Umbrella (22 page)

smug wraith in rotten cheesecloth
, it’s invisible, ain’t it. Now Busner leans in to that
Bovril
mouth to hear, We’re’erebecausewe’re’ere because e’re’ere because we’re’ere, the same palilalia he gets from many others of the others. One by one he brings the enlargements up to her face – but whatever it is that so transfixes her, it isn’t what’s immediately before her eyes. She drones on, becausewe’re’erebecausewe’re’ere, and he’s enraged – for an instant he is prepared to strike her. She is Miriam and all other recalcitrant women to him . . . Then a slippery strip detaches itself from the last print and spins to the floor,
What’s this?
a second negative of the film
Lesley must’ve done two
that he unthinkingly holds up between thumb and forefinger to the window . . .
I wonder what the hot dish’ll be in the canteen today –?
Two of the frames are
out of synch’
: in one her right hand pulls the invisible lever, her left turns the transparent flywheel, but in the next her left hand operates the lever
the chuck?
while her right remains idle. Busner looks to the third frame and finds that it is sequential with the first! The front wheels of the shitty and shit-coloured Austin hit the edge of a massive pothole on Winnington Road and the entire car
lifts off its axle Fosbury-flopping inside the chassis: I’m driving on the moon, what can it mean?
When the enkies tic they do it at great speed – hence the filming, hence the frame-by-frame analysis: he wants to see individual tics siphoned off from the seemingly incontinent spray of movements – but this . . . this is incomprehensible, this intercutting of time. He runs his laser gaze along the rest of the strip,
Am I transcriptase?
And discovers five frames at the beginning of the sequence to which this errant frame belongs, but: what can this mean? He has no difficulty in finding it credible that, at a neuronal level, she has succeeded in jumping from one sequence to the other and then back – it’s at a cerebral one that he experiences bamboozlement:
her brain . . . is outside of time . . . so far away . . . in another place . . . in another
phase of development, Willis said when they all pitched up that morning – the varsity men, one or two others from the discussion club, and Stanley, whom they all regarded with
a queer sort of respect
, especially after Cod Drummond arrived with a handcart piled high with picks, shovels and all else necessary for the undertaking. And Stanley, while in nowise wishing
to swank
, did take up a pick and give it a few experimental swings with a view to conveying that he was altogether at his ease with such work, just as he was at his ease with another phase of development, a phrase he liked and that kept running through his head as the work progressed and the sun rose above their hot heads. Another phase of development sounded like one of Willis’s pamphlets on political economy – which Stanley had done his level best to get through, though he feared he must be
frightfully dense
, for, try as he might, pretty soon after he began reading sleep would be the next phase of development. The varsity men were
bloomin’ daft
to look at – they’d all come in bags, sporting collars and cricketing pullovers. Their notion of navvying meant buckling on the gaiters they probably wore for
a little rough shootin’
in the country. For the first hour or two, while they hammered away at the cobbled roadway that ran up from the High Street, their spirits continued to rise – then their lack of experience began to tell. In truth, Stanley had no more familiarity with manual labour than these beefy chaps – some of whose faces were aflame – yet what he did understand was that all work has a rhythm appropriate to its duration, one that should be nicely judged to
preserve vim
. The varsity men nattered on – clearly, whatever their belief in Willis’s brand of socialism, this was still a
tremendous jape
for them: and, since they had never, ever worked, work was their
day trip
. They took cobblestones and, using picks for mallets, tried out croquet shots. Drummond did his best to
keep ’em in line
, strutting this way and that in the roadway, telling one chap to pound down the earth, a second to cart off the debris, a third to go to the Coach & Horses and fetch some ginger beer. – Ginger, mind. He was an ape of a man, Drummond, his head
big as two rugger balls
, but, for all his stamping around and bellowing, the varsity men only laughed, then, if he persisted,
ragged him
, which was easy enough to do. – Oh, I say, Cod ol’ man, have you been to visit the ape in the zoo? No – why not? She’s been bally well fetched all the way from darkest Africa to visit with you, you ought to show her some courtesy – some fellow feeling! Tha-at’s right, Cod, show some fellow feeling – they’ve dolled her all up for you, or is it that you aren’t partial to African ladies of your – sorry, I mean the species? This way and that Drummond stamped, the white dust covering his moleskin trousers – his face was purple, the handkerchief he’d tucked under the rim of his hat a transparent veil through which the folds of his fat neck could be seen quite clearly
one-two-three, he is me
: not at ease, never will be, with these types, despite my . . . conjunction with Adeline, a liaison that made of Stanley a man in the fullest sense, quite unlike these inexperienced . . .
