Umbrella (32 page)

the whole
shtate of play
, and how it was that – despite all contrary indications – the
harmonioush reconshiliation
of capital and labour under the leadership of the scientifically enlightened and philosophically minded was
closhe at hand
. . .
Audrey deprived him of his Logic and smoked to its
bitter end
. . .
His Dream
, the postcard is captioned, the photograph is a montage: a Tommy stands beside a bit of fence fringed with sweet william and marguerites. His rifle dangles from his shoulder,
lethal as a butterfly net
, his cap tips back at a bank-holiday-boater angle, and a stubby pipe is tucked in his hand. It’s his wispy moustache and whimsical expression, as much as the ridiculous props and a painted backdrop of the setting sun cloudily encircled, that suggest the war is being fought near Epsom, and which make the peculiar womb that floats above and behind his head all the stranger:
is the baby-face in the womb His Dream?
Or does his sweetheart, in point of fact, bear no resemblance to this
winsome thing
– her hair pinned up, her lips pricked red
– but is instead
a fat
baggage
of a fishwife, her bosom
sagging, her tongue coarse in her broken mouth?
Gilbert snuggled further into Audrey, the featheriness polishing the side of her breast
is this my mind child?
He smelt of old flannel and fresh tobacco – she could scarcely contemplate the sordid business of rising, washing out her privy parts, then dressing for the fourth time that day: she had made ready in the dark at Plumstead, and when she arrived at the Arsenal changed into her rough ticken overall. At the end of the shift she had stripped it off, stuffed it in its bag and hung it on her hook in the shifting house before getting her incendiary hair down from its ugly net.
Shifting house
. . .
Gilbert’s rooms were a sort of shifting house, one in which she changed – as did he, although the skin he stepped into was always either too big or too small for him: at times he loomed large over the city, his words uncial type at the head of newspaper articles, his speeches calling forth turbulent crowds, his chubby face with its
dishrag of moustache
affording him this curious distinction:
a great weight of
inoffensiveness
. Wealthy enough, for a so-called socialist, his suit coat slung over the back of his chair showed wartime privation, the collar and cuffs turned, the buttonholes worked over. A tin of Iron Jelloids shone greenish on the desk, proof, if any further were needed, of her lover’s anaemic weakness. — There were six operations to be performed on Gilbert Cook –
six operations
to cut his threads, internal and external, and to cut his recesses
. Audrey’s arms moved in and out, her fingery bits pressed into him
here
and then
there
– Ah! No! No – No! He bucked and squirmed and his heels drummed on the chaise-longue – but, thinking of the soot-black buildings and monstrous
slapperti-slapperti-slapperti-bang!
of the overhead belts that powered the lathes, Audrey swung her headstock over him and continued her operations automatically, kissing him behind his ear, at the nape of his thick neck – she was tired but her desire to control him was on direct drive, she could not stop until the fitter came to regrind her cutter. She smoothed over the swarf on his lower belly and grasped the fifth piece to gauge it
and turn it upside down
. . .
Gilbert gasped, Oh! In the soot-blackened buildings that house the New Fuse Factory, they never see the shell cases, only the fuse caps, and of those caps Audrey sees only their pins. – Aha-h’n-ha-ha! Adjusting her position so that his left buttock wound into the very threading of her, Audrey felt the complexity of glacé silk moving over and under. – Ha-ha-h’n-ha! There was Iron Jelloid breath in her nostrils – they never see the shell cases, only imagine their smoothly tapered brassy cones thrust into the breaches of the guns by Vesta Tilleys in rational dress. They
never see the shell cases
. . .
Gilbert Cook has insinuated his hand behind his back and so he plays upon her while she works upon him, until with a clumsy Oof! he sits up, leans over and retrieves the latex prophylactic from where it lies beside the chaise-longue, rolls it back on and puts it inside her, not troubling with the tin of lubricant. The
cold rubber
smells in her mind, the headstock completes its six precision operations, the fuse pin drops down on to the tray below,
Vaseline
spurts from the lathe
. . .
They never see the shell cases and yet without the utmost assiduousness on their part they will remain just that: cases, inert sheaths full of nothing.
Doo-d’doo, doo d’doo, doo-d’-dooo, doo-d’-dooo
, the little melody that the autopiano salesman said was by Johannes Brahms infiltrates Audrey not as melody but as the subsiding rhythm of their
coitus
– a term gleaned from a booklet given her by Hilda Peabody and read by dwindling candlelight in the matchboard cubicle of the Plumstead hostel. The oil – the lubricating oil. They issue the lathe operators with aprons, but there’s nothing done to protect their hands – the oil causes rashes, lividly pink corruptions of the skin that fill Audrey with funk, funk that in turn drives her on towards still more danger, past the Examining Shops, where defective caps and detonators are weeded out, down the muddy cobbled lane seamed by rails that runs between the new buildings, their tan brick as yet unbesmirched, surrounded by freshly seeded grassy plots upon which swank newly planted trees in June’s green tulle. Beyond these lies the riverbank of reeds and sedge and marsh mallow, its white heads
crazed a little by the wind
. If she keeps her head level, Audrey can feel the last drops of astringent lotion cupped in their lower lids. Once every sixteen days they wash out the canaries’ eyes, and for the next five or six hours the world kaleidoscopes, doubly so if Audrey looks into the oily waters of the ditches dug around the Danger Buildings, which are connected to a larger channel that debouches into the river, spreading rainbow swirls within which stretch and curl the weird designs of those Futurists whose own oils she had seen with Gilbert Cook at the Manor House Gallery before the war. Was it this they had been attempting to portray –
these spillages back into the past?
