Still

by Adam Thorpe

  (It was great tea, actually. The teapot stood on a stand. Elms swayed. Roses bloomed. I fell in love with England for about, hey, an hour. Flying wit and a teapot gurgling and elms, elms, elms. A film-maker chatting idly with a painter, sculptor, potter, author, art critic, you name it, he probably built suspension bridges in his time. There were just the two of us, by the way. Chatting idly under the swaying elms, in ’68, in Sussex, deepest most profound and forgotten Sussex, the teapot on a stand and mauve cups Thomas Hardy handed on so the legend goes – and me in my leather jacket, the one with the biggest lapels in Christendom, still smelling of diesel and nicotine and BR lavatories, thinking how I might actually belong if I purchased a teapot with a stand and mauve cups Thomas Hardy handed on and a stand of elms and a sun-hat that once sheltered Saxon Sydney-Turner from the Dorset sun in 1910, my dear boy. What did you do in ’68, Dad? Fuck all, son, ’scuse the lingo. Hey, one of the pleasantest hours of my life, as a matter of fact. I relive it when Houston gets to me. Minute by minute I relive it. Sorry, Tariq! Sorry, Daniel! That’s the way I am, guv. Unreconstructed. A teapot on a stand. An English rose. An elm. Pre-disease, of course. Of course! Jason doesn’t understand. Quintessences elude him. Quintessences elude you, Jason, I say. He knows what I’m getting at. He knows, for Christ’s sake.)

  It’s OK, I’m on the green. Springy little turf, clipped like nose hairs, perfect lie. It was close. I was a centimetre from the Black Hole, a bunker in the shape of England, quicksand you can see these fists sticking up out of and still gripping their wedges, their number eights, their niblicks, their Excaliburs – their score-cards sometimes, if it was a good one and they managed to get it out of their pockets in time. Fine, Zelda, fine, honey. I’m just fine. See ya.

  She’s busy tonight. She just came over because apparently I was snorting or grunting or something and weirdo complained. I invited her over for a meal. Candlelit, Eno for ambience, lots of laughs over the charcoal-stained chicken, like the old days, like last month, not even that, not even a month. When did the first elm leaf in England start to feel it?

  The cab, for Christ’s sake!

  It’s way up Whitehall, it’s way up, it’s a rear window with two wheels and a hat. I must have fallen off. OK, OK, I’m fifty-something but I’m running, guv. It’s got stuck behind the number 11 to Shepherds Bush. The number 11 to Shepherds Bush’ll get stuck in the mud outside La Briqueterie in three years time and lean over crazily, crazily, with blokes losing their caps and jumping. Nestlé’s Milk. Old Gold Cigarettes. Hudson’s Soap. Trevelyan Disinfectants. See that? That last one? Now you know. Sharp-eyes! I’m jumping up hup and holding on by the luggage rail around the roof. William’s suitcase is up there. It was in Jefferies’ carriage while the gauntlet thing was being performed. It’s scuffed at the edges. Pig leather, pinkish, very nice. Trunk to follow. Another hassle for Ags. I’m panting. This smell of dung is really incredible. I never knew horse dung smelt so much. It’s not wholly unpleasant. It’s better than HCDVA’s lilac air-freshener but try telling them that, mate. I think I’d better take a peep in at the window. It’s closed. Agatha is talking and Uncle Ken is nodding and his eyebrows are really getting exercised but the racket out here is incredible so you’ll just have to wait see, OK?

  Hey, I’ve nearly had my buttocks cleaved off by a beer-wagon. Look at it. Parliament Square. I could’ve used a film library archive for this clip but no, this is real time, this is the thick of it, this is me having my front teeth loosened by the luggage-rail because this guy must be pissed, it’s terrifying, these horses shouldn’t go so fast, it’s fucking dangerous, why do horses have to go so fast? Why does everyone have to go so fast? Why don’t all these horses and antique motor cars just pause for a moment and ask themselves that? Why does the world have to be so jerky all the time? Why is my throat sore?

