Umbrella (16 page)

Busner stands up. For a while he had thought that when he had more leisure he might do something with Maurice’s homolog, which was surely a sexual self-interrogation to rival the broader surveys of Havelock-Ellis and Kinsey. He supposed it might be in one of the orange boxes under the window, or in the attic at Redington Road – wherever it was, it would be together with tea chests full of the rotting correspondence of the parents Busner had never known, their serrated postcards, their now blotched but once creamy notepaper folded into thick envelopes that had been extravagantly franked and stamped. All of it he had foreseen himself unpacking, unsheathing and unfolding, so that the pressed flowers bloomed into dust as he read the missives for the first time since their long-gone recipients set the sheets to one side. It was not – he considers as he raises the candy-striped canvas blind to discover decals of outsized and grinning pizza-eaters being leant against by real people who are grimy in the surprising sunlight that shines on the far side of Fortess Road – the unexamined life that was worthless, but the one
un-re-examined
by the
properly qualified
. And at once he resolves to
throw all that stuff away
. To have it all picked over by the next generation, or in the declension below that, by an amateur genealogist avid for his roots would result in a further demerit, rendering his parents’ lives, Maurice’s, his own, worthless minus one. – And what of Sergeant Culcross? Busner says aloud, speaking to the hip-high fridge, the enamelled
BREAD BIN
and the electric jug, in a vain attempt to rouse them from their complacent inanimation.
What of him?
Busner sees the young man lying on the bleak roadside, his legs torn off by the blast, and wonders: did they pick the nuts and bolts out of him before ’coptering him back to base? Was he right now sedated in a hospital bed, waiting to be told . . .
like Ronald Reagan
that he had
nothing down below?
They might well reassure him all they could, they would probably rub talcum powder on his stumps, sheathe them in silk stockings and the leather sockets of the prostheses. No doubt capable nurses would lift him on either side, then put him on a walking machine – but that’s only another kind of treadmill, because in the end a phantom limb or two would be a blessing compared to this waking, walking nightmare with the half of you that’s been turned on a lathe now turned on another one . . .
and what might that feel like?
In the future, Busner didn’t doubt, microprocessors would be implanted in the brain and attached to sensors inserted between the relevant vertebrae – then this feeling might be examined, but for now it remained an enigma-r-elle est une vraie beauté, m’sieur! The queer little Frenchman has used the slow shoving of the tightly packed crowd to press Audrey against the railings surrounding the green. Right away Stanley suspects him of
making free
with his hands, so struggles to raise his own while spluttering, I know summuv yer lingo you – you muggins! Not much of a jibe, Audrey thinks – besides, she doesn’t mind the attentions of the Frenchman, whose lavender silk waistcoat and gay straw boater are flowers in the bed of black-and-blue serge which urges in the shadow of the Empire. May I av ze plezzure to –? He frees his hand enough to raise his hat but it’s . . .
too late!
She cannot forbear from laughing delightedly as the
gallant fellow is borne off by a flying column
of florid young men in football jerseys, who, singing, Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set, God –! carry all before them across
one fifth of the world’s land
,
with its populations of
theosophical Hindoos, jolly Hottentots, lazy Lascars, sullen Malays and woolly headed blackamoors
all
four hundred million of ’em!
But how many . . . Audrey wonders . . . Empires are there in the Empire? Bert would know . . . The stretched domes and finials of this one fall on the heads of the crowd,
the ash of Vesuvius
. In the sunlight beyond there is the jig of bunting and the glare of a band limbering up – with an oom-p’poom-poom a staccato march begins and the white glove of the conductor waves the smell of frying potatoes . . .
straight
to me
. Next a gratified spasm passes through the crowd, See – Stan is beside her – iss a two-cylinder Siddeley they’ve got . . . He’s said this several times already, yet Audrey knows that it isn’t the motor car that interests him, it’s the
ortommoton
that will conduct it from Shepherd’s Bush Green to Temple Bar,
its clockwork muss be woun’ up right tight
. The motor car is enclosed by ropes and a rope gangway leads to it from the doors of the Empire, doors that waver on their brass hinges, then swing open to reveal, Enig-ma-relle! Not so much a shout as a wave, Enigmanigmanigmar’r’r’ellle, that ripples across their
jelly faces
– and at once Audrey is
plungèd into egrimony
. True, the Man of Steel does his best to move in a mechanical fashion, cranking up right arm and right leg, then winching them down to the step below, but, much as the flesh-and-blood spectators push and pull at Audrey, so she remotely senses the muscles and tendons pushing and pulling inside the
shiny tubing
of his suit. Besides,
who could be fooled
by that metal visor, below which an irresolute chin is plastered with thick stage paint. A section of the crowd is bawling counter to the band, All the girls loved Ber-tie when ’e adda motor car! as Enigmarelle stilt-walks along the gangway to his waiting conveyance. That’s the man what invenned it! Stan bellows in her ear: Fred Ireland! Ireland is clean-shaven with spectacles that
’e fancies make ’im look scientifical
. He prods Enigmarelle between his shoulder blades, causing the Man of Steel to unlatch the motor car’s door, then climb jerkily up on to its dickey. Acknowledging the Huzzah! of the crowd with an exaggerated bow, Ireland takes his seat behind his clockwork chauffeur. ’Ow d’you fink ’e works, Ordree? Stan brightly delights –
how can he believe this fakery?
