic at Redington Road – wherever it was, it would be together with tea chests full of the rotting correspondence of the parents Busner had never known, their serrated postcards, their now blotched but once creamy notepaper folded into thick envelopes that had been extravagantly franked and stamped. All of it he had foreseen himself unpacking, unsheathing and unfolding, so that the pressed flowers bloomed into dust as he read the missives for the first time since their long-gone recipients set the sheets to one side. It was not – he considers as he raises the candy-striped canvas blind to discover decals of outsized and grinning pizza-eaters being leant against by real people who are grimy in the surprising sunlight that shines on the far side of Fortess Road – the unexamined life that was worthless, but the one un-re-examined by the properly qualified. And at once he resolves to throw all that stuff away. To have it all picked over by the next generation, or in the declension below that, by an amateur genealogist avid for his roots would result in a further demerit, rendering his parents’ lives, Maurice’s, his own, worthless minus one. – And what of Sergeant Culcross? Busner says aloud, speaking to the hip-high fridge, the enamelled BREAD BIN and the electric jug, in a vain attempt to rouse them from their complacent inanimation. What of him? Busner sees the young man lying on the bleak roadside, his legs torn off by the blast, and wonders: did they pick the nuts and bolts out of him before ’coptering him back to base? Was he right now sedated in a hospital bed, waiting to be told . . . like Ronald Reagan that he had nothing down below? They might well reassure him all they could, they would probably rub talcum powder on his stumps, sheathe them in silk stockings and the leather sockets of the prostheses. No doubt capable nurses would lift him on either side, then put him on a walking machine – but that’s only another kind of treadmill, because in the end a phantom limb or two would be a blessing compared to this waking, walking nightmare with the half of you that’s been turned on a lathe now turned on another one . . . and what might that feel like? In the future, Busner didn’t doubt, microprocessors would be implanted in the brain and attached to sensors inserted between the relevant vertebrae – then this feeling might be examined, but for now it remained an enigma-r-elle est une vraie beauté, m’sieur! The queer little Frenchman has used the slow shoving of the tightly packed crowd to press Audrey against the railings surrounding the green. Right away Stanley suspects him of making free with his hands, so struggles to raise his own while spluttering, I know summuv yer lingo you – you muggins! Not much of a jibe, Audrey thinks – besides, she doesn’t mind the attentions of the Frenchman, whose lavender silk waistcoat and gay straw boater are flowers in the bed of black-and-blue serge which urges in the shadow of the Empire. May I av ze plezzure to –? He frees his hand enough to raise his hat but it’s . . . too late! She cannot forbear from laughing delightedly as the gallant fellow is borne off by a flying column of florid young men in football jerseys, who, singing, Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set, God –! carry all before them across one fifth of the world’s land, with its populations of theosophical Hindoos, jolly Hottentots, lazy Lascars, sullen Malays and woolly headed blackamoors all four hundred million of ’em! But how many . . . Audrey wonders . . . Empires are there in the Empire? Bert would know . . . The stretched domes and finials of this one fall on the heads of the crowd, the ash of Vesuvius. In the sunlight beyond there is the jig of bunting and the glare of a band limbering up – with an oom-p’poom-poom a staccato march begins and the white glove of the conductor waves the smell of frying potatoes . . . straight to me. Next a gratified spasm passes through the crowd, See – Stan is beside her – iss a two-cylinder Siddeley they’ve got . . . He’s said this several times already, yet Audrey knows that it isn’t the motor car that interests him, it’s the ortommoton that will conduct it from Shepherd’s Bush Green to Temple Bar, its clockwork muss be woun’ up right tight. The motor car is enclosed by ropes and a rope gangway leads to it from the doors of the Empire, doors that waver on their brass hinges, then swing open to reveal, Enig-ma-relle! Not so much a shout as a wave, Enigmanigmanigmar’r’r’ellle, that ripples across their jelly faces – and at once Audrey is plungèd into egrimony. True, the