  I’d like to show you William but I can’t. My foot’s on the back axle and there’s not enough space between the body and the wheel and the wheel’s spinning round and it’s dirty, it’s spraying up dung and stuff, I daren’t foul my trousers because we’re about to attend luncheon and I haven’t spare.

  Anyway, I’m a coward. There might be another beer-wagon. I can just see the edge of William’s cape. Don’t worry. He’s still on there. The driver is chatting amiably with him – I can see that because the driver keeps swaying out my side and laughing. He’s a merry old soul. He’s pissed. It must be really annoying for William. I guess if you just imagine him looking stony you’ll be about right. Maybe not. Maybe he’s nodding and smiling like he’s about to start vacation. Life’s like that. It never clings to your expectations. He’s probably looking really jolly. Life’s weird. It wouldn’t surprise me. The more I think about it, the more I’m thinking that jolly probably is how he’s looking, out there on the front seat, next to this drunk who’ll kill me if he takes a gap between two omnibuses like that again, Christ in Heaven, blow me down, what a way and a time to go but we’re nearly there, nearly there.

  Print that! Strike the lot! Munchy-wunchies, yer lazy bastards!

  Where’s me megaphone, Julie ducks? Me froat’s frogged. No one takes any notice of me, these days. Aw, shucks. Ta.

  TAKE A BLEEDIN’ BREAK, OK?

  Christ.

  HI.

  I hope there’s life out there. I hope I’m not addressing a room ringing with echoes. I hope I’m not just talking to myself. I hope the projector’s not fucked up. If the projector has fucked up then you won’t be reading this. Maybe I’ll have a spare. But never in my life, in a lifetime of going to the cinema, has any projector ever fucked up. That time the cinema got flattened in an earthquake doesn’t count. It was in Peru. The cinema was a tin shack. It was a very local cinema. I felt like Tintin or someone, but actually I was on holiday. I was trekking, getting over the Deirdre disaster. It wasn’t a big earthquake, it was just a very weak cinema. It didn’t even kill anyone. Macchu Picchu was great. I’m pretty certain I was an Inca in a past life. I felt at home in the Andes. I was alone for once. I wasn’t jabbering. I was way up where the air is so thin you can hear it rattling around in your lungs and you’re scratching your freak’s beard and thinking that there’s an incy-wincy bit more to life than spray-on deodorant and automatic flush and that humanity might do the planet a favour by shutting Human Progress Inc. down for a while. Then you turn the corner and there it is, isn’t it just great, isn’t it a marvel, really? Five lavatories, a bar, air-conditioning, Cinerama, luxury berths on the third deck, the works. And they can’t even give you a lift.

  Makes you sick, dunnit?

  William is up there. He’s still very still. Agatha’s on her bed. The king is in his counting house. The queen is in her parlour. The maid is in the garden. William is up there on his mountain. He’s very remote. He’s actually still swaying from the thing that carried him up onto this mountain, but only inside, only in his head. He doesn’t know how he’s going to get off this mountain. Night will be falling soon. Supplies are erratic. At least his bum’s stopped hurting. The oil-lamp makes things think about moving and there are a lot of things in this attic. He’s pretty certain the contraption has moved. He keeps it in view, in the corner of his eye, because he doesn’t want the beastly thing to jump him. There are a lot of ghosts on this mountain. They pretend to be mice. They scamper behind the wreckage of past expeditions. That disagreeable smell is probably the rotting corpse of that famous mountaineer who never returned. Up he went, into the mist, calm and steady, and the mist cleared and he was gone, the ropes were gone, his footsteps were gone, it was like he had never gone up there but they had seen him, definitely seen him, and he had cast a long shadow over the snow. What a fine fellow, what a mysterious end. Perhaps the Beast of the Peaks had got him. Perhaps he had deliberately vanished. Perhaps there was some disreputable thing in his life that he could no longer cope with. The contraption shifts. It’s smelling blood. William my great-uncle gives a little sigh and it comes out as a tiny moan. The noise really shocks him. The w
hole mountain stops and stares. It’s so dashed quiet, up here. It’s so dashed quiet. And he hadn’t even noticed that nowhere in the house or garden is there the teekiest squeak out of Sparkler. That’ll come, that’ll come. The noticing, I mean, not the squeak. Not the faithful nuzzle. Not the weight of shaggy head in his lap.

