Umbrella

by Will Self

  They’ve been at it for nigh on four hours when on the stroke of twelve Jerry’s Maxims stop. Immediately after this Luftie comes back with the order to cease fire themselves – watch hand slim-stroking butterfly feeler, silence – hateful. How many rounds have they loosed? Two-hundred-and-fifty per box, eight boxes each run back from the forward depot, an ammo run every quarter-hour making for thirty-two thousand . . . Am I right, sir? The silence is hateful: Vicky’s nose tilts to the ground – the men swoon as smoke pools, then flows from the battlefield, they are listening to the thud-thud-pumping of their young hearts, hearing all their component parts. They are licking . . . kissing the tarnished casing of lockets, hissing out their own smoke as the blood rush-ush-ushes through their battered ears. The vanguard of defeat has already invaded them fucked-up francs-tireurs who straggle ahead limping, crawling, dragging themselves back into the battle of life . . . One little Scots gamecock bob-flits-whirrs from shell hole to ditch to tree stump for a couple of hours, before arriving at their position with his kilt in tatters. He collapses against the remains of the scullery wall and lying there lifts his remaining hand to his black cracked lips over and over again miming . . . what? Is it a request for the water they cannot spare – or the valiant urge to tootle his bugle? With superhuman toughness he’d managed to strap a tourniquet around the stump of his blown-to-bits hand or else he’d’ve gone long since . . . Feldman, spooked by the Jock’s sightless eyes and his dirge of amansamansamans . . . wants to: Finish ’im off – in kindness – but Corbett says, In justice any man who’s come through that has earned the right to take his chances. So the disagreement nags between them as the greenbottles give up on the other thing to trickle across to the Scotsman’s nostrils, to pour over his mouth and eyes . . . — A long time of this, until Feldman puts the bins to his eyes and, seeing two or three Union flags jerking about part-way up the ridge, says, We’ve taken their frontline, lads, p’raps the support ’as . . . then trails off, the bins dropping on their lanyard. He lifts them again, shakes his head disbelieving – and they fall again. He lifts them –. For fuck’s sake! Corbett cries, Now you an’ ’im both! – because they’re in time, Feldman and the Jock, lifting and dropping their arms. Corbett snatches the bins and the lanyard rucks up the front of Feldman’s tunic – He looks like a kid getting ragged. Wiv ’is blond curls and periwinkle eyes you’d never peg ’im for a Jew boy – took all he got with remarkable pluck . . . Eldest son of a schneider from up the Mile End Road – tho’ you’d never guess that either: made of himself a well-spoken coke and oil merchant in Shadwell selling direct to the public – but the dandiprat took it personal when the Contemptible points his old white-gloved hand, so up he goes for his shilling . . . His daddy? Mortimerfied oy-yoy-yoy! Rocking back and forth on his bum, forgetting his thimble drill. And now where’s the hand that wore the glove? Feeding fishies wiv its bleedin’ manicure – and here’s Solly, such a face on ’im that Luftie’s stopped filling Vicky with the piss-pan to laugh at him. Corbett ain’t laughing, tho’, Oh my sainted fucking aunt diddlin’ ’erself with a cruci-fucking-fix, he says by way of comfort – that being the way of it with him . . . Tenderly he untangles the lanyard from Feldman’s buttons and lifts the bins from around his neck. The section don’t speak as they pass the bins from hand to hand. Later, Stanley remembers amansamanferall . . . amansamanferall . . . and the whistling of the stretcher parties emerging from the wood. To begin with it is impossible to take it all in – probably just as well. The eyepieces are the viewfinder of a handheld stereoscope: it should therefore be possible to change the card, or remove them from his powder-stung eyes altogether to reveal the parlour at Waldemar Avenue, Gladstone’s plaster noggin, the Solar lamp on the table with its dangling prisms, the cottage piano and his sisters’ samplers – anything should be possible, not this: the figures elbow to elbow so closely are they packed, on their knees, praying maybe to the womanly breast of the hillside. The boys concertinaed in their khaki sacks at the end of this spiffing company sports day – will there be prizes? Fifty francs and a silver cup for the bull’s eye? The bins take Stanley’s bugged eyes probing into hollows, roving over spurs, and everywhere they go they discover more and more bodies – not hanging on the wire but reclining into it, so very dense are the coils those methodical Teutons have laid down. Amansamanferall . . . Amansamanferall . . . grates the dying Scotsman, Amansamanferall . . . Luftie, when it’s his turn with the bins, begins to weep, and Stanley says: They put this one on to take the pressure offa Frenchie down the line, but Frenchie – he has the right idea: when they ordered ’im back into the line ’e shot ’is own fucking officers – and Corbett says, Now, now . . . and there might have been some bother if the first of the stretcher parties hadn’t come along at that point, and a second lieutenant who was with them – and who seemed the very soul of decency – said that Fritz had very decently stopped firing so they could go and bring in the wounded – which is how Stanley comes to be tearing up a stretch of duckboard on to which he thinks they might be able to roll a tubby private of the Second Royal Welsh who’s taken a couple of rounds in the thigh – but no bones broken or arteries busted, so all things being well he’s a chance of making it if they get him back. A fighting chance if Feldman will only stop larking about – not that there is any joy to it, it’s more that the set-up of the Jerry trench has pushed him over the edge. Look at this, Lance! he cries. And this – and that! calling Stanley’s attention to the electrical wiring running from neat porcelain to neat porcelain along the trench wall. We know about it already, you daft bugger! Stanley cries. Don’t you remember the deep dugout? — The deep dugout, splendidly dry and with only the faintest odour of mouse droppings. Stanley had found a real china plate piled with slices of black bread and white onions, and set beside this