The Lime Twig (2 page)

“I’ll just do that, Captain. It’s good of you.”

Mother got the covers to her chin and, lights off, blackout drawn aside, I sat watching to see the aircraft shoot out the eyes of the cherubim who, beyond sifting snow, and triangulated, now and then, by flooding white shafts of light, hugged each other atop the Dreary Station dome. I held my cheeks. I listened to the old girl’s chamber pot—she had stuffed it with jewelry and glass buttons and an ostrich plume—that rolled about beneath
the bed. Missing one front wheel, a tiny tar-painted lorry passed in dreadful crawl and the bare hub of its broken axle screeched and sent off sparks against the stones. And all through that blistering snowy night my hands were drenching the angora white yarn of a tasseled shawl, twisting it like a young girl’s lock of hair.

When engines shook the night beyond the nymphs and apple leaves in the filigreed shutters of my window, I began suddenly to smell it: not the stench of rafters burning, not the vaporized rubber stench that stayed about the street for days after the hit on the garage of Autorank, Limited, but only a faint live smell of worn carpet or paper or tissue being singed within the lodging house itself. And I fancied it was coming round the edges of my door—the odor of smoke—and I held to the arms of my chair and slowly breathed into my lungs that smoke.

“Are you awake?” I said.

She sat up with the nightdress slanting down her flesh.

“You’d better put your wrapper on, old girl.”

She sat there startled by the light of a flare that was plainly going to land in old John’s chimney across the way. I could see her game face and I squeezed on the slippers and squeezed the shawl.

“Don’t you smell the smoke? The house is going up,” I said. “Do you want to bum?”

“It’s only the kettle, William. …” And she was grinning, one foot was trying to escape the sheet. They were running with buckets across the way at John’s.

“You look, William, you tell me what it is. …”

“Out of that bed now, and we’ll just have a look together.”

Then I pulled open the door and there was the hallway dry and dark as ever, the slipper still hooked on the stair, the one faint bulb swinging round and round on its cord. But our boxes were burning. The bottom of the pile was sunk in flame, hot crabbing flame orange and pale blue in the draft from the door and the sleeve of a coat of mine was crumbling and smoking out of a black pasty hole.

Mother began to cough and pull at my hand—the smoke was mostly hers and thick, and there is no smudge as black as that from burning velveteen and stays and packets of cheap face powder—and then she cried, “Oh, William, William.” I saw the pile lean and dislodge a clump of cinders while at the same moment I heard a warden tapping on the outside door with his torch and heard him call through the door: “All right in there?”

I could taste my portion of the smoke; the banging on the door grew louder. Now they were flinging water on old John’s roof, but mother and I were in an empty hall with only our own fire to care about.

“Can’t you leave off tugging on me, can’t you?” But before I could close my robe she was gone, three or four steps straight into the pile to snatch the stays and an old tortoise-shell fan from out of the fire.

“Mum!”

But she pulled, the boxes toppled about her, the flames shot high as the ceiling. While a pink flask of ammonia
she had saved for years exploded and hissed with the rest of it.

From under the pall I heard her voice: “Look here, it’s hardly singed at all, see now? Hardly singed …” Outside footfalls, and then the warden: “Charlie, you’d better give us a hand here, Charlie. …”

On hands and knees she was trying to crawl back to me, hot sparks from the fire kept settling on her arms and on the thin silk of her gown. One strap was burned through suddenly, fell away, and then a handful of tissue in the bosom caught and, secured by the edging of charred lace, puffed at its luminous peak as if a small forced fire, stoked inside her flesh, had burst a hole through the tender dry surface of my mother’s breast.

“Give us your shoulder here, Charlie … lend a heave!”

And even while I grunted and went at her with robe outspread, she tried with one hand to pluck away her bosom’s fire. “Mother,” I shouted, “hold on now, Mother,” and knelt and got the robe round her—mother and son in a single robe—and was slapping the embers and lifting her back toward the bed when I saw the warden’s boot in the door and heard the tooting of his whistle. Then only the sound of dumping sand, water falling, and every few minutes the hurried crash of an ax head into our smothered pile.