  Will?

  I’m holding my breath. That was Agatha. She’s opened the little door a crack. Great light, Mike – a pencil, a slit, a Chinese right across the boards until it hits the wreckage, but not brilliant, not glossy, not more than ash grey. Then it fans out because she’s stepping up and in until everything is covered in ash and she’s a silhouette and William feels cold, suddenly. Then it’s shut right down again, right down, to nothing but the oil-lamp up this end. Click. Print that.

  Willo?

  William wants to say something but he can’t, his jaw is frozen, he’s in this glacier, it’s got him by the boot. Help approaches. It’s tiny, it’s the other side of the range, it’s got miles of crevasse and ice-flows and boulders and stuff before it can reach him.

  Will, it’s all right. Uncle Ken phoned and pretended to be Papa. He’s been awfully decent. Uncle Ken, I mean. He calls it surprising the enemy by attacking first.

  Amazing, how this mountain does not echo. A whisper sort of goes blunt.

  Will?

  Agatha’s standing in view of her brother. She’s holding her dress up slightly for obvious reasons. An attic piled with junk is bad enough in jeans but when you’re kitted out in a long silk dress with extra-fine lace borders and fancy ribbons and a pair of soft shoes it’s like the world’s a porcupine. Actually, she could probably walk right through everything because she looks like a phantom in this outfit with nothing but a little oil-lamp to pick her up. Her face is in shadow because there’s a thing sticking out between her and the lamp, a small thing with a huge cast, maybe an umbrella, maybe a dead bat. My great-uncle blinks and frowns and then sighs like he did before.

  Did you speak to Giles, Will?

  She steps forward and puts her hand on the card-table. This is really the most terrific wheeze goes through her head like a clown. Cartwheeling through like a clown. She blinks it off, knocks it on the head with a parasol, kicks it in the butt – shoo, shoo! Will, did you manage to speak to him before …

  She waves her hand about. It makes great Fritz Lang shadows against the joists. Her face is now underlit. It looks scary. William opens his mouth to yell across the crevasse that he’s really quite all right apart from the broken back.

  No, not really, he says in such a tiny voice that Agatha has to lean right forward. Sorry, Ags.

  Listen, says my great-aunt, putting her hand on my great-uncle’s shoulder, you mustn’t be sorry all the time. You didn’t hurt anyone. You didn’t do anything wicked. It was horrible and beastly of them to do what they did. Uncle Ken says Papa was desperately unhappy at Randle, he remembers, it’s a horrible and beastly place and if it wasn’t for Uncle Ken’s illness he would have gone there too, but he was jolly glad not to. Have done. For more than a week.

  William nods feebly. He knows all this. I can’t go into why Mr Trevelyan sent his sons to the school he was incredibly miserable at. If you’re British you’ll understand. If you’re not you’ll go on shaking your head until they come for you in their white coats and scalpels.

  It was just pictures, wasn’t it, Will?

  That’s the most direct line Agatha has made yet. What she would do if William said no, Ags, it was the one-to-one deflowering of nine new boys and the gang rape of a tenth I have no idea, because she has actually no notion of what it is that boys do to each other that gets them expelled sometimes, mainly when the school needs a moral Hoover. I’m just using an example here – hey, it was just pictures, just watercolours in fact, if you don’t count the odd fumble and various filthy conversations and the common-or-garden jacking off behind the laurel shrubbery in the Wilderness. Agatha is very inexperienced in these things. She has only the fuzziest notions of these things, like she has only the fuzziest notions how a motor car actually moves along or an electric lamp lights up. So her heart speeds up a bit at this point while she waits for William’s reply. His smile catches the shadows on his face and makes big hollows of his eyes. He looks so like Evelyn. Did.