a clear glass bottle – on the label a bunch of cherries lusty in the pulsing light still being generated by an unseen and thrumming generator. Heedless as yet of Feldman’s crack-up, Stanley had seated himself at the table and crammed down the coarse food with little sips of the cherry brandy . . . kleine Boche stands on me tongue wielding ’is Kleinflammenwerfer . . . Solly wouldn’t keep still, kept diving into adjoining burrows to rummage in the bedding. – Feather quilts! he cried. Pillows! and returned with a single-page newssheet he said he could read on account of German not being that different from the Yiddisher lingo, Yes, yes, it revealed to him – sweethearts under linden trees, that spanking-hot summer . . . freshly brewed lager-beer with cloves . . . snatches of these simple boys’ souls, who, from Bavaria and Franconia, had got themselves planted here in the soil that clung to the roses of Picardy . . . There were pistols and rifles still in the dugout – and plenty of their brand-new Stahlhelms, such had been the frenzy of their retreat. Stanley had not been interested in these, although he took a couple of their potato-mashers, the superiority of which . . . everyone knows. In the dugout he had felt a bowel-loosening apprehension – the dense, cool air pressing in on him – and when, despite the ceasefire, there came the soft crump! of a falling shell, fear infiltrated his mind . . . a dirty plume. He’d rolled a cigarette with a corner of the newssheet and some coal-black tobacco, then availed myself of the facilities that, outrageously, had been plumbed in, so that, rising from the shapely seat, he was able rejoice in the fly away, little brown bird as he carefully wiped his arse with more of the Gothic type, discovering it to be unexpectedly kind to his piles. — Up top Solly has come upon the Welshman – who screams as Stan kicks the board in under him. Come and give me a hand, you daft fucker! Stan cries, knowing there’s little point because Solly’s all the way over now, dog-faced, gnashing . . . paws a blur as he scampers this way and that along the trench, from traverse to traverse, climbing up on to the neatly carpentered fire step to yap about their craftsmanship: You can always rely on a German, he howls, to d-d-d-doo-doo-doo the b-b-best he c-c-can with the t-t-tools available. Stanley’s hands tic to his wire cutters and the grenades in his belt – in that instant he resolves to ditch
the Welshman and if necessary lay Solly out, if that’s what it’ll take to get him back . . . Too late! because Solly has mounted the fire step and pulls himself from arms to knees, gibbering upright, low-angled afternoon sunlight striking him together with twenty or so 7.92-millimetre rounds from a Maschinengewehr 08 that must have loitered behind in a reserve trench, its craftsmen resolved to bide their time and do the best they could with the tools available. Leisurely – Solly Feldman’s death, so very slow . . . While Stanley has never been one of those machine-gunners who enjoy comparing the attractions of the Vickers .303 with those of her kissing cousin, the enfilade that buzzes over the trench, then burrs back to capture Solly and hold him in its kinetic embrace, leads him to consider – even as his comrade’s arms windmill crazily – that Jerry’s may be the better weapon. See, see! how it clasps him to its leaden bosom, reluctant to let him fall, although there’s hardly anything left but a tattered red rag. In the stretched moments as Solomon Feldman flaps into extinction, Stanley dwells upon this: that never before in his interminable nineteen months of service at the Front has he witnessed the impact of machine-gun fire. His fingers clenched on the trigger, Vicky trembling in my grasp, spitting and gasping inches in front of my face – yet theirs was never an exclusive relation, there were always these others with whom they were joined by the bullets. Solomon Feldman has his Heimatschuss an’ ’e’s gone west. Pointless to think of getting the Welshman back now – Stanley has seen enough to know . . . his time approaches. Instead, he turns and legs it along the trench, hoping there’s just the one Maschinengewehr covering this section. Where the trench makes a sharp right-angle a sap runs back towards the British lines, and he takes this bend for home, potato-mashers bouncing on his hips – rifle butt one side, Colt the other, both goading my withers, I’m Rothschild’s pair, trotting down Brook Green Road and turning into the Broadway . . . He sees the well-crafted step that leads up into the bramble patch, he sees old Hammersmith Town Hall soberly clad in red sandstone, gas-jets atop fluted iron pillars burning either side of its stolid portico. He hears the first salvo of the resumed barrage quite some time after registering the shell’s scream, and so he dithers: is the noise more piercing in his right or his left ear? He twists in the sap, compelled to turn first up, back and to the left, then up, back and to the right – it’s pointless anyway, because as it homes in on him the rising Eeeeeeeeeee! bores into the absolute core of his brain spores glow dried-out dandelion head and he knows he would have to go over the top to evade the shell that stops precisely where his gaze locks . . . Umbrellas Re-covered and Repaired on the Premises, Umbrellas Re-covered in One Hour, 2/6, King Street opposite the Temperance Hotel . . . If only he had availed himself of this service, because when all was said and done you should never go out without one. Nevertheless, he acquiesces to this: that the shell one of ours will fall between him and Jerry’s Maxim — such dull matters are a mere flapdoodle – what’s significant is that Stanley can see inside the brass casing of the 50-pounder, make out not only the discrete layers of Trotyl, guncotton and tri-nitro-toluene but what put them there: the sprinkling, wadding and pounding of those yellow hands. He sees those hands also fritillaries fluttering above the dingy wooden bench, he hears the peevish whine of the lathe, the hissing contempt of the oxy-acetylene torch, the rheumatic complaint of the overhead hoist, and he hearkens to the lusty voices raised in song, Where are the girls of the Arsenal? Working night and day, Wearing the roses off their cheeks for precious little pay, Some style us canaries but we’re working the