Umbrella (23 page)

full well
why Adeline was so changed in attitude as well as raiment – she wore an evening gown of vivid purple with an à la mode rounded collar, almost chaste, and she remained closeted in a corner with Willis and the old man in the bath chair, who had, he now saw,
the shaking palsy
, and who, he deduced – without any evidence – was her father. Stanley had not been introduced to anyone else – he was untutored in the craft of dovetailing into well-established joinery – and so he looked about the room at the Sussex corner chairs and the long refectory tables upon which sat a multitude of vases crowded with a multitude of flowers. Cheerfully, he despised what he saw: the three-quarter-ceiling-height wood-panelling with jut-jawed heroines and heroes buckled into shining armour painted on its individual squares, and above these roughened plaster decorated with
still more bloomin’ flowers
. So as not to appear
Wallie, Wallie, Wall-flowers, Growing up so high – All these young ladies, Will all have to die
, he went to stand by the window. They spoke of Bulgaria and certain alliances, and the Irish – it was always, he thought, the fucking Irish. — Land ironclads came rumbling on enormous wheels along the neat vee of a downland valley that cut through the escarpment opposite the house. The rifles poking out from their portholes traversed, dipped, traversed again, then fired. The Maxim at the prow puttered merrily and the bullets whizzed and struck
jaunty
. More mechanical cavalry came over the brow of the hills, the leading motor cars swivelling about on the muddy ground and hitting, from time to time, small craters in the chalk that sent them temporarily airborne. Beside the drivers in their bluebottle goggles sat the technical assistants all in white, the muzzles of their electrical guns fulminated and a lightning bolt bangcrackled over the lawn, the cypress avenue and the kitchen garden, before capturing the maid with the boil on her chin in its burning tentacles. She jack-knifed, then collapsed
stone dead
, her skirts up around her waist
showin’ all she’s got –
. — One day, Stan said to Willis as they mounted the waiting fly, there’ll be sorta air-car that’ll be as easy to drive as this horse – an’ as intelligent. The gamekeeper’s boy sniggered and Willis made a rare quip: Who’ll be in the shafts then, Pegasus? Down the wide flagged steps came the maid with the boil on her chin, resurrected, and with a parcel, dangling from its string, held out in front of her. Your things, sir, she said grudgingly. Stanley thanked her with still less grace, the boy cried nonsense: Heygeddleperway! and the fly swung off along the drive. Stanley swayed to the beat of his predictions:
There will be man-made plagues . . . And voyaging to other planets – the scientists will unlock the power of the atom
. . .
The fly’s wheels slid, then splashed, into the ruts, they held on to it with one hand, to their hats with the other . . .
a canal joins Europe to Asia, why not a tunnel linking England with France?
The three ducked as one to escape the drenched under-storey of the oaks that tilted in – the sun was out, still puissant enough to raise will-o’-the wisps from the flowery meadows they clopped beside. Willis kept his counsel and Stanley saw human manufactories like the one for motor cars in Philadelphia: a vulcanised belt stretched to a great length, to either side dronish workers taking parts from great zinc buckets, a leg, an arm, another leg and a breast, and another breast and a cunny, as they put together one Adeline, then the next, the female portions twitching in their hardened touch. Stanley had a thru’pence in his borrowed trouser pocket
together with?
How will it come to pass, he said turning to Willis and finding it difficult to impose any harmony on the top notes of his anger, that that sort’ll be content with so much less? That they’ll give it up, voluntary like, their land, their ’ouses . . . their servants too? The gamekeeper’s boy flicked the horse’s withers with the snake-tongue of leather on the end of his crop and the fly clambered, one wheel after the other, up on to the high road. Willis, who had been fiddling with the end of his tie – neckwear that was irksome to him, favouring as he mostly did a workmanlike neckerchief – turned his beady little eyes on his protégé and took a time to answer. The fly clopped up behind a wagon being pulled by a traction engine, and until it turned aside into a field they were all lost in its chuntering din and bothered by spears of straw flung back in their faces. Presently, Willis said, This business with the Lords and all the reforms of this administration and his previous one – lamentable as it is that they went no further, they are nevertheless a part of a general tendency – another phase of development, if you will. It may not be a, uh, well . . . a flagrant form of expropriation, still, a graduated tax on capital accumulation is precisely that all the same – slowly, one might almost say stealthily, it will carry off their Burne-Joneses and their Japanese fire screens, leaving them, in, uh, vacant possession of their architect-designed houses. You’ve made hnf’-h’ – You’ve made hmn-h’ – Willis whinnied up the scale
so-fa-la
as he neared an unprecedented second witticism, and Stanley wondered if he was
tight
– You’ve made a start by re-distrib-utin’ that suit of tweed about your own proletarian person! Hotly, Stanley retorted: I will be returnin’ it at the earliest hopportunity! How could Willis say such things in front of
the blabber-boy?
