White Blood

by James Fleming

  White Blood

  James Fleming

  One

  My father, George Doig, died of the plague. That was in 1903, when I was fourteen and he in the flower of his age. For many years he'd been the manager of their Moscow office for Hodge & Co., the big cotton-brokers. During this period he made himself attractive to Irina Rykov, and married her. She was the granddaughter of the Rykov who raised the loan that kept the Tsar's army going in 1812. In this way I was a direct descendant of the man who saved Russia from Napoleon.

  Until recently, these were the principal facts in my life over which I've had no control. I must add a physical description of myself.

  I can't remember having been small. Nanny Agafya sometimes sought to dominate me by saying that Mother had spat me out. "Five heaves and there you were, all slimy and bawling, no bigger than a gherkin." This has never been the sense I've had of my person. Some initial helplessness, suckling, infancy, these I concede, remarking that they belong to the period of the womb, which had nothing to do with me. It is from the age of my first complete memory, four years and two months, that I date myself.

  It was the day that we moved into the fifth, the top, floor of an apartment building off the fashionable end of the Tverskaya. Moscow was entering its most capitalist phase. Accommodation was difficult to find, everything being half finished. It was a measure of Potter Hodge's satisfaction with my father that the firm was prepared to pay the premium on the Tverskaya.

  To keep me quiet while the men were setting out our furniture, I was bribed with the gift of a troop of the 1st Sumsky Hussar Regiment in a polished chestnut box: black horses, the soldiers in brick-red breeches and blue dolmans with yellow braid. The brilliance of their colours and the evocation of Russia's martial glories made me shudder with excitement. Things got out of control. It was not my fault that a subaltern spoke dishonouringly of his senior officer, or that satisfaction was demanded. But it was I who whispered encouragement to the captain, I who set the two chargers and their riders at each other across the new tan linoleum, and I who plotted the melee. Sabres rang. The horses reared as if boxing each other. They snickered with fear. Voluble advice came from the seconds, both of whom I represented. At the exact moment that the subaltern's shako'd head flew off, my father, made testy by a week of packing and argument, was passing the door.

  "Why, you little devil, I'll have you know that I scoured the city for those. The best, none better in all of Moscow, and see what you've done to them. Already!"

  "What do you mean, of course they could be better," I countered. What were they for if not fighting? I threw the severed head at him. "Look at that."

  For this I was walloped by Nanny Agafya with the back of a long-handled wooden clothes brush. It was my first meeting with physical force, mankind upon man, object on flesh. The scene has remained in my mind as an example to be followed. Pummel! Strap! Flog! It's the only way. The carrot is the solution of the dilettante. It's invariably construed as a sign of weakness. To offer it simply hedges the issue, defers everything.

  From that day on I have been conscious only of being the Charlie Doig that I now am. Six foot two, strong in the shoulder and broad in the chest. Wide Russian face, straight dark hair, stubble. Eyes of blue: not the loony blue of the German philosopher but steadier, more brutal, with flecks of iron and schist. Powerful high-boned wrists. Mangling stride. A rugged obnoxious nose. And proper Russian balls that swing like the planets. Nothing of the gherkin down there.

  My father left a sackful of debts, which of course made everything even more desperate for Mother. I loved them both. Not equally, that would have been too ideal. But Mother had an ample allocation, which she knew. We were happy together. It filled us with pleasure to be the family we were. There are no childhood grudges hanging in my mind like old meat.

  Father's legacy to me was the unrequited portion of his ambition. Because he died so young this came to a sizable bequest, inferior in neither quantity nor zest. From the moment I got my hands on it I desired nothing less than complete success in everything that I did.

  Top of my list was to honour the memory of my father, which I swore to do as I knelt praying for his soul.