same as the lads across the sea, If it wasn’t for us, the munitions girls, where would the Empire be –? The arrested shell sings a hundred feet above the trench in a cloud of penny novelettes, and the turning of its fuse cap and detonator plug, the brazing of its smoothly seductive haunches – all the scores and hundreds of repetitive motions that led to its triumphantly short-lived embodiment are there, plain to his exophthalmic eye. And Stanley Death understands, even as the rest is over, and the angelic feet begin once more to pump the pedals, the perforations are engaged by the ebony pegs, and the pianola resumes its plummet Doo-d’doo, doo d’doo, doo-d’-dooo, doo-d’-dooooooooooooo . . . that upon impact all of its strings, hammers, levers, cogs and screws will blast across the shattered terrain in wave upon wave of tics, jerks, yawns, spasms, blinks, gasps, quivers, pursing, bobbing, pouts, chews, grindings, palsies, tremors and twitches, sending them dancing from mind to mind, so animating body after body to perform choreography that will stand in for civilisation unprompted, matinee upon matinee – evenings as well – a merry dance . . . However, this is all he thinks – the moment is over, the shell detonates, thrusting up an obscenely wobbling earthen breaker that curls over the sap – over Stanley, where he claws at its wall of sweet-smelling loam. Reddy-dark and then maroon-to-black, it pushes his eyes back into their sockets, it rushes silence beating into his eardrums, it packs around arms, legs, trunk, neck, head – hammering down cottony paralysis into every join and crevice – if, that is, these bits are between anything at all, for there is no feeling any more – none after that final and extreme myoclonic jerk: the arms flung backwards, the spine bowed by the shockwave. There is no information, no current, no resistance, no up or down or back-to-front – only this that worms through the mind, a thought that sucks upon its own tail even as it is reborn, disappearing into one hole, re-emerging from another, expressing only this nightmarishly symmetrical identity: I-am I-am I-am I-am, which is simultaneously expressed numerically, one-equals-one-equals-one-equals-one, over and over again, its maddening equivalence allowing for no purchase, nothing to be gripped upon, so that the I that am might be assisted to sit up – which is what Gracie does, and, although Audrey feels her friend’s arm behind her back, smells the broth, sees its floury steam sift through my hair and sees also her own top half, propped up now on a bolster, two cushions and a pillow, while above her tousled head hangs a dear little watercolour of a windmill backed by clouds that Gracie found in the bric-a-brac shop on Coldharbour Lane – still I am not in Flat G, 309 Clapham Road but remain in that other place, where, naked, she thrusts out her behind and kicks out her legs as she impiously struts the boards before an audience she can only dimly perceive, although – from the shape of its noses, the strength of its chins – she knows it to be composed entirely of Doctor Trevelyans who smile and with folded eyeglasses tap the backs of their copies of Married Love in time, as she sings over and over and over again, Don’t ’av any more, Missus Moore, Don’t ’av any more, Missus Moore, Don’t ’av any more, Missus Moore – a futilely contradictory ditty, because how can you avoid having more when your name is Moore, and therefore the very demand defeats itself, as there are more and more Moores the more this imprisoned part of Audrey descants, Don’t ’av any more, Missus Moore – more Moores and more Trevelyans as well, the rat-a-tat-tapping of their tortoiseshell spectacle frames on the book covers a hideous chaffering – if only she could get past this bulky womanish obstruction! On to: Too many double gins, Give the ladies double chins, Too many double gins, Give the ladies double chins – gins and chins proliferating now, chins doubling up as mouths yawn so more and more gins may be poured down, stray teeth in a magenta juniper haze, torn bodices . . . – No! Not there, on further: Our cemetery’s so small, There’ll be no room fer ’em all, Our cemetery’s so small there’ll be no room fer ’em – no! Not there either, so the bed of the lathe that’s me ratchets back to Don’t ’av any more, Missus Moore, while Gracie holds her around the shoulders, shouting it all down with the gentle entreaty, Can’t you at least take some of this broth, Aud’? There’s some brawn left inall if you’d fancy that – I’ll go an’ get it straightways . . . It has been two weeks since Audrey has lain in this swoon, two weeks during which Gracie has had to rouse her up for the lavatory and feeding. To Gracie’s untutored eye there is nothing mysterious about her friend’s affliction: illness is all around them in the long, low block of flats, it lingers in the dim stairwells, then either mounts the stai
rs to the three storeys above, or descends to the one below, where it slouches along the ill-lit passageways, a bad nurse bearing jugs full of microbes and bowls brimming with bacteria, who makes of this place a dying-in hospital. The building is only a couple of years old and there is still the foul sweat of distemper on the walls, and the nosey tickle of sawdust in the tiny angular bay windows. Illness is all around them – twitching the chintz back and opening the casement, Gracie hears Audrey mutter, Poor man they ’ung ’im, while from outside come the chants of urchins playing in the front yard: She open ve winder an’ in-flew-enza! She open ve winder an’ in-flew-enza! In the flat above them a returned Tommy has run a fever of a hundred and four for seven straight days. Audrey managed to whisper an address – Gracie took a precious sixpence and went to the office, where she painfully composed the telegram: miss death ill stop send help please stop, at a loss to know what to do with her five spare words. The doctor who finally comes from Kennington – paid for, Gracie assumes, by Audrey’s lover – speaks of this poor soul and many others. The isolation wards and fever hospitals are all full, he says, and, being a staunch progressive who believes in speaking the truth, whispers: the morgues and cemeteries also, I’ve been at Mortlake and seen bodies laid out in a potting shed . . . Our cemetery’s so small, There’ll be no room fer ’em