by Adam Thorpe
George rubs his toecaps against his shins. He gets a kind of smear with sheen in between. The alert ones among you, the ones who love the small hours and haven’t gone to sleep or slunk off to coit in the walk-in cupboard, will reckon that George’s method of polishing could be improved on. What he needs, you reckon, is a consultant. He needs to be taken aside and given a thorough consultancy. The consultant would tell him that to eat chocolate is OK, but not before you use your spittle as a free leathershine. There would be other things the consultant would advise, things which’d make George cleaner, leaner, more streamlined and viable. For instance, the way George uses the Come to Inverurie brush needs viabilising. George unhooks the majolica brush and slicks his hair with it: it works. But now he’s belabouring his lapels and shoulders with the same bristles. He’s peering into the tiny mirror on the scullery door. The tiny glass somehow manages to contain Dorothy ladling out the soup as well as the consultant. The consultant has a Panasonic notepad and portable phone and tiny TRY ME tie-pin between his wide lapels. OK, the consultant thinks, the scurf’s flying but big deal. As much scurf is reapplied and the greasy look of the lapels and shoulders is not just wear, it’s hair-oil. He gets tapping. He’s here not to advise but to evangelise. Buy another brush. Clarify roles. He’s netted three figures in three minutes. Impact’s the name of the game. TRY ME. George is viable, he’s been impacted, he’s clean. The bacterial hordes are running, they know when the game’s up, they’re instant refugees – billions of them pouring off George to be massacred by the new regime’s hostile sweeps and swabs, whole generations lost in nameless zones, a few surviving in inaccessible terrain behind the range. You’re getting carried away, Ricky. I am, I am. Piss off, consultant. Your time has not yet come.
The scurf is now alighting, as usual, on George’s thighs. He belabours them and grunts. He grunts because he’s bending over slightly into the flurry of scurf. Dorothy is ladling out the soup. You’ve guessed it. If you ever come to luncheon here, skip the soup. Or if you’ve got any manners have the soup but try to think of the little white bits in it as parmesan or something. Just try.
OK?
The soup’s settling nicely in the bowls, already cooling. It’s meant to be cooling. The veal’s not meant to be cool and it won’t be, it’ll be tepid. It’ll be tepid because it has to make this epic journey from the kitchen to the conservatory. Mrs Trevelyan likes to take luncheon in the conservatory until days when the frost doesn’t go from the windows, then she retreats to the dining-room which is about one degree warmer except around the fireplace which is fifty degrees warmer and is up her end and gets the ribbon-ties at the back of her corset curling through four layers. The temperatures in this house’d give the thermometer in your back pocket a real workout, a hundred press-ups a minute, Mercury meets Sparta, it’d probably throw up. I mean, you only have to move an inch and your butt shifts from Saudi Arabia to Siberia in the time it takes to say ouch. These fireplaces are the most inefficient heat source known to man. They heat the air above the rooftops mainly but above the rooftops is about as hostile as Venus or someplace: it’s permanent twilight, you wouldn’t believe the smoke, the pigeons have emphysema, they just sit there wheezing and blinking like they’ve just been rescued from a pit disaster or something. And it goes on and on and on. For miles and miles and miles, out to where Uncle Norbert’s father’s allotment is cabbaging its cabbages and sprouting its sprouts because a fifty-foot prestressed reinforced concrete pillar has not yet burst out the earth like Jack’s beanstalk and sprouted a motorway intersection. Down the other end of this brick tube, this chimbley shaft lined with soot and microscopic clusters of small boys’ skin-cells, last night’s fire is a heap of ash and this heap of ash is due to be swept out at four o’clock p.m. by Milly but right now it’s stirring in the down-draught, the down-draught is working really hard at lowering the temperature of the dining-room to a point where the fire arriving at four-thirty will spend all evening trying to get back up to what it would have been if the fireplace had not been there at all. Day after day this is repeated and meanwhile there are these hundreds of thousands of grimy guys underground having the worst time it is possible to have bar being baby-sat by Hisbollah or whoever just so this process can be repeated. Ninety per cent of their suffering goes up the chimney in smoke and hangs over the city like the dark phantoms of the dead – the early dead and the all-of-a-sudden dead who cluster round the pit-mouths on certain nights like their own widows and swivel their eyes and show their bright red tongues as they whisper till the dawn shift evaporates them possibly forever. And for every chimney with its black muscly phantoms crawling out of it there is a pedigree of skinned knee-caps and cancerous elbows and welted soles, Des, it’s like a graveyard up here, it’s like every chimney-stack sticking up out of the rolling grey vista of roofs is a gravestone, it’s like this rooftop view is a big cemetery for small boys and there’s not a single name or date on any of them, they’ve been folded over and forgotten, they handweave rugs in Hindustan for Harrods or serve businessmen’s butts in Bangkok these days – these days being nowadays and not this day in the 1913 down-draught of the Trevelyans’ fireplace where the ash is actually moving around like I’m playing the action backwards.