virgins the lot of ’em
, unless, that is, you entered on their account the sort of beastliness she had told him went on at their schools and colleges, and which Stan could well believe, not being an innocent and having seen exquisites strolling about the ’Dilly and certain seedy sorts who favoured Guardsmen and who frequented the pubs by Scots Gate . . . hands, backs . . . necks – a martial bearing down . . .
beastliness
. The work proceeded throughout the long, hot August morning – they would dig up the old cobblestones and level the roadway, although Willis had arranged for proper contractors to come and lay the new macadam surface, because this was patently no work for
raggle-taggle boys playing at being working men
. The cricket pullovers lay in a mound on the verge. The varsity men joshed Drummond, whose misfortune it was to have a
fish tail
too big for his mouth, it
flapped about
on his lower lip, foam-flecked – hence, Stanley supposed, Cod. The men from the discussion group – Addison, Poole – travailed with greater diligence, yet equally ineffectually, while Willis, whose show this was, took it upon himself to explain matters to passers-by, at first city-bound gentlemen on their way to Hampstead Underground Station, then grocers’ and butchers’ boys, and eventually a van of ladies who came promenading under parasols, followed by nursemaids pushing perambulators, each distinct echelon equipped with rugs and hampers and all the other impedimenta required for a constitutional and a sit-down on the grass at somewhere called the Vale of Health, which Stanley had never heard of before – although Willis told him, portentously, that it had been the haunt of
poetical types, that Johnnie Keats and ’is ilk
. To his credit, Willis demonstrated his own socialistic convictions by making no distinction – he would waylay anyone, regardless of whether they were respectable or not. He would treat an insolent telegram boy to a lecture on the dignity of labour and a bemused carter – who clearly wished he had one – to a sermon on the ugliness of the machine. He would placate irate householders, explaining that the small curve of roadway and its embankment were, in the letter of the law, private property – his own – and that, while no permission was needed from the Borough, he had in point of fact signalled his intent with comprehensive plans posted for all to see at the town hall in Belsize Park. — Willis stands now, his beard hooking to his breast, his specially tailored Jaeger cycling suit very close-fitting, his stockings equally so –
a Spy cartoon
, altogether a brilliant man, Adeline said, what with his pamphleteering and his lecturing for the extramural departments of the University. – You haven’t an idea in your head . . . she coiled on top of Stanley, hissing, one leg between his, the other athwart them, her face on his belly, her
breath on my John Thomas
. . . They swapped their roles all the time,
she-be-me, me-be-her
, no other he believed, devoutly, could ever understand Adeline, sobbing in green chenille for the loss of him . . .
My little Pierrot!
And Stanley tripping quite as tearfully along the rutted track from Norr to Carshalton, passing Rose and Grace and Tully the footman, coming from the station, back from their afternoon off, who went on up the hill without a backward glance at the fair young man – they recognised him not, while he had spied on them all from their lady’s boudoir, and from the lane hidden by lime hedging – inside and out, spying on these others . . .
another kind of servant, maybe?