all, Our cemetery’s so small there’ll be no –. He examines Audrey with enough care, exerting himself to lift her with an arm behind her shoulders so he may sound her with the cold collation of his stethoscope aspic shivery lies between my blancmanges, fish slice on my neck . . . dill tickles my nostrils . . . He is much taken by Gracie, and when she brings him a bowl of warm water to wash his hands in, he takes hers and, examining their backs, says, Oleum? She concedes as much with eyes downcast on the brown burn speckles. The doctor is not much more than thirty, very earnest and sandy, with a narrow skull and hazel eyes. When he tucks his stethoscope up inside his hat brim, it lies against his sparse hair black crêpe on a photograph frame. I’ve seen, he says, Thomasinas who’ve worked with tri-nitro-toluene, cordite and Trotyl, and who’re gravely ill now – how d’you fare? Gracie looks away to where her old overall dress, her jacket and her trousers hang on the hook behind the door, the stiffness of the material giving them . . . body. I miss . . . she is hesitant . . . t’be honest I miss the wages, sir, an’ the other girls. No work t’be ’ad juss now, no matter ’ow far you goes paddin’ the ’oof. An’ since they done turfed us straight out of the settlement ’ouse – rent ’ere’s eatin’ up our savings, an’ what with Ordree not workin’ . . . She falls silent, wondering if she should add that she begrudges her friend nothing – but it isn’t moral hygiene that interests the doctor. Headaches? he queries. Any, ah, hysterical seizures – fits? The ether, y’know, in the cordite – it’s been known to be productive of epilepsy. No paint or powder but he examines her face critically. It’s, she says, as you see, sir, I’ve only the jaundice to show fer me three years – an’ that’s fadin’. Gracie wants to ask about Audrey, whose head is cast down in the pillows, while her knees are Mother Brown! an unnatural posture she maintains as she murmurs, Dunavanymaw, dunavanymaw – and soon enough, Gracie knows, her friend will start to sob, she will keen and writhe, ravaged by grief. It is not, Lord knows, that there isn’t enough to sadden her – the loss of her younger brother, the estrangement from her family, and the near-total abandonment by fancy-pants Mister Cook, the swine . . . that’s as may be, there is still more grief in Audrey’s wasted frame than it can contain: a world of it. The doctor – whose name is Vowles – sighs. – We-ell . . . I’ve read a warning put out by the Medical Association concerning a strange sort of brain fever – strikes people down who’re in the finest of fettle, strikes ’em down in a trice. Your friend . . . well, her symptoms would seem to indicate that she does have this . . . this sleepy sickness, however, the malady is so, ah, curious that I cannot diagnose it with any certainty . . . He pauses – the cramped quarters are on the lower-ground floor, a dugout that forces its occupants to stare up at a pictorial space wherein the most abbreviated things have become . . . elongated. A telegram boy halts alongside the top panes of the snub bay window and bends to pull up his stocking – Doctor Vowles thinks of the skull in Holbein’s Ambassadors, its disturbing anamorphosis . . . I’ve seen two or three others who’re as difficult to bestir – who cannot do anything for themselves . . . The oppression of the half-buried room, the two ailing young women, his own exhaustion – it all bears down on him, and he steps to the window to breathe deeply. Gracie waits, her yellow hands twisting inside the pockets of her paler yellow apron. Vowles recovers: . . . and who, when they’re able to speak of it at all, report strange hallucinations and violent headaches, but then . . . the sickroom camphor and the stench of sweat-saturated sheets is as nauseating to him as Wilson’s claim that the war almost justified itself . . . I have another patient, a lady in Pimlico, who’s afflicted with the exact same unreasonable anxieties, these flushes and sweats, but who, far from languishing, can gain no repose at all – she’s been pacing and fretting for five days now, I’ve never seen the like: the strongest drugs make no impression on her, salts of salicylic won’t touch her fever, I greatly fear –. He stops, looks round, sees his Gladstone – acts upon this by crossing the room with two long strides, withdrawing a pad, taking a fountain pen from his breast pocket, scrawling upon a sheet, hunching up to tear it free and handing it to Gracie. He queries: Have you sufficient funds? not knowing what he will do if she doesn’t – for, while Cook cabled to him that he would accommodate Vowles’s bill, he said nothing of further subventions. — When he is gone, his boot heels ringing up the bare stairs to the front hall, Gracie reads the note to the chemist: Salicyclic prep. Asprin x 20 grns. Two weeks now and no sign of change: Audrey bellows, her knees fall down and her back bends . . . bends . . . the cushions and the pillow roll down under her back and she arches over them, her eyes all bloodshot sclera, their lids quivery. What is it that she sees, Gracie wonders, up there inside ’er own ’ead? Audrey arches still more, lifting her torso clear of the covers – her arms are flung back and her nails pick at the wallpaper, fingers scrabbling up to discover the picture frame, I-am I-am I-am . . . and then there is sensation – the answering pressure of fingers that make his fingers exist once more, and once they are, so are his wrists, his forearms, his elbows, all me benders . . . It is touch, Stanley thinks, the movement of touch that makes us be in time – for time had fled me also. Nisi agit non est . . . He thinks all this as first one arm, then the other, is freed from its interment in this citadel shaped so exactly like himself. Next there is further loosening of the hard-packed earth – it squeezes, then releases him, compelling a slithery second birth as the final backward dive he made when the shockwave hit still continues hours . . . days? later. Small clods, agitated, tickle away and his own face is exposed – whose other faces will he see, Fritzes’? Frenchies’? Our own? Will they be soldiers or stretcher-bearers? He strains for voices – there is only panting h-h-h-h-huh, thumping, and the falling away of the dug earth. Stanley calmly awaits the reddening-to-orange as daylight impresses his