  Next: a mansion with a flagpole, sobbing fountains, a butler, footmen, cigars, concubines, racehorses, silken scarves and monogrammed underpants. A portrait of my woman done in crusty oils showing clearly her emerald rings and the richness of her bosom-salad, to be framed with the most glittering vulgarity my money could buy. This is for the front hall of the mansion, a knock-over to greet my visitors. I have wanted a blond birchwood desk in an office the size of a banqueting hall so that the butler bringing my coffee has to approach for sixty paces down a narrow red carpet. I have wanted a hothouse and its dusky perfumes, bushels of women's flesh and raw anchovies and French wines, to gorge myself on life, cramming everything in together, with both hands, as a man out of the desert goes at a swag of grapes.

  Two

  A son must always tie up the accounting with his father. It's the final obligation.

  George, my darling impetuous father, whose black curly hair like karakul lamb, his luminous eyes and tropical skin had won him the nickname Pushkin from his legion of Russian friends, had just been made up to junior partner in Hodge & Co. The gaffer, as my father referred to Potter Hodge, had collapsed and died during a municipal dinner in Manchester.

  I remember so well his return with the news of his promotion. Surprise, triumph, beatitude, all were splashed like gallons of fresh paint across his face, which was bulging at every pore and resembled a brown paperbag stuffed with bulls' eyes. A partnership in Hodge & Co.! And cotton the thing! Wealth, solid dependable English wealth was at last within his reach. The barrel was rumbling towards him. He had only to whip the bung out and stick his hand inside.

  A price was naturally payable to get my aristocratic mother to live in Britain, which she called a "petity suffocating island," pronouncing the last word with the maximum derision that could be expressed by her tilted nose and a fading gesture with one plump white hand. Father, acting in full the character of the real Pushkin, gave her an IOU for his love in perpetuity and packed the two of us off to London to wait for him. He was going to undertake a last trip to the cotton fields around Tashkent. His spies had brought him early news that cotton-leaf worm was ravaging the crop. He was feeling his way to a spectacular coup that would wipe out his debts at one go. I know this, I know it as well as I know my name.

  It was night. We were leaving Moscow for England, Mother and I. The giant bull-nosed locomotive at the head of the courier train's five, dark blue, twenty-metre coaches was smouldering its way up to the buffers, dribbling ankle-high wisps of steam. Father flung his arms round me. I pressed my face against his foxy newly-trimmed whiskers and hung on. He patted me, he moved my coat up and down my back like a separate skin, he hugged me closely— and held me off. "Charlie Doig, I'm going to make us rich and when I've done it I'll show you how. Then we'll make some team, by God! Doig et fils, Moscow, Tashkent, the world!" We embraced, we kissed, the first bell went, and I entered the train in the footsteps of Boltikov, the sugar king, who'd barged into our farewell party at the station and smoked endless Northern Light cigarettes, holding them between his third and fourth fingers. (They came in a pink box with the manufacturer's name printed in Sargasso Sea blue on the papers. Their shape was oval, like Boltikov.)

  So we parted, Mother and I into exile, Pushkin to his doom.

  In the midst of his tour, which had hitherto been a lap of honour, he was bitten by a flea. This was not the common hopper Pulex irritans, the travelling companion of all Russians. I now know it to have been Xenopsylla cheops, a very different article whose host is the brown rat.

  Father's swarthy epidermis was punctu
red without malice. He was perhaps recumbent on a divan, perhaps quaking with laughter, but probably moving restlessly in bed in a sticky Central Asian night, so attractively odoured that cheops thought to refresh himself—a beaker of the best. It sank its probe and thereby donated to Father the gift it had had from the rat, its host—the plague bacillus.

  Within two days the buboes had formed and before the week was out my lovely father had died a gasping tossing bursting death.

  We were in London when the news arrived. We had to engage an English lawyer. And Father, who had died swollen with putrefaction, in agony, with his glory stillborn, had his corpse stabbed and stabbed with the dagger of his debts by a pilchard-faced lawyer from Surbiton who at the end treated us to a sermon on thrift. Instead of asking, But did George Doig enjoy his stay among the living? this man did nothing but crab Papa for his "exceedings." I passed Mother a note during this session: "May he take his seat upon the hot nail of hell," which was a saying in our family. And when the lawyer took his leave I said smiling to him, Poshol v pizdu, which means "disappear up your cunt." Gravely he replied, "Such a tragic business."

