Umbrella (41 page)

England’s foam
, a single sausage that oozes grubbily from its split charcoal skin and some slices of what looks . . .
like polony
. A tin mug of tea is pressed into his free hand – he takes a sip
strong, sweet
. . .
That’s good, he says, and, apart from name, rank, number, these are the first words he has spoken since his rescue. A skinny Irishman, naked except for a purple feather boa, says, Ah, yes, when Mboya makes tay, he makes tay . . . Stanley picks up the sausage and reveals the letters marmal on his makeshift plate – marmal, what might that mean? Surely it can only be marmalade missing its
ADE
? Why, then, do all these other possibilities press in on her claiming her aching attention
:
MARMALOUS DISPLAY OF RAGTIME FLYING, MARMALARCHING THROUGH PLUCKY BELGIUM A VICTORY REVUE, AT THE STEPNEY PARAGON THE JAILBIRDS AND THEIR BLACK
MARMARIA
– this last cannot be true, for there would be no room for it on the hoarding, which is only a board covering one of the hotel’s windows. The Alexandra is up for sale, a fact attested to by the estate agents’ names – Knight, Frank & Rutley – on another slab. It is they, she thinks, who will endure – and quite possibly longer than the buildings they sell, which seems preposterous, looking up at the Mameluke bulk of the establishment: its four storeys of windows – each one shuttered and wrought about with iron, its Saracen’s helmet dome covered in scales of lead flashing and surmounted by a coronet of iron railings. Tarrying, she thinks, that’s what I am:
tarrying
. . .
and so detaches her eye from the hoarding and its mysterious
MARMAL
, its timelessness of new poster peeling away from old bill booming Rowntree’s Elect Cocoa, to take in the smaller Saracen’s helmet capping the stairs down into the Underground station — then, and only then, does Audrey remember
whence I came
. Standing in the ill-lit culvert with the thunderbolt plunging towards her, trying desperately to judge
where it might fall
, she had become so agitated that she reeled away from the parapet edge to cower under the tiled curve of the parados, wanting to scream over the roar at all the other typewriters, clerks and shop girls that
this’ll be a direct hit!
Boarding the train automatically, grateful only that it had not exploded, it was not until the second stop that she realised it was going the wrong way – not towards Old Street and the sooty tramp down through weavers’ alleys to the Bishopsgate garret, but south. At Clapham Common, tormented by the weight of the earth above her head –
or in it, together with gasbags and pisspipes
– she unlatched the carriage door,
treadmilled up the escalator so fast
and emerged yawning uncontrollably into windy daylight and the mawkish cries of two piker heather sellers, who, flanking the station entrance, bullied all comers and goers with their vicious little sprigs. — Surfaced to this dilemma: should she attempt to fasten the Ince’s Ladies Walking Umbrella that had been a gift from Mister Thomas when she resumed her position at the firm – the ribs and struts of which flexed, unsettlingly alive, as the breeze tugged at their glacé silk webbing? She could not, she felt, rely on the liveliness of her fingers to pull the cloth band around and manoeuvre its button through the wiry eyelet –
this thimble drill is beyond me
. The alternative – to open the umbrella and rest its post casually against her shoulder – was a possibility that appeared equally remote. Her fingers were far off – her
hands farther still and missing in action
. Screws of newspaper and heather flowers shimmied across the pavement, starlings blew backwards overhead – Audrey could not assess the power of the wind, nor comprehend how it was that it managed to come first from this quarter, then from that, whistling through her
unceasingly
, fluting in her mouth, her nostrils, her ears, her vagina. — Waking that very morning, Audrey found the world was
barred to me:
she could hear Gracie already up and moving about, the rap! as she knocked the old leaves from the slops basin, the compelling raaaasp as she unscrewed the caddy. Audrey had felt a dreadful apprehension – something was
about to happen, a momentous – no,
calamitous event
. . .
Two pimples on her top lip, big, beneath her tentative tongue. This was not the revolution – the two hundred thousand strikers rising up and following the Spartacus League’s example – but an oppressive alteration to the most fundamental terms of her being: the way she sees and breathes, moves and dreams. She clutched at the sidebars of the bedstead, iron smarting her twisting hands, she arched backwards into the watercolour from the bric-a-brac shop and stood there beneath the windmill’s sails and they . . .
turned
. She moaned and Gracie came to her, her cool touch breaking the enchantment of Audrey’s febrile swoon. She held the cup to Audrey’s lips . . .
strong, sweet
. . .
That’s good, she said. Gracie helped her to rise and dress. – Returned to Ince’s only three weeks since and already the tedium of the endeavour bore down on Audrey without mercy: Appleby’s sententiousness – which, before the war, if not exactly agreeable, could still be endured – was now insupportable. The lost boys were still rotting in the mud – their comrades, having chased Jerry back to his own corner, were
a rash of khaki on the bare autumnal earth
. . .
Appleby’s mean-spirited carping and his harping upon the traditions of the firm –
the flitch of his neck with its piggish bristles . . . why isn’t he dead?
He had installed a capacious umbrella stand while she was at the Arsenal – his sole effort to be up to date, and he promoted this to her relentlessly – for the messenger boys had already
addenuff
– pulling out first one, then another model, opening an original Paragon so she might admire its sturdy yet resilient baleen ribs –
disgusting, this whale’s mouth opening and closing again: a leviathan feeding on the rotten core of the City, thrashin’ about atop its stinking dust heap of high and low finance
. Appleby took out a prototype lopsided umbrella, its post set obliquely so that when held at an angle it would still provide total coverage. As he did a crotchety turn about the attic, bowing beneath the trusses, Audrey stared very fixedly at the anciently adzed beam that ran above her brand-new Underwood – only her eyes could inch along, tapping in the small nicks and notches, then return and inch along again,
remaking the small nicks and notches
. . .