Man of Steel does his best to move in a mechanical fashion, cranking up right arm and right leg, then winching them down to the step below, but, much as the flesh-and-blood spectators push and pull at Audrey, so she remotely senses the muscles and tendons pushing and pulling inside the shiny tubing of his suit. Besides, who could be fooled by that metal visor, below which an irresolute chin is plastered with thick stage paint. A section of the crowd is bawling counter to the band, All the girls loved Ber-tie when ’e adda motor car! as Enigmarelle stilt-walks along the gangway to his waiting conveyance. That’s the man what invenned it! Stan bellows in her ear: Fred Ireland! Ireland is clean-shaven with spectacles that ’e fancies make ’im look scientifical. He prods Enigmarelle between his shoulder blades, causing the Man of Steel to unlatch the motor car’s door, then climb jerkily up on to its dickey. Acknowledging the Huzzah! of the crowd with an exaggerated bow, Ireland takes his seat behind his clockwork chauffeur. ’Ow d’you fink ’e works, Ordree? Stan brightly delights – how can he believe this fakery? The Ireland chap pantomimically fiddling between the mechanical man’s shoulder blades, Enigmarelle extending his stiff arms to the steering wheel, the mechanic in the Norfolk jacket yanking the hand-crank ta-ra-ra-round and ta-ra-ra-round and ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay –! The sharp crack of the engine firing flutters hankies and sends shopgirls swooning, and their sweethearts seize the opportunity to snatch a feel. The Man of Steel tilts at the waist, pulls one lever up and pushes a second down. Oh my . . . Oh my! Close beside Audrey a chit of a girl is allowing such liberties that looking down she sees her dingy underthings, Lottie Collins ’as no draw-ers, Will yer kindly lend ’er your-ers . . . Boots stomp to the oom-pah-pah! The organ-grinder has done his job and his instrument is alive with its own music, its pistons drumming, its steel-shod clogs hoofing it. Self-important stewards swagger away the ropes as the mechanic lopes up beside the inventor – the crowd parts as the motor car starts, and, sceptical as she may be, Audrey cannot deny that it’s a bang-up-to-date show, what with the band on its stand all done up with swags and streamers having achieved its own infernal combustion – Men of Brass whose red necks . . . bullfrogs . . . red and gold frogging. Stan, already a head taller than his elder sister, still cannot bear his poor vantage – he leaps, he pirouettes, he leans into the railings and, grasping a spear point in each hand, hops tentatively until Audrey says, Don’t be daft, you’ll get one up yer jacksie! Still, he’s beside himself, D-don’t yer see, ’e’s drivin’ it, ’e’s truly drivin’ it! Audrey sees nothing of the sort, she sees Ireland the showman throw a handful of farthings and barley sugar to the crowd, she sees the automaton wrestle very bodily with the steering wheel as the Siddeley accelerates round the green and proceeds east, flickering behind the railings, trailing pelting boys and swelling smoke. P’raps, Audrey thinks, there’s no need fer deceivin’ at such a speed. P’raps, Ireland cares nothing for the good opinion of heather sellers or railway navvies in soiled dungarees, p’raps he thinks he can’t be seen shouting in Enigma-wotsit’s tin ear from where she stands in the shadow of the Empire, p’raps — but, Hush now! These things are far too sure
that you should dream, lest they appear as things that seem . . . Such as, the Man of Steel turned on her very own lathe. She discovered it all set up that morning to do the job: six operations for each of his limbs. Engage the shaft, wheel in the cutter, cut the threads – internal and external – cut the recesses. Six operations for each of his limbs – yet I only get to see his right arm. Others get the left arm, still further along the line of lathes there are more expert girls who braze the legs with oxyacetylene torches in a blaze of flame, and beyond them are the munitionettes who operate turret lathes, lowering the headstock down carefully until it bores into the block with a ferocious whine, then raising it up again to the point where the mechanism ejects a new canister, empty and oily, and awaiting a brain – we never see these, any more than we see his privates . . . These, Audrey believes, must be machined in a secret workshop concealed in one of the Danger Buildings – p’raps No. 4 – where men too old or too lame for the front pride themselves on the steel pintles they turn on their lathes, each one screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeching into existence with ready-made hair of swarf. When Audrey is at her lathe, she gauges every fifth right arm and turns it upside down so’s he can be checked – checked as she was on her first day: sent down from the Labour Exchange at Plumstead, having signed on for three years or the duration. Coming through Beresford Square with all that carry-on, the blackamoors an’ wogs flogging scarves an’ such offa the ground, an’ cockatoos in cages, an’ all manner of pies, an’ whelk stalls, an’ other eats, an’ the ’buses pulling up with men dangling right offa the stair rails in bunches. — That first day Audrey and Gracie come straight in by No. 1 Gate, under the indifferent gaze of gunners cast in iron – one of the police sentries . . . ’e only takes my green ticket and salutes me! What larks! A male-bloody-biped kowtowing to me! Not so the Lady Superintendent a Vesta Victoria – to put it mildly, with a Unionist glint in her ’ow-now-brown-cow eyes and probably a Man of Steel somewhere inside of her. There are photographs of the burly munitions workers she’d like us all to be on the distempered walls of her office in the gatehouse, while in the corner sits a typewriter ticcing away, and looking mousy in horrid sky-blue poplin like pox-blebs. The LS hooks the earpiece back on the stand and barks: Age? Previous calling? I give Ince’s and when she says there’s no vacancies excepting the Danger Buildings, I say, Oh, I’ve experience as a turner – I’ve worked a lathe, done the posts for umbrellas – Peerless, Paragon – you’ve one there in the corner, ma’am, might be one I done . . . Not strictly true of course but Lord knows I’ve seen enough done – and I’m a quick learner. Poor Gracie isn’t, though – she looks altogether fagged out, spot on her nose – must have her monthlies – and her loosestrife hair twisting out of its pins. She starts when Gracie barks again: I’ve no vacancies excepting the Danger Buildings, then Gracie nods meekly and dab-dabs her temples with a shaky hand. – Are you willing to enter and work with mercury? says the LS. Are you willing to work in yellow powder and tri-nitro-toluene? Poor Gracie sits there looking shifty – who does she think this body is, Melchior the Mind-Reader? The LS don’t give a monkey’s whether we’re listening to that swine Asquith, or fanny-about-Fawcett, or the traitor Dacre Fox – all she cares about is packing more shells. Well? the LS says, and meekly Gracie nods. The typewriter gets up to hand us our chits, then the LS sends us straight out back to join the other sixteen in our draft. There’s a row of cubicles there – and in we clatter. They’re plain deal with lots of knotholes – cheap privy style. The order comes from another body to: Undress completely! Then put on your coats and shoes and form a line ready for your medical exam! She’s a bluestocking all right, but hiding it well under a khaki overall with divided skirts – no, trousers! Plain deal with splintering knotholes . . . impossible to resist! The rollicking of a heavy breast, its lush, long beating teat . . . Are you going to take all day in there? says the bluestocking, and I call back: No, no . . . but it’s almost as hard not to be inshooshiant, that’s what Gilbert would say: Be inshooshiant, m’dear, it’s all you can be in the ugly face of hypocrishy – and so I am, peeling off my stockings, letting down my bloomers, and smelling the resin in the wood and the coal smoke from the Arsenal. The war to end all warsh, Gilbert said, the electric light shining through bubbles and bumper and swirling on his hand as we sat in a private room downstairs at the Criterion for our special treat before he beat his retreat back to Woking . . . – I say again: Are you going to be all day in there? Emerging blinking and wanton in the daylight – then, as the others had been done and dispersed, I go straight in through long white muslin curtains to where an enamelled kidney dish sits on a washstand a baby’s bassinet awaiting what dark afterbirth . . . The clack of weights as the platform tilts beneath my bare feet. Seven stones and eight, she says. You’re slight . . . nevertheless you have a very athletic physique . . . Only now does Audrey examine the hazel eyes that are examining her through round and thick-rimmed eyeglasses. They are alone – although she can hear the clatter of metal instruments from behind the muslin curtains. You lie, Audrey thinks, I am bow-legged – I didn’t get enough oats when I was a pony, the goodly portion all went to my brothers . . . and my father. Then she thinks: How is