eyelids – it does not come. His rescuers must have hollowed out a cavity beneath his bent back because all at once he tumbles painfully on to the till, sees only the fencing of erratic wands – electric torch beams that magic up a dirty leg, a dirtier shirt-tail. His emergence is haled in various tongues: Veranstalten Sie ihn! Tirez-le libre! C’mon now, men –! Then he is being dragged bodily along a Russian sap that descends steadily down, its chalky walls beautifully ridged by the mattock strokes that hacked it out – here and there sardine tin lamps glimmer in little niches. Stunned by joy in living at all, to begin with Stanley is inured to scrape and dunt – soon enough, though, he bridles, legs bicycle, grip, propel him standing . . . The rescue party halts. Stanley’s bare head scrapes against the tunnel roof – his steel helmet has gone. He reaches for the lanyard – the Colt is lost as well, webbing, ammo pouches, belt, potato-mashers, haversack . . . the
entire battle order gone. His rescuers’ breathing rasps harsh, flutters bully beef on his face. Wh-what waar woo? he numbles. A lithening potht? From far overhead the noise of the barrage declines into innocence, a carpet beaten on a clothesline. One of the rescuers – whose wide face, combed yellow in the lamplight, Stanley is surprised to see thickly carpeted by beard – reaches out to take the insignia on Stanley’s collar between his blackened nails. Death, Lance-Corporal, 32nd Machine-Gun Company, 5665, Stanley says – he cannot stand to attention but attempts a salute that . . . flops. The bearded man laughs, and it is then Stanley notices that he, like the others, is naked apart from a shirt – his isn’t a greyback but a fancy cambric thing more like a woman’s blouse, with pleats on the bodice, puffed sleeves and a patterning of embroidered flowers planted in the dirt. The bearded man laughs again and, leaving go Stanley’s miniature crossed Vickerses, takes the floppy hand gently in his, tugging it down so that they stand there in the subterranean passage holding hands . . . like kids. Tush, the bearded man says softly, there’s no call for sooch talk down ’ere, chappie. He has long North Country vowels and is oddly courteous. You moost’ve ’ad a ’elluv a shock from that there blast – lookie-thar, yer kecks’re all blow t’bits. Stanley peers down into the fawnlight – it’s true, his trousers are in tatters, his drawers as well. His boots have deserted me and his tunic is in filthy ribbons. Even set beside this strange crew he’s a sorry ragamuffin. The bearded man resumes, Ahm called Michael and this ’ere – he indicates a slim, curly-haired figure with a fleecy beard and round, wire-rimmed spectacles – is Winfried, boot we call ’im, Winnie fer convenience. Thass Jean-François – a sallow-faced giant of man, bowed under the weight of his heavy, swallowtail moustaches – boot Johnnie t’uz, an’ this wun ’ere is Mohan. The Hindoo is clean-shaven in comparison with his mates, with only a thin braiding of black hairs on his full brown cheeks. Nah then, says Michael, having effected these peculiar introductions, try again t’givuz yer ’andle. Stanley says, It’s Stan, my name is Stan. Michael squeezes his wrist. Good, he says, you’re getting the ’ang of it beauty, Stan. Without relinquishing his grip, Michael draws Stanley on behind him. Mind yer ’ead, he says, it’s no better fer a lanky wun doon ’ere than oop top –. Laughing, he corrects himself: Savin’ that ’ere the worst azall ’appen is yer brains being bashed rather than blown t’smithereens. The gradient steepens and steepens, the tunnel doubles-back on itself and back again as it corkscrews into the earth, around corners worn smooth by the rubbing of shoulders . . . It’s no Russian sap, Stanley realises: not this deep – and these men are no black hand gang sent out to do the business before the big push, nor sappers either – for where’s their tackle? Curiouser and curiouser . . . The party shuffles by a narrow gallery lit by electric bulbs strung from a wire in the bright light of which casualties are being treated. Stanley hangs back to see field dressings torn apart, the bandage tossed aside, the ampoule of iodine broken into the wound – he sees morphia injected into tallowy flesh. We don’t keep ’em, Michael explains. Leastways, not oonless it’s a scratch. We taykem back oop, lissen fer the ebbin’ an’ flowin’ uvvit, an’ when we joodge it right nibble oor way through t’oonderbits inta a shell crater or a trench an’ leave ’em there fer t’oopsiders t’find. Stanley has absolutely no idea what Michael is talking about – although he grasps that the Northerner knows this and speaks only as he does to calm him, as he might have done a restive horse spooked by the cacophony of war. The long shaft terminates in a chalky grotto some twenty feet across, its roof high enough to allow all of them – Stanley and Jean-François included – to stand erect. Oor deepest point in this partuv t’line, Michael says, and Winfried plays his torch beam over the galvanised iron walls seeped-upon brown, writing into legibility the familiar mock street signs. Michael points to one that reads Unter den Linden and says, Over-yonder to the Jerries . . . then to the Champs-Élysées, saying, South-west to the Frenchies . . . and finally to the Tottenham Court Road: An’ back there to the British lines, see, we moost know oor way round better than t’belligerents – fer them it’s joost back an’ forth a few paces, fer uz it’s scootlin’ all abaht. Stanley revolves and in this murky-go-round sees the faint rings cast by the torchlight travelling along these man-made gullets like a . . . sort of pulse, I s’pose you’d say. Michael says, Now, laddie, Ah reckon yoove earned yer tommy, cummere, and, flinging an arm around the taller man’s shoulders, he encourages him under a low lintel, through hangings of sackcloth and canvas, to where there’s a rich, homely glow of firelight and a Catholic blaze of candles. The cool mustiness of the tunnel is replaced by fat frying – the saliva gushes into Stanley’s dry mouth. Men are packed into the well-lit chamber: Britons of all shapes, sizes, classes – Germans and French ditto, some plucky little Belgians, a scattering of coolies, several more Hindoos, also Negroes from the colonies – many are altogether naked, others wear bits and pieces of military-issue kit, others