Umbrella (31 page)

Every night when I’m asleep, I’m dreaming that I am, Forcing my way through the Dardanelles with a tin of Tickler’s jam
. . .
At present
a plump and studious Jew of the ginger type
has taken Feydeau’s place at the tea table, while as for Bertie, in lieu of his
cracked-and-glued white face, there is a nigger’s
– or, at any rate, the minstrel Audrey is aware of caring for her.

More tea, Miss Dearth? Busner asks. The old woman –
lady?
– has an erect bearing, sitting straight up in bed. She speaks with a peculiar accent as well – cockney
elocuted to death?
No, she says, I think not, Doctor Busner, but may I ask – they dangle on her every clipped vowel, brown suede and black leather kicking in the dense atmosphere of the summertime ward – why it is that you refer to me as Miss Dearth, when my given name is Death, D-e-a-t-h, precisely so. I can conceive that such a name may seem not fit for a hospital – not encouraging . . . There’ve been times, I admit, when I’ve given ground to common superstition and styled myself De’Ath, but, so far as I’m aware, all my official documentation – at the Labour Exchange and suchlike, census forms and so forth – will have me registered as Death, Audrey. Busner and Mboya exchange looks – they hear what she says, they listen amazed to the way she is saying it: her small sharp chin is no longer digging into her sternum, her eyes are neither transfixed nor anomalously mobile in a masklike face – indeed, face and eyes synchronise together in the subtle interplay of normal expressiveness. Gone are the puckering, pursing and pouting of the Parkinsonian mouth, its compulsive grimacing, its incessant chewing. The presence of her dentures gives her jawline definition, plumps up her cheeks, and when she smiles – which she does – the prosthesis is
perfectly charming
. All this is, Busner thinks, still inadequate to the task of expressing the quality of her resipiscence – a return to good health of a miraculous nature. – I – I daresay Miss, ah, Death, that at least initially – upon your admission that is . . . he desires to chafe the backs of her hands, hold them palm-down and strum with his thumbs
vein
,
bone
and
tendon
. . . your details were taken down correctly, but that was a long time ago, you’ve been here at Friern Hospital . . . Busner’s cadences are low and hesitant, the extreme oddness of it all is threatening to
gum me up
. . .
his thoughts have
a jammy
stickiness
. . .
and he cannot drag his eyes up from below the bed, where a baby-blue plastic potty
loiters with obscene intent: the chambermaid has long gone – it remains
. . .
a very long time. Audrey’s face,
scored into innumerable long-playing grooves scratches
. . .
–
I know that, Doctor Busner – I am not a fool and nor have I been in a complete swoon these past years. If you wish to form some idea of the constitution of my mind, it may well aid you to think of me as a sort of soldier but recently returned from the Front, and afflicted with a very peculiar case of shell shock. Busner is caught and held, he realises, by the selenian serenity of her features. It’s a shocker: she is a beautiful woman, and presumably always has been. Turned at last from the darkness,
she shines with self-possessed awareness of her own sex-appeal
. – Can I ask you, then, Miss Death – and please, I hope this doesn’t offend you – what year this is? A cosmic anxiety disrupts the ancient’s face – her fingers travel to her throat, her face. – I . . . I . . . Well, you can hardly expect – she ironises herself with mock-gentility – me to bother with such commonplaces. Busner, wishing to let her off the hook, pulls the sphygmomanometer from his coat pocket and Mboya rises to assist – but Audrey has pushed up the cuff of her nightie automatically,
it’s a conditioned reflex
. While they make the routine observations – Pulse one-twenty, BP one-seventy over one hundred and . . . one-thirty over seventy-five – she attempts her own arithmetic: Is it nineteen-twen—, no, nineteen-thir—? She struggles to articulate the never-uttered decades, until her physician, despairing impulsively of making this in any way bearable, spots a copy of the Daily Mail left on a nearby bed and says, Grab that paper would you, Enoch. Taking it from him Audrey, unfolds its rattling skirting. She looks to her hands and stumbles, Wh-Whose are these . . . old hands, is – is this my morbid affliction? Then a photograph of the Lunar Roving Vehicle on the front page catches her eye. – What an otherworldly motor car, she says, the chauffeur appears to be wearing a diving apparatus – and the brolly they’ve mounted behind the dickey is . . . is upside down! She laughs, a jollily ascending lark the psychiatrist foresees shattering its skull on the transparent hardness of Now – but, recovering herself, Audrey becomes attentive to the paper’s masthead and soundlessly shapes the syllables of the date. Slowly she refolds the paper and, passing it back to Mboya, says to Busner, Will you ask the blackie to fetch me my dressing gown? He looks to see how Mboya is taking it, but the charge nurse, whose long legs are casually crossed, only smiles sardonically and jiggles one foot so that it throws back its
flared cowl
. You do understand, Busner says, the situation – what year it is, how long you’ve been here? She composes herself before she replies, interleaving her fingers and arranging her laced-up hands on the turned-back sheet. He watches this intently, alive to her tremor – is it increasing in amplitude, in frequency? She
folds her
Crimplene
throat
and says, Er-hem, the situation – as you term it, Doctor Busner – is indeed quite extraordinary, but bear in mind that for me it has been quite, quite extraordinary for a very long time. If this specific or paregoric, or whatever it is you’ve dosed me with – what d’you call it by the by? He says: L-DOPA. She says, Eldoughpa, eh, – well, if this eldoughpa stuff continues to do its bit, then perhaps I will have the opportunity to tell you quite how extraordinary it has been for me. However, now is not the time, nor can we sit here all day twiddling our thumbs . . . The post-encephalitic is doing just that, the digits twirling with exceptional speed and suppleness. Busner gulps, riveted by the spinning thing, until along comes Enoch, stately enough and bearing a lime-green Terylene robe, its shapelessness emphasised by his modest headway. The garment is ugly, far too big for her and with a horrid fake-lacy collar – he expects her to reject it, and perhaps for the unaccountable resurrection to end right here,
throttled by its multitude of
tiny nooses
. But no: Audrey takes the gown, holds it aloft, throws back the covers, slides her legs out, rises and
twirls the cape
around her shoulders
. In profile:
the
reworking of Annigoni’s Queen
for whom the wonky bedside locker, the filmy-plastic water jug, the chipped green paint of the wall – all is folded into a backdrop,
a distant landscape of
blue ruled-over hills
. Hands clasping the gown together, she advances perfectly steadily, – Excuse me, and Busner jumps up and pulls his chair from her progress – they watch, the nylon curtains clinging to them, as she proceeds the length of the dormitory and on into the rest of the ward. Stately, yes, and also legato, her hidden legs supplying the rhythm upon which her melody of movement is sustained,
Doo-d’doo, doo d’doo, doo-d’-dooo, doo-d’-dooo!
