The Lime Twig (3 page)

Cold up here. Cold up here. Give a kiss to Rose
.

Surely it was Reggie’s breath—the tobacco he had got in an Egyptian NAAFI, his cheap wine—frozen on the slanting translucent glass of the forward cabin’s windows. Layer overlapping icy layer of Reggie’s breath. And I clapped the mask back on its hook, turned a wheel on the cylinder. Leaning far over, sweating, I thrust my hands down and pushed them back along the aluminum trough of floor and found the bottle. Then I found something else, something cool and round to the skin, something that had rested there behind my heels all this while. I set the bottle on top of the wireless box—I heard the sounds of some strange brass anthem coming from the earphones—and reached for that black round shape, carefully and painfully lifted it and cradled it in my lap.

The top of the flying helmet was a perfect dome. Hard, black, slippery. And the flaps were large. On the
surface all the leather of that helmet was soft—if you rubbed it—and yet bone hard and firm beneath the hand’s polishing. There were holes for wire plugs, bands for the elastic of a pair of goggles, some sort of worn insignia on the front. A heavy wet leather helmet large enough for me. I ran my fingernail across the insignia, picked at a blemish, and suddenly I leaned forward, turned the helmet over, looked inside. Then I lifted the helmet, gripped it steadily at arm’s length—I was sitting upright now, upright and staring at the polished thing I held—and slowly raised it high and twisting it, hitching it down from side to side, settled the helmet securely on my own smooth head. I extended my hands again and took the wheel.

“How’s the fit, old girl?” I whispered. “A pretty good fit, old girl?” And I turned my head as far to the right as I was able, so that she might see how I—William Hencher—looked with my bloody coronet in place at last.

Give a kiss to Rose
.

Between 3 and 4 A.M. on the night she died—so many years ago—that’s when I set out walking with my great black coat that made the small children laugh, walking alone or sometimes joining the crowds and waiting under the echoes of the dome and amid the girders and shattered skylight of Dreary Station to see another trainload of our troops return. So many years ago. And I had my dreams; I had my years of walking to the cathedral in the moonlight.

“My old girl died on these premises, Mr. Banks.”

And then all the years were gone and I recognized that house, that hall, despite the paint and plaster and the cheap red carpet they had tacked on the parlor floor. I paid him in advance, I did, and he put the money in his trouser pocket while Margaret went to lift their awkward sign out of the window. Fresh paint, fresh window glass, new floorboards here and there: to think of the place not gutted after all but still standing, the house lived in now by those with hardly a recollection of the nightly fires. Cheery, new, her dresses in one of the closets and his hat by the door. But one of his four rooms was mine, surely mine, and I knew I’d smell the old dead odor of smoke if only I pushed my face close enough to those shabby walls.

Here’s home, old girl, here’s home.

So I spent my first long night in the renovated room, and I dared not spend that night in the lavatory but smoked my cigars in bed. Sitting up in bed, smoking, thinking of my mother all night long. And then there was the second night and I ventured into the hallway. There was the third night and in the darkened cubicle I listened to the far bells counting two, three, four o’clock in the morning and all that time—thinking now of comfort, tranquillity, and thinking also of their two clasped hands—I wondered what I might do for them. The bells were slow in counting, the water dripped. And suddenly it was quite clear what I could do for them, for Michael and his wife.

I hooked the lavatory door. Then I filled the porcelain sink, and in darkness smelling of lavender and greasy
razor blades I immersed my hands up to the wrists, soaked them silently. I dried them on a stiff towel, pushing the towel between my fingers again and again. I wiped the top of my head until it burned. Then I used his talc, showed my teeth in the glass, straightened the robe. I took up the pink-shelled hair brush for a moment but replaced it. And off to the kitchen and then on boards that made tiny sounds, walking with a heavy man’s sore steps, noticing a single lighted window across the court.