still oddments of civilian clothing, including ladies’ walking cloaks, boudoir bonnets and even – adapted with blade and twine – the occasional corset. The men lounge on blanket-covered divans hewn from the sides of the burrow – they all seem to be simultaneously smoking pipes, mopping greasy plates with hunks of black bread and reading. The studied silence of their concentration is undisturbed by the arrival of Michael’s party, the members of which distribute themselves here, there – wherever we can . . . mingling not with laughing comrades. Stanley finds himself wedged between a hook-nosed Levantine and a flat-faced Finn, at his feet lies an etiolated and languid figure, not a stitch on ’im, with the most singularly sticking-out ears, who absent-mindedly rearranges his genitals, pulling the pinched sac of his scrotum from between hairless thighs, then sets down his Everyman edition of Pater’s Appreciations and calls over to the big blackamoor who’s cooking on a pot-bellied iron stove, I say, spear me another banger or two, will you, ol’ man? The blackamoor calls back, Two zeppelins anna cloud cummin’ up! And in due course the plate does come, hand to hand, on it two sausages and a lump of mashed potato. To Stanley the forceful impression of a domesticity long cultivated is unutterably sad: Where is dopey Olive, chirpy Vi? We sit no more at the familiar table of home . . . He hunches over, weeping not because of the pain from his strained back or bruised arms and legs, but unashamedly as his sensibility quickens. — The barrage, so muted now it resounds only as memories of summer rainfall on the roof of a bandstand . . . Michael squeezes in beside Stan, gloves his hands with his own thickly callused ones and says, Y’know biggest problem we ’av is wi t’smoke. See, we can mekk t’cunningest of chimbleys – he points to where a contrivance of soldered tin snakes up from the stove’s flue to wander across the uneven roof of the burrow – boot we still ass t’vent it soomwhere. Means we can only ’av cooking an’ ’eating by night . . . They’ve no part in the labour of the day-time . . . Not so bad now, but coom winter it gets right parky down ’ere. The naked officer at their feet drawls up from his resumed Pater, Yaas, deuced fucking cold. The newcomers have all found perches, and now their food comes – the plates are all in use, so they are furnished with platters fashioned from the lids of ammo boxes and other scrap. Nestling in his lap, scorching his thighs, Stanley’s platter supports greenish gravy, a potato splodge . . . England’s foam, a single sausage that oozes grubbily from its split charcoal skin and some slices of what looks . . . like polony. A tin mug of tea is pressed into his free hand – he takes a sip strong, sweet . . . That’s good, he says, and, apart from name, rank, number, these are the first words he has spoken since his rescue. A skinny Irishman, naked except for a purple feather boa, says, Ah, yes, when Mboya makes tay, he makes tay . . . Stanley picks up the sausage and reveals the letters marmal on his makeshift plate – marmal, what might that mean? Surely it can only be marmalade missing its ADE? Why, then, do all these other possibilities press in on her claiming her aching attention: MARMALOUS DISPLAY OF RAGTIME FLYING, MARMALARCHING THROUGH PLUCKY BELGIUM A VICTORY REVUE, AT THE STEPNEY PARAGON
THE JAILBIRDS AND THEIR BLACK MARMARIA – this last cannot be true, for there would be no room for it on the hoarding, which is only a board covering one of the hotel’s windows. The Alexandra is up for sale, a fact attested to by the estate agents’ names – Knight, Frank & Rutley – on another slab. It is they, she thinks, who will endure – and quite possibly longer than the buildings they sell, which seems preposterous, looking up at the Mameluke bulk of the establishment: its four storeys of windows – each one shuttered and wrought about with iron, its Saracen’s helmet dome covered in scales of lead flashing and surmounted by a coronet of iron railings. Tarrying, she thinks, that’s what I am: tarrying . . . and so detaches her eye from the hoarding and its mysterious MARMAL, its timelessness of new poster peeling away from old bill booming Rowntree’s Elect Cocoa, to take in the smaller Saracen’s helmet capping the stairs down into the Underground station — then, and only then, does Audrey remember whence I came. Standing in the ill-lit culvert with the thunderbolt plunging towards her, trying desperately to judge where it might fall, she had become so agitated that she reeled away from the parapet edge to cower under the tiled curve of the parados, wanting to scream over the roar at all the other typewriters, clerks and shop girls that this’ll be a direct hit! Boarding the train automatically, grateful only that it had not exploded, it was not until the second stop that she realised it was going the wrong way – not towards Old Street and the sooty tramp down through weavers’ alleys to the Bishopsgate garret, but south. At Clapham Common, tormented by the weight of the earth above her head – or in it, together with gasbags and pisspipes – she unlatched the carriage door, treadmilled up the escalator so fast and emerged yawning uncontrollably into windy daylight and the mawkish cries of two piker heather sellers, who, flanking the station entrance, bullied all comers and goers with their vicious little sprigs. — Surfaced to this dilemma: should she attempt to fasten the Ince’s Ladies Walking Umbrella that had been a gift from Mister Thomas when she resumed her position at the firm – the ribs and struts of which flexed, unsettlingly alive, as the breeze tugged at their glacé silk webbing? She could not, she felt, rely on the liveliness of her fingers to pull the cloth band around and manoeuvre its button through the wiry eyelet – this thimble drill is beyond me. The alternative – to open the umbrella and rest its post casually against her shoulder – was a possibility that appeared equally remote. Her fingers were far off – her hands farther still and missing in action. Screws of newspaper and heather flowers shimmied across the pavement, starlings blew backwards overhead – Audrey could not assess the power of the wind, nor comprehend how it was that it managed to come first from this quarter, then from that, whistling through her unceasingly, fluting