Smoke

by Dan Vyleta

  There are other portents. Spencer has begun to smoke. Julius, the head boy, primus inter pares. He has been seen, coming out of Renfrew’s office, with Soot on his sleeve. A pure boy, the purest we’ve had. Corrupted by his own master.

  And by the presence of that other boy. Argyle, Thomas Winfried. A child of sin. He smokes most every day, like a workman’s boy in puberty. Even the servants avoid him, the kitchen hands, the groundsman living in his shed on the south field. Noble by birth, Mr. Argyle is, if we have faith in the honour of his mother. Yet common as dirt. There is some mystery attached to his father’s name, but Trout forbade all questions and discussion on pain of suspension. Argyle must have a powerful sponsor indeed.

  For now he has been summoned by one of the highest in the land. Baron Naylor, lord of Stanley Hall, Marquess of Thomond. Nobody’s seen hide nor hair of him for nigh on ten years. Fell out with the Queen, some say; lost her trust. Trout’s sending Cooper, Charles Henry Ferdinand. The future Earl of Shaftesbury. A redhead, more pedigree than a prizewinning bitch; his father a beacon in this, our dusk. He must be disappointed with his son.

  Naturally Trout will want a report from the boy. I wonder. Is it the state’s business, or his own? And if the state’s, which corner of its civil service? There are divisions now, where there once was unity: the commonweal crumbling like a slice of sailors’ rusk.

  The New Liberalism. Science. Self-Governance. Progress. Fancy words harbouring heresy. A sin turned political movement. Sitting there, in Parliament, in plain sight.

  Renfrew is a liberal.

  Ask yourself: who studies his linen?

  The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale? See Stubb! he laughs! See yonder Chilian! He snorts to think of it. Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one tost sapling cannot, Starbuck!…(Aside) Something shot from my dilated nostrils, he has inhaled it in his lungs. Starbuck now is mine; cannot oppose me now, without rebellion.

  HERMAN MELVILLE, MOBY-DICK (1851)

  LESSONS

  They take a late-morning train. Thomas calculates they should get there well before nightfall, but they have to change twice and miss their connection at Rugby. The station is dreary and empty, the waiting room a row of wooden benches clustered around an oven without heat. A conductor tells them there will be a train within the hour, but three o’clock passes, then four, then five, before he reappears, buttoned up tight and smelling of Smoke and brandy, informing them there has been a delay.

  It is eight by the time they board the train and they are frozen through. In their compartment a stack of blankets sits folded on the luggage rack. They fetch them down and wrap themselves in the plain brown wool which appears clean but gives off a bitter, funky smell, as of soiled sawdust.

  Thomas and Charlie have spoken little in the past hour. The long day of waiting has exhausted their conversation and they are both busy with their hunger, having shared the last sandwich and the last apple not an hour after pulling out of Oxford, taking turns, bite for bite, each making sure he did not get the last. It left them nibbling at scraps in the end, laughing, passing the wretched piece of apple core back and forth, until Thomas swallowed it, seeds, stem, and all, and nearly choked himself with laughter. Now their silence sits with them in the compartment while, outside, high winds batter the train.

  “You hungry?” Charlie asks at one point, his own stomach growling in the dark.

  “No,” Thomas lies. “You?”

  “No.”

  “Tired?”

  “Not a bit.”

  “Same here.”

  ф

  They both startle awake as the train comes to a stop. Mechanically they shake off the blankets and fetch their luggage down only to realise it isn’t yet their station. It is hard to say how much time has passed. Darkness presses in on them, seems confirmed rather than relieved by a single gas flame shivering in its glass cage on the station platform. The wind is like a living thing, searching their windows for purchase, pushing fingers, tongues in through the cracks.

  As his eyes adjust, Thomas comes to realise that the platform is not as deserted as he had assumed. A group of men, women, and children huddle against the wall at the far side of the building, downwind from the storm. There may be as many as a dozen of them; have formed a circle, their faces focussed on the centre. When the train starts up again, they draw level. It is too dark to read any features, but their gestures and stance speak of a violent excitement, clenched fists and wide-open mouths, the feet planted wide apart. At the centre of their man-made ring, two figures are wrestling, one atop the other, the upper stripped to his waist. They pass too quickly to say whether it is two men or a man and a woman; whether they are fighting or engaged in something yet more intimate. The whole group is steaming with a misty Smoke, snatched off their bodies by the storm and blown down-country where it will plaster a barn, a house, a shade tree with their wind-borne sin.

