Still

by Adam Thorpe

  Whack! That was the mutton. Glistening, Mike. Those fatty raw hands are not the mutton or some giblets but Dorothy’s fingers, kneading salt in. The mutton is cooked, incidentally. And when I say cooked I mean cooked. It was in the back pan from about the Diamond Jubilee (look it up – do I have to tell you everything?) and now it’s cold. Its ambient temperature is the same as the scullery where the incredible amount of implements it takes for a Georgian (second time round Georgian without the powdered wig or twelve-foot high hairdo) person to receive food in his mouth gets washed up and dried on the racks that line the scullery like the washed-up timbers of old ships. (Zelda says Ricky, that’s the first original simile in a hundred pages, too bad it took you an hour and five ruined paper-clips to get. Shucks an’ fanks, darlin’. Did anyone ever tell you you resemble Jenny Agutter from your bad side?) The mutton is gonna be served up cut into hunks but otherwise unchanged. Dorothy’s fingers have not been washed all day but hey, they’re so raw and chapped and steamed that it’s a helluva hostel place for a salmonella or any other kind of germ to hang out in. Those guys are scrambling to get aboard George. He’s the ocean liner with luxury fittings and ten-course meals, he’s where every self-respecting bacterium wants a part of the action, or at least to retire to and put their feet up after a life of anxiety snucked up between the tiles where tidal waves of Trevelyan Disinfectant never quite got to but it was close. George is coming, he’s coming, just be patient if I’m talking to a bacterium now, a crowd of bacteria, my bacterial friends and relations who’ve made me queasy all my life and are now drinking my whisky – he’s gonna dock in in about two minutes, if you’re really sensitive you’ll have felt the bow wave of his indigestion, it always precedes him by about two minutes if he’s heading your way, if you’re ultra-sensitive you’ll be detecting something else, a swell, a slight swell of something nasty and tense but that might just be the air getting itself set, doing its buttons up, straightening its wing collar, screwing on its armour.

  The mutton’s for dinner, actually. It’s going to get even chillier, waiting. The soup for luncheon is in the most gigantic pan you’ll ever see in your life right at the back of the range, it’s pea soup, it’s sort of green and it’s like the planet in Solaris – it’s beginning to think, it’s definitely alive and thinking, and there’s probably something down there … whatever is down there is beginning to erupt, it’s a soup the pseud creep would call disrupting, he’d probably like it because he’d be too busy talking crap about Dizzy Derrida or Krazy Kristeva and what they have to say about Milos Forman to even notice how disgustingly out of date the taste is. I mean, this is 1913. How do we know things tasted the same in 1913? How do we know things were tasted in the same way in 1913? These are two quite different questions. While I’m asking these questions I have to point out that there is a minor crisis going on in Mrs Trevelyan’s dressing room. You’ve guessed it. Way above this kitchen Milly the maid is having a spot of bother with the hats and Mrs Trevelyan is rising – actually, she’s risen, but she is using the toilet which is off the dressing-room. From the sound of it (I don’t want to be too personal here) Milly is OK for about another three minutes. I’m going to slice this house in half for a second. I’m sorry, this is the only way I can show what an amazing organism this house is. The Steves have the most incredibly powerful state-of-the-art slicers with diamond teeth and they’re positioned as only I can position them. This is epic. It’ll be a hot knife through cold butter.

  Go.

  The tiles are a problem. They’re slate tiles or something. They don’t stay put under the slicers but kind of shoot off. Never mind. We’re through, down through the attic, a piece of guttering has come loose, this is the Blitz all over again – there has to be a bath-tub hanging from its pipe and someone in it, screaming. No no, only joking. They’re down through the servant’s quarters, they’re into the upper rooms for guests, a carpet’s got snagged in the bit, Mrs T is on the toilet, she’s screaming, I forgot about her, her toilet’s right in the middle of the house, there’s this diamond-tipped slicer roaring through the brick inches from her nose, down it goes, dig that antique cistern, that chain with PULL on a little china knob, the mahogany perch buffed by a hundred bottoms and Lily and still warm – down through the hallway and at the back down through the conservatory, watch the glass, slice through the pavement to get at the kitchen, hit the foundation rubble, keep going because there’s some nice medieval death-pits underneath and underneath dem bones there’s a Roman hypercaust system pretty well unusable and beneath that there’s a thin streak of Bronze Age sludge and some ash from when the whole city was razed and under that shit they’ve hit rats and I said stop when you hit the rats because that means you’ve hit the ceiling of the London Underground system but when Steves get going they’re petrol tankers, it takes glaciers to stop them, there’s this incredible fizz and bang and the whole system’s fucked.