in her mouth, her nostrils, her ears, her vagina. — Waking that very morning, Audrey found the world was barred to me: she could hear Gracie already up and moving about, the rap! as she knocked the old leaves from the slops basin, the compelling raaaasp as she unscrewed the caddy. Audrey had felt a dreadful apprehension – something was about to happen, a momentous – no, calamitous event . . . Two pimples on her top lip, big, beneath her tentative tongue. This was not the revolution – the two hundred thousand strikers rising up and following the Spartacus League’s example – but an oppressive alteration to the most fundamental terms of her being: the way she sees and breathes, moves and dreams. She clutched at the sidebars of the bedstead, iron smarting her twisting hands, she arched backwards into the watercolour from the bric-a-brac shop and stood there beneath the windmill’s sails and they . . . turned. She moaned and Gracie came to her, her cool touch breaking the enchantment of Audrey’s febrile swoon. She held the cup to Audrey’s lips . . . strong, sweet . . . That’s good, she said. Gracie helped her to rise and dress. – Returned to Ince’s only three weeks since and already the tedium of the endeavour bore down on Audrey without mercy: Appleby’s sententiousness – which, before the war, if not exactly agreeable, could still be endured – was now insupportable. The lost boys were still rotting in the mud – their comrades, having chased Jerry back to his own corner, were a rash of khaki on the bare autumnal earth . . . Appleby’s mean-spirited carping and his harping upon the traditions of the firm – the flitch of his neck with its piggish bristles . . . why isn’t he dead? He had installed a capacious umbrella stand while she was at the Arsenal – his sole effort to be up to date, and he promoted this to her relentlessly – for the messenger boys had already addenuff – pulling out first one, then another model, opening an original Paragon so she might admire its sturdy yet resilient baleen ribs – disgusting, this whale’s mouth opening and closing again: a leviathan feeding on the rotten core of the City, thrashin’ about atop its stinking dust heap of high and low finance. Appleby took out a prototype lopsided umbrella, its post set obliquely so that when held at an angle it would still provide total coverage. As he did a crotchety turn about the attic, bowing beneath the trusses, Audrey stared very fixedly at the anciently adzed beam that ran above her brand-new Underwood – only her eyes could inch along, tapping in the small nicks and notches, then return and inch along again, remaking the small nicks and notches . . . The rest of her was unbearably heavy, so heavy . . . she knew not why the floor did not give way under her, sending her tumbling down to lie among the stacked boxes in the storeroom of the Treadwell Boot Company Makes Life’s Walk Easier . . . Gracie had said to her, I fink you better stop ’ome, but Audrey was determined: We cannot afford it. Appleby withdrew more prototypes – an umbrella with a mica panel in its cover, through which a small square of the soused world might be glimpsed. The Paragon Optimus with its patented Automaton frame – pull a lever and the tightly wound silken bundle telescoped out. Compact, Appleby observed, untangling the ribs one by one, but sadly inefficient. He next erected the square umbrella and, setting it on the floor, expanded on its architectural qualities, its fittingness for the modern city, being as it was only a smaller and more portable example of the tiled roof. Then there were various umbrellas equipped with drip protectors – spongy guttering that edged the cover, and that connected to a drainpipe running down the post, capillary action drawing up, then squirting out, the water . . . which EVERY LADY SHOULD KNOW, the compressed towels being only 2? inches long and available in tiny silver packets that could be slotted into Southall’s Protective Apron and then fired! Because it was blood, blood . . . all about blood. — The previous week Audrey had languished, too lethargic to attend the memorial service held for the munitionettes at St Paul’s – and since then the malaise had come upon her relentlessly, in mounting heavy, earthy waves, until this morning she had feared she might never dig myself out from under it. Now, in Clapham High Street, her eyes scoot along the oriental roofline to a seraglio of bakers, where plump and eunuch loaves are squeezed and rubbed by houris in mob caps. In the midst of her accelerated cerebration Audrey catches hold of this: it is not the Ladies Walking Umbrella that cannot be furled, strapped and closed – it is me, I’ve got the wind up me. It is Audrey’s arms that, beyond her control, fly up and away, struts jerkily unfolding from ribs, then bending back on themselves, so that the riveted pivots bend and pop – her skirts blow up, and, caught by the strengthening wind, the canopy of cloth drags her backwards, her stockings are half unrolled on her stiff posts, her handles in their worn leather boots rattle across a cellar grating. Through the mica panel in her skirts she sees a jeweller’s with its display of NOTED LUCKY WEDDING RINGS – then, caught in her coat buttons, the cloth begins to rip – she thuds into the roadway and is wrenched this way and that across it, mercifully avoiding the bow of a tram, a gig, a grocer’s boy on a tricycle . . . Audrey feels the jumbling of her skeletal limbs as she is blown over-rowley past the Temperance Fountain and towards the chestnuts screening the railings of Holy Trinity — through the eye of this whirligig, the woman-contrivance receives this reminiscence: comin’ up ’ere with Mary Jane one Christmas to see Gus Elen an’ ’is old woman ’anding out gifts from their spankin’ new motor car. Not that Audrey’s mother counte
