Swiftly: A Novel (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  Back in his office he uncorked the brandy and poured himself a full glass.

  Nevertheless there is, he thought to himself as the sunlight pushed gleaming swords diagonally down through his window, some sort of hypocrisy woven into the very fabric of life. To think it had come to this. When he had first elevated himself, by his own efforts attained a more respectable position in society, he had been as shocked as a schoolboy by the manifest cant of the upper classes. He encountered such people at his club, where they drawled and chuckled over their wickednesses; revelling, for instance, in adulteries - actively revelling - comparing other men’s wives as if they were racehorses, boasting of unchastities. They lived a life quite different from the elegant surface they presented to society, a life of immorality, of wickedness and indulgence. The revulsion Burton had experienced had been genuine. How ironic, then, he told himself (pouring another glass), that he should find himself trapped into a life similarly hypocritical. To the world he was married, but of course the relationship between himself and his wife was not marriage as the term should be properly understood.

  Even the brandy was not removing the tartness of misery from his thoughts.

  He must do something. And yet, what could he do? He might be no gentleman in the eyes of polite society, yet he prided himself on acting as a gentleman should, and he could not abandon Eleanor and her mother. Might there not, he asked himself, might there not be a way to discuss the matter with his wife? To come to some rational arrangement between them? He pictured Eleanor’s face, the beautiful face distorted with disdain for him. His heart twitched as if stabbed with pins. It was too terrible.

  Pannell put his idiotic head round the door frame. ‘Sir?’

  ‘A gentleman,’ Burton bellowed, ‘knocks! Knocks, sir!’

  ‘I did knock, Mr Burton,’ said Pannell timorously. ‘I knocked several times. Perhaps you did not hear me?’

  Burton’s fury hovered on the lip of emergence, then withdrew inside him. His situation was not the fault of Pannell, after all, foolish though the fellow was. ‘I have been,’ he said, gruffly, ‘in a reverie. I have been thinking, deeply.’

  ‘I only wanted to say,’ said Pannell, ‘that Mister Bates is here.’

  ‘Very good, sir,’ said Burton. ‘Entertain him, sir. Show him the works, give him a drink, make him sweet. Make him sweet. Then bring him to me here.’

  ‘Very good, Mister Burton. The midday post has arrived, sir, also.’

  ‘Good,’ said Burton. ‘I’ll look it over whilst you show Mister Bates about. Does he seem,’ Burton added, unable to keep the anxiety from the edges of his voice, ‘does he seem a gentleman?’

  ‘Oh yes, sir.’

  ‘A gentleman, I mean, of means?’

  ‘Oh yes, sir.’

  ‘Very good.’

  Pannell slipped properly into the room, deposited a bundle of letters on the desk, and stole away again.

  Burton stared at the little string-bound package. There were, he estimated, half a dozen letters. A year ago the midday post had brought forty letters most days. There was a palpable sense of diminishment. He did not know why.

  The light had faded a little. Burton stood and looked through his window, over the ceaseless river to the warehouses and roofs of the south bank. Grey clouds had smoked out the wintry sunshine. Bundles of clouds, like bales, moved stately through the sky. The sun was uncovered for a moment, and then covered again. Light grew, filling the glass with brightness, and then shrank away again. Somehow it was like a yawn. A ruddiness blurred the clouds close to the rooftops over the way.

  The Thames was the colour of tea.

  Burton seated himself and started reading through the correspondence. The first two letters were dull, business communications, but the third letter was of a very different sort. It made Burton sit up sharp in his chair. A friend of his, a fellow businessman who made and brokered high-class Church paraphernalia (clergy dress, ornaments, carved pews, stained glass and the like), had written. It was not uncommon for the two men to correspond, but this letter carried a warning.

  You mentioned a certain Mr Bates, promising a generous contract for your manufactory to produce gyroscopic devices. Let me warn you: Bates is not what he seems. I’ll wager you a hundred pound he is not interested in any contract of work with you, my friend. He is a political agitator, well known in Parliamentary circles for always harping on at the rights of the Pacificans.

  This crowned the day. Burton heard himself, as if he were a third party, growling like a dog. It was too much.

  Burton stood straight up from his chair, and grabbed his cane. He felt doubly angry for the feeling of having been fooled. Bates was doubtless not even the fellow’s name. And he came here to try and put an honest businessman out of work? Freeing all the little devils? Burton pulled savagely on Pannell’s bell-cord. Pulled again, and then, unable to contain himself, stomped from his office, his anger heating and heating inside him.

  That evening, after he had seen Bates off the premises, Burton returned to his own office. The thrill of the fight drained out of him over a half-hour or so, and he was left glum. He opened another bottle of brandy and reflected, with melancholy little shakes of his head, that he had not drunk before his marriage. His marriage had been only unhappiness. What had he thought? What had he been thinking?

  At nine by the American clock on the wall Pannell knocked at the door of the office. ‘Yes?’ Burton drawled. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’ll be on my way home, sir,’ trembled his subordinate’s voice through the door.