All right, all right, Willis said, patting Stanley’s hand, simmer down young man, it’s merely my jest. The best thing about Willis, Stanley reflected as the fly rattled up the cobbled slope towards the station, was that there was no malice or humbug in him – his convictions might be childlike, but he believed in them with a child’s sincere fervour. Their appointed train was already at the platform, hooting to them through its steamy beard. Seated in the second-class compartment, Willis withdrew some long sheets from the portfolio that accompanied him everywhere and explained, It cannot be helped, I must correct these infernal galleys . . . The somniferous compartment could not be helped either – no one got in and there was no connecting corridor. They were as alone as they’d ever been. It wasn’t until they were jolting along the long straight from East Croydon to Balham that Stanley’s hands came to their senses lying in his itchy lap,
Jack the Ripper stole a kipper, Jack the Ripper stole a kipper
. . .
and trembled about there for a while typewriting the cadence of the bogies
ch-k’ ch-kunk ch-k’ ch-kunk ch-k’
before one crawled away to a side pocket of his borrowed trousers, where it felt the precise oblong of a visiting card. A crust of dead bugs rimmed the inside of the lampshade above Willis’s nodding head and Stanley applied the methods of a consulting detective to the smudges on the antimacassars – these were
cranial impressions
, each one instancing a unique pattern of hair tonic or pomade. If only they could be deciphered they would lead him, snuffling, to the culprit: Rothschild! his arm
Bill Sikes
upraised to another dog – or a dog
spliced with a child
that howls, then coughs, the
Coniston’s
catching in its throat, before loping off along an alleyway past a stinking shambles where there are staved-in casks, a shed-on-stilts, and beneath this a pyramid made from horse’s skulls, some flayed entirely except for their
twitching ears
. The dog-child gives a last despairing hooooooooooooooooowl and is gone into the August-evening quiet of the city that lies splayed there under the dirty orange of its senescent sky.

At Balham, Stanley is awakened by the ragged fusillade of carriage doors slamming –
sparrows’re the same as the crumbs they peck at on the platform: they’ve been brushed off by the sky
. Willis is snoring fitfully – he is an engine with no traction on the present, no means of drawing it into the future. With a start the train pulls out, with a second start Stanley realises he has been clutching the card in Cameron’s trouser pocket all this time, and at last he withdraws it so he may read what is written there in the warm waves of sunset breaking against the grimy window. The very patterning of the inky droplets where Adeline’s nib caught against the engraving of her name and address suggests a
wantonness
confirmed by, Four thirty, Tuesday next – be sure not to forget your pills, this said again and again by some daughter-in-law or other with that patronising grimace that is the forte of the
Janus-faced middle aged
,
who look down on old and young alike
. Busner savours the slight pleasure of wilfully forgetting her name: at any rate it was the same daughter-in-law who got him the days-of-the-week compartmentalised pill box which lies – this, he can remember – beside the egg timer on the shelf above the bread bin. Winching up his tracksuit bottoms and snapping their elasticised waistband around his paunch, Busner meditates on pills and forgetting. Really, he could do with a still larger compartmentalised box, divided into four, within which to place his weekly boxes. Twelve of these might then be housed in an annual box, a certain number of which could reside in a small crate, optimistically provided with sections for the years 2011 until, say, 2025, and labelled:
The Rest of My Life
. He remembers this – the
scrag-end
,
the
residuum
– even as he recalls his own hands fumbling up the little lid and tipping out the white pill for his raised cholesterol, the speckled capsule for his elevated blood pressure and the big orange Smartie that remedies some deficiency or other about which he cannot be arsed to ask his GP, although he thinks it might be to do with his gall bladder. No, he is not insensible to ironies big and small: these are not the sweeties of the elderly, any more than pharmacies are our confectioners – we do not stand on the dark floorboards, thruppenny bits held so tightly in our hands that they stamp pink portcullises, and point to this jar or that, requesting a quarter of lemon bon-bons and then thrilling as she tips the big jar so they tumble into the scoop of the scales in a puff of sweet powder. No, the molecular structure of HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors is the scaffolding with which we build Our Father’s many mansions out over the void, well beyond our allotted plot of three score by ten –
we need them to survive, but they could probably go on without us . . . There!
