Will Self - Umbrella

The slow thrumming of a player-piano eases in — the one Audrey had heard in the Aeolian Showroom the last time she had been up West, with Mary Jane, who, in a capricious mood, had said: Juss coz we ain’t quality don’t mean we ain’t allowed to avva gander. Then, when the counter-jumper parted his coat-tails to sit at the instrument, she couldn’t ’ old ’ er tongue an’ warbled on , a portly nightingalewho forced her accent through some imagined mangle of respectability. — Ooh, yairs, isn’t it luvverly, such fine mahoggerny — while the fellow’s knees rose and fell as he trodin the melody, Doo-d’doo, doo d’doo, doo-d’-dooo, doo-d’-dooo, triplets of notes going up and down. Audrey straightened up, lost her hoydenish hunch — seeing that she took a genuine interest , as he continued to march on the spot, the demonstrator spoke of Brarms, ’ is intermetso , and how this was a very high-class roll for the conny-sewer . Listening closely to the trills and coos, her stiff fingers freed themselves from the back of her dress, her chin stilled. The easy motion of the young man’s thighs, the invisible digits pressuring the ivory skin, the so-fa-la! rising up to the ceiling, the exposed roll revolving while around it the world turned — this was beauty, this was what Miss Conway at school meant by har-mon-ee — . A bang, followed by a whip-like crack, the shock of it seizes every passenger on the top deck of the ’bus as the pair shy and a trap horse coming from Sloane Square rears in its shafts. Through a curtain of blue smoke that rumples upinto almond blossom, the spectators see this freak: the wheels and chassis of a new-fangled motor car with the upright black body of a hansom fixed on top. A-ha! Ha-ha! Sam Death chortles as the ’bus driver wrestles his horses past the vehicle, which rests at an uncomfortable angle with one set of wheels up on the kerb. — Oh-ho my, what a sainted palaver! The motorist and his mechanic are flapping their tweedy wings over the open engine compartment, which still belches, and Sam says: Must’ve come from the other side — meanin’ Vauxhall, not ’ Ades — and, while it may seem unlikely, Fentiman, that ’Arry Tate an ’is pals’ll do away with our equine friends. . The conductor regards Audrey’s father respectfully as he speaks, as do the other passengers, surmising that the big man has a professional bent — but Audrey recoils from his portmanteau eyes and the Stilton veins that marble his fine pro-bo-siss . While the ’bus continues past the gardens of Eaton Square and the Fulham garage manager speaks of machines, she dreams of terrible chimeras, men with wheels in place of legs, their bellies a dreadful contrivance of rods, gears and flywheels, smoke venting from their iron buttocks. She envisions horses whose hindquarters are ’ Oxton whizzers , while steering columns have been speared between their shoulders so that their riders, sat astride their red-hot withers, may twist them this way and that, neighing, screaming. . A horse’s scream is a fearful thing that Audrey didn’t know she knew, coming as it does from a part of her mind that she didn’t know she had. It comes from underneath the mattress where things fester and cog-buttons are bug-toothed. Stan’s stories came from that place — the leopard man and the dog man, their screams in the night when their flesh was sliced and stretched. The beasts howled beyond the stockade, while Vi and Olive pulled at Audrey’s nightdress, hiding their faces, baring her shoulders. The three of them gaoled by the bedstead as their brother’s dark mouth swallers the nightlight . .The vehicle, madam, says Sam Death, has been engineered by taking the body of yer normal ’orse ’bus and securing it to the chassis and wheels of a Daimler petrol motor ’bus. . Her father believes he has won over the coal-scuttle with his informed disquisition. From their elevated position, as the ’bus rumbles from Buckingham Palace Road and on to the forecourt of the station, they are well placed to make a survey: Over there, madam, you may espy a Thornycroft ’bus, the motivation for which is supplied by steam from a coke-fired boiler, heggzackerly the same as a locomotive. Yonder, by the portico of the Apollo, that there is the Fischer ’bus, an innovation of the Americans, it employs both electrical and petrol engines in furtherance of increased reliability. Be that as it may wery well be. . he continues as they inch their way down the curved stairway behind her heavy silk train. . I doubt wery much its utility, indeed, I foresee the futility —. However, she has no wish to be lectured further, and so cuts Death off with a tilt of her bonnet and a twist of her parasol’s handle. And a good day to you too, madam! he says with the utmost repugnance and, raising his umbrella to salute Fentiman, he allows its ferrule to travel on, tracing the pilasters and wrought-iron balconies that cover the station’s façade. We ’ave reached the terminus, he says, and, taking her arm, guides her between vehicles jockeying for passengers, then past an advertisement for Germolene so large its letters loopacross the end wall of an entire four-storey block, the l encircling an open window from which a slavey in a mob-cap stares frowsily down on the crowded street. Urchins scamper into the road to grab harnesses, then pirouette for a flung copper, as the stand-pipes of toppers somehow join in Audrey’s mind with the droppings underfoot and the gulley-slops in the gutters. Here, more than in Foulham, the city is beset by its own contrariety: the smooth and stony Portland faces of the buildings along Victoria Street are streaked with smutty tears, the alleys that crack the mirroring windows of the smart shops are choked with costers’ carts piled with fruit an’ veg’ already on the turn . Flies dash damp in her face — faces all