Umbrella (17 page)

ticcing
away, and looking mousy in horrid sky-blue poplin
like pox-blebs
. The LS hooks the earpiece back on the stand and barks: Age? Previous calling? I give Ince’s and when she says there’s no vacancies excepting the Danger Buildings, I say, Oh, I’ve experience as a turner – I’ve worked a lathe, done the posts for umbrellas – Peerless, Paragon – you’ve one there in the corner, ma’am, might be one I done . . .
Not strictly true of course but Lord knows I’ve seen enough done – and I’m a quick learner
. Poor Gracie isn’t, though – she looks altogether fagged out, spot on her nose – must have her monthlies – and her loosestrife hair twisting out of its pins. She starts when Gracie barks again: I’ve no vacancies excepting the Danger Buildings, then Gracie nods meekly and dab-dabs her temples with a shaky hand. – Are you willing to enter and work with mercury? says the LS. Are you willing to work in yellow powder and tri-nitro-toluene? Poor Gracie sits there looking shifty – who does she think this body is, Melchior the Mind-Reader? The LS don’t give a monkey’s whether we’re listening to that swine Asquith, or fanny-about-Fawcett, or the traitor Dacre Fox – all she cares about is packing more shells. Well? the LS says, and meekly Gracie nods. The typewriter gets up to hand us our chits, then the LS sends us straight out back to join the other sixteen in our draft. There’s a row of cubicles there – and in we clatter. They’re plain deal with lots of knotholes – cheap privy style. The order comes from another body to: Undress completely! Then put on your coats and shoes and form a line ready for your medical exam! She’s a bluestocking all right, but hiding it well under a khaki overall with divided skirts – no, trousers! Plain deal with splintering knotholes . . .
impossible to resist!
The
rollicking
of a heavy breast, its
lush, long beating teat
. . .
Are you going to take all day in there? says the bluestocking, and I call back: No, no . . . but it’s almost as hard not to be
inshooshiant
, that’s what Gilbert would say: Be inshooshiant, m’dear, it’s all you can be in the ugly face of hypocrishy – and so I am, peeling off my stockings, letting down my bloomers, and smelling the resin in the wood and the coal smoke from the Arsenal. The war to end all warsh, Gilbert said, the electric light shining through bubbles and bumper and swirling on his hand as we sat in a private room downstairs at the Criterion for our special treat before he beat his retreat back to Woking . . . – I say again: Are you going to be all day in there? Emerging blinking and
wanton
in the daylight – then, as the others had been done and dispersed, I go
straight in through long white muslin curtains to where an enamelled kidney dish sits on a washstand
a baby’s bassinet awaiting what
dark afterbirth
. . .
The clack of weights as the platform tilts beneath my bare feet. Seven stones and eight, she says. You’re slight . . . nevertheless you have a very athletic physique . . . Only now does Audrey examine the hazel eyes that are examining her through round and thick-rimmed eyeglasses. They are alone – although she can hear the clatter of metal instruments from behind the muslin curtains. You lie, Audrey thinks, I am bow-legged – I didn’t get enough oats when I was a pony, the goodly portion all went to my brothers . . . and my father. Then she thinks: How is it that her hands are still so cold after handling the other fifteen? Cold too her stethoscope imposed above one breast. The lady doctor listens, then applies it above the other, Cough, she says, and Audrey
stirs up
the cold air around the two of them. The lady doctor moves behind and her chill fingers
sound me
. Breathe in, she commands – and . . . out, slowly. Good. Crouching in front of Audrey, her
virile
face
within inches
, the same fingers
part
and
re-part
. Don’t be alarmed, she says, her breath
stirring my quiff
, I’m simply ascertaining whether there is any infestation, or . . . she continues sotto voce . . . venereal infection. Audrey would like to tell the lady doctor that she is far from outraged – that this is how she imagines
the future
for womankind: such
impersonal
tenderness and
scientific
concern, and to restrain herself from
blabbing
she concentrates on the cold hand on her hip and the
rabbit’s skin
parting on the top of the lady doctor’s bare head. That all seems to be in order, she says, rising, going to seat herself at the card table that acts as her desk, and, taking up a pen, she dips, then inquires: Measles? Whooping cough? Diphtheria? Smallpox? Tuberculosis – you, or any other family member? Then scratches the replies in a ledger,
but she don’t ask about the mulleygrubs
. Audrey wonders: Can she tell? When she and Gilbert first became lovers, Audrey had been moved to look
down there
, assuming that any part of her that gave them both such pleasure must be
pink taffeta, jonquil leaves, a champlevé
of nerve endings
seared into my core
– not this
snub cleft in furze
, which was
so unlike Gilbert’s
puppetry
. Your swazzle, she’d called it. It’s Punch-nosed in its silky glove, then up it rears! No, he laughed, it needsh no name, it ish what it ish, Ding an sich . . . No, Audrey thinks now, thing-in-me,
thing-in-myself
. . .