  What if it wasn’t? says William.

  Oh-oh, he’s trying to be clever, theoretical, he’s doing a Todd Lazenby on Agatha. Agatha blinks a little. William’s looking at her. He seems a bit cross, in my view, or maybe anxious. The help that was coming for him has slid back down the mountain. He’s all alone again. Why did he try to be clever-clogs? I’ll tell you why. What he has gone through today – today! – has left him feeling extremely insecure. He’s only fifteen, for God’s sake. He’s holed up in this attic in his own house because if he were just to say hi, or rather, hallo, hallo, I’m home, how’re things, I’ve just been kicked out of my fee-paying school for painting nude boys, what’s for tea? – do you know what’d happen? I’ll tell you. There’s an even chance that he would never darken the door of this house again. Agatha knows this, Uncle Kenneth knows this, William knows this. It has happened before. Generally what happens is the outcast goes off and serves his country behind the mast until he’s either drowned or the black slug in him has been shrivelled to just about nothing by salt spray and salt winds and blistering sun in some profitable but hellishly unshaded part of the Empire. William really doesn’t want this. When he was still in the nursery sucking the lead off Giles’s soldiers this happened to some distant relation, so distant that by the time the fact got back to them it was three years later and the poor guy had been skewered by Zulus. His crime wasn’t even sexual, it was petty theft, it was stealing a shilling or something because his parents never gave him any pocket-money and he’d been desperate for a cherry cake in some lousy tuck-shop. Out he went, bang went the door, the maid pressed herself to the window to see what he would do, he didn’t have a bean, his parents sat facing each other in the sitting-room so upright and rigorous you could have waved your dick at them and they would not have budged an eyebrow. He didn’t really even go out because he didn’t really even come in. He just stood under the portal for as long as it took the maid to see who it was and then a bit longer to be ahem told and then for about a minute after the door slammed to collect his wits and not sob. To be honest, he’d been at boarding school so long they’d practically forgotten what he looked like. When he was at home he stayed upstairs in his room most of the time. At six o’clock he was ushered down and stood in front of them just so they could check he was still alive. Five minutes was all they could stand. They weren’t into kids. Meeting them at a dinner you’d have reckoned they were quite entertaining people if you like dry humour and a lot of stuff about horses. I mean, they didn’t look evil. They were present at Mr and Mrs Trevelyan’s wedding. Agatha and Giles and William worked out long ago that only twelve potential guardians not including their parents would have to die for them to end up with these people. After that it’d be the orphanage. Now it’s only eight, because there are so many fatal diseases at this period, not including childbirth and cars with dicky brakes. You can see why Agatha and William and even Uncle Kenneth are really uptight about the situation right at this moment.