He has swallowed them together with a mouthful of tepid water slung back from a plastic beaker decorated with diagonal lines of other pills. He leans with a hand either side of the sink: fat old man’s hands spattered with melanomas and implanted with shocks of hairs
. . .
What a peculiar thing to happen to a little boy
. . .
Busner flicks the tiny lid of the compartment that is Thursday up and down. How many pills, he considers, did I actually prescribe in a working lifetime behind the sweetshop’s counter, tipping the jar so that barbiturates, tranquillisers, hypnotics, sedatives, anti-psychotics, antidepressants and all the rest of the harlequinade tumbled out? Certainly, he had prided himself on his sensitivity – and abhorred those colleagues
not worthy of the name who were too free with the medication
. . .
And there’d been years outside of the system when
I rejected it altogether
. . .
Yet, in the end,
I tipped the jar . . . I tipped the jar
. . .
Would his old office up at Heath Hospital be big enough to contain this entire poisonous jumble?
No! Not the ward either!
There were times, he knew, when he’d got hold of lots of powder to be encapsulated, or mixed up in a lab beaker so it could be slung back, or else injected intramuscularly with very large syringes –
It hurts . . . it hurts, Doctor, it hurts
. . .
He finds himself once more in the bedroom and discovers one leg slung across the knee of the other. He has a sock rolled up and the
old yellow dog scratches
to get in
– but where to, where should he go? All my working life, Busner thinks, I’ve looked out on to woodland, or grassy meadows. It had always been economics as well as part of the cure to touchdown the dark starships of the asylums in the claustrophobic countryside of southern England. The final thirty years of
my careering
, these too had included long static periods spent staring through the fly-spattered windows of his office on to the Heath, which rose up, massy, oak upon oak – here the juicy splodge of a mulberry, there the
Tuscan taunt of a Lombardy poplar
. . .
And enclosed as these vistas may’ve been – smallish clearings in the ever-encroaching forest of brick – still he had longed to get out, to drop his routines
constricting like trousers
and clip-clop away into ferny dells, an unlikely satyr
seeking out the naiads of the duck ponds, blue-green algae in their hair
. . .
And now? He realises he had been wrong, sort of. That there was precious little outside of that constraint:
the body . . . the mind . . . it all falls apart
.
You find yourself free to settle this new-found-land: sleeping on a flattened cardboard box ’mid the dank and rubbishy shrubbery of a traffic island – a Ben Gunn in the community
, around whom the world turns, and turns. So what? He was dressed now in the oldster togs his youngsters despise: the relaxed fit of tracksuit bottoms, a sweatshirt with Santa Fe 1997 International Experimental Psychology Conference on its saggy blue breast, a smelly old Donegal tweed jacket and cheap training shoes
nothing else besides looks . . . dirtier
. He was dressed now and therefore he must go out. First, though, the tense prowl from room to room of the flat, eyes sweeping surfaces for keys, wallet and the deliciously apt Freedom Pass – and also a tan hat with a wide brim made of some synthetic stuff not stiff enough to prevent its creasing. He knows not whence this ugly headgear came, only that he’s fond of it: it feels appropriate, this coronet of his own old sweat tight around his temples. He decides against taking a book: for it is so very tiring now, to winch up disbelief in the energetic doings of characters so much younger than oneself – and as for academic literature, he had forsworn it – and as for philosophy, this he did all the time. I shall pick up a newspaper, he thought, and, catching a glimpse of his rather hippyish form in a mirror, he wonders at this atavism of apparel, is it an
inversion of foetal ontogeny
, in which the phenotype passes through previous fashion stages?