d on getting one, it was the gaiety of it all she craved: the band playing marches on the bandstand dressed with holly and ivy, a paper cone of sweetly greasy hot nuts. Mary Jane, out on the grassy plain streaked with melting and dirtied snow, the ice wind parting around her bombazine prow, an expression of the profoundest concentration on her face, the hint of steam an’ old cabbage water as she takes a stance . . . Only now, spiralling to pieces, her own skirts lifted to show all I’ve got, does Audrey realise what her mother was doing, She never got inter the wayuv bloomers . . . another privy thing vouchsafed to her daughter. — That is that: the umbrella is turned right inside out. It lies in the grass by the railings, a mess of buckled steel rods and shredded silk – a redundant thing no longer capable of any effort, war or otherwise. And so it remains there, a thing taken up only to be forgotten for a long while I have expected you to come and call on me. Adeline pauses on a half-landing – situation and pose, both, Audrey imagines, have been contrived for effect. She had been kept waiting by the mistress of Norr House – the housekeeper, treating her dismissively, had placed Audrey on an oakenly uncomfortable chair in the hall, the strong suggestion being that she should stay put. As soon as the woman had fussed off, Audrey got up and wandered about, chafing the piercing tingle of her chilblains and poking into a strangely sparse drawing room, where there was a lustre of polish – the smooth secretion of all those workers’ rubbings – that shone from wood, wood, more wood. There was a dying log fire, and above its mantelpiece a tapestry woven with the figure of a medieval damsel armed with a spindle – a child’s board game was set out on a large, low settle. Going forward, Audrey saw printed the legend Willie’s Walk to Grandmamma. Players’ coloured counters were scattered along the trail, winding across the linen-backed paper, and a teetotum lay keeled over beside a pictorial ravine. Audrey wondered: Was Adeline’s little boy called Willie? She had never asked Stan, and he – alive to his older sister’s disapproval – had never ventured anything concerning Missus Cameron’s domestic circumstances. It had been a long, cold tramp from Carshalton Station – Audrey thought about five miles. She did not mind, though – it would have been self-murder to have asked in her note to Adeline that she be met. Besides, Audrey needed all the fresh air she could get on her half-days away from the Danger Buildings – simply to be rid of the mustard smell, the burnt-garlic reek, the ground horseradishes . . . Not that these were any more than approximations: the odour of the Buildings was indefinable, you had to be there — not here, where paper flowers tickle your nose and where Adeline is: raised up on the fresh white beech of her stair, her hemline high enough to show plenty of fresh white silk stocking, and her neckline low enough to reveal the whiteness of her bosom. Between these whitenesses there floats a Japanese kimono, its pattern of heavy blue and magenta lotus flowers nodding her head . . . At least she has the decency not to affect mourning – the only black thing hung about Adeline is the velvet ribbon – dévoré? – criss-crossing into the beaver’s tail of dark hair that rests upon her too-wan neck. She resumes her descent and her speech: I–I was unsure about contacting you, Miss De’Ath . . . In truth, I didn’t know precisely where to find you . . . Audrey supposes another might locate in Adeline’s hesitancy the sincerity she has precisely placed there – however, Audrey is not to be seduced. Death, she says plainly, as Adeline is led across the hall by her own outstretched hand. Death, she says again, rising from the absurd chair. Free from personal vanity as she tries to be, Audrey cannot help seeing herself in the kohl-edged cameo of Adeline’s eyes, floating there . . . Nobody’s dream, her grey alpaca skirt’s brush braid adjusted several times over, the dyed straw of her hat retouched with a sixpenny bottle from Woolworth’s, the faded raptures and plushette roses on her jacket collar crushed by the rain, her boots oft-mended on a Sunday – the only religious rite ever observed in the Death household. To forestall any pity, to compel this moneyed sensualist’s attention to the true nature of things, Audrey strips off her glove so that they meet skin to skin, chipped nails sliding past manicured ones. The back of Audrey’s hand is uppermost, a freckled and oleum-pitted garnet in the fine lady’s clasp. Adeline’s palm is passionately hot, and beneath the brittle pad of her thumb Audrey detects a strong and rapid pulse. Ah, yes, Death, says Adeline. I knew, of course, that Stanley had enlisted under that name. Audrey, wishing within the confines of manners to be without pity, says, It is our name – when I went for factory work it was the name I had to give. She requires that this coldness between them be retained – that the chatelaine of Norr’s class position be sharply defined. Adeline frustrates this by refusing to let go of Audrey’s hand, drawing her instead towards another door off the hall, then through this into a cosy chamber – the walls brightly papered, many-branched candelabras set either end of a mantelpiece, below which honeycombs incandesce . . . Pine cones, Adeline says, a silly affectation, I daresay, but I collect them every year to burn – the candlelight is also perhaps an affectation, but I find it more aesthetical than the electric, besides, we think it incumbent on us to save fuel oil for . . . she falters . . . for the effort, and so do not have the generator except when people are down at the weekend. Adeline has manoeuvred them on to a small settee, where they are perfectly snug and still linked – she must have rung the bell because a very young girl enters, not in uniform but in a simple blue cotton frock gathered at her waist, and with her ash-blonde hair loose about her shoulders. Another affectation? Audrey says tartly once Adeline has given an order for tea, tea cakes and some of that fruit cake if Cook has any left? Yes, I suppose it is one, she replies easily, but I don’t see why they should have to be in black at all times. I give them an allowance – a generous one I believe – and they’re at liberty to get such clothes as are suitable. My own dressmaker will run them something up – like that, and almost at no profit to herself. Of course, Adeline sighs, at weekends it needs to be different – my husband takes the conventional view on staff. Audrey is unimpressed by Marie Antoinette playing with her domestics – more so by her casualness in speaking of the cuckold. She would like to look down on Adeline – her hostess has forestalled this by hanging on to me: they remain intimate in the complexity of their bones, the stretched coverings of their skins’ overlay.