The Underground Man (9 page)

I remember heaving against their heavy door and standing trembling in my nightshirt on the cold stone floor, only vaguely able to make them out in the half light, sleeping on the altar of their bed. Yet something would hold me back from calling out. Perhaps the fear of stirring up more monsters in the dark. I only know that in those endless moments
before I finally summoned up the courage to call I would look upon the bodies of Mother and Father and think to myself, ‘Far from me … far from me … They are far, far away.'

And it was true, they were indeed far from me; their bodies vacant, minds drifting on a distant plane. Together they had slipped away and lay wrapped in the winding sheets of dreams. Side by side they quietly drifted. Mother and Father at sea in sleep.

And though, in time, they would always groggily return to me, for those moments while I shivered in their doorway I would convince myself that this time they were gone for good. I listened for their breathing, watched to see if their bodies rose and fell, until finally fear itself squeezed out of me a squeak loud enough to bring them home. Then one or the other would turn momentarily from their dreams to say, ‘What? … What is it, son?'

It was a question, of course, I could not properly answer. I might have said I had a stomach-ache or was in need of a glass of water. But now that I am older and wiser and understand myself a little more, I can answer truthfully. ‘I woke from a bad dream and ran here for safety,' I should have said, or even, ‘I feared the two of you had slipped away.'

This morning, as I made my way down to the mausoleum, I remembered a song my father used to sing to me, which was entitled (if my memory serves me right) ‘Every Wingèd Thing', or something similar. A curious little piece it is, with each verse given over to a different bird. No real chorus to speak of, but a few bars where one whistles in the manner of each verse's bird. So as I descended the back stairs and felt the temperature around me fall I filled the whole well with
echoes of all sort of birdsong and made believe I was the keeper of some underground aviary.

I tend not to visit my parents' tomb more than two or three times a year, but have lately felt a growing need to impart a small prayer in their presence. To make some attempt at communion.

The mausoleum was the first thing I commissioned. I was twenty-two at the time. I see now how I was still too tender in years to properly run a house, but I had no option. Both parents were gone and I was the only child. So I took charge and did my best to run things in a manner worthy of their memory. Got up bright and early, ate my breakfast and spent the day marching manfully about the estate. First thing I did was have a resting place built for them, on the grandest scale. In other words, I jumped right in.

One enters through a huge wooden portal, where two dozen musicians reside – each in his own small compartment. A great gang of frozen troubadours … pipers piping, harpists plucking and so forth. In the mausoleum proper, six carved pillars support the ceiling, with a stone figure brooding at the base of each one. Beneath one pillar an aged scholar reads from an open book, beneath another a naked boy blows on a conch shell. At first they quite enchanted me, these stone inhabitants of my own small underworld, but when I now go down to lay a wreath or reflect awhile I find myself saddened by the old man studying the same blank page or the melancholy boy still failing to produce a sound from his shell.

The roof is crowded with cherubs and angels. Once, they looked down on my parents' tomb with a benign attitude and generally cast their love around. But no one warned me that the air down there is very damp and that in time it would eat away at the stone. So the cherubs now seem to contemplate only their own disfigurement and the angels are more kin to the gargoyles who gape from the house's guttering.

The trimmings up and down all the archways, so lovingly fashioned by the mason's chisel, were pocked and perforated within the year. A braided maiden's torso remains miraculously untouched, unaged by the atmosphere, but where her slender arms once offered grapes and flowers she now offers nothing but her breasts, has only chipped stumps jutting out below both shoulders. I came down one day to find her stone fruit lying shattered on the ground, as if she had had enough of holding them year in, year out and had cast them down.

Only last year, one of the gryphons which had perched on a ledge by the ceiling with never a murmur of complaint decided to try and leap across the vault to spend some time with his crusty twin. No doubt he had squatted for so long with his pounce all tightly-sprung that he felt he could clear the distance in a single bound but discovered that he was stiff from all that sitting and as things turned out covered hardly any space at all. He simply fell, hit the floor and exploded, trimming the nose from a woman with babe-in-arms on his way down.