It grew cold and before dawn I left the kitchen once: only to pull the comforter off my bed. Again in the kitchen and on Margaret’s wooden stool I sat with the comforter hooded round my head and shoulders, sat waiting for the dawn to come fishing up across the chimney pots and across that dirty gable in the apex of which a weathered muse’s face was carved. When I heard the dog barking in the flat upstairs, when water started running in the pipes behind the wall, and a few river gulls with icy feathers hovered outside the window, and light from a sun the color of some guardsman’s breast warmed my hooded head and arms and knees—why then I got off the stool, began to move about. Wine for the eggs, two pieces of buttered toast, two fried strips of mackerel, a teapot small as an infant’s head and made of iron and boiling—it was a tasteful tray, in one comer decorated with a few pinched violet buds I tore from the plant that has always grown on Margaret’s window shelf. I looked round, made certain the jets were off, thought to include a saucer of red jam, covered the hot salted portions with
folded table napkins. Then I listened. I heard nothing but the iron clock beating next to the stove and a boot landing near the dog upstairs.

The door was off the latch and they were sleeping. I turned and touched it with my hip, my elbow, touched it with only a murmur. And it swung away on smooth hinges while I watched and listened until it came up sharply against the corner of a little cane chair. They lay beneath a single sheet and a single sand-colored blanket, and I saw that on his thin icy cheeks Banks had grown a beard in the night and that Margaret—the eyelids defined the eyes, her lips were dry and brown and puffy—had been dreaming of a nice picnic in narrow St. George’s Park behind the station. Behind each silent face was the dream that would collect slack shadows and tissues and muscles into some first mood for the day. Could I not blow smiles onto their nameless lips, could I not force apart those lips with kissing? One of the gulls came round from the kitchen and started beating the glass.

“Here’s breakfast,” I said, and pushed my knees against the footboard.

For a moment the vague restless dreams merely went faster beneath those two faces. Then stopped suddenly, quite fixed in pain. Then both at once they opened their eyes and Banks’ were opalescent, quick, the eyes of a boy, and Margaret’s eyes were brown.

“It’s five and twenty past six,” I said. “Take the tray now, one of you. Tea’s getting cold. …”

Banks sat up and smiled. He was wearing an undervest,
his arms were naked and he stretched them toward me. “You’re not a bad sort, Hencher,” he said. “Give us the tray!”

“Oh, Mr. Hencher,” I heard the warm voice, the slow sounds in her mouth, “you shouldn’t have gone to the trouble. …”

It was a small trouble. And not long after—a month or a fortnight perhaps—I urged them to take a picnic, not to the sooty park behind the station but farther away, farther away to Landingfield Battery, where they could sit under a dead tree and hold their poor hands. And while they were gone I prowled through the flat, softened my heart of introspection: I found her small tube of cosmetic for the lips and, in the lavatory, drew a red circle with it round each of my eyes. I had their bed to myself while they were gone. They came home laughing and brought a postal card of an old pocked cannon for me.

It was the devil getting the lipstick off.

But red circles, giving your landlord’s bed a try, keeping his flat to yourself for a day—a man must take possession of a place if it is to be a home for the waiting out of dreams. So we lead our lives, keep our privacy in Dreary Station, spend our days grubbing at the rubber roots, pausing at each other’s doors. I still fix them breakfast now and again and the cherubim are still my monument. I have my billet, my memories. How permanent some transients are at last. In a stall in Dreary Station there is a fellow with vocal cords damaged during the fire who sells me chocolates, and I like to talk to him; sometimes I come across a gagger lying out cold
in the snow, and for him I have a word; I like to talk to all the unanswering children of Dreary Station. But home is best.

I hear Michael in the bath, I whet Margaret’s knives. Or it is 3 or 4 A.M. and I turn the key, turn the knob, avoid the empty goldfish bowl that catches the glitter off the street, feel the skin of my shoes going down the hallway to their door. I stand whispering our history before that door and slowly, so slowly, I step behind the screen in my own dark room and then, on the edge of the bed and sighing, start peeling the elastic sleeves off my thighs. I hold my head awhile and then I rub my thighs until the sleep goes out of them and the blood returns. In my own dark room I hear a little bird trying to sing on the ledge where the kidneys used to freeze.