  Then they are gone.

  Charlie and Thomas go on looking out the window long after they have passed the group, though now, coated by country dark, the pane has turned into a rain-streaked mirror.

  “Pedlars?” Charlie asks at last. “Circus people? Irishmen?”

  Thomas shakes his head. “Who knows.”

  The words are laced with a familiar flavour; the mirror shows a shadow darting from his mouth.

  “A group like that,” Charlie goes on, “they infect each other over and over. Like a tiny, travelling London.” He sighs. “I wish we could find a way to save them.”

  “Save them? Whatever for? Leave them in their filth. They deserve it. Isn’t that the point of Smoke?”

  The words come out wrong, hard and flat and ugly. Charlie looks at him in shock. Afraid that Thomas means them, aware of the smell that’s filling the compartment. For a moment, Thomas searches for a phrase that will explain. But you cannot unsay the said. And how do you account for the yearning, distinct in his chest, to go back and join the men and women in their circle, find out what it was that those two figures did, half naked on the freezing brick of the station platform?

  “We better get there soon,” he says, wrapping himself into the blanket, and leaving Charlie to worry for his, Thomas’s, soul.

  ф

  It must be past ten when they arrive at their destination. It is hard to be sure. The station clock is not working; Thomas has no watch, and Charlie quickly realises that he has forgotten to wind his. Baron Naylor’s coachman welcomes them on the platform. He is tall, bearded, half frozen, and nervous; stands muffled into a greatcoat; insists on carrying their luggage, then sets it down again after a dozen steps.

  “It’s too late now to harness the horses,” he explains, both in accusation and apology. “You were expected at three. Even then, the light would have been bad. It’s quite a ways, you see.”

  “Then we’ll stay the night,” Charlie suggests reasonably.

  The man nods, bends for their luggage, hesitates.

  “There is no inn.”

  “And the waiting room?”

  “Locked.”

  “Then where will we—”

  The man sighs, picks up the suitcases again, leads them down the platform steps and across the station yard. Here the horse stables form two shabby rows, shielded from view of the travelling public by a high brick wall. No streetlamp lights their footing here, and as they make their way down the alley in near darkness, Charlie becomes eerily aware of the animal eyes looking down at him across the stable gates, his ears alert to the shifting of hooves and the sudden shakes of horses’ heads; the exhalations of hot air; the smacking of lips and meaty tongues. When a horse bares its teeth not a foot from his ear, they catch the little light there is: crooked, yellow teeth like stubby fingers, sticking out of colourless gums. Startled, Charlie stops. Thomas bumps into him, swears, then places a hand on his shoulder.

  “Spooky, eh?”

  “Just lost my footing,” says Charlie, thinking that this is what it m
ust feel like to have a brother. An older one, willing to stick up for you in times of danger.

  They arrive at a door that the coachman wedges open with some difficulty. Inside, the scene is lit by a single tallow candle. The room is tiny, smells of hay and horse. Three men sit propped up against the wall, smoking cheap little pipes; two others are stretched on the freezing ground under shabby blankets, resting, sleeping, or dead, it is impossible to say. Nobody speaks: not to welcome them, not to communicate with one another.

  “The coachmen sleep here,” Baron Naylor’s man informs them. “I’m not supposed to— That is, gentlemen don’t usually come here.” He sets down their luggage on the little floor space there is, unwraps his scarf to free a throat marked by an old burn scar. “But I don’t know where else—”

  “It’ll do,” Charlie says, and Thomas sits down wordlessly, then spreads his coat out underneath him. The room is so small that once Charlie has joined him, they lie wedged between the prostrate men and the smokers. Charlie’s face rests not an inch from the hand of a stranger. It is a large hand, with a tattoo in the wedge of skin between thumb and index finger, and knuckles blackened by either dirt or Soot. The tattoo is some sort of picture. Charlie cannot make it out until the hand spreads itself upon the wooden floorboards like an animal seeking purchase for a leap. A mermaid, bare-chested, smiling.