  Stop showing off, says Zelda.

  Zelda’s my conscience.

  Hey, just take a look at the house for a minute. I’m opening it up like a book and the other houses are getting bad wrinkle, sorry, it’s not for long. There. You see how complicated it is? You see those little figures dotted about? You see George coming down the kitchen stairs, Lily making the candlesticks look suicidal in the smoking-room, Dorothy wondering why there are waves on the soup, Mrs Trevelyan hanging on to the PULL chain and getting vertigo, Milly smoothing out the gull’s feather which is impossible to do successfully even without the wind, Agatha and Uncle Kenneth putting their outside gear on in the hall, not bothering to get the servants to do this for them? You see how much junk there is in the attic? You see how I’ve done all this without breaking so much as a milk-jug? You see why the Royal National Theatre in London needs me to handle its revolving stage?

  Zelda has tears in her eyes. She says it reminds her of her doll’s house. She lost her doll’s house in a great depression. She chucked it out. Now she wishes she hadn’t. If Mrs Trevelyan falls off her lavatory seat we’ll lose the Martita Hunt of this picture and I can’t afford that. She’s very high up with her eyes shut. I’m closing it, boys. They’re still reconnecting the Underground cables. Leave it, leave it. Londoners are used to suffering. Or they’re gonna have to get used to suffering, soon. They’re gonna be bombed and they’re gonna get asbestosis from their gas-masks and they’re gonna have Stafford Cripps and they’re gonna have Margaret Thatcher and they’re gonna be stuck on the Underground for hours in the dark but they’re gonna be plucky and valiant and Cockney and Typhoo and their upper lips are gonna grow so stiff they’ll look like those Africans who put soup-plates in their mouths and they’ll love it.

  The Steves are pushing the house back. Gently, gently. We don’t want that kind of bump that makes the actors look like they’ve just been moved on a revolving stage instead of being caught in the middle of a conversation in the grand house of a Russian country estate or something.

  Bump. Mrs Trevelyan thinks she might have overdone it with the tonic wine this morning. She drinks tonic wine like my first wife drank vodka. George is in the kitchen. Let’s descend, let’s – at least let’s get out of Mrs Trevelyan’s toilet. Even if it does contain one of the earliest toilet paper dispensers known to man, of brass and imitation majolica, now gone the way of all toilet paper dispensers.

  Do you have to be so funny all the time?

  That was Zelda. It’s kinda relentless, she adds. Let up. Listen. You don’t have to prove yourself all the time. Sweep the leaves into circles, into perfect circles. Sweeping leaves into perfect circles for five hours, I reply, strikes me as really anal. The fact is, I am not being funny. I had to say this thing about the toilet paper dispenser because toilet paper dispensers are something we handle at least once a day, if you’re reg’lar. Women handle them many times a day, Zelda corrects me. Too right, I murmur, blushing. Zelda is my conscience. She makes me blush. But she’s got the point. She’s ruffling my hair. Not now, Zelda. I’m out to dinner toni
ght, she says. A date? A date. My heart sinks. I’ll bet it’s pseud creep, I say. I’ll bet it’s Todd Lazenby. Right, she says. Don’t believe a word of it, I stammer. Just don’t! What are you writing down what we’re saying for? says Zelda. Why not? I say, tapping out why not? I say, tapping out why not? I say, tapping out – you get the picture, huh? This is unedited action, this is CNN reporting from HCDVA Library, this is instant mush. She laughs. I love you, she says. Hey, Zelda, mnx | pqu |; | kjkfmiqduwyfquwaqkmwqkm

  That was Zelda’s buttocks laid gently on the keys. It wasn’t my command of Serbo-Croat being wielded or something. It was her joke. Then the Granville-Barker weirdo appeared at the borrowing desk with an incredibly complicated request to do with the On Tapp System here – he wanted to call up H. G. Wells’ Christmas gift list of 1901 or something, and Zelda’s sexual needs were sublimated. This’ll be up off the screen and into the wherever it goes when it goes up by the time she’s back over here. For once, I thank the weirdo. I’ve got to be fighting fit to handle this manservant guy.