Smooth the pillow, pull down the sheets for me. Thinking of Reggie and the rest of them, can I help but smile?

I can get along without you, Mother.

It is Wednesday dawn. Margaret’s day, once every fortnight, for shopping and looking in the windows. She is off already with mints in her pocket and a great empty crocheted bag on her arm, jacket pulled down nicely on her hips and a fresh tape on her injured finger. She smells of rose water and the dust that is always gathering in the four rooms. In one of the shops she will hold a plain dress against the length of her body, then return it to the racks; at a stand near the bridge she will buy him—Michael Banks—a tin of fifty, and for Hencher she will buy three cigars. She will ride the double-decker, look at dolls behind a glass, have a sandwich. And come home at last with a packet of cold fish in the bag.

Most Wednesdays—let her stay, let her walk out— Michael does not care, does not hold his breath, never listens for the soft voice that calls good-by. But this is no usual Wednesday dawn and he slips from room to room until she is finally gone. In front of the glass fixes his coat and hat, and smiles. For he intends not to be home when she returns.

Now he is standing next to their bed—the bed of ordinary down and ticking and body scent, with the course of dreams mapped on the coverlet—and not beside the door and not in the hall. Ready for street, departure, for some prearranged activity, he nonetheless is immobile this moment and stares at the bed. His gold tooth is warm in the sun, his rotting tooth begins to pain. From out the window the darting of a black tiny bird makes him wish for its sound. He would like to
hear it or would like to hear sounds of a wireless through the open door or sounds of tugs and double-deckers and boys crying the news. Perhaps the smashing of a piece of furniture. Anything. Because he too has his day to discover and it is more than pretty dresses and gandering at a shiny steam iron and taking a quick cup of tea.

He can tell the world.

But in the silence of the flat’s close and ordinary little bedroom he hears again all the soft timid sounds she made before setting off to market: the fall of the slippery soap bar into the empty tub, the limpid sound of her running bath, the slough of three fingers in the cream pot, the cry of bristles against her teeth, the fuzzy sound of straps drawing up on the skin of her shoulders; poor sounds of her counting out the change, click of the pocket-book. Then sounds of a safety pin closing beneath the lifted skirt and of the comb setting up last-minute static in the single wave of her hair.

He pulls at the clothes-closet door. He steps inside and embraces two hanging and scratchy dresses and her winter coat pinned over with bits of tissue. Something on a hook knocks his hat awry. Behind him, in the room, the sunlight has burned past the chimes in St. George’s belfry and is now more than a searching shaft in that room: it comes diffused and hot through the window glass, it lights the dry putty-colored walls and ceiling, draws a steam from the damp lath behind the plaster, warms the small unpainted tin clock which she always leaves secreted and ticking under the pillow on her side of the bed. A good early-morning sun, good for the cat or for
the humming housewife. But the cat is in the other room and his wife is out.

Inside the closet he is rummaging overhead to a shelf —reaching and pushing among the dresses now, invading anew and for himself this hiding place which he expects to keep from her. He stands on tiptoe, an arm is angular at the crook, his unused hand is dragging one of the dresses off its hanger by the shoulder; but the other set of high fingers is pushing, working a way through the dusty folds toward what he knows is resting behind the duster and pail near the wall. His hipbone strikes the thin paneling of the door so that it squeaks and swings outward, casting a perfect black shadow across the foot of the bed. And after a moment he steps out into the room, turns sideways, uncorks the bottle, tilts it up, and puts the hot mouth of the bottle to his lips. He drinks— until the queer mechanism of his throat can pass no more and his lips stop sucking and a little of it spills down his chin. Upstairs a breakfast kettle begins to shriek. He takes a step, holds the bottle against his breast, suddenly turns his face straight to the sun.

She’ll wonder about me. She’ll wonder where her hubby’s at, rightly enough
.