Soon there will be
gaiters and gloves
. . .
I will probably die, he thinks, clad in animal skins.
Hairy dags
are caught in the thick pile of the fitted carpet that runs down the stairs and along the
dusty ravine
of the hallway, under the
rectangular sun
of the transom, to where the letterbox
pukes leaflets
. Too late, he sees with superfluous clarity the telescopic umbrella lying on top of the boxes beneath his bedroom window: its black nylon sleeve and black leather-effect handle. When . . . he pauses, musing . . . did the umbrella first become an article to be routinely forgotten rather than assiduously remembered? Surely, to begin with, they would’ve been expensive items, invested with strong affect and not to be casually abandoned . . . as nowadays, given their cheapness and ubiquity – Busner’s attention has blipped to his unmoved bowels, and so he self-remonstrates:
do not fear them
as he finds himself in the street and at the bus stop a few yards from his front door, waiting, because that’s what you do at a bus stop, and pleased by his own aimlessness – a lack of planning that, sadly, then becomes its complete opposite by reason of being observed. Also in grey tracksuit bottoms – although these are flared and have a silvery stripe down them – an alcoholic puts a lot of
effort
into his own
imposture
. When the bus comes he will sidle on by the back door, together with his can of
tsk, tsk
. . .
Tyskie – a Polish lager, presumably. The drinker has a thick green puffa jacket and a thin nose spidery with one big broken blood vessel. He makes conversational stabs at the old
probably my age
woman
wrapped up
beside him, Luvverly day fer April, ’ow long you bin waitin’? who clutches a Yorkshire terrier to her chest, one stiff little leg scratching the air.
La puce à l’oreille
. The alcoholic isn’t, Busner judges, drunk enough to be this disinhibited, instead he diagnoses . . . what? A few years ago he would’ve marked the man down simply as a self-medicating schizophrenic, sousing his voices in lager – but now? Well, the dead weight of that pathology is decomposing – here be psychosis, certainly, but also a personality disorder, developmentally ingrained, that makes the man unable to grasp how inappropriate his sallies are, ’E’s a cute wee doggie, can I ’old ’im? let alone capable of registering the fear that uglies her face. It is a lovely day – there’s no need of an umbrella, any more than there is of another era of epithetic psychiatry, for it’s the
same diff’
:
a personality disorder is only a hysteric or a melancholic by another name
. . .
The spider is within biting range, Wot’s ’is name? and at last Busner feels he must intervene, put a stop to his compulsive soul-doctoring, so he turns away from the playlet yet is still reluctant to abandon the bus stop because the idea of a bus ride remains appealing: an avuncular conductor unwinding the ticket from his metal belly, the subdued cheque of the moquette, the
world held
gently respiring beyond the dirt-speckled window at a safe distance
. . .
He wishes he had a paper printed with the world to
wrap this one in
– but doesn’t want to miss a bus by crossing the road to the newsagent. Still, the traffic heading towards Archway is dense enough, a constipation of lorries, vans and cars of such bulk that
Maurice wouldn’t have been ashamed to be seen driving one . . . The traffic
grinds so . . . it snarls out fumes . . . I am vulnerable!
He staggers – an old man coughing on stinking reflux – and rights himself with the stanchion of the bus stop
emery-rough
to his fingertips. The wooziness dispels and there it is:
the shield I seek
held by a squire so intent that his cotton surcoat has been twisted out of shape by the strap of his heavy leather shoulder bag . . .
always the bags
. Busner hefts the memory of bags long since abandoned: gas-mask ones from army surplus, woollen ethnic pouches with tasselled hems, and canvas rucksacks with leather straps. He’s not so out of touch that he doesn’t realise what it is he’s looking at – but it takes a while, during which he sees only the spirituous twist from a bottleneck point into an iridescent panel that stretches, yaws, then furls away into nothing. He sees only this and the digits that flick and dabble against the screen, index finger and thumb pinching, then parting, pinching then parting again. What is this ticcing? Busner wonders, for, if he abstracts the shield of light with which the boy fends off the flaking stucco of the terrace across the road, he sees only this: one arm and its dependent hand held rigidly extended, the other arm crooked, its hand fidgeting – what did we call that? For this he need not struggle: