Дэймон Найт: Orbit 7

The pavement divided right and left. Mrs. Rosetti would have preferred the mild self-surrender of the pedestrian belt that arced, at a temperate velocity of five mph, above and across the traffic stream, but Emma was able, with no stronger persuasion than a coaxing glance, to persuade her to take the left fork into the subway arcade. Fragments of advertising melodies lifted and sank into the ground bass of the ventilation, and at intervals the murmuring twilight opened into abrupt, bright recessions of holography. The hollies were crude things usually (for it had always been more dowdy, this side Thames)—book-vending machines, a shower of gold celebrating Ascot Day, odorless images of food that boded to be as flavorless in the eating, and everywhere dense crowds of mannikins in polly and paper dresses, and cheap copies of the new African masks. Often the shops proclaimed themselves with nothing more than a painted sign-

Buy Your

Wet Fish

Here

or, even more sparely—

Stuffs

—an austerity that had been smart a decade before but was now, once again, merely drab.

There was, however, one shop in this arcade that could equal, in a small way, the brilliances of Oxford Street or Piccadilly, and it was this that had lured both mother and daughter down from the daylight world. The Bride Stripped Bare was admittedly only an affiliate—one of the smallest—of the great Frisco-based couturier, but here, in Southwark, it was something quite out of the way. Already, this early, a crowd was gathered before the two long windows, and Emma, who was small for her thirteen years, had difficulty worming her way to a vantage point.

The model this week was a Madagascan, shorter even than Emma (a fashion house of any pretension had to employ mortals), with the piquant name of Baiba. The model’s close-cropped head seemed grotesquely large, though considered as a thing apart it would have been judged a very pretty head indeed, with a ravishing pug nose and, when she grinned, deltas of deep-grained wrinkles about her dark eyes. She could easily have been as old as Emma’s mother, though, of course, she carried the burden of her years with much more grace. Four attendants, two men and two women, dressed her and undressed her in Stripped Bare swimwear, Stripped Bare evening dresses, and Stripped Bare pollies and origami, but the last item—an elaborate ensemble of mourning clothes—Baiba put on without their assistance to a droll, rather honky-tonk version of Death Shall Have No Dominion.

“Don’t they have lovely things there, Mother?” Emma asked, with what she thought a deceptive generality, as they continued down the arcade.

“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Rosetti said, not taken in. “And very dear too.”

“That little coral do-thingy was only twelve bob.”

“That little coral doily would last about two days, if you were careful, and then it would be down the chute with it. Polly obsolesces fast enough.”

“But I will need something , you know, for the party.” Walt would be sixty-seven on the twelfth of May, and Emma was determined to shine for him.

Her mother was just as determined that she wouldn’t— not, at least, too brightly. “In any case, Emma, that dress is years too old for you.”

“You say that about everything I like.”

Mrs. Rosetti smiled vaguely. “Because everything you like is too old. Now don’t , my darling, bring me down.”

Emma, who had learned to read the signs of her mother’s weathers, said no more, though she didn’t, for all that, give up hope. Friday, when Walt was at work and her mother shopped, was a bad time to dig for favors. The disparity between the real and the ideal, between what the money had to go for and what one would simply like , was then too starkly defined.

They came out of the arcade in front of St. George the Martyr, another whited sepulcher of the C of E, which was nevertheless prettier, Emma had to admit, both inside and out, than St. George’s Cathedral, where she went. Was it only that the Cathedral was made of yellow brick and lacked a proper steeple up front? The same architect, Pugin, had designed the cathedral in Killarney, which was so magnificent, but it only seemed stranger, then, that his London cathedral should be so … lacking. Emma would have liked, when she grew up, to become an architect, but for mortals that was out of the question. Leonard Aneker was the living proof of that.

“Come along then,” her mother said. “It’s only a church.”

“Only!” she protested, but (Emma was in the state of grace) she obeyed. Almost at once the strength of this obedience was put to a second test. Passing Trinity Street, Emma wanted to turn off to look at the stalls of fresh flowers. Irises were selling at four and six the bunch, narcissi at three shillings. This time her mother would not be swerved.

“We don’t have the time,” she said. “Or the money.”

“Only to look,” Emma pleaded.

The fact was that Mrs. Rosetti, perhaps as a result of years tending the shop, didn’t appreciate flowers. “Emma!”

“Walt would like them. Walt loves flowers.”

“Walt loves many things he can’t afford, including us.”

Sometimes her mother could be terribly coarse. Emma obeyed, though with a sense of having somewhat blemished, nonetheless, the immaculate Presence in the sanctuary of her breast.

At Maggy’s on the Borough Road they stopped for a snack. Emma had a sixpenny cake from the machine, while her mother went to the counter for jellied eel. Maggy’s was famous for its jellied eel. She ate them from the bag, four thick pale cylinders coated with quaking bits of gelatin. Now and again, chewing on one, she would wince, for her molars were getting worse.

Emma made a funny face. “I think those things are disgusting.”

“That,” her mother said, her mouth still full, “is half the pleasure of eating them. Would you like a taste?”

“Never!”

Her mother shrugged. “Never say never.”

Which was, if you looked at it closely, a paradox.

They crossed St. George’s Circus on the pedestrian belt. Emma’s mother cursed the crowds of idlers and sightseers who rode the belt with no other purpose than to view the Vacancy at the center of the Circus. The Vacancy was a monumental sculptured hole, and Mr. Harness said it was one of the masterpieces of twentieth century art, but Emma, though she had looked at it and looked at it, could see nothing but a big, bumpy, black hole. There simply wasn’t anything there , though now, because it was spring and people were flower-crazy, the lusterless plastic was strewn with flowers, irises and narcissi and even, here and there, the extravagance of a rose. The flowers were lovely, but the artist—Emma couldn’t remember her name—could hardly be given credit for that. While she watched, a bunch of daffs, at two and six a dozen, hurtled from the north-south belt into the sculpture’s maw, struck a ledge, and tumbled into the funereal heap in its farthest depth.

The drugstore on Lambeth Road was their last stop. Emma, as her conscience dictated, waited outside, almost within the shadow of St. George’s Cathedral. From this simple, unkind juxtaposition, Emma had derived, some time before, her first conscious taste of irony. Her mother had not been to Mass for years. Just as everyone in Clonmel had foretold, Mrs. Rosetti had lost her faith. There was no use talking to her about it, you could only hope and pray.

Her eyes, when she came out, seemed much darker, black rather than brown. Her lower lip had slackened, become kind. She seemed, though in a way that Emma did not like, in some new way, more beautiful.

“Shall we go back now?” Emma asked, looking aside.