He left the flat door open. Throughout the day, whenever anyone moved inside the building, slammed a window or shouted a few words down the unlighted stair— “Why don’t you leave off it? Why don’t you just leave off it, you with your bloody kissing round the gas works”—the open door swung a hand’s length
to and fro, drifted its desolate and careless small arc in a house of shadow and brief argument. But no one took notice of the door, no one entered the four empty rooms beyond it, and only the abandoned cat followed with its turning head each swing of the door. Until at the end of the day Margaret came in smiling, walked the length of the hall with a felt hat over one ear, feet hot, market sack pulling from the straps in her hand and, stopping short, discovered the waiting animal in the door’s crack. Stopped, backed off, went for help from a second-floor neighbor who had a heart large with comfort and all the cheer in the world, went for help as he knew she would.

Knowing how much she feared his dreams: knowing that her own worst dream was one day to find him gone, overdue minute by minute some late afternoon until the inexplicable absence of him became a certainty; knowing that his own worst dream, and best, was of a horse which was itself the flesh of all violent dreams; knowing this dream, that the horse was in their sitting room—he had left the flat door open as if he meant to return in a moment or meant never to return—seeing the room empty except for moonlight bright as day and, in the middle of the floor, the tall upright shape of the horse draped from head to tail in an enormous sheet that falls over the eyes and hangs down stiffly from the silver jaw; knowing the horse on sight and listening while it raises one shadowed hoof on the end of a silver thread of foreleg and drives down the hoof to splinter in a single crash one plank of that empty Dreary Station floor; knowing
his own impurity and Hencher’s guile; and knowing that Margaret’s hand has nothing in the palm but a short life span (finding one of her hairpins in his pocket that Wednesday dawn when he walked out into the sunlight with nothing cupped in the lip of his knowledge except thoughts of the night and pleasure he was about to find) —knowing all this, he heard in Hencher’s first question the sound of a dirty wind, a secret thought, the sudden crashing in of the plank and the crashing shut of that door.

“How’s the missus, Mr. Banks? Got off to her marketing all right?”

Then: “No offense. No offense,” said Hencher after Banks’ pause and answer.

The
Artemis
—a small excursion boat—shivered and rolled now and again ever so slightly though it was moored fast to the quay. Banks heard the cries of dock hands who were fixing a boom’s hook to a cargo net, the sound of a pump, and the sound, from the top deck, of a child shouting through cupped hands in the direction of the river’s distant traffic of puffing tugs and barges. And also overhead there were the quick uncontrollable running footfalls of smaller children and, on the gangway, hidden beyond the white bulkhead of the refreshment saloon, there was the steady tramp of still more boarding passengers.

A bar, a dance floor—everyone was dancing—a row of salt-sealed windows, a small skylight drawn over with
the shadow of a fat gull: here was Hencher’s fun, and Banks could feel the crowd mounting the sides of the ship, feel the dance rhythm tingling through the greasy wood of the table top beneath his hand. For a moment and in a clear space past the open sea doors held back by small brass hooks, he saw hatless members of the crew dragging a mountain of battered life preservers forward in a great tar-stained shroud of canvas.

“No offense, eh, Mr. Banks? Too good a day for that. And tell me now, how’s this for a bit of a good trip?”

The lodger’s hand was putty round the bottom of the beer glass, the black-and-cream checkered cap was tight on the head—surely the fat man would sail away with the mothers and children and smart young girls when the whistle blew.

“No offense, Hencher. But you can leave off mentioning her, if you don’t mind.”

Perhaps he would sail away himself. That would be the laugh, he and Hencher, stowaways both, elbowing room at the ship’s rail between lovers and old ladies, looking out themselves—the two of them—for a glimpse of the water or a great furnace burning far-off at the river’s edge. Sail away out of the river’s mouth and into the afternoons of an excursion life. Hear the laughter, feel the ship’s beam wallow in the deep seas and lie down at night beneath a lifeboat’s white spongy prow still hot to the hand. No luggage, no destination, helmsman tying the wheel—on any course—to have a smoke with a girl. This would be the laugh, with only the pimply barkeep who
had never been to sea before drawing beer the night long. But there was better than this in wait for him, something much better than this.