  “We will freeze to death,” Thomas whispers next to him, only half joking, and closes the gap between their backs so their spines can pool their bony warmth.

  They lie like that for half the night, strangers coughing around them, a mermaid dancing on dirty skin, her breasts shrivelling, expanding, winking with every twitch of the coachman’s mighty hand.

  By dawn, the boys are so stiff, they have to support each other as they limp into the coach. They crawl onto padded benches and drift into a state more stupor than sleep.

  ф

  The coach ride has the texture of a dream: half a dozen impressions sewn together with no reference to time. They set off in twilight, amongst undulating hills; pit towers and smokestacks dotting the horizon. The sounds of travel seem to reach them through their skins as much as their ears, clot together into lumps of noise they are too tired to unpick: the churning of the muddy wheels, the crack of the coachman’s whip, the frightened whinny of the horse when it slips in a puddle. Once, Thomas wakes to see the ruin of a windmill studded with tiny birds: the sun at its back and the coach riding through its mile-long shadow. Then, the moments miles apart but adjacent in his consciousness, separated only by the closing of his eyes, they arrive. The coach halts before the long flank of a stone building painted dark by rain. A butler runs out, umbrella in hand, and escorts them the ten steps from coach to side door, gravel crunching under their feet.

  “Delighted to see you have arrived, Mr. Argyle, Mr. Cooper. You will be hungry, I presume? If you’ll follow me to the breakfast room.”

  At the mention of breakfast, Charlie’s stomach growls like an ill-used pet.

  ф

  They sit at breakfast. The room is large and formal, the tablecloth starched; the chairs high-backed and stiff; the cutlery elegant silver. The table seats ten, but the boys are the only ones in attendance. They perch shabbily—their clothes rumpled, their hair unkempt, their hands all too hastily washed—afraid they’ll stain the upholstery. The butler has left them. A door to their left admits kitchen smells but has not yet produced any food; cold heavy rain running down the glass veranda doors.

  Then a serving girl arrives. She may be eighteen or nineteen; casts a glance at them from large, thick-lashed eyes before kneeling in front of the fireplace and setting to lighting it. She strikes a match, holds it to a scrap of newspaper already crumpled amongst the coals, repeats the action; cowers down, still on her knees, her chin now almost touching the floor, to blow into the hearth. The boys—dazed, blurry-eyed, travel-weary—feel they have no choice but to stare at her. At her bottom, to be precise. In this position, stuck in the air with most of the skirt’s fabric trapped under her knees, it is most awfully round. When a stomach growls (Thomas’s? Charlie’s again?), it sounds pleading, forlorn. And still the girl kneels, blowing at coals.

  “I believe the fire is quite lit.”

  They did not hear her enter. Thomas and Charlie move as one: reflections in a mirror. Both heads swivel; both faces fill with blood. Charlie’s blush is the darker. A redhead, he is, copper-skinned. To those of his complexion, nature is not kind. It’s like a different type of Smoke, marking a different type of sin. There is no chance at all that the lady does not notice.

  For she is a lady, though she is no older than they. Not tall, but holding herself as to appear it, her long, plain dress cut almost like a habit. A small face: pale, rigid, self-possessed, cold.

  And pretty.

  Her lips are naturally very red.

  “Come here, please,” she says, not to them but past them, at the cowering form of the servant.

  The girl obeys with haste but no enthusiasm, her large eyes on Thomas, then the floor. Her blouse is tight over her chest, the skirt rides up a little where it has caught at the swell of her hips.

  “It appears your clothes have shrunk in the wash.”

  The young lady’s voice is neither cruel, nor loud, nor yet commanding. Notes of patient sadness underlie it; humility forced into action against its will. Next to the serving girl’s large, florid frame, she appears dainty, almost fragile.

  An elf, Charlie thinks.

  Thomas thinks: a nun.

  “It would be better if you returned to scullery duties for the moment. Until you learn to be a little less obtrusive.”

  “But Lady Naylor promised me—”

  “Until the New Year.”

  “But she said I could—”

  “Spring, then. You are excused now.”