Aha, exclaims the lady doctor, Miss . . . Miss – she examines Audrey’s docket from the Labour Exchange – Death, is it? Unusual name, ye-es . . . well, it seems you’ve been altogether fortunate – it is no mean feat to’ve reached womanhood, in London, in – if I may so – one of its less salubrious districts, without contracting any of these scourges, many of which would’ve been eradicated by now were simple hygiene measures univer—. Breaking off, she rises and goes to the washstand, pours some water from the jug into the enamelled dish and wreathes her capable hands in suds from a coal-tar bar. Over her busy shoulder she calls: I’m sorry, you may, of course, put back on your coat – your shoes. Yet Audrey has become quite blithe about her nakedness – her hip jutting, a foot poised – and enjoyed the other woman’s assessment. – Miss Death . . . As Audrey robes she admires the way the lady doctor sits with her legs forthrightly parted in her plain fawn-wool skirt, her white-sheathed arms laid in her lap, the starched pleats of a cambric blouse in the exposed vee of her coat, a cameo at her full throat . . . – I hardly know, that is to say – up she gets and comes across, her hand held out
manfully
– my name is Doctor – that is to say, Hilda – Doctor Hilda Trevelyan. I believe I’ve seen you before at WSPU meetings perhaps? And certainly at the Opera House last September when Miss Pankhurst dropped her, ah, bombshell . . .
She’s not certain – cannot, mustn’t be
. . .
Audrey is not looking any more for debate, or amity – although this she sees in Doctor Trevelyan’s tired eyes and thick lips. —
I am weary too, and how can I explain this
: Samuel Death had journeyed for a full fourteen-hour day by branch lines from Devon to Andover, where he put up at a pub for the night – a circumstance
he never minded
. All that
clackety-clack
simply in order to give his younger son a
slap
in front of his new comrades, then show him off around the town in his buff coat and odd little cap
like a Turkish kepi but still in civilian trousers
:
riding breeches –
or so Father had written –
and gaiters
, which Audrey supposed he would’ve had either from Feydeau or the cuckold, and were probably the only things of real utility they had ever bequeathed
my poor little brother. Poor Stanley!
Compelled to go a’crawling with Rothschild up and down the High Street and then back to the mess at the camp, where the beer was
atrocious
, although it cost only
a ha’penny a pint
. It wasn’t Rothschild who had to do jankers the following greydawn or go out to clod-hop on the sodden plain — it wasn’t him, or Gilbert Cook, or Doctor Trevelyan for that matter, who would have to fight
the war to end all
. . .
– I dunno, ma’am – the cockney rises up, brackish and broken – I ain’t ever been at no meetin’ savin’ the Church Army, an’ vat wuzz oanlee fer a cup an’ slyces . . . Doctor Trevelyan stands looking at Audrey for longer than is acceptable for any
reasonable intercourse – am I scuppered?
Audrey listens to the burring of breath in the older woman’s nostrils, smells the coal tar from her hands – she looks not at Audrey’s face
but my hair
– so distinctive, a flare
of Phillips’s Lucifer as he pauses on the rich, Burgundy-red carpeting of the stairs, his hair still glossy and
shellacked
to his round head, although in the huge expanse of mirror that opposes them Albert can see that his benefactor’s face is sickly
with
fatigue
. . .
or worse?
You still won’t? Phillips asks, ladling fresh greenish smoke with the cigar in question. No, Albert sighs, and never will, sir . . . For fear of his own face
reddening and his becoming, quite literally, Rothschild – he knows some German, he knows
a lot of things
. . .
but he has taken a glass of Hock with the Dover sole and he regrets even this small impairment of his faculties, faculties he assesses by calculating the number of tiles on the hall floor, the number of crystals in the chandelier, and multiplying them together as they descend. Phillips kicks spat out from under spat, until he stands
too big a piece
on the chequer-work of the hall
and listing
. A club servant comes from a door
swinging soundless
, a ribbon of tickertape in his hand that he pins to the bundle already on the baize-covered board. There are fires lit at either end of the immense and shadowy space: sea coal laid with such care that it forms two glowing pyramids, while up above there are
four thousand
,
three hundred and eighteen shards arrested at the point of
explosion
. Phillips says, Not many around this evening, Fulton, and the servant replies chirpily, They’ll be hanging up their holly and suchlike, sir. Phillips grimaces. That, he says emphatically, I very much doubt – d’you mind, Death? – he has lifted a hank of the tickertape – I forgot my spectacles in my rooms. Albert takes the bundle and unravels it carefully so as not to detach any strand from the board. He knows his benefactor will enjoy this demonstration as evidence of his own
foresight
and
sagacity
. At dinner, as he sawed wearily through his cutlet, Phillips spoke of how
utterly
fagged out
he was with his committee work, and how he had
half a mind
to abandon it all to the