Certainly,
in service
and moving along concealed passages and back stairs of his and his mistress’s devising. Cod Drummond would, Stan considers as he drops a cobblestone with a dull chink, always be in service as well:
Omdurman, Krugersdorp, Lhasa . . . Hampstead High Street . . .
a soapy tang rises on the hot air from down there, where a laundry must be . . . in the sultry noonday heat Stanley throws back his head, a single
cloudy bolster
lies on the divan of the sky – he thinks of standing, awed, inside the belly of a Zeppelin, and looking down its bellying nave. He thinks of Colonel Cody’s
sycamore seed plunge
– Adeline had promised him a combined ticket, he would fly the figure-eight course at Hendon, then she would join him to see the War in the Air at the Hippodrome in Golders Green: the spidery models of aircraft creeping above the audience’s heads on invisible wires. He would not speak of this to Willis, despite his being a strange sort of confidant: he knew of their relation, yet was blinded to its carnal essence by his own peculiarities – a bachelor rising forty
who brought bouquets to the West End stage doors not with any motive, unless it be to discover leading ladies unchaperoned in their dressing rooms and lead them unto the kindly light of a socialism, which implies
no loss for anyone, only gains all round
. . .
It is my pyorrhoea, he had explained to Stanley with the frankness he believed exemplary of the New Man. Stanley laughed: Pardon? My pyorrhoea, Willis said again, baring his inflamed gums in their reddish and hairy net. It makes it next to impossible for me to . . . ahem, become intimate with a woman . . . Stanley did not altogether believe this, thinking it more likely that, while a bicycle saddle between female thighs might kindle passion, the brutal leather would only bear down still more on what little manhood the apostle of free love possessed.

Sprawling on the grassy bank, Willis’s workforce drinks its Batey’s ginger beer, then presses the cool earthenware to their burning cheeks. No matter what their egalitarian guv’nor said, it is difficult for them to escape the conclusion that this is serfdom – albeit of an unusual stamp. Willis was a nob of sorts, although a second son – and there was his manorial property at the top of the rise – of modest proportions, true, but a pretty enough flat-fronted little house in old honeycomb-coloured brick, with newer chimneypots
just so
, and a shining colophon of a knocker
just so
. The garden fell away so steeply to the High Street that the canes implanted to train runner beans, tomatoes and peas made a
stockade lashed together with edible rope
. Willis was a vegetarian: I graze my own garden, he said the day he took Stanley with him to the garden party at Norr — the day Stanley met Adeline and it all began under her husband’s complaisant wolf-yellow eyes.
I drift, I float, I loop-the-loop
– yet, like Pegoud performing the stunt at Brooklands, I feel as at ease as if I were sat on a settle poking a cosy fire. They were all hugely amused by his pash for the aeronauts and their machines – an old yokel coming past stopped and set down his trug simply to laugh with them. Stanley thought that, notwithstanding how the flying men soared up and up, still they remained far below these bluestockings and their foppish gentlemen friends. Willis had lent him a blazer, a boater and cut him a buttonhole with his own strange hands. There had been a fly waiting for them at Carshalton Station – only then, under the withering gaze of a gamekeeper’s boy in a suit of cheap broadcloth, did Stanley appreciate that he passed muster – true, the boy saw him for what he was, yet still
I
passed muster
. The young ladies who gathered round him, screening out the downs with their pretty gowns, asked after his people, and, as naturally as
h
’s,
r
’s and
t
’s rose up from the close-cropped lawn to mesh with his careful elocutions, the lies fell from his lips: They stopped at Dulwich, his father was in the City. The young ladies laughed, and Stanley laughed with them, grasping in that moment the poisonous quicksilver of their prejudices: that for them this was far, far below, down with the aeronauts and still more sublunary creatures – people in trade and the like. Between raised and brick-lined beds of syringas, hydrangeas and hellebore, Turkish rugs and gold-embroidered cushions with tassels had been carefully arranged, while in garden pavilions he recognised as Ince’s the servants were setting out the buffet: big bloody bowls of rhubarb syllabub, meats quivering in aspic, a naked salmon laid out on its
cucumber petticoats
