Homesickness (35 page)

Gerald gave a kindly smile, ‘Well, you're almost there. It won't be long.'

But they fell silent for a while, for many miles. The Cathcarts' expressions showed they were thinking of their street in Drummoyne with its honest bleached telegraph poles, the embedded solid shapes, weathered colours and glare, the family grown up. They passed neat pastures and the fixed spaces of England, the British Isles, the cultivation of centuries. So neat and ordered, so tame, it was slightly depressing.

In the 1930s, Douglas William Gumbley, CBE, ISO, invented and designed the airletter or
aerogramme
while he was employed in Iraq as Inspector General of Posts and Telegraphs. Gumbley was one of those Englishmen who labour(ed) tomato-magenta under a blazing foreign sun: bazaar hum, servants with sliding eyes, the evening
nimbu pani
, a game at the club, dirty messengers in strange garments, drumming efficiency into them and whatnot. So forth. Some favoured the pith helmet. Some formed a path by swinging a silver-tipped cane. They set an example which in itself kept them going. Not many went native. Out there, Gumbley ran a tight shop. Had to.

In Iraq he realised the need for a ‘lightweight missive of specific size and weight'. International air services were growing by the day. For this purpose he designed and printed an air-mail lettercard which was issued by the Iraqis on 15 July 1933. These soon became accepted and relied upon by travellers the world over.

Douglas Gumbley had been in India in 1898 and was responsible for the construction of the telegraph line from Karachi to Tehran…

He died on the Isle of Wight in 1973, the ripe age of ninety-two.

The air letters (
aerogramme
: ‘by air mail', ‘par avion') of countries such as India and Pakistan are smaller than others, the paper and gum are noticeably poor in quality. And not all air letters are blue. For reasons known to themselves, the Danes chose spotless white. America's air letter is oblong, suitably large, efficiently laid out. France now has an
aerogramme
; ether blue. Britain's which is small but long when fathomed out naturally has the most powerful blue (best to use red biro on theirs!), an attempt at regal, near-royal, historical blue.

Walking with Borelli, Louisa looked as if any second she would grab his hand. Gaiety (spontaneity) inflected her flying coat-tails. Leaning forward she kept glancing at him, shaking her head with a type of mock sadness: well, at his harebrained theories and the observations he made. And it was as if they were against the world, the two of them: forcing their way through the surge of oncoming words and soldier faces, Borelli was discussing the social implications of toast, Anglo-Saxon toast, when he crouched wombat-shaped to tie a shoelace, and she turned and stood over him, and out of the blue demanded to know about the walking stick, ‘and no monkey business, please.'

‘Silly bitch!' He fell backwards onto his flat palms. ‘What a time to ask.'

This wasn't like Louisa.

Several people stopped or at last turned.

‘Never mind,' he called out, ‘she's crackers.'

‘Tell me! I am not letting go!' Louisa laughed. Never had she acted so carefree, one foot planted on Borelli's jacket. A few seconds before he'd been strolling like a drum-major.

Waving the stick Borelli called out, ‘Help me. I'm a cripple. This woman—' To her he said, ‘Wait till I tell my Uncle. Help!' he croaked aloud.

‘Stop it!' she cupped her mouth. They wouldn't have done it in their own city; certainly Louisa wouldn't have. It was because they were away and felt anonymous. ‘It's all your fault.'

‘What?' He took her arm. ‘Seeing you've embarrassed me, I'll have to tell you. And keep it to yourself.'

They were walking and she looked at the ground.

‘It has nothing to do with my leg. I have legs that are in perfect shape. It's an affectation. A way of getting sympathy, attention. Some people have their arm in a sling. I need the sympathy.'

He went on, ‘It's a swordstick as well…'

‘You've told me all that before, and I never know whether to believe you or not,' she walked on ahead.

‘This uncle told me the way we behave before women reveals our selves. He was right. I've been telling lies because—you've confused me. I think we're lost.'

Borelli pulled out a street directory.

Back, turn left, right, left again, cross Dean Street. Women pushing wicker prams had them filled with cauliflower heads (nothing more). Street musicians; one a former pug. A balding groovoid leaped out of a cab in tan platforms, silver film cans glittering under his arm.

Borelli tried to answer Louisa's questions about his uncle; his age, his women and appearance, physical and geographical history, why he chose to live alone—not only in London, but in Soho. He held Louisa's hand. A bearded man vomited in the gutter.

‘In Soho alone because he sees himself as a specimen in a glass case. He examines himself minutely. He told me last time it accounted for his stooped back; I believe him. He said his room is almost the precise geographical centre of London. It is like a small museum. The angles and lines from elsewhere pressed in on him, as does the entire population. It forces him further into himself. In any case, we are all specimens, he says.'

‘Then he's where you get all your silly ideas from. Hey?'

Borelli glanced away and frowned.

‘I promised I'd see him again. He's from my mother's side.'

‘I think I'll like him,' said Louisa swinging her bag.

A crane lowered artificial clouds onto the outside of a cinema for a display.

As usual Borelli couldn't contain himself. He stopped. ‘Isn't it interesting how the normality…or the actuality of things goes on without our descriptions? Our time is spent cataloguing the description of objects and animals, and explaining, even though they exist solidly in the first place. I find that increasingly odd. We like to classify and describe. We want to understand; I certainly do. But it only adds to the nature of things, it doesn't alter.'

Louisa was shaking her head. ‘No, I didn't mean it like that! I love being with you!'

Borelli looked up. ‘After you…'

They climbed the stairs over the sandwich shop. Bending down on the landing he read the sign opposite:

FREDDIES
* * * T
HIS
I
S
T
HE
S
HOW
!

‘I didn't notice that before…'

He continued, his voice sounding loud.

‘You see what I'm saying. Everything continues without descriptions, and yet descriptions are all that we are doing—it seems to me. I find it strange. Museums, for example—.'

He tapped on the door with his walking stick.

It was opened by an ageing redhead in a pink dressing-gown. Borelli smiled and glanced past her. She put one arm across the door and the folds of her gown fell open.

The woman glanced at Louisa.

‘Who are you looking for?'

Borelli looked around the landing.

‘This is 7. This is it. I came here some weeks ago.'

The woman folded her arms.

‘No you didn't. I'd have remembered.' Again she looked at Louisa.

‘No no! My uncle's place,' Borelli corrected. ‘He lives here.'

The woman laughed.

‘I've been here for four years April. There's no one else who lives here. No man. I have a name. It's Flora Burton.'

‘I remember,' Borelli frowned, ‘that banister there is very loose, right?'

‘It's always been like that as long as I remember.'

She added, tired. ‘I've never in my life touched a banister that isn't loose.'

‘Did you say your name is Burton?'

‘That's not who you're looking for, is it? Well I'm here any time,' she smiled. Then she began coughing.

‘Come along, James,' Louisa tugged.

‘But I was here only a few weeks ago,' Borelli said loudly. ‘He was in there!'

‘He must have moved,' Louisa whispered.

Borelli went over and touched the wall and the banister. The entire building seemed unstable.

‘Now you listen,' she called down from her door. ‘I've been here for years. I don't like people imagining. You're worrying me.' A high, thinly pitched voice, a worn violin.

‘Come on,' said Louisa, ‘we've made a mistake.'

He looked through the window at FREDDIES and back up again. The first floor landing was empty. There was silence.

‘Poor woman,' said Louisa.

The flash of chrome and plate glass struck them from all angles. The stairs had been dark, the walls fingermarked and torn, as remembered: a building condemned. The essential interior colour was brown. Even the traffic patiently banked in the street looked like the other day. Brightly lit clarity: always deceptive. Beware.

Louisa had to take his sleeve. ‘Now come along.'

Her gentle way implied a mistake.

‘But I wrote to my mother about him. He asked me to come back. We had things in common. And this is the street. I remember the stairs; that's the building.'

‘If you walk along, we might see him in the street,' Louisa suggested.

