by Adam Roberts
Bates did as he was bid. The details of the street now impressed themselves upon him as they had not done at first. There was a long façade of housing on the far side of the street, all the dwellings built from suitcase-sized blocks of grey stone and all roofed in slate. Every one of the windows of these houses was cracked, every single pane broken open by star-shaped and maple-leaf-shaped holes. Several of the doors were gone. Chipped indentations and areas of smoke-blackening were visible all the way along. On the near side of the street were a succession of larger, detached houses, including the inn at which they had stopped, and from whose water trough the horses were now slurping. There was similar damage here: inn, town hall, wealthy house, all battered and spotted with damage. A little way further along the street a tangle of nerveless limbs and a sack-like torso. A corpse, like litter, abandoned in a doorway like litter.
Death.
Over his head a bird scurried through the air on its chilly wings. It was gone.
‘There has been fighting here,’ Bates said, stupidly. The Colonel did not reply. But of course there could be no nurse discovered here. Well then, he must sort it out himself. He felt a draught of resolve pass through him. He must do it now! He would steel himself, carry that cross, and clean the lady up himself. It would be, in its own way, an offer at the altar of her purity.
He took a metal bowl from the back of the front coach, something borrowed from a soldier’s pack, and filled it at the trough. With this and his own handkerchief, he clambered back into the carriage.
His first thought was to remove the Dean from the small space, for the practical reason that there was very little elbow-room as it was, and also for the more specific reason of propriety. The old man was unconscious, it was true; but what if he woke up? He had opened his eyes a few hours before. It would make Bates much less uncomfortable if the Dean could be moved outside. But, after placing the brimming bowl on the seat and tucking his handkerchief away, he found it harder to shift the corpulent figure than he had thought it would be. He tried several times to get a point of leverage under the Dean’s arms, but without success. Then he dismounted from the carriage, went around to the far side, opened the door, and tried again. He could, he decided, simply pull the old man down, but then he might very well fall upon his head, and - who knew? - injure himself. Better perhaps to leave him where he was. He closed the far door, returned to his side of the carriage and climbed back inside.
On a sudden inspiration he searched the Dean’s slow-breathing body for a handkerchief, and, finding one, he placed it carefully over his face. Should his eyes open, as they had before, this screen would prevent even the possibility of him glimpsing anything improper. Prompted by this to another thought, Bates once more climbed out of the carriage and sought out the French soldiers - all standing in a group beside the horses.
‘Tout le monde n’approche pas,’ he instructed them. ‘Ne venez pas. Dans la, eh, carriage-là je vais laver une femme, une gentilfemme’ (he paused, unsure that this last was truly a French word, but he could think of none better), ‘et je ne veux pas être interrupté. Comprenez?’ The soldiers, as one, looked at him as if he were a crazy man. Piqued, he wished them ill fortune in English, using a mild tone and a smile to disguise the insult.
He returned to the carriage.
He could prevaricate no longer. This thing must be done. He positioned himself opposite Mrs Burton and took a deep breath. The stink came in with the air; but despite this noisome stimulus, and despite his efforts to place his mind in a pure state prior to acting, he felt physical arousal stir between his legs. It was too much!
He needed to get the action over with, finished, complete. With clumsiness born of sheer haste he grasped Mrs Burton’s shoulder and pushed her down upon the seat, so that she was lying on her left side, her legs still reaching to the floor of the compartment. Then, trying simultaneously not to look down but also to get his bearings, he raised up her dress to her thighs. A broad mess of brownness ran on the inside of the fabric, from side to side, from the top of the skirt to the hem. At those places where Eleanor’s legs had been in contact with this mess the skin was crusted and daubed with the same effluvium. Bates felt the gag in his throat, as if his Adam’s-apple had swollen and blocked his airway. Such foulness. He raised the dress further, and found a pair of cotton pantey-shorts, stained and soaked through with the revolting semi-liquid proctal release. The matter had squirted right past the thigh-hems of this garment, and to some degree had oozed through the weave of the fabric itself, like whey draining though cheesecloth. He slid reluctant fingers in at the top of these panteys and tried to manoeuvre them down Mrs Burton’s legs. They stuck, they would not slide. He pulled harder, wincing at the slippery feel of their innards, but still they would not move past the place where their wearer was lying against the seat. But they must come off. Off they must come. He must, he saw, wash them wholesale in the trough outside. He gave a firmer pull, and at once they ripped and came free, the stitching pulled clean away. Mrs Burton’s body shuddered and nearly rolled from the seat - Bates put out his left hand to prevent this, and touched her bosom. He recoiled at once, but there were tears in his eyes, mixed from frustration and revulsion and also from the awareness that this hideous corporeal stink and slipperiness was rousing his manhood to a painful degree. He extracted the slopping undergarment and almost bolted from the carriage with it.
Outside, in the fresh air, he found himself almost gasping. The befouled garment went dunkers into the trough, for the horses had finished their drinking and were now cropping the grass that grew on a patch of land between the inn and the adjacent building. Bates put his hands into the chill water and rubbed the cloth against itself to loosen its dirt, all the time wondering why it was that God had designed his creatures such that a clear application of willpower could not override physical manifestations of lust. Wouldn’t it be better if the mind could trump the body in this regard ? Wouldn’t that make the difference between lechers and pure-minded men easier to maintain? Had the Devil wormed his way into the nature of human will itself?
