by Ned Beauman
Sinner thought of Connelly and the police, and also of the sausages again. He could just stay a night or two and then make off with some of Erskine’s money. That would be satisfying enough. He didn’t like to think about how few alternatives he had, and how grateful he was for the arrival of this chinless toy soldier. ‘Fair enough, then,’ he said.
‘Splendid. We’ll shake hands on it.’
Sinner shook Erskine’s hand as firmly as he could manage. Erskine led him shivering and bleeding to the cab, parked out on Bread Street. As soon as he sat down in the back seat, he fell asleep.
Later, he was awoken to be examined by a bearded doctor. He was in Erskine’s flat, in a bed that seemed astonishingly soft and spacious after the cots at St Pantaleimon’s. His shoulder hurt.
‘Malnutrition, of course, and one or two nasty infections, but also severe alcohol poisoning,’ said the doctor after cleaning Sinner’s cuts. ‘How long did you say he’s been missing?’ The doctor seemed to have been told that Sinner was a stableboy who had run away to London from a place called Claramore.
‘Only about two weeks,’ said Erskine, who had sat in a chair in the corner of the small bedroom and watched the examination from beginning to end.
‘Well, he must have been drinking under your noses for quite a while. Not worth the trouble, I dare say.’
‘I promised his father I’d bring him back,’ said Erskine as he paid the doctor. The doctor gave him some packets of powder that he was to stir into a mug of hot water twice a day for Sinner. Not long after the doctor had gone, the landlady, who had evidently been told the same story, came up with a plate of liver and onions on a tray.
‘You said I could have some booze,’ said Sinner when he’d finished eating.
‘Yes. You understand, I expect, that you are speeding your own death? You understand that you will never be truly healthy again unless you give it up?’
‘You said I could have some booze.’
‘Then I take no responsibility.’
Erskine poured a glass of beer for Sinner, who drained it in one. Before the liquid even hit his stomach he felt an intense relief, as when someone tells you at the last moment that you do not have to do something that you have been dreading. It had a strange taste, though.
‘What kind of beer is this?’ he said, reaching for the bottle.
‘It’s just beer,’ said Erskine, taking it quickly off the tray. ‘You’re probably used to cheaper varieties. Now, in a few minutes I have to go out to a meeting at the Royal Entomological Society. I’ll be back in the evening. I hope you find the bed comfortable, and I suggest you stay in it, but if you wish to get up there are clean clothes in the drawer. You won’t find any money or any more alcohol in the flat, and my laboratory is locked. I can’t stop you from leaving, of course, but if you leave you can’t come back. Do you understand all that?’
Sinner nodded. Just as Erskine turned to leave the bedroom, there was a knock at the door of the flat.
‘Just a minute, Mrs Minton,’ shouted Erskine.
‘Phippy? Phippy, it’s me!’ The voice was a woman’s, but not the landlady’s. Erskine went white and clenched his fists.
‘I’m dressing,’ he shouted.
‘I’ve seen you dressing. Open the silly door.’
‘Just stay here and be quiet,’ whispered Erskine to Sinner, and went out of the bedroom, shutting the door behind him. Sinner heard him open the front door.
‘I thought you were dressing,’ said the voice.
‘And now I’m dressed. I really wish you’d telephoned first, Evelyn.’
‘Well, I knew you’d be in, didn’t I, brother? You never do anything.’
‘Actually I’m very busy and I have to go out in a moment or I shall be late. Why don’t we just have dinner this evening?’
‘No.’
‘Is dinner too bourgeois?’
‘I wanted to see your wonderfully grown-up new flat. It’s a bit poky, isn’t it? Oh, at least you’ve brought that picture with you. The purchase of that picture is the only concession to good taste you have ever made in your life.’
‘You just like it because Mother says it’s horrible.’
‘A horribly lazy pastiche of the Rembrandt, yes, but apart from that quite striking.’ Sinner heard footsteps. ‘Now, what’s this room?’
‘Don’t go in there,’ said Erskine.
‘Why not?’ said the voice, and the door of the bedroom opened.