  The point is, guv, Mr and Mrs Trevelyan APPROVED of what Mr Trevelyan’s second cousin once removed did to his boy, who was called Ashley. Agatha remembers them approving. When the subject pops up now and again, as it does, not even a hairline crack has appeared in the huge windowless wall of their APPROVAL. Actually, this wall is a dam. It’s keeping out what’d sweep everything away in a tide of moral filth and squalor. This APPROVAL appals Agatha. She’s eighteen, just. There’s a big gap between her and her parents. She’s not Victorian but Edwardian OK Georgian. Her cognisant life has been spent out of the shadow of that miserable old tent. It’s made a difference. Her heroine is Sylvia Pankhurst. She’s hung around at the back of two demonstrations for Women’s Suffrage in Hyde Park. She�
�s seen a woman dig her elbow in a policeman’s stomach. Her friend Amy tells her that there are secret classes in hand-to-hand combat and How To Disable A Policeman. Zelda wouldn’t believe me when I told her this. I said these suffrage women make Germaine Greer look like a kitchen sink. Zelda has this idea that everyone before 1968 were parents, they just spent all their time yelling up the stairs about the noise and collecting Tupperware and getting their hair done. I said 1968 was a wash-out, it was a fake, it was a student vacation in the woods where the camp-fire and the brown acid does weird things for an evening or two. She thinks I’m hung up about ’68 because I was too old for it. You were too young for it, I tell her, you were too young for it. Anyway, 1968 is completely outrun by what’s happening around Agatha. These people are inventing things like Cubism and Old Age Pensions and Militant Feminism and National Insurance and the Modernist Novel. It’s really incredible what’s going on behind these gigs and omnibuses and Model T Fords and mahogany doors with brass knockers and ridiculous clothes that swish and hats that fall off in a wind, they’re so tall, so broad. It’s really incredible. Blimey, think where it could have got to. But the contraption is on the move. Sir Philistine Fascist is shaking his Spectator in the Criterion. He’s plotting how to quell the natives. Break their spirit. Give them baubles. Kill ’em in large numbers. Ho yes, Sir Philistine won’t be that easily taken. Wha’dya think of it, Trevelyan? Ha? Arthur Trevelyan peeps out briefly from behind his Times. His knee is being attacked by the Spectator. Trevelyan is having a hard time just at this moment. I won’t go into details but it’s to do with Izal cornering the market in anti-typhoid measures in India. Trevelyan Disinfectants has sat back on its buckets and is paying the price. Izal have made huge inroads in London hospitals. Izal Disinfectants & Antiseptics are cheaper. Trevelyan had pinned his recovery on the enormous requirements of the sub-continent, the teeming filth and flies, the mass swab that the Empire demanded and which he was absolutely primed to provide. But Izal is 2d cheaper per bucket. He doesn’t like Sir Philistine Fascist banging his knee with the Spectator. It’s vulgar, apart from anything else. But Sir Philistine is a knight, he has connections, he has the ear of Bonar Law. Quite so, quite so, says Mr Trevelyan. My wife is a nervous case, for instance. They are all nervous cases. Society is rapidly becoming a nervous case. I suggest the medieval instrument whereby the scold was silenced. It fitted around the mouth and was locked with a key. I shall take out a patent and go into immediate production if you provide the investment, Sir Philistine. Sir Philistine roars his approval, turning heads. It’s good for these heads, they need the exercise, most of them have been asleep under their newspapers and illustrated periodicals for about forty years. I’ll tell ya what, Trevelyan, growls Sir Philistine, I’ll back ya to the hilt as long as it’s not the other damn opening you’re plugging up, what? He roars again. Trevelyan nods politely and disappears back into the obituaries. Terrible to say, but Sir Philistine’s vulgar quip has stirred Mr Trevelyan into a mild sexual need. An antique orgy is briefly squeaked down in front of the day’s dead, hiding the bishops and judges and generals and stuff. He closes his eyes and lets it play itself out. One of the participants is Ruthie. Ruthie does not fit in with the general picture, which is kind of eighteenth-century classical-pastoral. She giggles too much and says gerrofwivyer and her unlaced flopping corset is out of place amongst the gossamery Psyches with their fat thighs and tumbling hair under the ilex. He must see Ruthie. He must fit her in before dinner. He stirs and studies his fob with a frown. Apart from the fact that the guy has a wing collar and mutton-chop whiskers and an antique suit it might be now, it might be one of those City pinstripes with veined cheeks checking his Rolex in