The Danger Buildings have their own dirty-side canteens and on balmy days such as this the doors are left open so that sparrows fidget in from the wider world and peck at the crumbs that fall from the canaries’ yellow hands. Sitting at one of the long refectory tables, staring out through the doors, her mouth gummed up with potted meat, Audrey is confused by all the disruption: the ugly blare of a marching band hauling past the British Grenadiers is accompanied by this solo shout: Eight-five-seven-nine! Which also means
Or-dree!
Because for
that old lay
, the Deputy Principal Overseer, there are no names. A motor car pants past a chauffeuse at the wheel, and for a moment, framed by the doorway, Audrey sees a short kinematograph of a familiar right-angled triangle cleaving the sweetly choking engine fumes. – 8579, Death? The DPO is right by her, staring down at the remains of the munitionettes’ tommy – crusts, crumpled-up wax paper, tin mugs – with official gravity: for all her bulk
she’s not the hungry-gutted type
. – You are Death, aren’t you? She pronounces the name with relish, pleased by this exception to the rules. Yes, miss, that’s me.
Virile
, that’s the word for the DPO – instead of gussying herself up with key- and watchchains,
she should be playing a trouser role
. She says, Mister De’Ath, the Controller of Artillery Production, is here to do an inspection of the Danger Buildings – he isn’t, by some caprice of Jove, a relation of yours? Audrey is emphatic: No, miss, no relation at all that I’m aware of. The DPO hooks her thumbs in her broad leather belt. Capital! she says, in that case you shall help Mister Harris to show him round – come along now. She leads Audrey out of the canteen and then heads straight out through the shifting house. Audrey, still in her khaki overall, cap and Arsenal shoes, calls, Miss, I’m in my dirty-side togs, but the DPO doesn’t break her stride, flinging back: Well, young lady, you can hardly give him an accurate impression of the work we do here if you’re in your ball gown and pearls! Albert waits in the sunshine beside his official motor car: he is slender, youthful, so very tall in his top hat, emphasising cut-away coat and well-tailored striped waistcoat. The only marks of the burthen he bears are two comical smudges underneath his bulgy grey eyes
that might be greasepaint
. While he is introduced to her and Mister Harris, Audrey’s brother doesn’t show – as she knew he wouldn’t – the least sign of having recognised her. The Prime Minister, or so they say, has engaged a suffragette driver – Audrey wonders if Bert has been compelled to a similar gesture, but the young woman – girl, really – behind the wheel has the silly painted face of a debutante, and wears her peaked cap and gauntlets with the affected, dégagé manner of someone at a promenade concert. Moving through the shifting house under the drear light that washes down from the high windows, Audrey doesn’t hear the explanation of the safety procedures, but
Don’t av any more, Missus Moore, Missus Moore, please don’t av any more! The more you av, the more yull want, they say, An’ enuff izzas good as a feast any day!
And sees Rothschild brandishing his moustache cup so that tea spatters across the oilcloth, and Olive with dull eyes and the imbecilic expression of
a calf soon to be poll-axed held to his cheesy cheek
. Auntie, who takes care of the shifting house, shows the Controller the fillers’ fireproofed gowns and explains how, while soft and pliable when new, they are now stiff with the impregnation of mercury and powder. If you please, Mister De’Ath, we had better get on, says the DPO, there is a lot to see and I’m certain your time is valuable. In her tone Audrey hears not contempt but the steely resistance of a social superior forced to bend to
an inferior. Bert, she supposes, must hear this
off-key note
all the time, although he gives no sign of it as the DPO talks up and down to him of the shift system, and points out the regulations posted on the wall together with hortatory posters:
HIS LIFE IN YOUR HANDS, A CLEAN WORKPLACE IS ESSENTIAL
. From time to time he turns to his secretary – a ferret-faced young man who has the crabbed walk of the club-footed – to ensure he is taking notes
for form’s sake
. – And over here, Mister De’Ath . . . they troop across to the ambulance basket and the DPO hands Bert the inventory, which he runs his
Datas eye
down, committing immediately to memory lint dressings x 20, Germolene tubes x 20, hydroperoxide ointment x 20, etcetera . . . Then the DPO, her frogging of key- and watchchains clinking, takes her leave: If you’ll spare me, Mister De’Ath, I must give the shift absentee list to the Principal Foreman . . . — Mister Harris pushes the swing doors to the Filling Shop and their rubber skirts drag in all the furious hubbub, the clatter of the chain hoists and the slap of the drive belts and underlying it all the relentless salvos of score upon score of wooden mallets, rising and falling and hammering a leaden rhythm into the Honeysuckle and the Rose. Moving towards the singing canaries, Audrey feels those other bodies carried between the shape of Bert and the shape of her:
casts, plaster-white and plaster-light of Vi and Olive
. . .
and Stan
. . .
Missus Moore, who lives next door, is such a dear old soul, Of children she ’as a score!