it that her hands are still so cold after handling the other fifteen? Cold too her stethoscope imposed above one breast. The lady doctor listens, then applies it above the other, Cough, she says, and Audrey stirs up the cold air around the two of them. The lady doctor moves behind and her chill fingers sound me. Breathe in, she commands – and . . . out, slowly. Good. Crouching in front of Audrey, her virile face within inches, the same fingers part and re-part. Don’t be alarmed, she says, her breath stirring my quiff, I’m simply ascertaining whether there is any infestation, or . . . she continues sotto voce . . . venereal infection. Audrey would like to tell the lady doctor that she is far from outraged – that this is how she imagines the future for womankind: such impersonal tenderness and scientific concern, and to restrain herself from blabbing she concentrates on the cold hand on her hip and the rabbit’s skin parting on the top of the lady doctor’s bare head. That all seems to be in order, she says, rising, going to seat herself at the card table that acts as her desk, and, taking up a pen, she dips, then inquires: Measles? Whooping cough? Diphtheria? Smallpox? Tuberculosis – you, or any other family member? Then scratches the replies in a ledger, but she don’t ask about the mulleygrubs. Audrey wonders: Can she tell? When she and Gilbert first became lovers, Audrey had been moved to look down there, assuming that any part of her that gave them both such pleasure must be pink taffeta, jonquil leaves, a champlevé of nerve endings seared into my core – not this snub cleft in furze, which was so unlike Gilbert’s puppetry. Your swazzle, she’d called it. It’s Punch-nosed in its silky glove, then up it rears! No, he laughed, it needsh no name, it ish what it ish, Ding an sich . . . No, Audrey thinks now, thing-in-me, thing-in-myself . . . Aha, exclaims the lady doctor, Miss . . . Miss – she examines Audrey’s docket from the Labour Exchange – Death, is it? Unusual name, ye-es . . . well, it seems you’ve been altogether fortunate – it is no mean feat to’ve reached womanhood, in London, in – if I may so – one of its less salubrious districts, without contracting any of these scourges, many of which would’ve been eradicated by now were simple hygiene measures univer—. Breaking off, she rises and goes to the washstand, pours some water from the jug into the enamelled dish and wreathes her capable hands in suds from a coal-tar bar. Over her busy shoulder she calls: I’m sorry, you may, of course, put back on your coat – your shoes. Yet Audrey has become quite blithe about her nakedness – her hip jutting, a foot poised – and enjoyed the other woman’s assessment. – Miss Death . . . As Audrey robes she admires the way the lady doctor sits with her legs forthrightly parted in her plain fawn-wool skirt, her white-sheathed arms laid in her lap, the starched pleats of a cambric blouse in the exposed vee of her coat, a cameo at her full throat . . . – I hardly know, that is to say – up she gets and comes across, her hand held out manfully – my name is Doctor – tha
t is to say, Hilda – Doctor Hilda Trevelyan. I believe I’ve seen you before at WSPU meetings perhaps? And certainly at the Opera House last September when Miss Pankhurst dropped her, ah, bombshell . . . She’s not certain – cannot, mustn’t be . . . Audrey is not looking any more for debate, or amity – although this she sees in Doctor Trevelyan’s tired eyes and thick lips. — I am weary too, and how can I explain this: Samuel Death had journeyed for a full fourteen-hour day by branch lines from Devon to Andover, where he put up at a pub for the night – a circumstance he never minded. All that clackety-clack simply in order to give his younger son a slap in front of his new comrades, then show him off around the town in his buff coat and odd little cap like a Turkish kepi but still in civilian trousers: riding breeches – or so Father had written – and gaiters, which Audrey supposed he would’ve had either from Feydeau or the cuckold, and were probably the only things of real utility they had ever bequeathed my poor little brother. Poor Stanley! Compelled to go a’crawling with Rothschild up and down the High Street and then back to the mess at the camp, where the beer was atrocious, although it cost only a ha’penny a pint. It wasn’t Rothschild who had to do jankers the following greydawn or go out to clod-hop on the sodden plain — it wasn’t him, or Gilbert Cook, or Doctor Trevelyan for that matter, who would have to fight the war to end all . . . – I dunno, ma’am – the cockney rises