The rest of her was unbearably heavy,
so heavy
. . .
she knew not why the floor did not give way under her, sending her tumbling down to lie among the stacked boxes in the storeroom of the Treadwell Boot Company
Makes Life’s Walk Easier
. . .
Gracie had said to her, I fink you better stop ’ome, but Audrey was determined: We cannot afford it. Appleby withdrew more prototypes – an umbrella with a mica panel in its cover, through which a small square of the soused world might be glimpsed. The Paragon Optimus with its patented Automaton frame – pull a lever and the tightly wound silken bundle telescoped out. Compact, Appleby observed, untangling the ribs one by one, but sadly inefficient. He next erected the square umbrella and, setting it on the floor, expanded on its architectural qualities, its fittingness for the modern city, being as it was only a smaller and more portable example of the tiled roof. Then there were various umbrellas equipped with drip protectors – spongy guttering that edged the cover, and that connected to a drainpipe running down the post, capillary action drawing up, then squirting out, the water . . .
which EVERY LADY SHOULD KNOW, the compressed towels being only
2
? inches long and available in tiny silver packets that could be slotted into Southall’s Protective Apron and then fired! Because it was blood, blood . . . all about blood
. — The previous week Audrey had languished, too lethargic to attend the memorial service held for the munitionettes at St Paul’s – and since then the malaise had come upon her relentlessly, in mounting
heavy, earthy
waves, until this morning she had feared she might
never dig myself out from under it
. Now, in Clapham High Street, her eyes scoot along the oriental roofline to
a seraglio of bakers, where plump and eunuch loaves are squeezed and rubbed by houris in mob caps
. In the midst of her
accelerated cerebration
Audrey catches hold of this: it is not the Ladies Walking Umbrella that cannot be furled, strapped and closed –
it is me, I’ve got the wind up me
. It is Audrey’s arms that, beyond her control, fly up and away, struts jerkily unfolding from ribs, then bending back on themselves, so that the riveted pivots bend and pop – her skirts blow up, and, caught by the strengthening wind, the canopy of cloth drags her backwards, her stockings are half unrolled on her stiff posts, her handles in their worn leather boots rattle across a cellar grating. Through the mica panel in her skirts she sees a jeweller’s with its display of
NOTED LUCKY WEDDING RINGS
– then, caught in her coat buttons, the cloth begins to rip – she thuds into the roadway and is wrenched this way and that across it, mercifully avoiding the bow of a tram, a gig, a grocer’s boy on a tricycle . . . Audrey feels the jumbling of her skeletal limbs as she is blown
over-rowley
past the Temperance Fountain and towards the chestnuts screening the railings of Holy Trinity — through the eye of this whirligig, the woman-contrivance receives this reminiscence:
comin’ up ’ere with Mary Jane one Christmas to see Gus Elen an’ ’is old woman ’anding out gifts from their spankin’ new motor car
. Not that Audrey’s mother counted on getting one, it was the gaiety of it all she craved: the band playing marches on the bandstand dressed with holly and ivy, a paper cone of sweetly greasy hot nuts. Mary Jane, out on the grassy plain streaked with melting and dirtied snow, the ice wind parting around her bombazine prow, an expression of the profoundest concentration on her face, the hint of
steam
an’
old cabbage water
as she takes
a stance
. . .
Only now,
spiralling to pieces
, her own skirts lifted to show
all I’ve got
, does Audrey realise what her mother was doing,
She never got inter the wayuv bloomers
. . .
another privy thing vouchsafed to her daughter. —
That is that:
the umbrella is turned right inside out. It lies in the grass by the railings, a mess of buckled steel rods and shredded silk – a redundant thing no longer capable of any effort, war or otherwise. And so it remains there, a thing taken up only to be forgotten for a long while I have expected you to come and call on me. Adeline pauses on a half-landing – situation and pose, both, Audrey imagines, have been contrived for effect. She had been kept waiting by the mistress of Norr House – the housekeeper, treating her dismissively, had placed Audrey on an oakenly uncomfortable chair in the hall, the strong suggestion being that she should stay put. As soon as the woman had fussed off, Audrey got up and wandered about, chafing the piercing tingle of her chilblains and poking into a strangely sparse drawing room, where there was a lustre of polish – the smooth secretion of all those workers’ rubbings – that shone from wood, wood, more wood. There was a dying log fire, and above its mantelpiece a tapestry woven with the figure of a medieval damsel armed with a spindle – a child’s board game was set out on a large, low settle. Going forward, Audrey saw printed the legend Willie’s Walk to Grandmamma. Players’ coloured counters were scattered along the trail, winding across the linen-backed paper, and a teetotum lay keeled over beside a pictorial ravine. Audrey wondered: Was Adeline’s little boy called Willie? She had never asked Stan, and he – alive to his older sister’s disapproval – had never ventured anything concerning Missus Cameron’s domestic circumstances. It had been a long, cold tramp from Carshalton Station – Audrey thought about five miles. She did not mind, though – it would have been self-murder to have asked in her note to Adeline that she be met. Besides, Audrey needed all the fresh air she could get on her half-days away from the Danger Buildings – simply to be