Umbrella (4 page)

She comes clattering down the bare stairs – the runner in the hall has yet to reach them, it trails behind the Death’s measured tread as they mount from floor to floor of No. 18 Waldemar Avenue. When they had arrived, the house – barely twenty years old – had just suffered its first demotion: sold on by the family who had bought it from its spec’ builder to one Emmanuel Silver, who had sliced it into three residences. The Deaths – Samuel, Mary Jane and the three older children, who were then very small – had the ground floor, a proper kitchen range and a
spankin’ new geyser
, although they and the other families still had to share the old bucket privy in the backyard. The Poultneys had the rooms on the first floor for a while, until Abraham Poultney was laid off from his job as a fitter with Ellis Tramways, a happenstance that coincided – or may have been caused by – the death of their younger daughter, Rose, from diphtheria. She wuz not the right sort, Mary Jane said of Missus Poultney. Not that she wuzzn respectable – but she ’ad no backbone, poor soul. I didn’t see little Rose for, ooh, on toppuv a week – you remarked onnit, Ordree – so I goes up there and finds they’d put her on toppuv the wardrobe in the back bedroom. The whiffuvit – terrible, it wuz. The merciful Deaths had paid for the funeral – including the toy casket, knocked up from deal,
cheap but decent
. At about the same time, Samuel had secured his own position as Deputy General Manager of the London General’s Fulham garage – this, after long service as a driver, and latterly a conductor.
’E was a blackleg in the strikes
, said Stanley, years later,
so they give iz nibs iz dibs
. Audrey never thought this the whole story – she had seen how her father was with horses
bussing and petting ’em
. . .
She had been with him one time when he stooped down in the road after another hearse had passed by and said, See ’ere, girl, ’ere’s shit an’ straw both. What they eats an’ what they lets fall at the far end. Straw’s ’ere to muffle it up when they carts us away. When they’ve planted us in the ground, we’ll turn inter ’urf – which is only by wayuv sayin’ another sorta droppin’.
It was an uncharacteristically lengthy speech for her father to have made – at least, in the presence of a member of his own family. — Parked outside the Cock & Magpie with a jujube to suck – or not, Audrey heard not Father, Samuel or Sam, but Rothschild Death holding forth in the public bar: on the follies of the turf, the moonstruck fancies of the new women and the socialistic madness of the Progressives. An occasional late hansom or growler might bowl along King Street – straw bristles plaited in its horses’ tails, followed by a ’bus rattle-chinking towards her father’s garage. A swell got up in Ulster and homburg might elbow a tinker woman away from the pub door,
bloody jade
, giving a keyhole warbler the chance to slide in to the
goldensmoky
mirrored cacophony on his coat-tails. Once ensconced she might yowl out, Well if you fink my dress is a littulbit, juss a littulbit – not too muchuvit! While hiking up her petticoats, such as they were, until overwhelmed by cries of outrage: Flip ’er a tinker, Rothschild! Gerriduv ve drab! Her father’s face hanging mottled from the shiny platter of his topper’s brim, the hiss of the jets in the outsized glass lamp that hung above the double doors. Up there, in the elemental radiance, floated a softly moulded figure in a dainty print gown. Up there, where
speechless Thought abides, Still her sweet spirit dwells, That knew no world besides
. . .

Audrey had seen her father with horses – and she had seen him with men, a stallion among them, his commerce easy enough – yet fraught with sufficient danger to give him authority,
Gentlemen, I have dived into Romano’s, and now
. . .
his
sausage seegar sizzles
innis face
. . .
my tissues are refreshed!
He’s a study, Rothschild, a quick turn, who hooks his thick neck in the crook of his bamboo cane and hoiks himself offstage. He had
so they said
once thrashed a navvy to
wivvinaninch,
not that you would divine these
fistic manoeuvres
from the way he plotted his course home down the Fulham Palace Road, his flame-haired
slippuv a dorter
clipping along in front of him, lighting the way through the particular to
anuvver meat tea
. . .

Albert and Stanley sit, both with books held open by the lips of their plates, both with collars unbuttoned, their tea cups cradled in their hands for warmth as much as refreshment. Vi and Olive gawp, pasty faces pinched by pointed shoulders, each with a slice of bread and dripping in their hand as they behold this virile spectacle: the man and the boys taking turns to hack at the leg of mutton, then put meat in their too-similar faces. Albert’s glassy paperweight eyes, Welsh-slate blue, scan up and then down the narrow columns of Rous’s Trigonometric Tables – not consigning cosines, sines and tangents to memory, only confirming the tight joins of the granite setts already laid out along the rule-straight roadways of his metropolitan mind. And Stanley – his complexion cooler, his brows finer than those of his older brother – he sighs, ahuh, shuffling fingertips from one page to the next of a Free Library book. His eyelids flicker and his fringe bobs, the whirring mechanism of Bakelite and crystal rods, propelled by scores of flywheels, squeezes his very atoms into the kinetomic beam in a number of abrupt spasms that, while they bend him back so far his just-stropped neck touches his rear, are not in the slightest discomforting – and all the essence of Stanley is then discharged from the elevated muzzle of the contraption, shooting a streak of light between the spokes of the Great Wheel at Earls Court. Up and up above the city it goes – dolorous hoots from the steamers anchored at Tilbury, gas-mantle-ssssh! in the upper atmosphere – and higher still, the clouds flickering far below. In one aperture pickelhaube-helmeted Junkers slash each other’s cheeks to ribbons, in another the Tsarina kisses an egg set with rubies and garnets. The beam is so high now that Stanley’s atoms sweep into orbit, girdling the earth once, twice, thrice! Before tending down and down into the viridian heart of Africa, where, in a jungle clearing, awaits
Fortescue, my mechanic
, cranking the handle of an apparatus that sucks the beam into its celluloid funnel. Stanley is an apparition that swiftly solidifies, panting in a patented woollen Jaeger bicycling suit. He and Fortescue shake hands vigorously. Capital shot, old bean! the mechanic says, as a nigger chief steps forward from the trees, his honour guard of naked warriors dropping their tribute of tusks
at the feet of the
scientific adventurer
. . .