In the crowd at the foot of the gangplank an officer had asked for their tickets, and Hencher had spoken to the man: “My old woman’s on that boat, Captain, and me and my friend here will just see that she’s got a proper deck chair and a robe round her legs.”

And now the dawn was gone, the morning hours too were gone. He had found the crabbed address and come upon the doorway in which Hencher waited; had walked with him down all those streets until the squat ship, unseaworthy, just for pleasure, lay ahead of them in a berth between two tankers; had already seen the rigging, the smokestacks, the flesh-colored masts and rusty sirens and whistles in a blue sky above the rotting roof of the cargo sheds; had boarded the
Artemis
, which smelled of coke and rank canvas and sea animals and beer and boys looking for sport.

“We’ll just have some drink and a little talk on this ship before she sails, Mr. Banks. …”

He leaned toward Hencher. His elbows were on the table and his wet glass was touching Hencher’s frothy glass in the center of the table. Someone had dropped a mustard pot and beneath his shoe he felt the fragments of smashed china, the shape of a wooden spoon, the slick of the mustard on the dirty spoon. A woman with lunch packed in a box pushed through the crowd and bumped against him, paused and rested the box upon their table. Protruding from the top of the box and
sealed with a string and paper was a tall jar filled with black bottled tea. The woman carried her own folding chair.

“Bloody slow in putting to sea, mates,” she said, and laughed. She wore an old sweater, a man’s muffler was knotted round her throat. “I could do with a breath of that sea air right now, I could.”

Hencher lifted his glass. “Go on,” he said, “have a sip. Been on the
Artemis
before?”

“Not me.”

“I’ll tell you then. Find a place for yourself in the bows. You get the breeze there, you see everything best from there.”

She put her mouth to the foam, drank long, and when she took the glass away she was breathing quickly and a canker at the edge of her lip was wet. “Join me,” she said. “Why don’t you join me, mates?”

“We’ll see you in the bows,” said Hencher.

“Really?”

“Good as my word.”

It was all noise of people wanting a look at the world and a smell of the sea, and the woman was midships with her basket; soon in the shadow of the bow anchor she would be trying to find a safe spot for her folding chair. Hencher was winking. A boy in a black suit danced by their table, and in his arms was a girl of about fourteen. Banks watched the way she held him and watched her hands in the white gloves shrunk small and tight below the girl’s thin wrists. Music, laughter, smells of deck paint and tide and mustard, sight of the boy pulled along
by the fierce white childish hands. And he himself was listening, touching his tongue to the beer, leaning close as he dared to Hencher, beginning to think of the black water widening between the sides of the holiday ship and the quay.

“What’s that, Hencher? What’s that you say?”

Hencher was looking him full in the face: “… to Rock Castle, here’s to Rock Castle, Mr. Banks!”

He heard his own voice beneath the whistles and plash of bilge coming out of a pipe, “To Rock Castle, then. …”

The glasses touched, were empty, and the girl’s leg was only the leg of a child and the woman would drink her black tea alone. He stood, moved his chair so that he sat not across from Hencher. but beside him.

“He’s old, Mr. Banks. Rock Castle has his age, he has. And what’s his age? Why, it’s the evolution of his bloody name, that’s what it is. Just the evolution of a name— Apprentice out of Lithograph by Cobbler, Emperor’s Hand by Apprentice out of Hand Maiden by Lord of the Land, Draftsman by Emperor’s Hand out of Shallow Draft by Amulet, Castle Churl by Draftsman out of Likely Castle by Cold Masonry, Rock Castle by Castle Churl out of Words on Rock by Plebeian—and what’s this name if not the very evolution of his life? You want to think of the life, Mr. Banks, think of the breeding. Consider the fiver bets, the cheers, the wreaths. Then forgotten, because he’s taken off the turf and turned out into the gorse, far from the paddock, the swirl of tom ticket stubs, the soothing nights after a good win, far from the
serpentine eyes and bowler hats. Do you see it, Mr. Banks? Do you see how it was for Rock Castle?”