Dan Vyleta - Smoke

“What now?” Charlie asks.

“We need to take off his nightshirt, wash his legs and — the rest of him.”

Livia blushes, points to her father’s midriff. It alerts Charlie to the whole sadness of a situation in which a mother and a daughter have become nurses to their husband and father.

“I will do it,” he says. “You take a rest.”

ф

Washing a man’s legs and body proves surprisingly straightforward once Charlie gets past the simple fact of his nudity. It is, in the end, rather like cleaning yourself. Baron Naylor is so calm now, he even lets Charlie shave him, very slowly and carefully, until five or so years of premature age have been scraped off his chin. Afterwards, the baron dressed in fresh clothes, his bedsheets changed, Charlie joins Livia by the window. Dawn is breaking, the lawn still grey with shadow, the nearby wood a black square framed by lighter fields.

“Can you see a woman out there, walking out of the woods?” Livia asks in a whisper, then carries on, not expecting an answer. “The servants, the old ones, they have a story about a woman wandering the woods. Lost, they say, living on the edge of them, half in darkness, half in light. They say she is father’s lost soul. His sanity.” She smiles sadly at the windowpane. “But I’ve never seen her, not in a thousand mornings of looking.”

She turns to Charlie then, studies him, frankly and systematically.

“You are shocked, aren’t you? Shocked and disgusted. I can see it here.” She points to where his eyebrows have knitted over the bridge of his nose.

Charlie is silent for a moment, gauging her expression. He knows it is important to give an honest answer.

“No, I am not,” he says at last. “I have been thinking. It came to me just now, looking out the window with you. This is what Smoke is, isn’t it? Smoke is madness. It’s as simple as that.”

When she answers, there is a catch of excitement in her voice. It is as though Charlie has just spelled out a long-cherished thought.

“Plato writes that evil is having a disordered soul.”

She is about to go on, but breaks off instead. She does not trust him yet.

“We never read any Plato,” Charlie tells her. “We only learned his dates.”

Livia chews her lip.

“Father has his books downstairs, in the library. In Greek. He translated some of them. When he was a professor, at Cambridge. I found his notes.”

Livia looks over at the man in his bed, shackled again, placid and vacant. Her eyes fall on the razor on the little table. Charlie has washed and wiped it, and left it open to dry. She walks over, folds it, weighs it in her hands.

“You shaved him,” she says suddenly, as though she has only just discovered the fact. In her head it’s connected, somehow, to Plato, and madness, and sin. He does not quite fathom how. “You have good hands, Charlie Cooper.”

He masks his embarrassment by shaking his head.

“Only because of this,” he says, picking the candy from out under his tongue. It has diminished in size and turned dark, almost black, and looks for all the world like a rotten tooth.

She stares at it in distaste.

“Throw it. It won’t hold any more Smoke.”

He nods, closes his fist on the candy.

“Where do you have it from?”

“Mother. The government produces it, or rather there’s a special factory that has a government contract. It used to be that it was a big secret. Only very few people were issued them, people in certain positions. Churchmen, for one. Government officials.”

“Teachers.”

“Yes. For emergencies; and to ward off infection when they are dealing with common folk. But Mother says that this is changing. Beasley and Son sold the monopoly, and the new owners, they are selling sweets, secretly of course, to whoever can pay. A black market. Mother says they even sell to commoners. Soon, I suppose, greengrocers will sell it, along with tea and soap.”

Charlie whistles. It sounds brighter than he means it to. “Or along with their liquorice and nuts! But this is good, isn’t it? It means people can fight their Smoke. Suppress it.”

She grows angry, fierce, her eyebrows knotting.

“It’s a sin, is what it is. A crime.”

She stares at him as though she holds him guilty too. In his fist the spent sweet lies sticky against his skin.

“I better go.”

Livia does not stop him. All she says, as he walks through the door, is “Merry Christmas.”

He turns.

“Already? I lost track of time.”

“Christmas Eve at any rate. Mother grew up abroad. She keeps to Continental traditions. We’ll have a formal dinner, followed by carols at the tree.”

“I have no present for you.”

“It isn’t expected.”

Her voice, when she says it, is cold and distant. It is as though the morning never happened.

ф

“Smoke is madness,” Charlie repeats to himself on the way down the stairs. “That’s why she is how she is. She is her father’s daughter. He lost his reason. So she is afraid.”

The thought is still with him when he enters the guest room and finds Thomas straddling the threshold of the open veranda door, looking gaunt and sickly in the early-morning light. Rain has soaked one sleeve of his nightshirt and glued it to his arm.

Charlie closes the door behind himself before he speaks.

“I know what sweets are. And I understand Smoke.”

Thomas looks over, water streaming down his face.

“I know more than that, Charlie. I’ve read the Bible.”

They sit down on the floor shoulder to shoulder, and explain.

We spend Christmas with our guests. Mother, in keeping with the customs of her family, serves carp in black plum sauce and buttered potatoes. She roundly ignores my objection that dressing fish with fruit turns a dish that should at least remind us of a fast into something sweet and gluttonous. We have guests, she says, we can eat convent food when they are gone. The evening is further spoilt when Lizzy, the kitchen maid, is caught attempting to steal a present from under the tree. It is I who have the misfortune to catch her. The silly goose of a girl gets tangled in a crude lie, then immediately bursts into Smoke. Mother has little choice but to dismiss her, and we all watch as she runs off, her thick shoes making a racket on the floor and her skirt riding very indecently up the back of her calves.

Despite this, a certain solemnity prevails throughout the holiday. I am delighted to discover that Mr. Cooper — Charlie, as he insists I must call him — has a lovely voice for carols. He is a well-mannered, even charming guest. On the morning of Christmas he surprises me by waiting outside my father’s room when I arrive. He does not explain but blushes rather becomingly, takes the jug and the washcloth out of my hands, and sets to helping me. I like him for that blush. He insists on not taking a sweet this time and humbly steps outside when the Smoke overwhelms him, until he has reclaimed his calm. Father has taken a shine to him and can be heard humming a nonsense melody as we leave. Mr. Cooper falls in with it and starts skipping down the corridor like a fool.

Mr. Argyle is a different matter. He humiliates me. There is something to his gaze, something forceful and insolent and searching that makes me aware of the plainness of my dress and hairstyle, the scuffed old shoes I wear around the house. It is not that I wish to appear prettier for him — God knows I would rather be spared his stares — and yet I have found myself donning the odd piece of jewellery for dinner and have slipped into the silk gown Mother gave me for my birthday, just to put him in his place. Not that I see much of this dark cousin of mine. Mr. Argyle spends his afternoons shut up with Mother, who is filling him with her theories. It is hard to tell whether or not he believes her: she, too, is subject to his gaze. Its force is such that it leaves his own face inscrutable. He must be a most unpopular boy at school.