up, brackish and broken – I ain’t ever been at no meetin’ savin’ the Church Army, an’ vat wuzz oanlee fer a cup an’ slyces . . . Doctor Trevelyan stands looking at Audrey for longer than is acceptable for any reasonable intercourse – am I scuppered? Audrey listens to the burring of breath in the older woman’s nostrils, smells the coal tar from her hands – she looks not at Audrey’s face but my hair – so distinctive, a flare of Phillips’s Lucifer as he pauses on the rich, Burgundy-red carpeting of the stairs, his hair still glossy and shellacked to his round head, although in the huge expanse of mirror that opposes them Albert can see that his benefactor’s face is sickly with fatigue . . . or worse? You still won’t? Phillips asks, ladling fresh greenish smoke with the cigar in question. No, Albert sighs, and never will, sir . . . For fear of his own face reddening and his becoming, quite literally, Rothschild – he knows some German, he knows a lot of things . . . but he has taken a glass of Hock with the Dover sole and he regrets even this small impairment of his faculties, faculties he assesses by calculating the number of tiles on the hall floor, the number of crystals in the chandelier, and multiplying them together as they descend. Phillips kicks spat out from under spat, until he stands too big a piece on the chequer-work of the hall and listing. A club servant comes from a door swinging soundless, a ribbon of tickertape in his hand that he pins to the bundle already on the baize-covered board. There are fires lit at either end of the immense and shadowy space: sea coal laid with such care that it forms two glowing pyramids, while up above there are four thousand, three hundred and eighteen shards arrested at the point of explosion. Phillips says, Not many around this evening, Fulton, and the servant replies chirpily, They’ll be hanging up their holly and suchlike, sir. Phillips grimaces. That, he says emphatically, I very much doubt – d’you mind, Death? – he has lifted a hank of the tickertape – I forgot my spectacles in my rooms. Albert takes the bundle and unravels it carefully so as not to detach any strand from the board. He knows his benefactor will enjoy this demonstration as evidence of his own foresight and sagacity. At dinner, as he sawed wearily through his cutlet, Phillips spoke of how utterly fagged out he was with his committee work, and how he had half a mind to abandon it all to the upstart jobbers. Albert, scanning six of the tapes at once, announces: Cotton three per cents dearer on the Bourse than in Berlin, and the London Exchange closed four per cents dearer still . . . As he had observed the flesh-coloured mole under Phillips’s lip and sipped his own glass of the thin Rhenish wine, Albert mused, What precisely do I owe him? Now, Phillips says: Can it bally-well be countenanced . . . his is a voice pleased with its own enunciation . . . that they will . . . will, what? I mean what conceivable methods are at their disposal? Albert clears his throat, er-hem, then goes on: They – that is to say the mill owners, sir – may consider their interests better served by putting a stop to all manufacture, reasoning that by such a demonstration of what yet lies within their control they may bring the weavers to their senses. He paid for me initially, certainly . . . although once Albert was at Bancroft’s he was quickly awarded a bursary – and then won a scholarship. Phillips says, Come – and soon enough they are in the library, sunk in armchairs so deep that intimacy should be easier than imposture. Phillips has known me, Albert thinks, since I was a boy – will he always smell the Foulham on my clothes? Will he always look at me and see clotheslines, chimneypots, tu’penny Eccles cakes? As it is, while Albert’s coat may be comme il faut for the Second Division – well cut by a tailor in Swallow Street – the cuffs of his trousers are a long way off on the rug, and fraying, something probably seen plainly enough by the grandees who peer down from the library walls with soon-to-be-cashiered eyes. The grandees lean on marmoreal pillars, ignoring open tomes and laughing their Harrovian laughs, A-ho-ho! A-ho-ho! at the upstart. Phillips must have rung the bell because here comes another retainer, moving from pool to pool of candlelight – no gas in the library, the hiss disturbs readers and sleepers – the facings of his jacket gilded and then not, a salver with decanter and port glasses trembling in his agèd hands. Yes, yes, put it down there . . . Phillips says brusquely, then takes the sting off with a florin. They