You are, practically, says Zelda. You sound like Miss Barnett with the brace. Who’s Miss Barnett with or without the brace? I ask, wiping my forehead because that last break got me sweating. Miss Barnett was our lousy history teacher in fourth grade, says Zelda. She was spying for the Russians, we reckoned. We called her Sputnik. She was really left-wing. I wish you’d cut the history and just get on with the action, Ricky. Zelda, I say, I’m a talking Jackdaw Folder, didn’t you know? Greg used to have the whole set. They educated me, along with his Look & Learns. This was in the days when kids read Look & Learn and built the Clifton suspension bridge out of Meccano instead of what they do now, which is learn how to remove eyes and lift fingernails and have sex in three different ways at once and keep a few guys in the movie industry very nicely off, thank you. I don’t know what you’re squawking about, Ricky. Am I squawking? You are. This is a library. There are people trying to concentrate. I’m sorry, honey-bunch. This is a thing of mine. We’ve taken kids out of the chimney-shafts to put the chimney-shafts into the kids. We’re filthying the insides of their minds. We’re callousing their brains. If they rub up their sores enough they’ll harden and no longer hurt. Then they’ll go out and run the world like it’s always been run, only more efficiently. I said to stop squawking, says Zelda. I’ll have to bar you else. You’ve talked about this before. You repeat yourself. I like repeats, I reply. Praise be to the video recorder. I’ve watched La Silence de la Mer forty-one times. I identify with it. It’s the lowest budget masterpiece ever. Until now.
Ssssh.
Zelda’s hand on my forehead is leaves in a perfect circle. Maple leaves, probably. Maple leaves on raked white sand at dawn in Kyoto with a temple bell somewhere not too close tolling. In other words, it’s c-c-cool and consoling. It’s nice.
Come to Inverurie’s back up on the scullery door. Hey, Lily’s down here. Lily is shorter than Milly and has this chin you could balance a candlestick on. She’s got the soiled tea things on the tray and George is chortling because I think Lily must have said it’s ready for laying as she usually does. George is dabbing his mouth with a tea-towel and chortling. The forks and spoons are waiting in the drawer that sticks, waiting in the darkness, like they’re used to this waiting, they’re veterans, they’ve been pensioned off, their silver’s been buffed by so many lips and towels it’s gone through to something that flavours the food and hits the teeth like ice, like shot in game, like the metal of blood (I’ve never understood this taste of blood thing, it’s like we’re androids, it’s like we’ve got a foundry instead of a heart, mine’s actually tin rather than steel but there you go) and the orders are that if Uncle Kenneth is visiting and likely to stay for luncheon it’s these old guys that are to be lined up. These are Mrs Trevelyan
’s orders. Otherwise it’s the crack troops kept in the dining-room. There’s a sudden whisper of a gust that shifts the steam some more and it’s cold and smells like coats do when they’ve just come in. That’s the wake of Agatha and Uncle Kenneth’s departure out the front door, they closed it behind them ten minutes ago but it takes that long for the draught to work its way down. They’ve gawn aht, says Lily. Im and Miss Agfa. She only talks like this down here. Somewhere on the kitchen stairs there’s a force field that does things to her mouth, when she’s up there Agatha no longer sounds like a marketing rival to Miss Kodak, bom bom. But I’m finkin’ eel be back, adds Lily. No one tells you nuffink ’ere. Where’s that Milly milt, eh? says George. Veal is it? says Lily. Veal and spuds, Dorofy? Dorofy nods, because she’s sipping oyster sauce from a big spoon. I forgot to mention the boiled potatoes in oyster sauce. The range is so wide I couldn’t include it all in one shot, I’d have to pan slowly, ha ha. The only reason she covers the boiled potatoes in oyster sauce is because a page fell out in Mrs Rundell’s. It’s a chance combination – and it works, it works. The pages falling out thing doesn’t always work: the beef hotpot with Sauce Mousseuse did not work. But she read it so long back and repeated it so many times it’s established itself and no one notices any more. Poularde Strasbourgeoise with hot chocolate on it did not have a hope in hell of working – actually, maybe in hell it would. The menus in hell would be like that, along with those long red-hot tongs. There is a dangerous area in the book where the savouries end and the sweets begin, and the page looseness there is severe. Duck and stewed prunes was a lucky break. It was the only lucky break, in that area.