She had to lead him away.

‘I couldn't have been imagining…'

‘Even if you were,' Louisa half answered. She was looking left and right for a nice restaurant. She'd steer him away from his mistakes.

As mechanical as the trumpets, strippers were performing behind the walls, weary in the bones; business as usual. It was a bright morning in London.

Over the door in wooden serifs (soaked in printer's ink):

ZOELLNER & ROY G. BIV
*
Definitions, Maps
*

‘This is the place,' said Gerald.

A tiny brass bell shivering on a spring shaped like a comma sprang into action when they entered, at odds with the sedentary calm of the shop, and remained shaking there long afterwards, like a salmon dying on a line. Undoubtedly it indicated the turbulence beneath the marmoreal calm of both Zoellner, the dying bibliophile, and his junior partner, the repressed Biv (one given to daydreaming). Still waters, so it is said, can run very deep: even these scholarly backwaters. Otherwise, wouldn't the harsh little bugger—the bell—get on their nerves? Perhaps, as North pondered afterwards, it punctured the parchment-yellow steadiness of their day, reminding of the world outside—only a few feet away through mullioned glass—of words spoken and deeds, the real action, so making their lives more tolerable. Much has already been written on Zoellner in technical journals around the world. Roy Biv out the back, handling the maps, glanced up. Not old Zoellner. Behind the desk where books tilted like laminations of slate he kept his head down, annotating a pamphlet on Swahili phonemes. An electric waistcoat (for warmth) restricted his movements to a tight circle: a badly frayed maroon cord fell from the light socket, into his collar. In Clarendon Bold on the wall a small sign announced: NO BAD LANGUAGE. ‘This is the place,' Gerald rubbed his hands. He was evidently pleased with his find.

Words had been collected from all corners of the globe and stored in bound volumes, singly or in sets. The air was grey, teeming in effect with phosphenes—an appearance of rings of light produced by pressure on the eyeball, due to irritation of the retina. Zoellner & Biv retailed every dictionary and word binge imaginable; every Harrap's, Larousses from way back, old Grimms' and a Littré, and the latest Langenscheidt; the Oxford blues with Supplements alongside Chambers Twentieth Century—preferred by the crossword puzzlers; Webster's Internationals, American Heritage, and all the other Yankee upstarts, illustrated and non. Zoellner & Biv stocked glossologies, language maps, semantic atlases on Gleek, Anglish, Jappish, East Indian, Ptydepe and Jarman, Double Deutsch, and an indispensable phrasebook on Swiss; all kinds of cocky argot, Strine and Partridges: a low shelf of Dirty Words or ‘rudery' made browsers bend down or squat. [
Wowser. n
. (Aust.) Fanatical puritan; spoilsport, killjoy; teetotaller.]

The varnished steps placed to reach the higher shelves—Astronomical Definitions, Scientific Terms—were opened like the arrow A, the rope stays forming a taut X. There were words and articles lying on the floor. They stumbled over certain words. Zoellner & Biv had one of the finest collections of Collective Nouns to be seen anywhere. A regular scriptorium; polyglot's trove.

Dictionaries of Surnames, of ‘Misunderstood, Misused, Mispronounced Words', long shelves bending under the weight of Historical Principles. ‘Ghost' words made their occasional appearances. And in a dimly lit corner languished those languages suffering from entropy, gathering dust and mould: Old Norse, Celtic and Wild Boer, Latin, boring Olde English, Volapük, Zend and Tasmanian Aborigine, Navajo and Mandarin. Et cetera.

The gargantuan cash register, an antique Remington, resembled a Japanese typewriter or a small lino machine: so tall and wide, so black and scratched, so appropriate. On either side stood the virile new tongues in glossy rows. They include Canadianisms, Afro-French, West-Indian and Anglo-Indian, stubborn Esperanto, and the rejuvenating neologisms from America, e.g. jeep, coke, napalm, apartment, typewriter and skunk. Lingua franca! As a sideline Zoellner & Biv sold letterboxes.