It is as if the entire population of that vast damp room has returned from the same strange battlefield. It is like some hospital for fractured statues. Every month I have the floor swept from one end to the other but there is always the crunch of fresh grit underfoot.

This morning I bowed my head by the effigies of Mother and Father, who lie side by side just as they did in their sleep all those years ago. The stone angels continue to crumble all around them, but the figures of my parents remain pristine, carved as they are from Carrara marble and wiped clear of debris by a housemaid every second week. Their features, though beautifully shone, are in fact poor representations. My father looks more concerned in death than he did alive. My mother is almost softened by the stone. The marble has
given them a sallow glow, as if they had been cut from candlewax, though there is no denying that my parents' flames went out long ago.

Strange that their faces are now younger than mine. In their absence their only son has grown old. When I think of them I am always a bright young boy. Not the bald and bent old man I have become.

After I had said a prayer for my mother and father, I said a prayer for myself. I find I am troubled by that half-remembered memory, that fragment of some distant dream. Something very far back demands my attention.

I asked my parents, ‘What is it I cannot remember?' but received no reply.

They are not telling. Their lips are firmly closed. In the end, of course, they did indeed slip away from me.

A day spent around the house, recuperating. Still a little pain in my stomach region. I think the skin must have become stretched while accommodating all that mysteriously-accumulated wind. Otherwise I am feeling much improved, if a trifle tired.

Took a mint bath first thing and dressed in velvet trousers and smoking jacket. Wrote a letter of thanks to Miss Whittle at the Norton Post Office from whom I received today a package containing one tin of ‘Essence of Beef'. An accompanying note explains how she has heard I have been suffering from ‘difficulties with stomach' and that ‘the enclosed beef essence', which is entirely new to me, ‘is a
guaranteed remedy for the unsteady gut'. She goes on to say how it is frequently employed in her household as a pick-me-up and comes with her heartiest recommendation.

An odd little tin, I must say. No more than four-inch square, but quite a weight. On the underside a printed label, announcing …

It seems not a single item finds its way onto the chemist's shelf these days without some physician, celebrated or otherwise, putting his name to it (and for a tidy remuneration, no doubt). Every razor blade, bunion cream or hair-restoring device now carries the enthusiastic personal approval of some much-respected Expert. Yet I note how a good many of these revolutionary remedies, hailed on the inside page of magazines one month, are seldom there the next. It would be too much to hope that their manufacturers had gone bankrupt and been hauled up before some humourless judge, so I must assume instead that these fellows are constantly transferring their energies on to other, ever more miraculous cures.

Which is not intended as any slight towards dear Miss Whittle and her tin of essence of beef. She concluded her note by suggesting I take half the tin at lunchtime with a brandy and water, and as I put such store in the woman's opinions I resolved to do just that. The odd whine and whinny still came up from my stomach and it seemed that beef essence might be just the stuff to quieten them down.

Noontime found me in my dining room, looking nervously down at the tin which I had placed on the tablecloth. Its case had moulded on it a strange bas-relief and I mused awhile on
how the lid's lovely rounded lip and exotic design might lead one to suppose it contained not beef but some flavoursome Turkish tobacco. In this way I managed to dally for several minutes before getting around to removing the box's lid with my penknife. It was quite a struggle to get the blade into the nick between the lid and base and, having got some purchase, even more of an effort to prise the two apart. The knife seemed to push in vain against a vacuum until at last the lid sprung off with a mighty ‘pop'. Beneath was a muslin cover, very sticky to the touch, and, having peeled back its corners, I found beneath a solid leathery block, like a shrunken pocket Bible, set in a thick film of gelatine.

The knife went through the stiff jelly and into the beef substance with no trouble at all, but as soon as the skin of the latter had been punctured the most rancorous smell leapt out. My whole body reeled back as if I had been struck on the chest and it was all I could do to hold the tin away from me while trying to keep my balance and shake some sense back into my head. So pungent and pervasive was the odour, it was as though a living beast had appeared right there in my dining room. I had to wipe my eyes with a handkerchief until I recovered myself sufficiently to open some windows and let some breathable air in.

