Dark Angel (58 page)

In his father’s study, Boy looked at these letters with a sense of despair. He had seen the war. He had seen men shredded. He knew only too well what was likely to have happened to Acland. It seemed terrible to him that his father should delude himself in this way; he felt a bitter anger against Jane, who had forced him to give his father this second blow—now, at such a time. Nevertheless, he had promised. The information was duly spelled out.

Boy then discovered that Denton would not accept the reality of the broken engagement; it was no more actual than the death of Acland.

“A lovers’ tiff,” he pronounced, and plucked at the rug. Boy found the room insufferably hot. “A lovers’ tiff. Nothing to make a song and dance about. You’ll make it up.”

This sounded like a prophecy, or possibly a command. Boy had begun to sweat.

“No, Papa,” he replied, as firmly as he could. “There was no quarrel. We remain friends. But it is decided. There is no going back.”

“Time you left.” His father picked up his pen. “Pass me the blotting paper.”

Boy knew when he was dismissed. He left the room. He was agitated. He paced up and down the black-and-white flagstones of the hall. He looked up the vertiginous well of the staircase, past the four landings to the yellowish glass dome that surmounted it. Boy felt dizzy.

His bags lay packed in the hall; his father’s ghostly Rolls waited outside the door to convey him to the station; his farewells to his mother and to Freddie were said. Freddie had already left for his ambulance duty. In Boy’s pocket was a small leather box containing Jane’s engagement ring, which, the previous afternoon, she had returned to him.

Boy juggled this box in his pocket; he shook his head and pulled at his ears. He did not know what to do with the box. Take it with him, or leave it here? It seemed a decision he could not make. He paced up and down twice more. He did a thing he had not done since childhood: He navigated the expanse of the hall one way on the white stones; he navigated it back on the black ones. Steenie came racketing down the stairs.

“Where’s Constance?” Boy said. As soon as the words were pronounced he knew that was why he paced: The words needed to be said.

Steenie fluttered about the hall, gathering up letters, a long scarf, a walking stick with a silver head, a pair of gloves whose color made Boy shudder. He gave Boy a curious look, and a suspiciously pink smile.

“Connie? She’s out.”

“Out?” Boy felt aggrieved. Military engagements awaited him. His return to the war surely deserved more ceremony than an empty hall and a distracted brother.

“Boy, honestly! Your memory is like a sieve! Connie said goodbye at breakfast.” Steenie fiddled with his gloves. He put them on. He smoothed supple yellow pigskin against his fingers.

“I need to speak to her. Out where?”

“
Aren’t
these divine?” Steenie was still admiring the gloves. “I only bought them yesterday. Now, Boy, I must rush. No long farewells—I hate them.”

Steenie hesitated. It occurred to Boy that, beneath the fuss with the gloves, Steenie was embarrassed. They looked at each other. Steenie tossed his scarf over his shoulder. He moved toward the door. Steenie had a new way of walking that Boy distrusted, a walk that resembled a glide, the hips advancing, the upper part of his torso at an exaggerated angle, leaning back. He touched the doorknob, turned back. He laid one yellow-gloved hand on Boy’s uniformed arm.

“Boy, I shall think of you. And I will write. You know I always write. You will take care?”

Boy did not quite know what to do. He was touched, for it was true that Steenie did write, often; his letters were long, amusing, undaunted, decorated with drawings. Boy, who read and reread them in the trenches, had found—somewhat to his surprise—that they were comforting. Oblique—but comforting. He felt he might like to embrace his brother, but, in the end, he shook his hand. A military handshake; his eyes watered.

Steenie always fenced with emotion. He at once backed off.
En garde:
quick glittering blocking swishes of his foil. He made one, two, three inconsequential remarks: the weather, the waiting motorcar, his impending visit to a new gallery.

These remarks shamed Steenie, a little. Boy stood on a white stone flag; he stood on a black one: he saw himself and his brother from a distance, two figures on a chessboard, blocked. Boy could not say what he felt, because he believed it right to be manly; Steenie could not say what he felt, because he distrusted the spoken word. As he had said to Wexton, it was always too approximate. With this, Wexton did not agree.

“How absurd we are,” Steenie said, foil glittering. Then, repenting, he made a rush at Boy and gave him a hug.