round are pastier than those on my manor . .They are deeper dahn an’ ahtuv ve light . .He points out to her the yellow-brick bulk of Queen Anne’s Mansions rising above the rooftops in the direction of St James’s, its mansard roof festooned with cabling. He speaks of the hydraulic lifts that raise the well-to-do tenants up fourteen storeys, and of the piping that supplies the pumps burrowing beneath the streets. — He conjures in Audrey’s mind a vision of the city as all connected up by streams of invisible power: the telegraph cables coursing with letters and figures, the electricity zipping through gutta-percha sleeves — her own vision skronks so that the beaver skin of a passing homburg conceals. . an eye , a girl’s pretty face splits lengthwise, sideways . .She wishes she could turn aside to enjoy the steamer trunks, fishing rods and pith helmets carefully arranged in the window of the Army & Navy Stores, she wishes she could get in there wiv ’em . .but her father will not slacken his pace. For the first time on this peculiar excursion Audrey feels the frigid probing fingers of anxiety: he is so intent, his moustache spit-damp, his high forehead shiny with perspiration . .on they go, his umbrella marking the time for their marching feet, tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap . .Her uncovered head falls back, my crownin ’ glory swishes between her shoulder blades. A great purple-grey quilt is falling over it all, cloudy clumps trapping the scurrying bedbugs in their own poisonous fumigation. The air darkens and darkens: a smutstorm in lurid yellow suspension from out of which swim the castellated battlements of the Westminster Hospital, supported by voluntary contributions — beyond this the rigid skirts of the Abbey fall perpendicular from its stony stays.

An impression of the bashed boiled-egg face of the big clock, and of the gentlemen petrified on their plinths — Audrey sees the pipe organ of Parliament, hearkens to its maddening fugue. . She looks down at her freckled hands, lying once more in the lap of her shabby dress, ’ ow they shake with palsy . Her father tenderly places a bag between them, the rumpled paper, cloth-soft . She withdraws a bonbon reeking of acetone and presses it to her bloodless lips — then tastes the pear essence as it bashes her teeth. — You ’ad a little turn there, m’dear. His solicitude is more troubling than his contempt. They are on a motor ’bus that shudders up Whitehall — a leather hanging strap tap-taps against his bowler, he pats her hands, the action as involuntary as hers. He speaks of the ’bus and its route from Victoria to the Bank, but Audrey cannot hear him that well for her hands have twisted into claws that scrabble on the mounds of her thighs, back and forth, over and over, in a pattern that cannot really be a pattern — since it is never repeated. The unstoppable movement towards the city’s central lodestone is affecting, Audrey notices, her father’s elocution: aligning the wayward consonants, repelling the colloquialisms. — As I was saying before, Audrey, Mister Phillips is now making a fuller commitment to Albert — he’s to board at Woodford. Mister Phillips has arranged it all with the Drapers, while he himself will pay for his books. . his sporting equipment and suchlike. Well —? This is not, she realises, a question — it’s more akin to a chairman’s patter between turns, and so begs the question, What’s coming next? She sees Albert as Mister Phillips must have, spottin’ ’im in Anderson’s, the tall youth’s bulging grey eyes running down the column of figures scrawled on a bill — tu’pence for this, ha’pence for that, thru’pence for the Eccles cake — his severe mouth pronouncing the total instantly. His family are, of necessity, familiar with Albert’s prodigious calculating ability, his pals too: they call him Datas, after the music-hall mental prestidigitator. Just as his father has his moniker shouted after him in the street, so Datas Death has his own salute, Am I right, sir? Although unlike the genial Datas on stage, there’s no jocularity to Albert’s correctitude. He is rigid in all things , disdaining brawling, yet looks fit to kill if he’s accused of having funked it by failing to answer a question or complete a computation. Now the days are balmier he strips to the waist in the hugger-mugger of the backyard — having obtained a copy of Sandow’s Magazine, he performs the exercises it describes using Indian clubs he has made by sawing up old railway sleepers. — Datas is not Stanley’s hero, but Enigmarelle, the Man of Steel — he desires to be a mechanical man with an engine hammerin’ in his belly and smoke spurtin’ from ’ is mouf an’ nose . .I’ve never been up on a motor before! is Audrey’s answer, shouted over the rattle-bash that reverberates through the saloon. Her eyes skitter to the back platform, fall from it to the pattern of crushed droppings-on-tarmac that unrolls there. Try as she might, she cannot will the grunting ’bus aloft, up from the congeries of cabs that mesh into a millipede inching its way from Whitehall into Trafalgar Square. Audrey cannot — yet Stan flies whenever he wants: he positions her beside him in front of their mother’s new cheval glass and tips it back to fling them suddenly, silver, skywards . .Stan says: In twenty years’ time everyone will be an aeronaut, Colonel Cody will perfect his war kite and there’ll be gazetted aeroplane services connectin’ all the cities of the Empire. Airships’ll carry the heavy freight that goes now by sea: pig iron, coal, Canadian wheat. They’ll anchor up above the Pool of London and the air will be fick with their hawsers — the stevedores’ll operate movin’ beltways high as cranes. See! Up we go, Aud! And again he tips the glass so the flame-haired girl and the bat-eared boy lift off, suddenly, silver, skywards . .