  ‘Have you locked up the Blefuscans? Have you seen to it personally?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘Till tomorrow, Mr Pannell.’

  ‘Tomorrow, sir.’

  Burton listened, remotely, to the receding sounds of Pannell’s footsteps. He uncorked the brandy bottle again. As he poured, the bottle’s neck glugged like a gourmandising man.

  [8]

  Eleanor could not sleep. She lay in bed and stared at the plaster knobs and ornaments on the ceiling. From time to time a carriage would clatter past the window, down in the street; or the sound of pedestrian voices would crescendo and diminuendo as people passed outside.

  It was gone midnight by the time she had dressed and left the house. The butler implored her, as forcefully as his position allowed him, not to go out, but she felt stifled, buried, in the house. ‘I will visit my husband,’ she said.

  ‘It is late, Madam,’ the butler observed, his face screwed up with concern as if he were tasting something unpleasant on his tongue.

  ‘It is late,’ Eleanor retorted, as if with a clincher, ‘but not so late that my husband has yet returned from his manufactory. I will visit him there, since he chooses not to return.’

  ‘Allow me, at least, to call the carriage, Madam,’ the butler murmured.

  ‘No,’ said Eleanor. ‘I choose to walk.’

  She marched out of the house and along the well-lit pavement of Gower Street. The night was chill, and she tugged her shawl tighter around her shoulders. She made her way briskly but unhurriedly. London, she thought sourly, was in its glory. The crowd of carriages and pedestrians was swollen by the contributions of the theatres, which now gave forth their audiences in dense volumes up and down Oxford and New Oxford Street. Talking, laughing, sometimes singing, these metropolitans passed cheerfully along their illumined streets with all the security that noonday would have provided.

  The Strand was similarly well lit and thronged, but ducking down a side street took Eleanor into another world. There were no street lamps here. The dark was palpable as black silk. The noise of merrymaking shrank back, became increasingly drowned by the night the further she went down the alleyway.

  At the main entrance to the manufactory Eleanor caught a whiff of Thames water, a tart, sewer smell of water that was nonetheless mixed with something clearer, something ozoney. The nightwatchman was standing in his alcove. ‘Ma’am,’ he grunted, recognising the owner’s wife. ‘Here al
one, Ma’am?’

  ‘I have come to see my husband,’ Eleanor said, rather primly.

  ‘Very good, Ma’am,’ said the old man, unlocking the door and letting her through.

  Inside the air smelt musty, cool. Megasaurian shadows, machines and tanks, loomed around her. At the far end of the barnlike space, on the level of the first floor, the light was visible through the window of her husband’s office. It was the only light in the place, four squares of gleam marking out a shadowy cruciform cross-bar. It would guide her to her husband, like the star of the Nativity.

  Such thoughts were not appropriate.

  She took a step forward. With another of those jolts of inner knowledge she realised that she had come to murder her marriage, to end it, to bury it once and for all. She took another step. The stairway up to the office was faintly visible, as if under grey tracing paper in the blackness. She would mount the stairs, and confront Burton. The memory of her honeymoon would give her strength. She would kill their marriage. She could murder him. Him? Him, though? - and why not? Think of the biblical Judith. Then his wealth would be hers, but she would not be inconvenienced with the man himself. Her heart thrummed. To murder the marriage.

  At the foot of the stairway she stopped. There was a scrabbling sound to her right, and she thought - panic startling her - of rats. She turned to face the noise. The manufactory was hard by the river, after all. There were surely rats here. Vaguely, lit poorly by the single illuminated window from above, Eleanor could see a stack of large boxes, big as kennels. She peered closer. They were fronted with wire mesh.

  A light flared inside one of the boxes; dolls, standing in row, loomed into sight as her eyes adjusted. The middle doll was holding a lucifer, a miniature firebrand.

  Her heart still thumping, Eleanor tiptoed over to the cages. Within, the Lilliputians were all arrayed in ranks, as if on miniature army parade. All were awake, their eyes wide, and all were looking at her.

  ‘Do you speak English?’ she whispered, throwing a guilty look up at the lit window of her husband’s office. She crouched down, bringing her face on a level with the little folk. Their motionlessness was truly uncanny. Like toy soldiers. One of them, in pale trousers and a dark waistcoat, leapt at the wire-mesh of the cage. The motion was so sudden, so rapid, that Eleanor jerked back in alarm.

  The tiny figure piped: ‘Release us.’

  It was gripping the mesh, its fingers delicate as eyelashes.

  ‘Your pardon . . .’ mumbled Eleanor, her heart hurrying.

  ‘Release us,’ repeated the Lilliputian.

  ‘My . . . little friend,’ whispered Eleanor, bringing her face close to the wire. ‘I do not carry the keys to your prison. I am sorry for it.’

  The little creature made a theatrical sweep of its arm, pointing past Eleanor. ‘There,’ it cooed. ‘To your rear.’

  Eleanor twitched her head round. She could see nothing in the darkness behind her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘There,’ came the tweeting voice again. ‘On the bench behind you. You may see a pouch of jeweller’s tools. You may pass these to us.’