The two men are seized by the akinesia of others of the others whom she passes by – one paralysed by a pillar, a second arrested half risen from a chair – and whom she nods to, acknowledging these frozen subjects of her icy realm.
Doo-d’doo, doo d’doo, doo-d’-dooo, doo-d’-dooo!
On she lilts in her own netherworld – the ill-lit tunnel system of her affliction. Audrey has a word to describe her condition: I am unmusicked, she would whisper to herself – un-mu-sicked, but now she’s
musicked again
. Another patient, not a post-encephalitic, sits at a table, a pencil in her hand its point inserted in a cogged Perspex disc that whirls in her fingers, throwing off graphite rings across the donated paper. Outside the windows it is early afternoon and a heavy summer downpour draws Spirograph patterns on the puddles spreading across the flat roof of Occupational Therapy. — What was it, Audrey reflects, that Gilbert had said – yes! A universe comesh when you shiver the mirror . . . shiver the mirror of what may appear to be – on the shuperficial level – the leasht of individual mindsh.
Doo-d’doo, doo d’doo, doo-d’-dooo, doo-d’-dooo
. . .
I am the piano – my memory the roll, my thoughts Doo-d’doo, doo d’doo, doo-d’-dooo, doo-d’-dooo
. . .
The pane she leans her forehead against is hard and cool – that it is transparent doesn’t mean it isn’t there. He had said that thing and she was furious – furious! – that she had come all the way from Woolwich after a twelve-hour shift, braving the crowds in Beresford Square to struggle dangerously over the steering gear and ascend to the top deck by way of the stairway’s rail, paid her ha’penny and then another tu’pence on the tube up from London Bridge –
escaping the thunderbolts underground together with thousands of others who lay there in mounds on the platforms
– only to have him smuggle her
like a
common trollop
into his rooms above the colour shop on the Gray’s Inn Road so that she might hear this –
this!
the puffed-up little popinjay
declaiming these lines to her from his latest infantile fantasy, which lay there in light tinged greenish by the desk lamp’s shade. Lay there, line below line of his girlishly rounded handwriting in green ink, in a quarto-sized manuscript book covered with green morocco that sat upon a similarly mounted blotter, handwriting that described – or so he had glossed it – his approbation of his own works, blinding him to the depredations exacted by hers – a society of the not too distant future in which the sprawling cities had been gathered up into pinnacles of glass, steel and concrete, of the sort lately found on Manhattan Island, leaving the countryside free not only for agricultural production – since, due to the chemistry of Herr Haber, this would require a fraction of the arable land employed heretofore – but a new Xanadu of pleasure gardens, and indeed entire tracts that could be allowed to revert to their autochthonous state, the greenwood providing for young men who would otherwise, perhaps, grow too softly effete – what with the ending of all wars through the institution of universal plenty – to practise the old chivalric arts of
queshting, joushting and sho forth
. . .
Audrey had been furious that she’d lent so much as an ear, let alone her intellect, to this lantern lecture, one that contradictorily diminished the magnitude of his pomposity and his conviction that it was his principles – rather than his weak lungs – that placed him on an upper storey of his own glassy moral pinnacle, one vastly elevated from the trenches where the Tommies choked to death on gas and blood, or the munitions factories where the Thomasinas lost their teeth and hair to quicksilver poisoning, or even yet the residents of a humble suburban villa near to Woking – three waif-like kiddies, a poor drab of a wife – who were lucky – according to Feydeau, whose general approval of his comrade’s freedom from all convention balked at this –
if they clapped eyes on their father and husband more than
once or twice a year
. It had been cold outside – along by Mount Pleasant there were banks of refrozen snowmelt pitted with the city’s inexhaustible
filth
, and a special constable
picking at the rime on his tin hat
. At the hostel it would be colder still. Hating herself, Audrey had subsided on to the chaise-longue given to him by Venetia Stanley. Hating herself, she allowed him to unbutton, then undress her, in the smarting haze of his Logic smoke – and hating them both, she lay beneath him jerking not with pleasure provoked by his caresses but the repetitive motions of operating the lathe – twirling, cranking, pulling – that had been
dinned into every nerve-fibre
throughout the twelve-hour shift. Spent, in repose, there remained at least this charm clinging to Gilbert: his utter disregard of his pigeon chest or the scabrous pate that showed through his feathery hair in the steady illumination radiated by the large gas fire’s white-hot coralline elements. He lay back in her arms and used the cork tip of his Logic to link with smoky ribbons the surrender at Kut, the battle of the Four Courts, the routing of Villa’s desperadoes and Smuts’s Kilimanjaro escapade, pinning these to an immaterial map that showed