by Adam Thorpe
Because, I have to remind you I’m afraid, she will already be a phantom when he thinks of her in ten years’ time. A phantom with grey eyes who didn’t know she was going to be a phantom in ten years’ time. Actually, I’m very afraid to say, in almost exactly five years’ time. Zelda’s saying that’s ruined it, it’s like you said about your father reading the last page of your books out loud, there’s no suspense, it’s stupid. I say, hey, I didn’t say how she was going to die. Zelda’s upset, she thinks I’m morbid. Listen, O golden-toothed one, I cannot think of my great-aunt who I am also in love with as anything other than a phantom. It’s weird. But you know why? Because I have the date of her death, and it was much too early, and I might have met her if she’d lived as long as her mother, or not even as long as that, and then after her death I’d maybe still think of her in a slightly morbid way because I’d know and she wouldn’t when and how she died but I didn’t meet her and she’s always beautiful and grey-eyed and sad even when she’s happy because to me she’s a phantom and I want you to feel that, too.
Zelda says I talk too much about myself. Nobody’s interested in you and your crazy feelings, she says. Her tongue is worse than her keisaku stick. I am not an interesting person. Oi, wotcha mate, get my drift? We’re talking about complicated things. Agatha’s just told Uncle Kenneth about William. We missed it. It wasn’t important. It was actually really banal. It was sort of breathless and banal. The dust-cart’s gone. If we’d been looking out of the window we’d have seen a chinless guy in round spectacles watching the iron grille of the stinky drains being put back. This guy is going to father a girl who’s going to bring forth a guy who keeps the chinlessness thing going and who at the age of nineteen will be sitting on this beautiful palm-waving surfy island with two hundred other guys and they’ll all have their hands over their eyes and there’ll be this light so bright it makes it through the hands into their eyes and when they open their eyes there’ll be this great thunder and incredibly beautiful rising cloud rising in slow motion up and up and up right in front of them and about two days later their skin’ll start peeling off and they’ll start suffering and dying over years and years and they’ll say that the day the Shadow fell was August whatever 1958 – and tough luck ’cos even after my documentary (Death on Christmas Island, 1978) Her Majesty’s Wankers refuse to take the rap for GBH and murder. I mean, it’s not even in the Encyclopedia Britannica, it just goes on about phosphate mining and stuff, it’s like they’re all ashamed or something. Zelda’s impressed. Hey, it was in my furrowed brow phase. The budget was so small we didn’t make it out there, it was all archive and interviews, it was screened at midnight or something, it wasn’t even a fully-grown turkey. Zelda’s impressed above all by my modesty. Shucks, thanks. My history of failures impresses someone. There’s something Zen about my successes: they empty the mind just like that.
The chinless guy’s gone. I didn’t mention this but I think I ought to: his Christmas Island thing grandson will father a girl who’ll bring forth a guy who’ll father a guy who’ll father twin girls who’ll bring forth, about halfway through this spanking new millennium, nothing but mutants. I’m projecting ahead. Zelda says stop inventing. I’m not inventing, it’s statistically certain, hurts and poisons are laid down in the genes, they wait there and then when you think you’re in the clear they shamble up and say hi, stranger. Remember Christmas Island, ’58? Remember Hiroshima? Remember that stuff they put on the wheat for the aphids and on the backs of cows for the warble fly? Remember that tricky sector on the No. 3 redoubt at Le Transloy that got soaked with mustard? You don’t? You think the twentieth century was buried with the twentieth century? You think Shadows fall once only and only once for about ten minutes or something? You think you got away with it? You think massacres and violations and stupid oafs don’t have a half-life about the same as Caesium 3 or something? You think Tarkovsky’s Stalker wasn’t projecting ahead? You think you can go visit the Ukraine without hitting the Zone? You think the Zone isn’t going to be there in 25,000 years time? You don’t think Tarkovsky was a genius? You don’t think I’m a fraud? You don’t believe in phantoms with silk gloves up to their elbows? You think it’s pleasant being thrashed with a keisaku stick by the woman you love in a library with the best air-conditioning system in Texas? You think we ought to change the reel? You think we ought to put ice on the top of the projector? You think we ought to have some action?
You crazy or supp’n?
THERE’S A STEAM train coming right for you.
So you’re not screaming and running hell for leather out?
Say, how sophisticated.
I hope you’re keeping awake. I hope the twenty-first century hasn’t started off with a power-cut. I hope the Rickmansworth Liberation Army hasn’t had a go at the building because they’re way out of date. I’m projecting. I’m burying the action in a whole load of junk. Zelda says it’s like peering through cigarrette smoke. Cigarete has only one r, she says. One r, two ts. It’s my weak spot, I reply. I can’t kick the habit. I’ve had hypnosis for it. I wiped out my spellcheck because I ran out of room. I’m over-confident. I ask her to spell iridescent, exaggeration, and millenary. She passes. Shucks.
Anyway, it’s not cigarette smoke. It’s – begins with ph, ends in ms. I’ve overplayed that one. There’s no longer a chill.
Uncle Kenneth is trembling all over. Minutely, but not quite imperceptibly. He is sitting in the over-padded sofa by the Chinese lamp and is knocking the tassels on the shade with his finger. This is unfortunate, because it really gets to memsahib if these tassels are not completely straight. But Uncle Kenneth is stressed and when he’s stressed he has to fiddle with something in the world, something out there, generally the nearest fiddleable thing. The tassels are way out of line now. Some of them are kind of stuck up on the curvy silk of the shade and one of them is actually loose, it’s dangling, he’s broken an object. It is one of the most unoriginal and literal phrases of Mrs Trevelyan but I have to repeat it at this juncture: Uncle Kenneth is a bull in a china shop. He has large elbows and knees. The house has more china in it than a china shop. He has broken three pretty good plates and a fancy piece of delft in the last few years. That’s worse than any of the domestics, who aren’t doing too badly either. Lily is second at one Meissen Bruhlsches Allerei-Dessin porcelain saucer dated 1758, one squat terracotta jug of purely sentimental value and a salt-glaze stoneware flower vase with blood-red blisters said to have been plucked from the Great Fire of London but it wasn’t, it was a crappy firing. George (he’s the manservant/butler, he’ll be shambling into view in a minute – appreciate this minute because he is Not Very Nice and looks nothing like Anthony Hopkins let alone Anthony Perkins) is third with one deliberately smashed Sèvres flambé-glaze coffee pot and a Schwarzlot faience dish with hunting dogs sniffing at tousled lovers in foreground which Mr Trevelyan particularly liked to point out to guests. George is way out first if you take value into consideration. Dorothy has broken one crappy milk-jug in thirty-four years. There was one mentally defective maidservant (I mean, literally challenged, OK?) who tipped over a tray with nine long-stemmed peachblow champagne glasses with milk-white linings and violet rims and eight shattered and she screamed and screamed until she was hit by George, twice.
I wonder what happened to her. I don’t suppose anything nice.
Agatha is standing directly in front of her uncle. She wants him to say something. She wants him to take over. She wants him to guard William and herself from the cold winds, from scandal, from the end of the old world. But he’s trembling, she can see it, he’s buckling, there’s a shadow across him, she’ll have to cope on her own. We must take matters in hand, says Uncle Kenneth. Should we tell anyone? says Agatha. She’s already said this three times. We must indeed take matters in hand, Uncle Kenneth repeats. They’re on a kind of loop which is going nowhere. We must get to the station, oh dear, it’s all so beastly, says Agatha. Most beastly of all for the poor boy, says Uncle Kenneth. Ve
ry beastly, says Agatha. I cannot imagine what he might have done. Should we tell anyone? We must therefore take matters in hand, says Uncle Kenneth. The tassels are a mess. He stares at them. Then he grips the stem of the table lamp and shakes it. The little silken tassels jig about and come to rest, miraculously, in order. Such things please me, murmurs Uncle Kenneth. Dorothy, says Agatha. We could tell Dorothy. Dorothy would know what to do. I know what to do, says Uncle Kenneth. He feels he is not matching the situation. He feels the situation coming at him from various angles and perforating him in various places and he feels this Shadow across him. Boys have been expelled before, he says. Ssssh, hisses Agatha. It’s true that Uncle Kenneth’s voice booms. The house has ears all over. It has a dumb waiter in the dining-room and frequently a less dumb waiter at the bottom, catching the booms, leering, saving it up. A glimpse of George, a weeny preview. Uncle Kenneth rubs his hands. A wretched business, he says, a wretched business. He thinks he’s sounding like a novel. He wonders what the term depravity might include. He sees red plush curtains and painted ladies but knows it must be to do with boys, with boys’ bottoms, which for some reason are in a row bent over while someone is saying depravity in a horrible manner so that the cruel lips dribble and fart. He wishes he hadn’t brought over the zoetrope with its nude fellow. It was to cheer Agatha up. Damned difficult to put the lid on, he says. He’s quite tubercular, says Agatha in a jaunty way. Uncle Kenneth knows William is quite tubercular, that his lungs are quite scarred, that his wheeze is quite pronounced at times and that his sputum has been quite yellow on occasions. But he still says, ah, yes, he is indeed. Because he quite sees what Agatha is getting at, oh yes. He always does. They comprehend each other, each other’s drift, they practically don’t need to talk, I wish I had someone I felt like this with, I wish I didn’t need to verbalise so much, I wish I was more like me mum, Moira. Ah yes, he repeats, nodding, he is indeed quite tubercular, and has been sent home on several occasions in the past, I think. Once, says Agatha. But once is enough, says Uncle Kenneth. They are sending a letter, we’ll have to intercept it, says Agatha. It’ll be our secret, whispers Uncle Kenneth. Supposing, whispers Agatha, leaning towards her uncle slightly, he really has done something quite frightful? Uncle Kenneth feels the gelatinous presence of unimaginable frightfulness briefly bubble over the rug at his feet. He has not done, he replies. He has merely shown himself to be too much Willo and too little Randle. Have faith in your brother. Uncle Kenneth is not quite sure that Willo has not indeed committed bestial acts of some unimaginably depraved kind because anyone is capable of anything, however unlikely, it’s a rule of life, it’s the Shadow. He stands up. He places his hands on his niece’s thin shoulders. Let us not sit in judgement, he murmurs, but in honourable love. I have to say that this is not typical Uncle Kenneth. He’s speaking like this partly because the play he saw last night is still running round in his head and partly because he is rising to the occasion despite being Uncle Kenneth the unkempt windbag. He clears his throat because the line didn’t come out quite clearly enough, he’s nervous, he’s vaguely frightened of his brother and his sister-in-law and beyond them the dark lump of Randle College scowling as only fear can make dark lumps scowl.
He drops his hands and lets them writhe around together. I suppose we ought to meet the train, my dear. He suddenly feels that the whole enterprise is ridiculous. It is a mountain of immense proportions, he thinks. It is a vessel full of holes and they will be sunk before the harbour exit. But he cannot deliver his nephew to the hands of the mob, the judges, the stony-hearted dreadfulness of society’s judgement. (OK, that play again. It was a mediocre play.) Agatha is going on about Dorothy again. She’s probably sensing his faint-heartedness. There must be a key, a clever ruse, a devilishly clever wheeze which will let them all off the hook and William to catch his butterflies in peace and plenty. William won’t tell us, I don’t suppose, Agatha murmurs, we’ll have to get in touch with Giles; Giles will telephone us I’m sure, he’ll tell us exactly what has happened. Is that important, my dear? I don’t know, actually. Agatha’s striding up and down the room, it’s really lucky she didn’t put her hobble skirt on today, lucky for the skirt I mean, she’s sort of muttering to herself so that Uncle Kenneth has to raise his voice a little when she comes near. Supposing we told your mother and father— Oh, we can’t! Why not, my dear? Agatha fingers her collar, paces up and down, up and down. Because it would be too awful, Uncle. They would do something awful like cut him off, or send him to Aunt Constance in Calcutta, or to some even worse school. Mightn’t they forgive him? They will make such a ballyhoo, Uncle, they’re like that. I would defend him and get cut too, probably. We would all disintegrate.
Zelda says, hey, you know that’s the longest run they’ve had without you poking your nose in? I say, hey, that’s the longest run they’ve had because they are making the action so fast the sound guy almost knocked over the standard lamp with his mike boom. It’s a directional mike he’s using. It was hell for him. They were only just touching the levels. Every time my great-aunt went through a cable he got fuzz. He says can’t I do something about the fat guy’s whistle? I say Uncle Kenneth’s not made to suit your equipment, Bosey – if you don’t like it you can mix it out but keep the master for me, OK? I like my relatives untampered with. He says it’s the worst space he’s ever had to work in. I say watch that fucking creamware ewer, Bosey, its cerulean tint is unique. He’s a dark lump, he’s scowling, when a Hupmobile 12/14 changed to top second the other side of the street his needles hit red. And I’ve got to work with these guys, because they’re legends, legends in their own time.