At dawn I returned to the charcoal of the hall and met the captain in corduroy jacket and wearing a gun and holster next his ribs. For a moment we stood looking
at the scorch marks on the lath and the high black reach of extinguished flames. The captain ran his toe through the ashes.

“How is your mother, Hencher? A bit hard on her, wasn’t it?”

“She won’t say, of course, though the pain must be considerable. …”

“Well, Hencher,” rattling tin and glass in his pocket, “give me a call on the pipes if it gets worse. I happen to have a needle and a few drops in an ampule can relieve all that.”

“Oh, she’ll do quite nicely, I’m sure. …”

But the blisters did not go down. They were small, translucent, membranous and tough all over her body, and no matter how often I dressed them with marge from Lily’s kitchen they retained their bulbous density. And even today I smell them: smell the skin, smell the damp sheets I wrapped her in, smell that room turned infirmary. I smell that house.

For after a decade it is the same house, a different landlord—Michael Banks now, not poor grieving Lily—but the same house, the one in the middle of Corking Street not five minutes east of the station. Refurbished, an electric buzzer at the door, three flats instead of beds for lodgers, and a spirit shop where John’s house stood—from the peaked garret to the electric buzzer it is the exact same place. I know it well. A lodger is forever going back to the pictures in black bead frames, back to the lost slipper, or forever coming round to pay respects when you think you’ve seen the last of him, or to
tell you—stranger as far as you know—that his was the cheek that left the bloody impression in your looking glass. “My old girl died on these premises, Mr. Banks,” looking over his shoulder, feeling the wall, and he had to take me in. And then it was home again for William when I found the comforter with hearts on it across my bed. Now there are orange deck chairs in the laundry court, and sitting out with a sack of beans on my stomach and hearing the sounds of the wireless from Annie’s window, still through half-shut eyes I see the shadow of the bomber that once filled the court.

Sometimes I wake in the night, very late in the still night, and go sit in the lavatory and run the water and smoke half a thin cigar until there is nothing to feel, nothing to hear except Margaret turning over or the cat pacing my step in the parlor. I see the cherubim safely lit, I wipe my hands, I sleep.

I waited three weeks before signaling the captain on the pipes, and then I beat at them with my slipper until I threw it across the room and found the warden’s torch in the covers and, after the blow that smashed the glass, fetched the captain with loud strokes on first the hot water pipe and then the cold. Together they came, captain and corporal, while the pipes still shivered up the wall. I looked away when I saw the captain pulling out the plunger.

“You ain’t going to give my stuff to her?” said Sparrow. “Not to the old woman, are you? I’d sooner you give a jab to this fat man here. …”

I trembled then.

“No use giving my stuff to her,” said Sparrow, the corporal.

And then in the dark: “She’ll do now, Hencher. I’d get a little sleep if I were you.”

But it was not sleep I wanted. I fastened the robe, tied the white shawl round my throat. “Good night, old girl,” I whispered and went out of the door, flinging an end of the shawl aside flier fashion. It was cold; I walked beneath the black supports and timbers of a burned city, and how often I had made passage through the length of Lily Eastchip’s corridor, carried my neat square of dinner garbage past the parlor when Mother and I first joined that household and ate alone. No garbage now. Only the parlor with pinholes in the curtain across the window and a pile of clothing and several candles in the fireplace; only the hallway growing more and more narrow at the end; only the thought that, behind the screen, I had left Mother comfortable and that tonight, this night, I was going to stand bareheaded in the laundry court and breathe, watch the sky, hear what I could of the cries coming from Violet Lane, from the oil-company docks, the Mall. When I found the bolt and pulled it, squeezed out of that black entrance with a hand to my throat, I expected to see the boy dancing with his dog.

The light snow fell, tracers went straight up from behind the garret that faced me across the court, I noticed a pink reflection in the sky west of the station. The airplanes were bombing Highland Green. I saw the humps of dead geraniums and a wooden case of old stout bottles
black and glistening against a shed. I had not moved, I felt the snow wet on my shoulders and on the rims of my ears.