Steenie was wearing scent; Boy recoiled.

“I’ll give Connie a message if you like.” Steenie was repenting still.

Boy picked up one of his bags and inspected the label on it. “No. It doesn’t matter. It was nothing important.” Boy continued to inspect the label, as if it contained some secret message. It was addressed by rank and title, followed by numbers.

“Where is she anyway?” He straightened up.

“She’s gone to Jenna’s wedding. Boy—you know that.”

Steenie knew he was about to burst into tears. When Steenie cried he made an exhibition of himself: The tears spouted; they smudged his mascara; they made runnels in the rice powder he applied to his cheeks. He distrusted tears as much as words; he knew he cried too easily.

Meanwhile it was possible—always possible—that he would not see his brother again.

Steenie made another rush, this time for the front door. He called his final goodbye over his shoulder.

“It was terrible,” he said to Wexton some while later. “Boy can’t say what he feels, and neither can I. What’s
wrong
with us, Wexton? I do love him, you know.”

Wexton smiled. “I expect he’s noticed,” he said.

The wedding was in a church. (Jane did not believe in registry offices.) The church was south of the river, august Victorian gothic, an island surrounded by slums. The church was cold: as cold as charity, Constance thought. An English summer could not be relied upon: Outside, the weather was squally.

The congregation was sparse. On the bride’s side of the aisle sat Jane and Constance, side by side in a front pew. Constance’s small feet rested on a tapestry hassock. She sat and flicked at the prayer book; Jane knelt and—presumably—prayed.

On the bridegroom’s side of the aisle there was a better turnout. Hennessy’s family was not present. He was represented by the Tubbs family, out in force. There was one large woman with a worn but kind face, and several girls of varying ages who must be Arthur Tubbs’s younger sisters. There were five of them; the youngest was about four years old, the eldest about fifteen. The fifteen-year-old, Jane had whispered, was Florrie, with whom Jenna shared a room. Florrie worked nearby, packing shells in a munitions factory that was one of several south of the river owned by Sir Montague Stern.

Florrie looked thin and jaundiced; her skin was yellowish. Like the rest of the family, she wore serge. On her feet were buttoned boots, which looked several sizes too large. The youngest child wore woolen mittens with the fingers cut out. All looked excited. To the serge, they had pinned nosegays. Constance sniffed; she could smell poverty. It emanated not just from the Tubbs family but from the church itself, which had an air of keeping up appearances in grinding circumstances.

Once, perhaps, more prosperous families had worshipped here. Ranks of stained-glass saints and dragon-slayers celebrated their memory and their acts of piety; there were neat slabs commemorating them upon the walls. Constance could hear their ghosts, these merchantmen and their wives; she heard the men rustle the pages of their hymn books; their beards brushed her cheek.

Outside, the streets stank. The houses had a bowed, hopeless look, cramped in upon one another, seething. The children ran in the stinking streets in bare feet; they made toys from rubbish. These streets shocked Constance (who rarely ventured far south of the park, let alone the river). She felt they shocked the fabric of the church also, but in a different way. The church was affronted by this decline in the neighborhood; it reared up its black iron railings, the granite of its headstones; it slammed its great oak doors. It turned its back. It did its best; it smelled of incense, but also scrubbing buckets. There were two arrangements of flowers, provided by Jane. They stood either side of the altar, framing the backs of the bridegroom and best man. Dahlias, with large spiky heads and stiff stalks; they were orange and scarlet, acid-yellow and ineptly arranged. Constance looked at them with hatred.

Hennessy and Tubbs: they had both made an effort, that was clear. They had arrived on the overnight train from Yorkshire that morning; they would return on a train that afternoon. Jack Hennessy wore the uniform of a private; Arthur Tubbs, that of a corporal. Hennessy’s uniform was spruce. His khaki jacket strained across the muscles of his back; the toes of his army boots were mirrors. The back of his neck looked raw—a severe army haircut; there was a shaving gash on his cheek. They made an incongruous pair: Hennessy so massive, Tubbs so shrunken. Tubbs was fluent as a weasel; his hair, parted in the middle, was smarmed with grease. He sported a new moustache; traces of the acne remained.