. He was offered champagne – but knew better than to accept. They gave him sarsaparilla flavoured with cloves instead, so he took pleasure in this and also the small woolly dogs that got under the ladies’ skirts, then were reborn, yelping. He loitered, listening to the hushed amazement with which the outrages in the West Country were being discussed – some of the young ladies expressed a muted sympathy, the martyrdom of Davison was invoked. Had he been honestly himself, Stanley might have had something to add – but he was not, so did not. He hung about, caught up in the crisp curves of the maids’ white caps and the neat pleats of their snowy aprons. – Later, when
cunning panther
padding he went in search of the conveniences, he found himself on an upper storey, stuck in beeswax and staring into a linen cupboard through a door half ajar at wicker trays of frilled and freshly laundered linen – pure white linen, underclothes threaded with
white, white
ribbon, petticoats, shifts, chemises, shirts and still flimsier things. Lavender wafted across these small white meadows, and the desire to romp on them, to bury his sunburned face in those sweetly flowery furrows, was . . . resisted. He found the WC and drained himself – a
horsey
splatter, the cistern squealed and clanked and gushed and groaned. Adeline asked him about his situation – Willis had introduced her as Missus Adeline Cameron,
empee
, and she had laughed, Not yet, Fey! which Stanley knew was short for Feydeau, Willis’s nonsensical nickname. Stanley said smiling: I have none. If he had but known it, it was this clumsily done approximation of charm that drew her in, her neck so long and white stretching
up to him, with its tresses of dark, dark hair either side of a face . . .
some men might’ve found too strong
. Come, she said – not unkindly, although it was clear
she meant business
– let us be frank with one another. And so he was. She heard him out about his dismissal from Ince’s, and before that the Post Office. – My old man . . . he hesitated . . . was with the London General. She quizzed him: A doctor? while knowing full well what he meant. Stanley came clean: No, the ’bus company – but ’e’s left there now, leff London inall. My bruvver found ’em a place down in Devon, where me muvver’s lot’re from. Sincerity had chipped away at his imposture – she affected not to notice. They had somehow managed to set a course away from the other guests, and looking back he saw them all grouped on the stone-flagged terraces that sat below the spreading eaves of the new house. The guests – of whom there were not that many – had, by some application of the
laws of motion
, loosely arranged themselves into
two orbits
, one around an
elderly body
in a bath chair, the other intent on a small boy who was showing them the finer points of his model biplane. Willis touched a wing – Stanley turned back to his hostess, then went where she was looking: beyond the sudden falling away of the lawn to a
melting chessboard
, cows lying
enamelled
in the centre of a field-square lashed their tails at flies, clouds dappled the flanks of the downs and on top rain drew a discreet
hatching
between earth and sky. Boots stamped across Stanley’s recently filled grave – he shivered, also, there was some
forcemeat and two cold, cooked potatoes in a deal box on the windowsill
. . .
off by now
. His rent was far beyond being in arrears and they knew he had nothing left to pawn – they might sell the debt on
to the boys
. . .
a second shiver, hair pricking thighs inside
these flannel trousers, too hot
– yet he was frigid. He dismissed the thought of Arnold Collins and the ways in which he would be beholden if he asked for
a little leg-up
. There were poppies nodding above the long grass and large dock leaves cast still deeper shadows in the hedges’ shadow, and for Stanley there was a great falling away of the substance from everything – a pair of linnets hung on a bramble that trailed from the hedge,
the
arms
of
oaks embraced
. . .
Then how do you sustain yourself? she asked. He mentioned a modest sum due to him for minuting the proceedings of the discussion group – of his sister and how she had obtained this position for him, as she had the last, he said nothing. Merely to say her name,
Or-dree
, was to evoke all her energy and so confirm his own moody fatigue. Stanley looked down at his shined brogans spreading on the lawn
cow pats
, and said: Also . . . I make things – fabricate them. She put her
ebonised
eyes on him and saw a well-made young man, who, despite the obvious unravelling of reduced circumstances – she could not bring herself to think poverty – nonetheless appeared
clean, with a clear complexion and an expression perfectly manly, without slyness
. . .