Large, brown, a lifeless airplane returning, it was one of our own and I saw it suddenly approach out of the snow perhaps a hundred feet above the garret and slow as a child’s kite. Big and blackish-brown with streaks of ice across the nose, which was beginning to rise while the tail sank behind in the snow, it was simply there, enormous and without a trace of smoke, the engines dead and one aileron flapping in the wind. And ceasing to climb, ceasing to move, a vast and ugly shape stalled against the snow up there, the nose dropped and beneath the pilot’s window I saw the figure of a naked woman painted against the bomber’s pebbly surface. Her face was snow, something back of her thigh had sprung a leak and the thigh was sunk in oil. But her hair, her long white head of hair was shrieking in the wind as if the inboard engine was sucking the strands of it.

Her name was Reggie’s Rose and she was sitting on the black pack of a parachute.

Dipped, shuddered, banged up and down for a moment—I could see the lifted rudder then, swinging to and fro above the tubular narrowing of its fuselage—and during that slapping glide the thick wings did not fall, no frenzied hand wiped the pilot’s icy windscreen, no tiny torch switched on to prove this final and outrageous landfall. It made no sound, but steepened its glide, then slowed again with a kind of gigantic deranged and stubborn confidence and pushed on, shedding the
snow, as if after the tedium of journey there would be a mere settling, rolling to silence, with a drink and hot sandwiches for her crew. And I myself fell down next to Lily Eastchip’s garbage tin, in darkness drove my cheek among the roots of her dead bushes. Through the dressing robe and bedroom silks the heat of my body dissolved the snow. I was wet and waited for the blow of a flying gyroscopic compass or propeller blade.

Or to be brushed to death by a wing, caught beneath cold tons of the central fuselage, or surely sprayed by petrol and burned alive: tasting those hard white rubber roots I wondered whether the warden and his friend Charlie would hear the crash. And tightening, biting to the sour heart of the root, I saw the bomber in its first shapeless immensity and thought I could hold it off—monstrous, spread-winged, shadowy—hold it off with my outstretched arms eternally or at least until I should escape by Lily’s door.

The warden must have heard the crash. His Charlie must have heard the crash.

Something small and round struck suddenly against my side. When again I made out the sounds from the far corner—the steady firing of the guns—I breathed, rolled, sat with my back to the wall. My fingers found the painful missile, only a hard tuft of wool blown loose from inside a pilot’s boot or torn from the shaggy collar of his flying coat. The snow was falling, still the sky was pink from the bombing of Highland Green. But no whistles, no wardens running: a single window smashed on the other side of the court and a woman began shrieking
for her husband. And again there was only silence and my belly trembling.

I took one step, another. Then there were the high dark sides of the intact bomber and the snow was melting on the iron. I reached the first three-bladed propeller—the two bottom sweeps of steel were doubled beneath the cowling—and for a moment I leaned against it and it was like touching your red cheek to a stranded whale’s fluke when, in all your coastal graveyard, there was no witness, no one to see. I walked round the bubble of the nose—that small dome set on edge with a great crack down the middle—and stood beneath the artistry of Reggie’s Rose. Her leg was long, she sat on her parachute with one knee raised. In the knee cap was a half-moon hole for a man’s boot, above it another, and then a hand grip just under the pilot’s door. So I climbed up poor Rose, the airman’s dream and big as one of the cherubim, and snatched at the high door which, sealed in the flight’s vacuum, sucked against its fitting of rust and rubber and sprang open.

I should have had a visored cap, leather coat, gauntlets. But, glancing once at the ground, poised in the snow over Rose’s hair, I tugged, entered head first the forward cabin.

The cabin roof as well as the front gunner’s dome was cracked and a little snow fell steadily between the seats. In the dark I sat with my hands on the half wheel and slippers resting on the jammed pedals, my head turning to see the handles, rows of knobs, dials with needles all set at zero, boxes and buttons and toggle switches and
loop of wire and insulated rings coming down from the roof. In this space I smelled resin and grease and lacquer and something fatty that made me groan.

I tried to work the pedals, turn the wheel. I could not breathe. When suddenly from a hook between two cylinders next to my right hand I saw a palm-shaped cone of steel and took it up, held it before my face—a metal kidney trimmed round the edges with a strip of fur—I looked at it, then lowered my head and pressed my nose and mouth into its drawn cup. My breath came free. The inhalation was pure and deep and sweet. I smelled tobacco and a cheap wine, was breathing out of the pilot’s lungs.