Of the two, it was Tubbs who appeared the more nervous. He fingered the wisp of moustache; he craned his head back and forth; he winked at his mother and his sisters; he shifted from foot to foot. Tubbs was a coming man (though Constance of course did not know that). Tubbs would do well out of the war: His expertise in supplies would become adroit; he would learn about markets, black and white; he would come to understand the poetry of supply and demand. After the war, Arthur Tubbs would rise; Jack Hennessy would not. Coke, and the boiler in the basement that ate pound notes, lay in wait for Hennessy, whose instincts were feudal.

Hennessy, meanwhile, was an impressive bridegroom. No sign of nerves: He stood ramrod straight; he did not turn once. A tree of a man, an oak of a man. Constance looked at his rigid back. Hennessy, who used to catch butterflies and put them in matchboxes. Once he showed her a stag beetle and pulled off one of its legs, so that it ran around in a circle. With such diversions Hennessy had entertained Constance Cross the albatross.

The asthmatic organ changed key; it made a new attack to herald the entrance of the bride. Still Hennessy did not turn around. Jenna was wearing gray, not white (Jane had paid for her dress). It was of soft material, gathered across the front to disguise the alteration in her figure. She came up the aisle on the arm of a small rusty old man, presumably another member of the Tubbs family, for as he passed them, the rusty old man winked. A steady pace. Jenna held her chin high; she looked neither to right nor left. She was carrying, Constance saw, a bouquet of violets.

Violets were cheap, easily available on any street corner, and perhaps therefore predictable. Nevertheless, they made Constance angry too. The ghosts in the church shifted and shuffled; they whispered about the violets; they snuffed at their scent of damp earth. Jenna had reached the altar rail. The priest drooped within vestments too big. Jenna faltered once as—for the first time—Hennessy turned.

How the anger sang! Constance knew she ought to clamp down on it now, quickly, but she did not want to clamp—she wanted to let it rip. There was lightning in her fingertips; her hair burned; she tasted smoke; her heels drummed. Acland’s baby was being given away.

One person was missing from this congregation, and that person was Acland himself. Constance waited for him to join the other ghosts. She waited for him to stop this terrible ceremony. When he did not come (of course he would not; he had come once only, to her, to say goodbye) her anger rebelled. It made a chaos of this church: It took up the tiles from the floor and hurled them about in the air; it whistled and hooted its revolution; it made barricades of the pews and burned down the altar rails.

Constance looked up: up, up, up. Above the arches of the nave, above the clerestory windows, up to the spandrels and the curvatures of the roof. A dark place, full of words and whispers, they whirled with the most violent energy.

They brushed her skin. Constance gave a small cry; she would not stay. It was too wicked and too terrible. Easy to leave. Snap the prayer book shut. Kick the hassock. Tap the heels and the toes on the tessellated floor. Down the side aisle, past the monuments, past the poor box, past the font. The porch door was heavy. Its hinges screamed. Constance was outside on the steps. The rain still fell. The wind blew paper along the street. London wept.

Constance lifted her face to its tears. She breathed in great gusts of its air. She tasted salt and soot. She remained absolutely still—that was necessary—until the anger left her.

It did not want to go. It was like an incubus. It liked it inside her. It clutched and it clung. It insinuated itself into her veins. It pounded its fists in her head and made it ache. It drummed its heels up and down inside her lungs. It became soft, and the sponge of her lungs soaked it up.

It could be willed away; she had willed it away before. Constance closed her eyes and concentrated her mind. She gathered the ugly incubus into a bundle, a malevolent amorphous thing, a crafty thing, dwarfish and sly. It resisted being gathered, but she could do it. Tentacle by tentacle: there it was. She could feel it: It was lumpish. She forced it down, out, and away. It was like giving birth, getting rid of the thing. It stuck. Its lumpishness jammed her up. It clung to her.

“Get out, get out, get out.” Constance said the words aloud. The thing gave a knotty and reluctant consent. It bunched, squirmed, clung, gave up.

It was gone. She could breathe again. Constance hugged her arms around herself. She began to see again. The city righted itself. The sky stopped weeping. She felt very pure. She was like an empty purse, a hollow shell; she rejoiced in the emptiness. It made her feel cleansed and perfectly light. A light, pure, clean, empty thing. Dry as a nutshell, light as a feather, capable of flight.