Dan Vyleta - Smoke

“You don’t know that,” Livia replies, though she, too, is bowed by the same thought. Charlie is alone: detained in Oxford, or lost on the road to London; in a train compartment, on the back of a wagon, lying wounded in a ditch. They were shot upon before. When Livia closes her eyes she can hear the screaming of the horses dragging her mother’s coach over the precipice.

Charlie does not arrive at noon. She does not need to wait for Thomas to tell her what he is thinking. He wants to go find Charlie; trace him all the way to Oxford if need be. She can feel it in her pores, on the hairs of her arms. And yet, Thomas is not smoking. There must exist, then, another type of Smoke: invisible, clinging to them as surely as their shadows. The breath of their needs and worries; the truths each must assert and impose upon all others. The potentiality of sin. If so, they are all in each other’s mouths every time they speak. How dangerous then proximity, those hours and days spent shoulder to shoulder until the other’s being begins to grow into one’s own and sows its hunger in one’s furrows. How blissful, conversely, solitude, and how miraculous Grendel’s isolation. Of all the men and women in London, he alone is an island, unadulterated, himself.

“You go,” she says as much to release Thomas as to be rid of him. “See whether you can find him. I will wait.”

“It isn’t safe for you here,” he barks back, protective, resentful.

“There’s Grendel. And the priest. I will be all right.”

He thinks, nods, hesitates over how to say good-bye, then simply turns and strides off.

“I shan’t be long.”

Thomas walks as though he is leaning into wind.

ф

It’s well past dinner by the time Thomas returns. When Grendel dons his coat and goes to look for him out on the street, Mrs. Grendel turns from where she stands scrubbing dishes.

“Boys, eh? Hard to keep track of them. Always running off on some adventure.”

Livia cannot tell whether she is taunting her or trying to soothe her worries. Mrs. Grendel’s face does not take easily to emotion, and her interactions with Livia have been guarded and stiff.

“Here he is now.” Grendel returns, a grim-looking Thomas in tow. “Let’s find you some food, my lad. You must be starving.”

Thomas accounts for his day over a bowl of cold fish stew, eating with a crudeness, Livia notes, which speaks of a childhood running wild.

“I took the main road west. Asking whoever I could for news. A red-headed youth in dirty clothes. Well-spoken; good boots. I thought maybe somebody had met him up the road.” He grimaces, slurps stew, picks fish bones from pursed lips.

“I walked for miles out of town and talked to dozens of people. But nothing: no sign of Charlie, no word. Then I met a tinker hailing from Oxford and he told me about rumours concerning the school. He said that one of the schoolmasters had been attacked by a gang of robbers. ‘They fed him to their dogs,’ he said. ‘Can you believe it? They literally ate him up, crown to sole.’” Thomas shakes his head as though wishing to rid himself of the image. “The tinker also told me that someone came and rescued the schoolmaster’s daughter. ‘A ginger knight dressed as a beggar,’ he said. ‘Whisked the girl to safety right under the robbers’ noses. But listen to this: what the lad didn’t realise, not until he’d got her to safety, was that the schoolmaster had done surgery on her. On his own daughter! Turned her into half machine. I swear by all the popish saints.’”

Thomas pauses, pulls a face.

“But that’s nonsense. Gibberish.”

“Gibberish, Livia? I suppose so. I also met a man who told me there was a devil on the loose on the London road. A devil with a necklace made of human fingers.” Thomas stabs his spoon at the last morsel of fish. “That ‘ginger knight’ of the tinker’s story, though, that must be Charlie. And if so, something happened at Renfrew’s, something bad. And now he is lost, in between Oxford and here.”

“So what do we do? Charlie could be anywhere. And Mother’s delivery is tomorrow night.”

“We should never have split up.” Thomas curses, rises, his face flushing dark with more than blood. “What can we do? We wait.

“If Charlie’s hurt,” he adds, storming out, “I will make them pay. Your mother. The school. Everyone.”

But even here there is to the train of Smoke he leaves behind something other than his anger, something guilty, whispering her name.

ф

Livia sits up late, talking to Grendel. It’s that or going to bed. Worrying about Charlie. Listening to Thomas shift on the blankets in his room. It is the first night since leaving her father’s house that she wishes she had never met the two boys.

So she sits and asks questions. About Grendel’s youth. About London. About his work at the church. Then she asks Grendel about his neck. It is the only thing that’s twisted about him. One side of his throat appears shorter than the other. It bears the puckered line of a scar.

“How did this happen?”

“I did it myself. I was sitting shaving one morning. The razor in my hand. You know that sound it makes when it scrapes off the bristle. I heard it and felt lonely. Not just lonely. Alone in the world. A creature all to itself. So I thought to myself, why not end it? Or rather my hands thought it. It’s like they had reasoned it out.” He shrugs, lopsided. “I cut the muscle, largely. Missed the artery. The surgeon patched me up, only he was drunk and botched it, or so another surgeon told me when he had a look at his work. All the same, he saved my life. My wife, you see, she was the surgeon’s daughter. She looked after me while I was lying sick.” His eyes grow warm. “She figured out what I was, and she cared for me all the same.”

Livia sits still, trying to square this account with the woman whose house she has been sharing. Her life is not an easy one. She trawls the river mud each day, picks shellfish, mussels, rags, and bone, then trades her findings against meat and money at the market; a cudgel dangling from her belt to ward off rivals. Mrs. Grendel stood washing kidneys that evening, preparing them for the morrow, complaining about their price. “Two extra mouths,” she kept saying, “it is a strain on the purse.” All the while looking at Livia; the tang of urine rising from the sink.

What Livia says to Grendel is: “You must love her very much.”

He heaves a sigh. “I do. But I love her with my head. There are moments in married life when it is important that one love with other parts. That one forgets oneself and smokes.”

He stops abruptly, in doubt whether Livia is too young for such truths, and too nobly born.

“ Passion ,” she whispers, not looking at his face. “You are talking about passion.”

He hesitates before he nods. “I have seen it in others. It’s a kind of greed.”

“You are saying you can’t — in married life, I mean. And of course you have no children.”

He smiles shyly, looks about himself, furtive with the weight of his insight. “Oh, I can, I can. But not with that greed. It makes a difference to one’s wife.”

ф

It is a small step from there, in conversational terms, and yet Livia is flustered by it, feels primness return to her bearing, bland modesty to her face. All Grendel does is point into the depths of the flat.

“Is that one your sweetheart then?”

“No.”

He seems surprised by her denial.

“You like him though.”

“He’s a bully and a brute.”

He weighs her words, his gentle face grown gentler yet, speaking to her as though to a child.

“Then there is someone else. This Charlie, perhaps?”

Livia chews on this, not looking at him, struggling to turn away the lies that rise to her tongue.