  OK. Geronimo.

  He’s cracking his knuckles in front of the copper. The copper is made of iron. The knuckles are made of bone. The copper is like the funnel of the Great Eastern and it’s supposed to pour out piping jets of water from its tap but it’s Grendel’s Great-Aunt, it’s related to the range, it never has done, it manages something just a bit more than tepid, about the temperature, George has noted, of a man’s glue. (You know what he means. He uses expressions that are now historical. I’m not gonna translate. He has as many words for seminal emission as Inuits have for snow. One of them is snow, actually, but even he regards that one as pretty pathetic. He calls the luncheon soup glue, too. It’s his private joke. Dorothy doesn’t like George, not surprisingly. Even in her generous bosom there is no little corner for George. There might be a very narrow window-ledge, way up, really way up, and definitely outside.)

  This is George’s usual place. He’s cracking his knuckles and holding them out to the copper. There’s always this wee burn of a chill running through him. If George’d been born a hundred years later he could’ve been a famous novelist right now, buzzed round to readings where he vomits or whatever and delights the literary ladies with his filthy mouth – because George has poetry in him, like my old dad. It comes out in coarse chunks like cheap coal but it warms, it warms, and none of the middle-class wankers can do it quite in the same way, don’t you know. George had a very interesting childhood, he could have mined it as a novelist or as a film-maker for the whole of his career, like I should’ve done and didn’t because I was ashamed and it doesn’t work south of the South Mimms Junction. (Doesn’t South Mimms Junction sound like an Ealing heyday comedy, wrapped up in steam and stuff? But I’m talking, for the benefit of the Yanks and other foreign flotsam among you, blaspheming my Laphroaig with London ice and, Christ alive, soda – I’m talking of the M25/A1 coitus interruptus where once my Uncle Norbert’s allotment cabbaged its cabbages and sprouted its sprouts. If George says how’s your cabbage? and chortles it’s because cabbage is one of his fifty-eight ways of saying female pudend, by the by. I have a list of the other fifty-seven. I’m not revealing it. You can make your own and tick ’em off. That list took me agonies of being in this guy’s company. I’m still using Dettol in my bath. I have a bath in Houston. I had it installed. I’m British to my tub-wrinkled gonads, okeydokey?)

  Still Six: the house. Number 25, Albermarle Terrace, Westminster borders (about three houses down you plummet into Pimlico, OK?). Not sliced in half. I forgot it before. Go see. Sorry about the water stain across the living-room bay. It was there already. But the living-room bay is identical to the dining-room bay. Accidents of time. Great phrase. Zelda’s.

  CHECK THE PROJECTOR, Ossy. Put the ice-bag on top. It has a burning headache by now.

  Nice pad, 25 Albermarle Terrace, huh? Up-date, 1994: it looks like a wedding-cake, they’ve painted everything in sight Dulux Icing White Gloss or something, they’ve chucked out the art students and they’re working hard to chuck out the Polish guy because apparently some Iranian geezer wants to make it his fifteenth home. The Polish guy has actually written to me to aid him in his Fight, he thinks I have some rights in this because it was once In The Family. I say it’s now In The Iranian Family and if they want to make a mosque out of the living-room – Allah be with them or whoever. They might be nice people. They are breaking my Life, Mr Thorby, he writes. What is Life, I reply, but the nonchalantly withheld threat of permanent eviction? Ralph Waldo Thornby, Selected Apothogems Of. Poor old Ladislaw. From Auschwitz to Belgravia in one swap. I’ll invite him.

  Hi, Ladislaw! Help yourself to the wodka, and I mean it. You’re In The Wamily.