Oh, she said, what sort of things? He recovered his other self and said: That would be difficult to explain, it’s easier for me to say what I make them out of – now it’s dowelling and rice paper or butcher’s paper, because these are easy to come by . . . When I was with the umbrella-makers there were always damaged frames and plenty of material offcuts – oiled cottons, art silks, that sort of thing – Oh, and fish glue, but that you can always get . . . None troubled to come across to them, some cried out as they turned towards her house. The maids and menservants hurried to gather up the cushions and roll up the rugs. Adeline remained scrutinising Stanley. Are they like gazeekas or billikens, Mister De’Ath? she asked, and so he realised that, for all her cleverness and aplomb, there were few years between them, for she too had desired these daft toys. He laughed. – No, much bigger than them – when kids see them they want to play with them. I won’t allow it. My models are delicate and airy things, their struts snap, their coverings tear . . . so . . . I won’t allow it . . . She was hatless, and, as the rain swept over them, his first instinct was to hand her his borrowed boater – before he could do so he became enthralled by the exaltation he saw there, her strong features dissolving in the warm droplets. No words were spoken as the carefully arranged folds of white muslin at her neck greyed into transparency and her clavicle filled
a loving cup
. Over her drenched shoulder a cattle trough boiled with perfect bubbles – and still they stood. We have, she said amidst all this tumult, an apartment at the Albany. I go up to town from time to time – fairly often, in fact – not simply to visit Selfridge’s and the other bazaars, but also for lectures and committee meetings. You might consider all of this frivolous – a leisured woman’s profligacy with time –. Stanley mewled with the effort of finding the right register of dissent. She paid this no mind: I should be delighted if you would call on me there – say, this coming Tuesday . . . Her dress was saturated, the fabric clinging to her breasts, her belly . . .
her thighs
. Stanley could not forbear from noticing that there were
no stays or lets or hindrances
. . . at teatime, by which I mean four thirty. Only then did she put up her parasol. He offered her his arm and under this
glossy shell
they at last made for the house, slithering over the wet lawn. In Cameron the empee’s own dressing room, Stanley hid behind a screen in his dank shirt. When he peeked out he saw an entire costume had been provided for him: the jacket and trousers mounted on a sort of stand, while some of the snowy linen he had admired was arranged in the shape of a man on a chaise-longue. Stripping naked, he dried himself with a hand towel, thinking of how she must be doing the same between her legs and he spasmed picturing
her cunny
– there need be no bashfulness for them, not now: she was his own little sister, caught by the rain while playing out, then
rubbed down an’ set before the range
. Dressing, Stanley saw on top of the chest of drawers soft beige leather gloves, a carved wooden box full of gold and silver cufflinks, some golf tees and silver-backed brushes with their bristles in a clinch. Stanley eyed his own avaricious face warily in a pier glass, for circling the box, tilting the golf tees, lying in the palms of the gloves, were sovereigns and half-sovereigns – for
a chap short o’ sugar nuff silverware
to provide the wherewithal for a month or more’s diligent
loafing
– steak and kidney pie, cutlets, white seeded rolls. His mouth filled with his juices, he regretted the
brute force
of his other hunger: there had been trifle. From below there floated piano notes and the soft beating of the rain on artfully stained panes. The suit was of tweed, heavy and musty with moth-balling – yet it fitted him well enough, belonging as it did, he supposed, to a younger and more meagre empee. In the drawing room, where one of the young ladies continued to play
without mercy
while the gentlemen hubbubed over premature pegs and the Kaiser’s five million men-in-arms, Stanley was chagrined, despite understanding