  The thought leapt up in Eleanor’s head - and why shouldn’t these little people be free? The parallels between their circumstance and her own struck her forcibly. Were they not also imprisoned by Burton? Slaves to his weight, to his money, as she? Natural justice would see them released. Without allowing herself to follow the chain of consequence along its length in her mind, she stood and felt her way to the workbench behind her. Her hand touched the felt purse of tools almost at once.

  She returned to the cage; the Lilliputian carrying the lit lucifer was holding it higher now, as the flame - large as his head - burned down. The light throbbed against the sides of the little cage. Eleanor could see pigeonholes lined with bedding, could see a pencil-length water-trough along the back. Mice or rabbits might be kept in such a cage.

  ‘The pouch,’ she said, breathily, ‘is too large to fit through the mesh of your cage.’

  ‘Open it,’ urged the first Lilliputian. ‘To take the tools out. To pass them through one at a time.’

  The tools each had their own cloth pocket inside the pouch; tiny screwdrivers and gravets no bigger than her little finger, ivory handles with needle-fine pins and shafts. Eleanor hurriedly pushed half a dozen through. ‘Is that enough?’ she asked. ‘Is that enough?’

  But the Lilliputians seemed to have lost interest in her now. They were huddling together, a tiny high-pitched murmur in some foreign tongue. For moments Eleanor watched them, but soon enough she began to feel she was, somehow, intruding. She moved away.

  Her eyes were better adapted to the dark now, and the steps were clearly visible to her.

  She felt prepared, now, to confront her husband. Now was the time.

  Her foot struck the lowest of the wooden steps with a thud, like a blow connecting with a body. She breathed in deeply, her ribs hooping out underneath her chemise. Another step. She did not know what she was going to say to Burton when she got to the top; but the spirit would move her. Screw courage to the sticking point.

  But the encounter was anticlimactic, as these much-anticipated occasions often are. Eleanor pushed through the door of Burton’s study and stepped inside. Her husband was sitting slumped in his chair. At first she thought him awake, but then she realised that he was asleep with his eyes open.

  Eleanor took in the scene. The uncorked bottle of brown glass standing on the desk; the dirty tumbler with a fluid cylinder of brandy, half an inch tall, inside it. The story told itself.

  Burton trembled in the seat, let out a drumroll snort, and lolled his head from left shoulder to right. His eyes were wide. Perhaps, Eleanor thought, he was not asleep after all, but rather in a half-stupefied waking state. Perhaps he could see her, could hear her. Her stomach buzzed with a strange excitement.

  She crossed to her husband and laid a hand upon his shoulder, thinking indistinctly to rouse him. The pressure of her arm rolled the chair backwards, pushed the seated man a foot back across the floor.

  His chair was upholstered with green leather, and mahogany arms arced from back to seat. It was supported underneath on a single wooden pillar that led down to a claw-like spread of four spars, each fitted with a small wheel. The wheels were so well oiled that it was an easy matter to move chair and man across the floor. Eleanor took hold of one of the armrests and heaved the whole round. Burton grunted as his feet trailed over the floorboards.

  When he was positioned by the door, Eleanor sat herself on the edge of his desk so as to face him. The room’s single window was open behind her, letting in the chilly finger of a night breeze to stroke the back of her neck, making the hairs of her nape stir and rise. Did hairs stiffen according to the same mechanism by which the male generative organ stiffened? Eleanor wondered - the thought coming to her from some obscure corner of her brain. How did they manage to stand proud of the skin at moments of cold, or of excitement? - tiny thorns poking from the skin to raise them up? There was so much mystery about the human organism.

  A plan occurred to her then and there. She saw a path. This marriage was no marriage. She would explain affairs to her husband: she could never love him. Better by far that he provide her with an income - nothing excessive, a thousand a year perhaps - and that she live her own life. She could devote herself to science; buy all the books and the equipment she desired. The prospect animated her; she felt her heart move more swiftly with the prospect. Surely Burton would agree. She would explain it to him now, when he was incapacitated. When she was in a superior position. How could he deny her now, seated intoxicated and degraded as he was? How could she fail, when the fizzing in her stomach told her how much power she possessed? Revenge, justice, righteousness. She could feel her face reddening with excitement, as if with shame.

  Behind her, through the open window, the river hushed her, hushed her.

  She took a breath.

  ‘Husband,’ she said, her voice a croak. She cleared her th
roat and spoke again, more audibly. ‘Husband - Jonathan. I am sorry to see you like this.’

  His eyes were certainly fixed on her, but his mouth drooped like an unbuttoned pocket and his body was still.

  ‘This drinking is a poor habit to fall into,’ she said, matronly. ‘It has ruined better men than you in its time. Shame, shame on you.’

  Nothing.

  ‘I released your Lilliputian workers,’ she declared, with a swelling of pride in her chest. There’s nothing you can do about that! sang her inner voice. See what I have done to you now! ‘They’re free now, and I am not ashamed at my actions.’