  There is a sequence to what follows. The Smoke comes first, a sudden little plume that rises from the servant girl’s chest and leaves a smudge in the starched cotton. Then tears start running, clear and silent, from dark eyes to chin. A sob follows, starts in the depth of her and shakes her frame. Next she flees, all grace forgotten, the sound of her flat shoes travelling through the closing door.

  “My apologies. Miss Livia Naylor. Mr. Argyle, I presume? And Mr. Cooper. How do you do? We were expecting you last night. It is, of course, long past our breakfast time. Never mind, here comes the food. Sit. I shall keep you company.”

  ф

  They sit and eat under her scrutiny. Her gaze is all the more disconcerting for being patient, judicious, meek. Charlie finds it turns the toast to ashes in his mouth and the tea to bilge water. A well-brought-up boy, he forces himself to make conversation.

  “Thank you for welcoming us so kindly, Miss Naylor. Will your father—the baron—will he be joining us this morning?”

  But the girl gives him no help. “I am instructed to tell you he is unwell.”

  “That’s too bad. Your mother then?”

  “She has ridden out.”

  Charlie feels rebuffed but is not ready yet to admit defeat. He adds with an increasing air of desperation: “I assume you’re home from school. Just like us. Not that we are at home, of course. But all the same…”

  She waits attentively, patiently for him to finish, but he no longer knows where he is going, is hiding behind his cup of tea, appalled at the noise he makes when he tries to take a quiet sip.

  Thomas rescues him.

  “You are not a prefect, by any chance?” he asks, his mouth full, a dangerous note to his question. “Back at your school?”

  She meets his eyes calmly. “I have that good fortune. How did you guess?”

  They cannot help themselves. Both boys start to giggle, furtively at first, then, their frames shaking, with blushing abandon, while she watches on, calm and meek and disapproving, until their hysteria dries out along with their appetites, and the butler reappears to see them to their room.

  ф

  “We’ll have an early dinner a
t five.”

  These were Livia’s parting words. The only thing of substance that the butler added to their stock of information was the location of the bathroom, right across from the room in which they have been housed, and the exhortation that they “may feel more comfortable once they have had a moment to refresh themselves,” which Charlie takes to mean they stink. The room is prettily but sparsely furnished. It holds two beds, a press, and a little desk and chair. They remain on the ground floor; a large veranda door grants access to the gardens. The clock shows a quarter to eleven. When Charlie returns at eleven twenty from his bath, he finds Thomas at the open veranda door, watching a pheasant striding up and down the garden path. He leans out, into the pouring rain, and Charlie hears him count the windows along their wing of the house. He breaks off after three dozen, turns, his hair wet and his face streaming with rain.

  “Is your house like this, Charlie?” He points for some reason at the marching pheasant who is on yet another of his rounds.

  Charlie thinks about it.

  “You mean this big, with gardens like that? Yes, I suppose it is. Grander, even.” He shrugs. “How about yours?”

  “More like that.”

  It takes Charlie a moment to see the garden shed through the sheets of rain, standing with its back to the dark treeline beyond.

  “Do you miss it? Home?”

  Thomas’s eyes turn hard. “No.” He gathers up a dressing gown and towel. “My turn for a bath.”

  ф

  Their afternoon passes turgidly. Five seems an eternity away. The rain continues unabated, making exploration of the garden impossible. When they step into the corridor instead, they find most of the doors closed, the house all but abandoned. It seems rude to climb stairs and look around in earnest, and after running into the hard stare of the butler at what appears to be the stairwell down to the servants’ quarters, they retreat, watch the clock move in painfully slow spasms. At three thirty they change into their formal attire. It is only now they realise they have forgotten to hang their clothes or ask someone to press them, and their shirts and jackets look hopelessly rumpled. Thomas’s dinner jacket is not only cut according to some long-abandoned fashion but appears to have been attacked by moths. The cloth underneath the left arm is all but worn away. This leads him to walk around awkwardly, pressing one elbow into his flank so as to hide the bald spot. When the clock hand finally twitches onto five, their nerves are exhausted with boredom. At three minutes past, the fear takes hold that nobody will come to collect them.