I was amazed and, quite frankly, more than a little impressed that such a potent odour could be contained in such a tiny tin. I edged my way back up to it and tentatively peeked inside. ‘Who on earth would actually eat the stuff?' I thought to myself, giving the beef a little prod with a fork. It had the same texture as the dirt packed around a horse's shoe.

About then I saw me put my head round the door at the Post Office and Miss Whittle asking how her medication had gone down. I have never been much good at lying. She would see right through me at a glance. I would simply have to bypass the Post Office for six months – or a year, maybe. The
last thing I would wish to do is hurt Miss W.' s feelings but only a fool of the highest order would insert into his body something which smelt so convincingly of living cow.

It was a good five or ten minutes before I finally lunged at the tin with my little fork and wolfed down a chunk without a single chew. I then grabbed the brandy decanter by its delicate neck and took a couple of swigs, paused, then took a couple more.

I must have sat in the chair for quite a while, waiting to see what happened next. When Mrs Pledger came in to announce lunch I doubt if I had moved a muscle; was not sure if the essence of beef was happy where it was or might suddenly reappear. She stepped into the room, filled her lungs to speak, then paused, with her mouth hanging open. A look of consternation quickly spread across her face, causing both eyebrows to bunch up together above the bridge of her nose. She took a second, more discriminatory sniff of the air, her eyes flashed left and right before settling on me in her most withering glare. Then she span her great weight around and exited, without having uttered a single word.

It is now a good eight hours later. Thankfully I am still alive. And though my stomach is a little queasy and my breath much beefier than before I comfort myself by thinking how I can at least now face Miss Whittle with my conscience clear.

Afternoon spent catching up on accounts and correspondence. Wrote a note to Dr Cox expressly refusing to pay his bill and telling him, in plain English, how I want nothing
more to do with the fellow. Blew down to Clement and had a boy take it round to him straight away.

I learn from his letter this morning that the Reverend Mellor has been excavating the caves at Creswell – something I apparently gave my consent to several years ago – and now seeks my permission to stage a lecture there. Yesterday I received a tearful epistle from one Sarah Swales, appealing for the continued use of a cottage, following her mother's recent death. Gave the Reverend Mellor permission for his lecture (he can stage a circus there if he can fit all the animals in) and dear Sarah, who I am told works out at Norton, appears to have wrongly assumed I am about to throw her out. This is, of course, absolute nonsense and I wrote to assure her of the fact.

Sitting quietly at my bureau, fiddling with papers and pens, brings me no end of pleasure. It is here I fancy some order is restored into my cock-eyed life. I am told it is a Dutch ‘cylinder-front' bureau – by now well over a hundred years old – previously belonging to my father and his father before him. In a house packed with ancient furniture which long ago set to sagging and spewing their stuffing all over the floor my bureau is one of the few remaining upright pieces in the place.

Inlays and veneers cover about every inch of it: a kaleidoscope of fine marquetry. Weird birds and butterflies flutter up and down its sides, leafy vines creep across its drawers and dangle down its belly. The whole thing glows warmly from a thousand French polishes – ten thousand! – so that an idle caress evokes an exquisite squeal.

Three solid drawers make up the bulk of it, curving most seductively, as if they may have melted in the sun. And when the ribbed lid is rolled back, to disappear into its own slim cavity, a heady aroma is released – not just of lovely woods and varnishes but also inks and pencil shavings, old manuscripts and book-binding glues. A neat little row of sentry
boxes stands at the back, housing tilted notebooks, ragged letters, miniature ledgers and suchlike. In the middle of them sits a small stack of drawers, six inches wide, where odd bits of wax and blotting paper, nibs and pens are tucked away. These worthless but oft-sought odds and ends are what my paper-sentries so nonchalantly guard.