.
. . Olive
, Olive! Oh, I dunno, there’s summat wrong wiv you, girlie, carncher see yer father’s wantin’ izale? Olive turns back to the scullery, limping on the toes of her too-tight boots – she almost lays a hand on the ruddy range to steady herself. Audrey agrees
there’s summat wrong wiv that girlie
, and moreover:
They’re in cahoots
, they want her to be like this, lost, confused,
a top spinnin’ round ’em
. Sam plucks the beaded cloth from the jug and pours a draught into his moustache cup, and there are
beads
of sweat on Mary Jane Death’s forehead. Above her in the cabbage-steam-fug hangs a sampler Audrey sewed at school. —
One, two, three, four, girrrls. One: needle in the right hand. Two: thread in the left. Three: Through the eye. Then four: loop and knot. Now, thimble drill
. . .
Audrey’s hands, not suited to this fine work, twitched and shook in an ague that she felt incapable of mastering, or even to be a part of her at all, but something
that snowed down poisonously from the arsenical-green ceiling
. . .
Thimbles on yer thumbs, one-two, thim-thumbs, thimthums, tee-to-tum
. . .
— Out of the eater, she says, came forth meat and out of the strong came forth – Burrrurp! Really, Samuel, Mary Jane says, laughing, mussyer?
They’re in cahoots
, together
they’ve made five now an’ loss none
. Stanley laughs at his father’s eructation and says, Judges, Chapter 14, Verse 14 – thass evens, guv’nor. Albert, without looking up, grimaces and Audrey can hear what he hears: the echo of one brother inside the other’s bony cave. I’m inbertween ’em – I’m a prism or a lens. Beams of Stanley, beams of Albert, playing, each on the other brother’s
blank face
. . .

The curious
round-’ousing
of a big man pulling himself together with his braces – his moustache is
wet wiv beer
and tobacco-stained above his hidden lip. Hard to imagine that there is a lip beneath it, because Samuel Death’s hair is so fleshy in tone, and, if it weren’t for the reddening of his cheeks, you would think the
tache wuzziz lip
, while there are waxy skin strands plastered at the back of his bare domed head: Bedlam engraved in the Illustrated London News. — A large worthy-looking body walking along the quayside of a Mediterranean port, a basket of laundry dumped on her head. Four sailors dice in front of a tangle of ropes and spars while gazing at her behind. None of the Deaths know where this racy print has come from – it simply cropped up on the wall, hiding the wallpaper with its criss-cross pattern of violets and pansies, wallpaper that is steam-slackened, torn into strips, and certainly antedates the Deaths, for, when Audrey was a littler girl, she was convinced her baby sister had been named after it. — Violet now clambers on to the chair her father has risen from, and, smuts on her cheeks, reaches up to fasten his collar stud. All of them have been dragooned into his toilet: Stanley sent to fetch the showy coat from the hook in the passage, Olive buckles his gaiters, Audrey and her mother mix tea and gin into his flask. Only Albert remains at table, his eyes triangulating a realm of purer forms, his fork negligently
sccccrrrraping
gravy shapes. Samuel cries, Get the Coniston’s! A hair tonic he madly applies to the front and back of his dome, as he places first one profile, then the other, before the oval of looking-glass chained up by the door – this, a motion that shows off to its fullest effect the sharp isosceles that, together with his love of swank, has earned him his moniker. Not, Audrey muses, that he’s like the landlord, Silver, who comes attired soberly in bowler, wing collar, impeccably shined and elastic-sided boots – but whose face is sallow, handsome, the features somehow exaggerated,
outlined wiv charcoal
. The Deaths are plaster mouldings, Romish swags and vine trails pressed into their whiteness. They are pink and blond, brown and blonder, all save Audrey, whose flaming glory and cake-crumb-scattered cheeks betoken . . .
wot? Or-dree, Or-dree, Ordree’s mammy gorrersel knocked up by a navvy!
Howsoever the taint was acquired, these are no distinguishing marks – leastways not up towards the Munster Road, where the houses are all
knocked abaht
and there’s a family of Irish – or two – in every room, and the
ginger nuts
are everywhere in the streets. Still,
Comes the Jew-boy, Comes the Yid, Comes the Jew-boy for iz gelt
. . .
is sung with gusto on Thursday evening, with whichever of the two little girls is to hand, grabbed and bounced on his knee. Samuel breaks off only when he hears the
sccccrrrreeeching
of the front gate, then he goes to the door to watch, derisively, as Silver undoes his trouser clips, pulls off his gloves and courteously doffs his hat. From the Horeb heights of the doorstep Audrey’s father hands down a tosheroon, then a second, which is followed – after an insulting interval – by a sixpence. He places the coins in the dapper man’s palm,
paying t’be fucking crucified
, before, sucking on his own gall, he retreats to the Golgotha of the parlour so that Silver may trot upstairs and do the same to the other tenants.