  Dorothy is stirring the soup. George is stirring his body inside its stock, jacket, breeches and boots. Actually, Dorothy is letting the furry wooden spoon with a fissure in it – the only spoon she uses to stir soup, which is why the fissure has this weird deposit in it like uranium or something – idle on the erupting surface of Thought like a Received Idea. Thank you, Zelda. I thought it was original, too. George is letting his furry non-wooden spoon with a fissure in it (one of his thirty-nine ways of saying dick) idle on the erupting surface of Sexual Fantasy like it usually does. I have to say here that George MacPhearson has been doing these usual things for an extremely long time. Basically, no one has been longer in this house than George. He arrived before his voice broke as something so junior he was under the washstand. He’s risen above everyone and everything now, in principio: risen ineluctably and ineliminably up to being equivalent to a butler on good days and general manservant on most days and where’s that bloody footman on really terrible days when Mr Trevelyan is drunk and highly stressed. But George is only paid as a general, which is why he moans a lot. Moans is the wrong word. Carps is better. Carps and cavils and crows. Zelda gave me a pocket thesaurus for my birthday because she said I was ruining my back with the library copy. Really, it was because I was ruining the library copy. She’s still dealing with weirdo, it’s OK, she won’t see that. She loves her books. Her Zen master says she shouldn’t have any books. She doesn’t, personally. But they’re hers, they’re hers, they’re all hers in here.

  Like it’s all Dorothy’s in the kitchen, except for the clothes brush with Come to Inverurie on it, which is George’s, for belabouring his lapels and shoulders and thighs. It hangs on the scullery door. Whenever Dorothy goes in and out of the scullery it jigs and taps. Come to Inverurie, O Come to Inverurie jigs and taps through her head, she can’t help it. She has no idea where Inverurie is, except that she never wants to go there, because it’s under a snow of George’s scurf. Everything else in the kitchen is hers, down to the last badly corroded oyster-opener in the enormous mouth of the gigantic dresser which was here when the house was built – she reckons the house was built around it because they couldn’t have got it down, and the same with Grendel’s Grandmother. When she thinks of history she thinks of the big range and the big dresser in the open air, enjoying the sun, before these guys in armour came along and started piling bricks up and yelling at each other in Ancient Greek. Otherwise she is fairly sensible.

  Now hold on tight, we’ve a lot of curves coming.

