Ali Smith - Autumn

There are worse tastes to have in a mouth though, truth be told, and the trunks of Scots pines do tend to be narrow. Straight and tall, because this is the kind of tree good for telegraph poles, for the props that pit builders used in the days when industry relied on people working in pits and pits relied on pitprops to hold the ceilings of the tunnels up safely over their heads.

If you have no choice but to go underground, go in the form of something useful. If you have to be cut down, good to spend the afterlife as messenger between people across landscapes. Pines are tall. It’s a lot better than being confined in a dwarf conifer.

From the top of a Scots pine it’s possible to see quite a distance.

Daniel in the bed, inside the tree, isn’t panicking. He isn’t even claustrophobic. It’s reasonable in here, excepting the paralysis, and perhaps it won’t last. Let’s be hopeful. No, in actual fact he’s pleased to be being held immobile inside not just any old tree but such an ancient and adaptable and noble species, the kind of tree that pre-dates by quite a long way the sorts of trees with leaves; a versatile tree, the Scots pine doesn’t need much soil depth, is remarkably good at long life, a tree that can last for many centuries. But the best thing of all about being inside this of all trees is the fact that it’s more versatile, when it comes to colour, than your average general tree. The green of a forest of Scots pines can verge towards blue. And then in the spring there’s the pollen, as yellow as bright paint pigment in an artist’s jar, plentiful, pervasive, scene-stealing like the smoke round a conjuring trick. Back in the old days, the primeval days, the people who wanted others to think they had special powers used to fling such pollen about in the air around them. They would come to the woods and collect it to take home and use it as part of their act.

One might imagine it’d be unpleasant, being sealed inside a tree. One might imagine, ah, pining. But the scent lightens despair. It’s perhaps a little like wearing a coat of armour except much nicer, because the armour is made of a substance through which the years themselves, formative, have run.

Oh.

A girl.

Who’s she?

She vaguely resembles all the pictures in the papers, back then, of,

what’s her name,

Keeler. Christine.

Yes. It’s her.

Probably nobody knows who she is any more. Probably what was history then is nothing but footnote now, and on that note, he notes she’s barefoot, alone in the summer night light of the hall of the great stately house where, by coincidence (history, footnote), he happens to know that the song Rule Britannia was first ever sung. She is standing next to a tapestried wall and she is slipping out of her summer dress.

It falls to the floor. Up go all his pinecones. He groans. She doesn’t hear a thing.

She unhooks the armour off its stand and sorts it into pieces on the parquet floor. She fits the breastplate over her (quite magnificent, it’s all true) chest. She puts her arms through the armholes. There’s no metal cover at all at the place where her, ah, lower underwear is. She puts her hands down to the space in the metal there as if she’s just realized how she’s likely to reveal herself, through this gap, when fully armoured.

She wriggles herself out of what’s left of her underwear.

It falls to the floor.

He groans.

She steps out of it, leaves it on the carpet runner. It lies there. It looks like a boned blackbird.

She fits one leg-piece to a thigh, then the next. She yelps and swears — sharp edge maybe, inside the second of the leg-pieces? She straps the leg-pieces to the backs of her thighs and slips a bare foot inside the first huge boot. She slips her arms inside the metal arm-pieces, lifts the helmet and fits it over her hair. Through the slits in its front she looks around for the gauntlets. One on. Now the next.

She pushes up the visor with her metal hand and her eyes look out.

She goes and stands in front of a huge old mirror hung on the wall. Her laugh comes tinnily out through the helmet. She knocks the visor down again with the gauntlet edge. The only thing visible of her is her privates.

Then she sets off, but delicately, so anything loosely strapped won’t fall off. She clinks her way down the corridor quite as if a suit of armour isn’t nearly as heavy as it looks.

When she comes to a door she turns and pushes it. It opens. She disappears.

The room she’s just entered explodes into raucous laughter.

Can laughter be well-heeled?

Is powerful laughter different from ordinary laughter?

That type of laughter is always powerful.

There’s a song in this, Daniel thinks.

Ballad of Christine Keeler.

Well-heel-er. Dealer. Feeler. Squealer. Conceal her. Steal her. Mrs Peel her.

Ah, no. The fictional creation Mrs Peel came later, a couple of years after this creation.

But probably the Peel of Mrs is based, partly at least, on the Keel of Keeler, a suggestive little gift to the ear of the beholder.

Right now he’s pressed so close between all the people up in the public gallery that — where now?

A courtroom.

The Old Bailey.

That summer.

He only imagined Keeler trying on the armour. He dreamed it, though it’s rumoured to have happened.

But this, this below, about to happen, he witnessed.

First up, Keeler versus Ward, her friend, Stephen the osteopath, the portraitist. No suit of armour but nonetheless she’s armoured here, sheet-metal listless. Impervious. Masked. Perfectly made-up. Dead with a hint of exotic.

She puts the place into a trance by speaking like someone in a trance might speak. Clever. Empty. Sexy automaton. Living doll. Sensational, the public gallery turns pubic gallery. No one can think of anything else, except her friend Stephen, down at the front, who every day picks up his pencil and sketches what he’s seeing.

Meanwhile, days pass.

Down in the witness box, someone else now, a woman, a different one, a Miss Ricardo, truth be told she’s even lower-class than poor Keeler, young, coiffed, roughed at the edges, her hair piled red and high on her head, a dancer, I earn money by visiting men and being paid by them .

She has just announced to the courtroom that the statements that she first made to the police about this case were untrue.

The crowd in the gallery presses forward even harder. Scandal and lies. What prostitutes do. But Daniel sees the woman, just a girl really, fighting to hold herself straight. He sees how her face, her whole demeanour, have gone something like pale green with the fear.

Red hair.

Green girl.

I didn’t want my young sister to go to a remand home, the girl says. My baby taken away from me. The chief inspector told me they would take my sister and my baby if I didn’t make the statements. He also threatened to have my brother nicked. I believed him and so I made the statements. But I have decided I don’t want to give false evidence at the Old Bailey. I told The People newspaper. I want everyone to know why I lied.

Oh dear God.

She’s green all right.

The prosecuting lawyer has an air of foxhound. He makes fun of her. He asks her why on earth she’d sign a statement in the first place if the statement she was signing wasn’t true.

She tells him she wanted the police to leave her alone.

The prosecuting lawyer worries at her. Why has she never complained about any of this before now?

Who could I complain to? she says.

A deliberate liar, then, is she?

Yes, she says.

Daniel in the gallery sees one of her hands, the one on the rail of the witness box, cover itself in little shoots and buds. The buds split open. There are leaves coming out of her fingers.