The Ireland chap
pantomimically fiddling between the mechanical man’s shoulder blades, Enigmarelle extending his stiff arms to the steering wheel, the mechanic in the Norfolk jacket yanking the hand-crank
ta-ra-ra-
round and
ta-ra-ra-
round and
ta-ra-ra-
boom
-de-ay –!
The sharp crack of the engine firing flutters hankies and sends shopgirls swooning, and their sweethearts seize the opportunity to
snatch a feel
. The Man of Steel tilts at the waist, pulls one lever up and pushes a second down. Oh my . . . Oh my! Close beside Audrey a
chit of a girl
is allowing
such liberties
that looking down she sees her dingy underthings,
Lottie Collins ’as no draw-ers, Will yer kindly lend ’er your-ers
. . .
Boots stomp to the oom-pah-pah! The organ-grinder has done his job and his instrument is alive with its own music, its pistons drumming, its steel-shod clogs hoofing it. Self-important stewards swagger away the ropes as the mechanic lopes up beside the inventor – the crowd parts as the motor car starts, and, sceptical as she may be, Audrey cannot deny that it’s a
bang-up-to-date
show
, what with the band on its stand all done up with swags and streamers having achieved its own
infernal combustion – Men of Brass
whose red necks . . . bullfrogs . . . red and gold frogging
. Stan, already a head taller than his elder sister, still cannot bear his poor vantage – he leaps, he pirouettes, he leans into the railings and, grasping a spear point in each hand, hops tentatively until Audrey says, Don’t be daft, you’ll get one up yer jacksie! Still, he’s beside himself, D-don’t yer see, ’e’s drivin’ it, ’e’s truly drivin’ it! Audrey sees nothing of the sort, she sees Ireland the showman throw a handful of farthings and barley sugar to the crowd, she sees the automaton wrestle very bodily with the steering wheel as the Siddeley accelerates round the green and proceeds east, flickering behind the railings, trailing pelting boys and swelling smoke. P’raps, Audrey thinks, there’s no need fer deceivin’ at such a speed.
P’raps
, Ireland cares nothing for the good opinion of heather sellers or railway navvies in soiled dungarees,
p’raps
he thinks he can’t be seen shouting in
Enigma-wotsit’s tin ear
from where she stands in the shadow of the Empire,
p’raps
— but,
Hush now! These things are far too sure that you should dream, lest they appear as things that seem
. . .
Such as, the Man of Steel turned on her very own lathe. She discovered it
all set up
that morning to do the job: six operations for each of his limbs. Engage the shaft, wheel in the cutter, cut the threads – internal and external – cut the recesses. Six operations for each of his limbs –
yet I only get to see his right arm
. Others get the left arm, still further along the line of lathes there are more expert girls who braze the legs with oxyacetylene torches in a blaze of flame, and beyond them are the munitionettes who operate turret lathes, lowering the headstock down carefully until it bores into the block with a ferocious whine, then raising it up again to the point where the mechanism ejects a new canister,
empty and oily
, and awaiting a brain –
we never see these
,
any more than we see
his privates
. . .
These, Audrey believes, must be machined in a secret workshop concealed in one of the Danger Buildings –
p’raps No.
4
– where men too old or too lame for the front pride themselves on the steel pintles they turn on their lathes, each one screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeching into existence with ready-made hair of swarf. When Audrey is at her lathe, she gauges every fifth right arm and turns it upside down
so’s he can be checked
– checked as she was on her first day: sent down from the Labour Exchange at Plumstead, having signed on for
three years or the duration
. Coming through Beresford Square with all that
carry-on
, the
blackamoors an’ wogs flogging scarves an’ such offa the ground, an’ cockatoos in cages, an’ all manner of pies, an’ whelk stalls, an’ other eats, an’ the ’buses pulling up with men dangling right offa the stair rails in bunches
. — That first day Audrey and Gracie come straight in by No. 1 Gate, under the indifferent gaze of gunners cast in iron – one of the police sentries . . .
’e only takes my green ticket and salutes me! What larks! A male-bloody-biped kowtowing to me!
Not so the Lady Superintendent
a Vesta Victoria – to put it mildly
, with a
Unionist glint
in her
’ow-now-brown-cow eyes
and probably a
Man of Steel
somewhere inside of her. There are photographs of the burly munitions workers
she’d like us all to be
on the distempered walls of her office in the gatehouse, while in the corner sits a typewriter