between meetings that keep the free market free and the world in jail. Sir Philistine Fascist is snoring. He always does this, it’s embarrassing, he dribbles some sort of coppery stuff. Trevelyan’s mouth goes up at one corner, shoving his whiskers around. He’s anticipating, he’s anticipating. Saliva gathers in his throat. He swallows it down along with some sweet smoke and a taste of antique sherry. He hasn’t been smoking, he hasn’t been drinking, it’s just the air, the air is expensive in here, it’s exclusive to the club and it’s been built up over about a century to this very collectable miasma. He settles back and closes his eyes. He has pouches under his eyes. He’s only forty-five but he has pouches. He likes to close his eyes sometimes and listen to the baize doors thumping away off and the brash and vulgar world tiptoeing past on its muffled hooves like a memory but Sir Philistine’s snore is really bad today and Trevelyan clears his throat loudly which always helps. Sir Philistine grunts and twitches his nose like a fly’s landed on it and then he lets off. It’s foul, it really is, there’s something very rotten inside Sir Philistine’s guts, my great-great-grandfather closes down the hatches of his nose and breathes through his mouth. The fellow knows Bonar Law. Bonar Law might form the next government. Members are always pooping. You can’t bar a fellow for letting orf. You can only bar a fellow for not wearing a tie. That’s the worst thing, that’s criminal. The second worst thing is to expire under a newspaper so no one notices. Sometimes no one notices until decomposition sets in. When it is eventually noticed there’s a lot of whispering and flunkeys bobbing about and then suddenly the chair is empty. Then this guy comes in and swabs it discreetly because there’s often some sort of evacuation and even if there isn’t it’s a symbolic gesture, it’s a reassurance, it means you can sit in it as soon as the smell of disinfectant has evaporated and the leather’s dry but no one does for about a week, just in case. Mr Trevelyan likes members to expire on site because he can smell his product. It’s always Trevelyan’s. The reason it’s always Trevelyan’s is because he’s done a cut-price deal with the club. The day they use Izal he’ll resign and probably go shoot himself. So he keeps this deal up, even though it hurts. Especially when times are lean. And they are increasingly lean. His eyelid tic is due to this leanness. It tics away uncontrollably in meetings and just before he goes to sleep. I’m leaving him in the chair because Agatha and William are having an interesting conversation in the attic about ten streets away and I don’t want to miss it. Notice how I’m really concentrating and not thinking about Zelda and HIG too much. This is because I’ve had a break. I’ve been off set for about a month. The Mussolinis, anyway, were wondering why I was spending so much time in the library. They don’t like the idea of their employees spending too much time in the library. It means they might be spending HCDVA time on research, instead of their own personal time, like after midnight or just before dawn. So they gave me three extra classes and five hundred essays to mark. It was really about fifty essays but the students can rewrite, it’s a divine right, it’s liberal and progressive and so they take all your comments and the notes they took down when they wasted an hour of your life asking you why you gave their work of incisive genius a lousy grade and they hang ’em together and come back and you give them a slightly less lousy grade and encourage the use of the comma and the full stop and even the semicolon from time to time and the whole process repeats itself. Meanwhile Zelda was seeing Hair In the Gate. I got very depressed. I took my phone off the hook because these dumbo students kept shouting down it. Now they’ve all got straight As because I’m a great essay-writer, I know my stuff, there’s nothing I do not know about stuff like the impact of the moving image on social discourses and the impact of social discourses on the moving image – it’s all in here, tap tap, and I can’t blow the Hair Out of the Gate. So I’m concentrating. Zelda says hey, it’s platonic. I say I never believed that stuff about Plato. So I’m concentrating and not in the HCDVA library. I’m in my study, I’m busking a bit part in The Life and Times of St Jerome. We go out once in a while, my sweetheart and I. To the zoo, last week. It has great colobus, they like doughnuts, they keep looking around like neurotics who’ve just realised why they’ve lost. I could watch them for hours. Zelda prefers the cheetah. I can’t stand the cheetah. I can’t stand watching the fastest animal in the world
searching for somewhere to get the acceleration up and not finding it, not ever finding it. I’m patient. One day I will tell him to lay his hands off. Not yet, not yet.