Tear a page out, get the scissors clipping, we’re going outside.
OK. Agatha and Uncle Kenneth are taking a growler cab (a horse-drawn one with brass lamps and stuff, you’ve seen it in a hundred cossy dramas, it seats two dry and one wet who drives) to Paddington station and they plan to be back in time but it’s tight. As the oyster sauce hits Dorothy’s intestines the cab is negotiating Piccadilly Circus. There’s horse-dung scattering over the tarmacadam and lots of flying advertisements for stuff like Hudson’s Soap and, wait for it, Nestlé’s Milk and this is big budget, there are at least thirty omnibuses in action and two and a half times that in cabs and the omnibuses and cabs are split fifty-fifty between cylinder and horse-heart which are both thumping really hard to keep up and the number of private motor cars is actually into double figures and there are twelve drays and an old wagon looking like it’s wandered off a country lane into the wrong scene and just thousands of people who’ll mainly be dead by 1990 and in all this remarkable comment on the serio-comedy of London life in which wealth and poverty, happiness and misery, mingle in a kaleidoscopic picture that, once seen, can never be forgotten (can you imagine that on a postcard these days?) there’s a spattered growler negotiating and the driver flicking his whip and it’s amazing, there’s filth everywhere, there’s dung and soot and mud and litter and the tyres and wheels are just spinning it up and out and even Mike can’t stand it, his trainers are black and his jeans are wet and yet all over the place there are these long skirts and somehow they float along and now and again they seem to hitch up like magic. Sylvia’s shouting it’s not magic it’s dress clips, they have these tiny sprung clips dangling from their waists and when they come to dung or something they get into action, it’s just practice – and anyway, I yell back, the pavements are clean, they’re scrubbed and swept and washed. Zelda says I have a hygiene complex. Maybe I do, but I want to say how amazed I am at the dirt, you could power a turbine on the dung being dropped here and as a matter of fact I’m feeling sick from the smell, it’s like a silo with a coal-burning power station next door and a few leaking tins of Castrol at my feet and I’m not sure they’ve got their perfume consumption worked out – every time a lady floats past it’s like she’s pickled herself in rosewater or violets or something, it’s really thick and cloying and when this stuff isn’t around it’s straight body odour. Maybe they’ve all got adapted, maybe their noses have filters in them. Hey, I’ve got a sore throat just standing in the middle of all this with that jerk Eros prancing about on one leg way up there when he ought to be flying, his wings are big enough, and Mike moaning on at me about the terrible light. It’s smoke, I tell him. We are in the Big Smoke. He’s coughing into his handkerchief and saying that I told him to read Mrs Dalloway and in Mrs Dalloway everything glitters and glints fresh as a rainbow and he’s got all the wrong filters and why aren’t we still in the kitchen? I yell, Mike, shut your trap, we’ve got wild sound here and Bosey doesn’t want you making it tame and Virginia Woolf had the right filters and she happened to be feeling good when she wrote Mrs Dalloway and anyway, once or twice a year the sun comes out and it all looks like a rainbow instead of like this, that’s London, if you tire of her you tire of life because life’s like London, it’s a shit-hole – she was never anything else since the first jumped-up centurion with a squeaky voice and bad catullus threw a ford across this swamp pretending to be a river with scuffy foliage all around and a damp problem. Now we’ve lost the growler. It disappeared between Pears Soap and that terrible thing on at the London Palladium. Mike says it was nice in the fourteenth century, it had apple orchards or something right in the middle and about three thatched cottages with an uninterrupted view of the Tower and the appel orchards sweeten’d ye aere most delitefulie. I holler stop spelling like a corner shop and catch some general atmosphere, we can always cut it in later, no one’ll know, a year or two here and there – there’ll only be that bastard from Stockton-on-Tees with his world-beating collection of horse-drawn cab whips or motor omnibus leather-faced cone clutches or whatever his wife’ll leave him for in about three years writing in as usual with an offer of his Xeroxed specifications at double the price. As if I need these people.