  This was a hard spell for Mother and myself, but especially for her. Then my great-uncle Igor, the head of the Rykovs, rallied round. The creditors were paid off and Mother was settled amongst artisans in a narrow red-brick house in Fulham, London, until I'd finished my schooling, for which Uncle Igor also footed the bill.

  This was at Battle Hall, outside Hastings, on the cliffs looking towards France. Proprietor Capt. W. Slype, wedded to Muriel, who wore a built-up shoe. She dragged this foot, which was out-turned, and so could be heard approaching from a distance. Anyone caught mimicking her was taken off and caned by Slype. It was a brisk and biblical school that saw its purpose in supplying the Empire with irrigation engineers, bureaucrats and quellers of riots.

  Mamasha, I wrote, they treat me like a Russian peasant. Why must the English always be so victorious? Let's go home, let's go back to Moscow. But she, having weathered the emotional catastrophe of exchanging Moscow for London and then having Papa die, was determined to stick it out. I think this was in the nature of a graveside vow, so to speak. Patience, she counselled.

  And soon they had to stifle their scorn, these English schoolboys.

  The heat of my anger drove them back: that Father had died, that we were supported by the charity of relatives, that I was taunted for being a foreigner by a bunch of barbarians. I learned to punch first and punch hard. I carved out my territory with Russian fists and Russian balls. The day I arrived a boy called Morfet had me squeeze his testicles, I suppose to groom me for some sodomitical game. They were like a pair of boiled baby beetroots. I said to him, "Don't worry, they'll fill up one day." Later he became subservient to me. He was always short of cash—whereas I never was since Mother would go without to keep me in pocket money. Sometimes I'd get soaked when out birding on the cliffs. For threepence Morfet would sleep in my wet clothes and have them dry and clean by roll-call. So things got themselves advantageously sorted.

  Three

  The notion grew within me that the best way to honour my father would be to avenge him. I'd become a naturalist. I'd capture a couple of cheops alive—only one specimen was known, in the Rothschild collection: dead. I'd force the brutes to breed for me. Put the lot in a cage with infected rats; milk them for serum; sell it and become rich on the old Rykov scale.

  To do this I had to get my mind into all the right habits. I had to understand the structure of insects and their purpose.

  My first collection was of moths and butterflies. I maintained a caterpillorum on a thicket of groundsel in the school's kitchen garden, hemming in my beauties with discarded panes from the vegetable frames. Fox moths and Drinkers were the worst for giving skin rashes. For a halfpenny each Morfet would let any untested caterpillar climb up his bare arm. The maximum incubation period seemed to be twelve hours.

  The next stage was initiated by the discovery in the school library of Dr. Erwin Zincke's Insects of Europe. It had a spine of the utmost black on which the title had been neatly painted in small white capitals. It made straight for my eye, begging to be opened. The raciness of his text and his sympathy for these unconsidered, often hated, creatures, which flowed through the book like a stream of luminous evening light, bowled me over.

  I was fifteen, and in love for the first time.

  The louse was my steady date. I was without prejudice. The ebony louse of Africa, the topaz louse of India, the ochre of the Japanese, the mushroom-brown of the Eskimos, and our own, the grey of our European skies, I loved them equally for their unrepentant hedonism. A louse feeds with less trouble than knocking a coconut off a tree. On the death of its host it has only to saunter across the blanket to obtain new lodging. Nothing too tiring, just a toddle in its bedroom slippers. As Zincke said, and how I adored him for it, the louse lives in a Shangri-La where nature has provided warmth, shelter, a constant spread of the finest food he can imagine, "the odours he loves best, copses for love and secure undergrowth to nest in." Could anyone resist such a description?

  Vivid too was the scene that he painted of the death of Thomas Becket, when legions of lice fled the congealing body to be ground underheel by his killers, into the gore and the cathedral slabs. Perhaps this was a caprice of Zincke. Were the knights really so hygienic? Would they have acted so prettily after beheading an archbishop? Some reservations seemed to be in order. But I still loved the man for the succession of noises he presented: the rasp of swords leaving scabbards, the splintering hacked-about bones and at the last the oathy squelching of all these gorged episcopal lice. I loved him too for the danger I scented in the cathedral on that gaunt December afternoon.