  There’s this really weird thing going on in George’s face. It’s like he’s about to give birth to an Alien through one of his cheeks. He opens his mouth wide and you can see right in, you can see this wedge of cooking chocolate his jaws are negotiating with. This is what he usually does, after cracking his knuckles. Dorothy’s going to tut in a minute. Wait for it. There, what did I tell ya? She looks at George for about a half-second and tuts again, because if she didn’t tut at least twice he’d think he could just cabbage a piece of her cooking chocolate any time. After these two (sometimes three on bad days) tuts, George makes a sound like my doctor telling me I have hypercholesterolaemia very quickly and sinks his teeth into the wedge as hard as their precariousness can take. (Great pun. Thank you, Zelda. She’s back. What�
�s hyperwotsit? she asks. Did you find H. G.’s gifts list? I ask back. Don’t change the subject, Ricky. It means, my sweet lullaby, every time I get heartburn I say my prayers. Seriously? Seriously – I’m way overdue. When I get to Heaven they’re gonna fine me. Doc Zwingli says it’s under control, I should take some gentle exercise – yoga and sex and stuff. Lots of gentle sex and a bit of yoga and both at the same time to save time. But – Subject closed, OK?) George doesn’t really like cooking chocolate. He might have done about twenty-five years ago but he’s too old to change. He likes the tuts. It makes him feel wanted. His mam used to tut at him, before she got into hitting him and the bottle, roughly at the same time, up in Aberdeen or somewhere. Certainly not Inverurie. He stole the hairbrush about a century ago. It is not a family icon. Let’s not be sentimental about this guy, just understanding within tight parameters. There are worst things in life than not having a butler/ manservant/footman, and that’s having one like George. I stress this now because Remains of the Day has been served up in Houston recently and everyone wants a butler who hasn’t actually got one already. I’m just putting the record straight. They don’t all come looking like Anthony Hopkins. As a matter of fact, most of them over here come looking like Anthony Perkins as Bates and are called Antonio and wear galoshes to serve rum and coke in the Jacuzzi and call everyone by their first name. Hi, Ricky, said an Antonio last month. It was at this guy’s who owns this gallery I’m trying to ingratiate myself into for Greg’s sake although Greg isn’t interested, he says it’s junk. Of course it’s junk. The private view was so private you couldn’t see it, there were too many people. I caught a glimpse of baby dolls covered in slime and stuck through with nails. I got talking to this fire extinguisher who turned out to be the artist and I’d already said I thought it was all fake. She was really small, she had a private view of my zip and that was about it, I think she eventually got trampled but not before she’d said she was going to report me for expressing my opinions forcefully, or forcibly. Anyway, this Antonio was somehow gliding around on roller-skates with about three trays of piña coladas and I grabbed a glass as he did an entrechat or whatever between me trying to approach the owner and the owner and I said thanks and he said, Rick, any day – which really got to me. No butler should talk to you like that. Anyway, no one wants these guys any more. They’ve all been fired and everyone’s been asking me to take their place because I’m the only person in Houston that doesn’t sound like he’s playing scales on a slide guitar – I sound about forty-nine per cent English, would you believe it. This is because of this stupid film. I say, hey, it wasn’t like that, then I say, how much? I say how much? to the elegantly ageing and incredibly wealthy widowed ex-beauty queens who ask me. There are a few. They still have teeth like pianos without the black notes and their skin is not yet hung out to dry. But it’s never enough. I know how George feels. It’s never enough when you have to do what you have to do. I mean, they expect me to sound like Anthony Hopkins all the time when I’m just doing it for a party turn, for a giggle, hm, very well, m’lord. And I don’t want to do their chiropody. I draw the line at that. The problem is, they don’t know where to draw the line. They’re not good enough for an English butler. It’s what the movie’s all about, I tell them. Next thing, they’ll be asking me to satisfy their enormous sexual needs or something. Zelda says that’s enough lies for now. I say it’s important to express oneself. It’s not easy being English over here. I’m a minority. I have the right to be oppressed but no one recognises it. They just oppress me. Even this library oppresses me. It has more CD-ROMs than books: I called up Dickens the other day and he was waving to me the other side of this gate called non-American English. I had to show my passport and get checked for lice, practically. At least I didn’t get punched up. We’re a negative quantity, we’re a subset, the flagpole’s squeaking as the flag is lowered, it’s sunset time, the Union Jack’s a tea-towel. Actually, I myself am a subset of a subset. I’m not-quite-non-American English. I’m not quite anything. This is what the butler saw when he looked in the mirror. I’m not quite anything. This is George’s big problem. Maybe we have something in common. I hope not. He’s just gobbed against the copper. It actually sizzles. Relatively, against George’s spittle, the copper’s hot. The gob’s chocolate brown. I feel sick. He sticks his finger in his mouth and clears out the last bit of chocolate and licks it. Then – do I have to go through with this? – he smells his finger. Anyone’d think he was married to Dorothy, he’s so unabashed about his intimate rituals. Soup be maunderin’ at me, she be that ready, says Dorothy. Dorothy isn’t reciting poetry, she’s just Wiltshire born and bred, she speaks like this all the time, it really gets on George’s nerves. Actually, I have to say, it’s great the first time you hear this thing about the soup maunderin’ at her but it kind of palls when you’ve heard it about twelve thousand times, which is roughly how many times George has heard it, at a quick calculation (she started using the phrase thirty-one years ago, so it’s thirty-one times three hundred and sixty-four because she doesn’t say it on Christmas Day because there’s no soup of any kind on Christmas Day) – and he sucks his teeth, drowning out the last bit of Dorothy with an amazing squeal. He’s wiping his wet finger on his jacket, it’s always the same spot, it’s just under the last green button and if you had an electron microscope you wouldn’t sleep for days for what’s patrolling the thick ropes of fibres, guv. Ready, George? says Dorothy. Och, woman, George says. Dorothy has licked the spoon and places the lid back on the pan. Clang. Sorry, Bosey. The steam’s making great effects against the electric bulb, it actually looks fake the way it’s pummelling against the ceiling. George does this weird sort of growl as he always does and stands up. It sounds like his trousers have ripped because someone’s put glue on the chair but he always makes this sound and this isn’t silent comedy, is it? He’s tugging his cuffs down and wriggling his wrists one after the other. Where’s that drat Milly, then? says Dorothy. She’s tugging the enormous mouth of the dresser and taking out a ladle. They’re both tugging, note. Two gobs descend apparently in slow motion – hey, why not, slomo it is, down they go like brown amoebas tracking through hyper-space – until they blurt and do a kind of mini-mushroom cloud on George’s toecaps, one after the other, spilling little bits of themselves out and away and on to somewhere where things will be grateful for it, things which will survive us and our spittle by several billion years and’ll still get along fine as they always have done.