have a glass, another and a third, Albert wishes I could loosen this damn knot . . . meaning all his old ties. This démarche . . . Phillips’s affected jargon demands the right sort of rejoinder . . . – D’you imagine it’ll –? This is the fourth of their annual quartet of club suppers and by tradition it passes in review the old year, which is what Albert does, delivering pithy reports on Agadir, Stolypin, Pu Yi and Tripoli in turn, dispatches put together out of snippets of gossip, newspaper reports and some of his own methodical analysis. But what say you, Phillips tees me up, to the déjeuner sur l’Afrique? And Albert comes back gamely: It’s rather amusing to think of their funk when, eventually, they qui vive in the jungle . . . This Phillips enjoys a great deal: he guffaws, he hee-haws – he must be tight! Albert, phlegmatic, not inclined to introspection, nonetheless understands this: the cross-threading of their sensibilities, as, over time, he has been turned on his benefactor’s lathe, a machine that was fully functioning at the time of the retreat from Kabul. An upright Victorian, Phillips cannot be known by me – or anyone, he is an established quantity that over the years has remained the same mixture of the furtive and the brazen. Sitting in the far corner of Anderson’s tea rooms day after day and watching. Swapping the Morning Leader for the Daily Telegraph – but always with a paper of some sort, which, when he came in, would be a tightly rolled umbrella. At the exact point where he becomes repelled by his father’s bogusness – Sam’s beery sweats and horsy high spirits – so Albert is drawn into Mister Phillips’s orbit, which, because it can be foretold, encourages the exercise of his ward’s unusual capacity for calculation – his adding of bills with a single sweep of his bulgy grey eyes, his inability to ever neglect an order, and his capability of performing two, three . . . as many as six tasks at once. Albert’s iron grip on detail has ensured this: a meteoric rise at the Ministry, where the lofty ideals of ceilings edged with plaster laurels are belied by coal fires . . . dirtier than these and the schoolroom atmosphere, the clerks and computers pelting each other with bent old nibs, dried-out inkwells, chalk dusters – in short, anything to hand. In the Under-Secretary’s rooms, to which he obediently repairs, Albert may gain a little peace, spend a while looking out on the bodies of the elms – lain dormant since the heat wave – and the sago of ice that’s forming on the ornamental lakes, and the Palace newly faced in the distance. Then he must square my shoulders to receive more files: jute statistics from Bengal, the remarks of that asinine White Rajah, Nyasaland’s Border C
ommission – the minutes thereof. The Empire – to one burdened by its minutiae – presents a paradoxical case, its extremities are vigorous and kicking out, while its heart is as congested as the old King’s, what with its ports blockaded, gunboats on the Mersey . . . and the Irish, always the Irish –! We had some of ’em in here . . . Phillips says, breaking in, his cigar ash having fallen and lies prettily in a fold of his waistcoat. Right here in the library! One three-parts-gone harpy takes me on, pokin’ me – pokin’ me! – with a wooden spear. I say, who the Devil’re you meant to be? She says, Boadicea, and you’re the Roman oppressor! I say, you’re no such thing – you’re Cecily Gutteridge and I know your mother! Bloody funny, took a while for the peelers to get ’em all out. What I’m trying to say . . . Phillips leans forward and Albert worries that he’s forgotten himself and is about to become intrusive. In which eventuality: am I scuppered? Because no more does Albert speak of his people than Phillips of his. — Once there was a call paid to the villa by the river in Mortlake, and Albert, aged sixteen, declaimed at great length: Nor force nor fraud shall sunder us! Oh ye who north or south, on east or western land, Native to noble sounds . . . folding his cloth ear to the fact that the least sounds appeared to trouble Missus Phillips excessively, for in the box window she writhed decorously. She wore long white gloves and petted a Persian blue the entire time – years later Phillips vouchsafed that it was altogether absurd, because the creatures gypped her badly. Tacitly, the visit was not deemed a success – by either party. This business of moving the old folk and Olive to Cheriton Bishop Phillips does know of and approve. Of the others, however, Albert remains silent – and so has Phillips, at least until now? — But it’s nothing to do with that.