Erskine’s sister was twenty-two years old, pretty, with wavy brown hair pinned up behind her head to reveal a dull shine across her cheekbones like old scuffed velvet. She wore a sylphine green dress and lugged behind her a battered antique umbrella with brass fittings that could have sheltered a small village from a mortar attack. Her eyebrows were at a permanent ironic tilt, as if she were waiting patiently for the rest of the world to throw down its cigarette, abandon the charade and admit how absolutely ridiculous it was.
‘Who on earth is this in your bed?’ she said.
‘That’s not my bed. That’s the spare bed.’
‘Who is it?’
‘Oh, he’s my valet. He’s been ill.’
‘Phippy! How long have you had a valet? How absurd! And he looks like a Jew!’ She said this with surprise, not disdain.
‘He is not a Jew. His name is Roach. If one takes a flat one must take a valet.’
‘Boy, are you really my brother’s valet?’
Sinner waited a long time before he replied, enjoying Erskine’s pleading eyes and gritted teeth. At last he said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ Erskine slackened as if shot dead.
‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘He’s got kidney stones,’ said Erskine.
‘What a bore. Where did my brother find you?’
‘I absolutely must go, Evelyn,’ said Erskine. ‘Come along and I’ll find you a cab.’ Evelyn wasn’t, of course, allowed a flat of her own, so when she was in London she usually stayed at the house of her friend Caroline Garlick near Gloucester Road. ‘Let’s say eight o’clock at the Ravilious, shall we? I’ll book us a table.’
‘I can’t, I’m busy.’
‘With whom? Is Mother making you have dinner with the Bruiselands? She mentioned they were up in town.’
‘With your old friend Morton, actually.’
‘You’re still going about with Morton?’ William Erskine, their father, had briefly forbidden Evelyn to speak to Morton after discovering that Morton had attached himself to the British Union of Fascists, an organisation which he believed gave fascism a bad name; but later he had relented.
‘I don’t know what you mean by that, dear brother, but you ought to be pleased. Remember that, whatever your pettier differences, he shares both your college scarf and your politics. Goodbye, Roach.’
They went out. Sinner got up, put on a dressing gown and looked around the flat. It was clean, well lit and not too cold, but it was also bare even compared to his parents’ flat in Spitalfields: there were no ornaments and only a single picture, the one that Evelyn had presumably been talking about earlier.
Seven or eight doctors with black coats and big sideburns were crowded around a cadaver like ravens around a piece of meat. The cadaver was jaundiced but still quite well muscled, the tendons in its right thigh exposed by a hanging flap of skin and rendered in detail. A cloth was draped across its groin but you could see the bulge beneath. All around was gloom, like the morgue at St Panteleimon’s, and indeed the cadaver’s face did remind Sinner a little of Ollie Renhsaw. He turned quickly away from the painting, feeling that if he looked any longer the doctors, if they really were doctors, would fall upon the body and devour it. But then, strolling into the bathroom for a piss – what luxury not to be using a bedpan like at St Panteleimon’s – he found himself staring into a mirror, which, if anything, was even worse than the painting. It was weeks since he’d seen his own reflection in anything clearer than a grimy window, and he understood now why the bouncers hadn’t let him into the Carav
an. He didn’t want to look like this.
Apart from the sitting room, the bathroom and the two bedrooms, there was just a small kitchen and a mysterious sixth room with a locked door, presumably Erskine’s laboratory. The lock was heavy but he could probably break the door off its hinges if he wanted – maybe not today, but certainly after a bit more rest and a bit more liver and onions. He wondered where he could go to pawn whatever it was that Erskine kept in there. Fifteen minutes later, as he stood at the window looking down at the street and thinking how strange it was that he’d ended up here, there was another knock at the front door of the flat. Sinner opened it. Evelyn had come back, without her brother.
‘I got the cab to take me in a circle,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘Because I wanted to know if you were really Philip’s valet. You’re not, are you?’ She had a mannish way of jutting her chin forward when she was daring someone to contradict her.
‘I don’t know. An hour ago I was a stableboy.’
‘I knew it. If one of his servants really ever looked as deathly as you he wouldn’t go within a mile of them, let alone put them up in his flat. What do you really do?’
‘I was a boxer.’
‘You’re rather short for a boxer.’
‘I punch pretty hard for a short bloke. What are you?’
‘I intend to be a composer. Do you like avant-garde music?’
Sinner shrugged.
‘I’m quite sure you would,’ said Evelyn. ‘I can almost invariably tell.’ Evelyn was aware that she didn’t completely convince when she made knowing remarks like this, especially to someone like Sinner with that gaze of his, but she didn’t see how her repartee was supposed to gain any poise when she had absolutely nobody to practise on at home. If she tried to deliver a satirical barb at dinner her father would just stare at her until she wanted to cry. And Caroline Garlick’s family were lovely but the trouble was they laughed rather too easily, rather than not at all – it wasn’t quite the Algonquin Round Table. She was convinced that if she had been allowed to go to Paris she would have had lots of practice, and of course met lots of people like this boy, but as it was, if she ever met any genuine intellectuals – or any beyond their neighbour Alistair Thurlow – they would probably think she was hopelessly childish. For about a week she’d tried to take up heavy drinking, since heavy drinkers were so often reputed to be terrific conversationalists, but most of the time she just fell asleep.
Evelyn recovered herself and smiled. ‘You know, my brother is an extraordinary character in many ways. I never would have known he had the courage. He gets through twenty-six years with such olympic diffidence and then suddenly it’s an ordinary Thursday and one discovers a concubine in his bed. I don’t expect you mind if I call you that?’
‘What does it mean?’
‘You don’t, then.’
‘What does it mean?’
‘What it means is that I have never had any illusions about my brother’s real—’
‘You don’t call me names, you stuck-up bitch,’ said Sinner, and turned away from her. Immediately he heard a swish and felt a hard blow to the back of his head. He turned back. Evelyn had clonked him with the umbrella.
‘And you don’t speak like that to a woman,’ she said, slightly flushed. She went out.
Sinner sat down in an armchair, rubbing the back of his head, surprised at how deeply he’d allowed Evelyn to irritate him, and knowing, really, that it was because of how deeply Erskine’s sister reminded him of his own. The sister he’d once had. Anna.
The last time he’d seen Anna, he was fifteen and she was only twelve, eyes still too big for her head. One Friday night the whole family was at home in the flat on Romford Street, in the big all-purpose room which they called the kitchen. Sinner’s mother was at the hob cooking chicken soup, Anna was determinedly trying to teach Sinner to knit, and Sinner’s father was sitting with three or four of his old friends from his home village, grumbling about business over a Polish card game called Ocka on which they were gambling with shillings. After losing nine hands in a row, Sinner’s father had stamped his foot and said to one of his friends, ‘You took three cards instead of two.’
‘I took two cards.’
‘You took three. You thought I wouldn’t notice?’
‘I took two.’
‘Cheating,’ said Sinner’s father. ‘Cheating again,’ he roared. Then he rose from his stool, picked up the rickety little fold-up table on which they were playing and hurled it out of the open window. There was a crash outside followed by a couple of startled oaths. Sinner jumped up, ran down three flights of stairs almost before the first ace had hit the cobbles below, and started snatching up the coins that had scattered across the street. He’d picked up nearly £2 in shillings before he turned and saw that his sister had followed him down.
‘Go back upstairs, Anna,’ he said.
‘Are you going to buy sweets?’ she said. She was wearing one of his old shirts.
His father appeared at the door of the tenement block. ‘Come back here with our money, you little shits.’
Sinner ran.
When he got back that night, drunk, he found his mother in the room that he shared with Anna. (He’d slept in the same bed with her for most of his life. In the world he knew, it wasn’t unusual for brothers to end up fucking their sisters, or at least to come close, and he was proud that he’d never touched her like that.) His mother was holding a cold wet cloth to a green bruise on Anna’s head. Anna was half-awake and mumbling. Sinner went into his parents’ room, woke up his father, and beat him until his face was all blood and he was cowering in the corner beside his mother’s sewing machine. Then he went back into the other bedroom and took over with the cloth from his mother, who went out. The next morning he said goodbye to Anna and went to the gym to train with Frink. In the evening he had a match at Premierland, at the bottom of the bill, and a man in the crowd came up to congratulate him afterwards, and he lived for about a week in that man’s flat; he tried cocaine there for the first time, but he didn’t like the blank and cubic tone it gave his orgasms. When he finally went home again, Anna wasn’t in the flat.