  But for the girl of my dreams I turned to the flea, my father's slayer, to which Zincke had devoted two intense chapters.

  I was fascinated by the creature's techniques and by the grainy monochrome illustrations, hugely magnified, of its lethal weaponry. The maxillae that covertly parted Father's body hair, the mandibles that pierced him, and the labrum that sucked out his gambler's blood in exchange for the plague worm, over these I would linger time and again.

  When I learned of his death I was certain that Father had gone down battling and cursing. But now that the mechanics were so clearly exposed by Zincke, I realised he hadn't a chance, from the moment cheops abandoned its host, a rat dying in a drain, and attached itself to a dog, then to a bazaar merchant, to a purchaser of that man's spices and finally to the mattress in the shabby Europa Hotel to which my exhausted father retired one night, his clothes speckled with cotton lint.

  It's a still, dense summer's night in the land mass of Central Asia. The poplars hang their wilting leaves. Dogs bark sullenly. Lightning splits the huge indigo sky and thunder bombards the horizon, never closer. Papa sleeps fitfully and sweatily, eyelids trembling as in his shallow dream he pictures a foggy English apple orchard. Cheops, which has no eyes, inhales his human scent and emerges from its lair into the panting night, carrying— I thought like a fireman, upon its back—its cylinder of venom. Tick-tick-tick goes the pulse of life in that swollen vein in Papa's outflung arm. I see cheops's mouth red with blood, and I hear my father check in his snoring. Perhaps, in what will be his only gesture of defiance, he rolls onto his side and scratches the spot where cheops, sated, is taking his ease.

  Alone in the library I would sit with Zincke and his insects. How does ambition arise? From a desire for revenge. From dreaming, from necessity. I had all three.

  Four

  I am sorry now for that flamboyant beetle, a Green Tiger, that I dissected for the sole purpose of verifying that beetles had, as stated by Zincke, blood as yellow as the dandelion flower. There was no excuse. I should have taken his word. I destroyed its beauty in a frivolous cause, making me as evil as a cat. I was late returning to class on account of this experiment and was caned by Slype.

  Regarding this as a dare to do something worse, and disgusted with myself over the Green Tige
r, I forsook insects for a while and became a birder. Over the garden wall and down through the trees to the forbidden cliffs and a wilderness of gorse and salt-stunted oak and hawthorn scrub. It was an excellent location. In winter exotics from Africa and the Americas would pitch up on ocean-going freighters and hang around for a few days. Droughts or hard weather in Europe would bring all sorts of unfamiliar visitors. In one day I myself recorded two Little Buntings and a Sardinian Warbler.

  I had no binoculars—Slype was the only person at school who could afford them. Therefore I learned field craft; patience, stealth and how to mimic birdsong. Most birds are natural conversationalists. They enjoy being spoken to. Watch them as they cock their heads and try to figure out your amateur notes.

  Abolish the plumage trade! Extirpate all feral cats!

  These became my mottoes as a birder. I would weep at the small heaps of feathers I found—pounced-upon victims of a cat's sadism. Eventually I got some snares through one of the gardeners and for the whole of a summer and half a winter did good work among the cat population. The corpses I would wedge into the fork of a suitable tree, jamming their heads tight into the cleft so that carrion-eating birds could get their fill and avenge the millions of their slaughtered brethren. In some cats the whiskery death rictus was the very picture of Muriel Slype, especially as regards the stained teeth.

  An echo of this thought must have reached the Slypes.

  As I was returning amid the embers of a magical dawn in April—a sky originally of blistering red whose temper had softened through every shade of pink, with some hues of lily-throat green, and settled at last on rose-grey clouds presaging rain from Ushant—I was collared by Slype. I came over the garden wall, hung the ladder on its hooks, and there he was, behind me in the doorway.

  "Doig, I'm going to beat you for this. You could have been killed."

  I've had enough of you, I thought, and went to give him a low poke. If I was going to go down, I'd do it with colours flying.