George. I have to bring in George. I have to let him be picked up by this craaazy process. I have to pick him up off the scenery and turn him into wafers of celluloid and shoot him back out again so he’s a giant making gel of our eyeballs as we angle for the last itzy-bitzy crumb of honey-coated popcorn in a bag that is pure white noise. As a matter of fact, the idea of George being bigger than he is is not a nice one. The idea that some shots are going to show him filling the screen is not a nice one. George is playing George. Those boils and pimples and scurfy bits on his cheeks and that complicated relation of nose to nose-hair is natural. We have no face-paint in this picture, geddit? I’m about to show you the kitchen. The kitchen may not come up to your standards of cleanliness. OK, it’s cleaned. It’s scrubbed and swilled and mopped and waxed and buffed and generally disinfected because that’s Mr Trevelyan’s line, it’s the family business, disinfectant, disinfectant and antiseptic Ideal for Use in the Home and home starts here but somehow the kitchen in 1913 is not the kind of micro-surgery unit my friends call their kitchen. Neither is it glossy. I said this to Mike at the outset: I said, gloss is out, Mike, just pick up the sheen on the waxed stuff, the sheen of waxed stuff is not the same as gloss. I said to Mike and I said to Sylvia: do you know what it takes to get that sheen on that banister knob? It takes six coats of wax and in between each coat enough buffing to power the Great Eastern. And I mean buffing, not polishing. Buffing is buffing. This sheen has depth. Look at it. It is the depth of a thousand hours of buffing. It is the depth of a thousand hours of muscular activity in the region of the upper forearm, mainly. Lily’s right breast is slightly larger than the left, it is firmer, she knows this, it is the buffing bubby phenomenon and every maidservant who is not a cripple has it. In Houston we do not know this depth. Our interior wood, and there is quite a lot of interior wood, is gleam’n gloss and has no depth. Sounds like Merchant-Ivory, says Mike. Sounds like Ricky Thornby, says Sylvia. I have this great relationship with Sylvia: I like my continuity girl to cut me. Sylvia is not continuity on this picture any more: she fired herself. She wasn’t being used, she said, you cannot be continuity when no one cares a fuck about continuity. I said continuity is vital in this picture: there are twenty-three crates etc. and Lily’s always shifting stuff and it gets right up Mrs T’s nose. This house needs its own private continuity person. It needs someone to pad around
after Lily and now Milly and straighten everything up. Mr T does this, every night. The painted bits on the ceramic bowls and plates and stuff are always half hidden. It’s like they’re bashful or something. The candlesticks are the worst. The candlesticks on the mantels (hey, there are a lot of mantels in this house) look like they’re not quite sure why they’re up there and they’re discussing it. There’s some military gene in Mr Trevelyan which comes out over this candlestick business. Every night he gets them looking like the guards outside Buckingham Palace and pretty well every morning they go back to discussing why they’re up there and looking hesitant. Sometimes after Lily’s been through they look like they’ve decided there isn’t in fact any point in being up there, especially in a time of electrical illumination, and seem set to jump it, right out on the edge.
Zelda thinks I should wrap this cleaning thing up. I say I’m not talking about cleaning I’m talking about gloss, I just got diverted a little. Basically what I need to establish before we move into the kitchen is that hey, there’s a hell of a lot of dirt and germs and matt surfaces around. This kitchen is not the latest thing, it has not changed since Mr Trevelyan was knee-high, it’s kind of settled into itself and looks grumpy and worn and dark. Because it is dark. It has one flex that made it down here somehow and that lights up an electric bulb next to the old gas fitting and the ceiling has a complexion problem. It’s got blisters all over it and it sweats. The flex is really thick, it looks like a hempen rope, it comes already-frayed, it loops across the ceiling and if Health and Safety could step down here they’d have to be carried out in shock because the flex is crazy, it’s touching damp places and metal places and looks like it couldn’t care less, which it couldn’t, it’s a psychopath, it’s waiting to kill. The kitchen is damp and in the summer the damp factor turns into steaminess, it’s really unpleasant. This is because the kitchen is buried half-underground. There is actually a window but it’s pavement high, long and mean, like it’s peering up silk skirts which it is in fact, it lets in about as much light as would slightly ghost a photographic plate. Dorothy practically lives down here. I don’t think you people know how much grease and filth this kitchen produces before it’s even cooked a thing. I’m talking about the range. The range is a monster. It’s Grendel’s Grandmother. It has a leak where smoke comes out but even if it didn’t have a leak it would manufacture more grease and filth than it does heat. It really doesn’t like to heat. It only heats if Dorothy talks to it nicely. You have to plan way ahead. If you want to boil an egg for breakfast it has to have about twenty-four hours’ notice. Actually, Dorothy doesn’t plan ahead. She inherited pots and pans that were kind of permanently bubbling and she just throws stuff in. Mrs Rundell’s New System of Domestic Cookery she also inherited. Pages fall out each time she humps it down. She humps it down because it’s symbolic. She doesn’t use the word symbolic or totemic but that’s what it is and it’s also in memory of Mrs T Senior who told her she must use It and Nothing Else. She opens It and lays her hand on It like It’s got great energies or something and then just chucks stuff into the pans that Grendel’s Grandmother has a real grudge against but can’t do anything about because they were put on there about forty years ago and are actually really hot by now. Right at this moment, if we peep through the steam and lift the lid, there’s something bumping around in there that makes you think there might be an actual psychopath in this house but sorry, old fruit, there ain’t, this ain’t Homhitch or Murder by Weak Electrical Light – it doesn’t give your buffed nails a hard time, it’s a family tentativehook, it’s dull as real life is dull but wow, real life dullness is extremely interesting, it’s a boiled knuckle of veal being re-boiled, in there.