‘Where is she?’ he said to his mother.
‘She’s gone. Your father’s out looking.’ She’d been crying.
‘What the fuck do you mean she’s gone?’
‘I went out and I came back and she wasn’t here.’
‘Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘If you stayed with us, Seth,’ said his mother. ‘If you stayed with us this wouldn’t happen.’
‘Stay with you? Every day and night until he dies or fucks off somewhere else?’ said Sinner.
‘Just until she finds a husband to take her away.’
‘Every day and night?’
‘Why not? Why can’t you? Because of prizefighting and girls? Stay with us, or just go. He hits her because he can’t hit you. God above! If you weren’t here at all, he wouldn’t want to hit so much. If you were here all the time, he would want to hit, but he couldn’t. But you come and go. You stay just long enough to make him angry and then you disappear. Do you think it helps when you come back here once a week to punish him? That just makes it worse for her. And for me.’
Sinner went out to look for Anna himself. He never found her. And when he lost Anna, whom he loved, he lost more than just a sister. Because he was certain that Anna – just like, it now seemed to him, Erskine’s sister Evelyn – had known something important about her brother long before her brother had really known it himself. She used to smile one way when she heard their mother blather to him about local girls and another way when she saw him stare at a handsome man in the street, neither smile her usual smile, which rose slowly in her face like a glass filling with orange juice until it overflowed into laughter. She was only twelve but she knew him in a way that no one else had ever known him. So what else was there to find out about himself that she had never told him, and could never tell h
im, now that she was gone? What other secrets of Sinner’s had been washed away with her in the rain?
9
MARCH 1936
At twenty-two, just down from Cambridge and not very happy, Erskine had begun a three-month period of rigorous self-experimentation in imitation of his hero Francis Galton. Of the experiments he had performed in that time, four were particularly memorable.
The first was very brief. For most of his life, Erskine had wondered if the unconscious processes of the body could be subjugated more fully to the conscious mind. So one day, as a preliminary study, he sat down on his bed at home in Claramore and, for half an hour, concentrated only on inhaling and exhaling. Then he turned his attention to an essay he was planning about the genus Ceratophaga (the moth that eats nothing but dead horses’ hooves and dead tortoises’ shells) and commanded his body to go back to breathing without supervision as it normally did, rather as one might impatiently send a child off to play.
But his body ignored him, and he continued to feel as if he’d suffocate and die unless he specifically willed each breath. After several minutes of panic in which he wondered if he had permanently shut off some gasket in his brain and would never be able to concentrate on anything else again for the rest of his life, he realised he was breathing without thinking – but as soon as he realised, he stopped again – panicked, started, realised, stopped – again and again – and it wasn’t until his mother knocked on his door to tell him about his sister’s early return from holiday that the torture was interrupted. Three far more ambitious related projects had been planned – to fall asleep at will, to stop his nasal mucosa from producing unwanted mucus, and to pace his digestive system so that he could eat a huge breakfast every day and then skip lunch without feeling hungry – but he decided to postpone them all in case he did himself some sort of lasting damage.
After that, he wanted to know if the mind could ever be quite as unruly as the body. So for two weeks he carried a notebook, and every time he made a decision to do something, however unimportant, he made some rapid notes about the circumstances, then before bed he would expand on those notes in detail. And in all that time he couldn’t find a single action that was, in Galton’s words, ‘uncaused and creative’: everything he did, every so-called whim or fancy or inspiration, was a consequence of utterly predictable and conventional desires or obligations, and those in turn could probably be traced back to some banal combination of heredity and environment. This depressed him. Then, on the fifteenth day, he was passing his sister’s bedroom when he saw on her dressing table a picture, torn from a newspaper, of the young French bank robber Alexandre Stavisky, known as le beau Sasha. He went into the room and stared at the photo for some time, then went back to his own room and took out his notebook, but he wasn’t sure what to write down: he had no particular interest in crime and punishment so there was no earthly reason why he should have looked at the photograph. He abandoned the experiment.