He got a good deal of foul matter off the fabric of the undergarment, and examined it. A brown stain marked the threads in a wide oval. That could not be washed out by mere water. But this was the best Bates could do at this moment. The stitching was all gone from one side, giving the flap of cloth a strange fattened M shape. But perhaps a little needlework would restore that. Worse was the realisation that Mrs Burton would now for know certain her body had been handled in this intimate manner. Of course, Bates considered, she would probably have been able to deduce that anyway. But this made it imperative he prepare himself. What would he tell her? Why not (the idea launched itself in his mind) tell her that they had indeed found a nurse, a woman, in this village? A white lie to spare Eleanor’s blushes. The nursemaid had ripped the underclothing, which was regrettable; but she had performed the necessary ablutions. Bates (he spun the tale a little) had carried the Dean out of the carriage and waited whilst this saintly woman - this old woman - had performed the necessary ablutions.
Examining the undergarment, Bates realised that he was going to be obliged to remove the whole of Mrs Burton’s dress. It could not be cleaned piecemeal. It would have been better had the dress been wholly thrown out and a new one substituted for it. But Eleanor had no luggage. Bates toyed with the idea of searching one or more of the abandoned houses for such a garments, but the practical difficulty of finding a dress of the correct size was forbidding (how could he know what the right size was?). And there were also the moral difficulties: for in effect that would be to steal the dress. Should he then become a thief? Truly? No: better to remove the dress, wash it, and then dress Eleanor in it again.
Remove and wash and—
Cleanness. O-Peal!
He returned to the carriage and positioned himself opposite Miss Burton. It took several deep breaths before he felt steeled enough to proceed.
He began by hauling up the dress as far as he coul
d, bunching it around Mrs Burton’s waist, and trying not to stare at the curves of whiteness thus revealed. Then he pulled her body into an upright sitting position, and gathered the far side of the dress too. From here it was a relatively easy matter to pull her sleeves over her arms and tug the whole garment over her head. She was wearing no corset beneath, but she did have on a cotton shift - some small quantity of foul matter brushed from the inside of the dress onto this undergarment, but it was not too bad. A little more had got itself caught up in her hair. He would deal with that in a moment. Her skin was extraordinarily soft.
No.
He bundled the dress into a ball with the dirt inward, and turned his attention to cleaning the soil from Mrs Burton’s epidermis. Laying her down carefully on her side once more, he dipped his kerchief in the water bowl and rubbed up and down her thigh. Several times he was forced to change position because the tightness of his membrum virile made his position uncomfortable. He tried not to think of that. He tried to turn his mind elsewhere. He imagined that Mrs Burton was a baby-a giant baby, to be sure; say a Brobdingnagian baby - which had soiled itself and needed changing. But this thought did not quench the intensity, or alleviate the dirty-pleasurable sensation in his own loins. He rinsed the kerchief, wrung it out and went to work again. It was necessary to shift Mrs Burton’s body a little, such that her rear quarters be angled in a slightly more upward posture. He closed his eyes. It was too much. With his left hand he touched the globular shape of the left thigh-cheek, and brought his handkerchief-holding right hand to bear on that point. But, in a way, doing this with one’s eyes closed was worse than otherwise. It meant that he found himself visualising, imagining, a far more voluptuous process. The thing to do was not think of the beauteous smooth curve of the female body, but only to think of the filth he was cleaning from its surface. To think no deeper than the surface. He opened his eyes, rinsed the kerchief again. Turning back he kept his eyes open, but tried with all his might to think only of the filth, not to think of the woman upon which the filth was so lamentably encrusted. To think of a job, to work as an automaton. To think (he stroked the kerchief over the right gluteal muscle) of the filth, not the woman, not her skin. Satin. His cockstand was, if anything, growing more fiercely rigid. But not to think of that. Think only of the dirt - he could not even smell it any more. The smell had acquired innocuousness through ubiquity. He was an automaton, not a man. He was thinking only of the filth. It was necessary to clean that point where Mrs Burton’s two naked thighs, pressed close together by her posture, tucked into the crease at the base of her posterior. It was dirty here. This must be cleaned. And, pressing the kerchief home and wiping straight down in a firm motion, Bates felt the twist of his own trowser catch and rub across the head of his deplorable, hateful cockstand and, unable to prevent himself, he cried out in mingled frustration and release as a half-strangled emission burst, a sweet-painful leakage from his loins, a hot and loose phlegm inside his clothes.
He flung himself backwards, and his spine banged noisily against the wooden back of his seat. His eyes were wide. His hand, holding the soiled handkerchief, was trembling violently. His tried to calm his agitated breathing.
He gasped. Fish on the bank. Fish.
Long indrawn breath. His first instinct was to look to Mrs Burton herself - her face, its cheek pressed against the wooden seat, her eyes closed, a globule of saliva bulging from the side of her mouth. She had seen nothing. She had noticed nothing, she was unconscious. He looked at the Dean. The handkerchief on his face quivered slightly, pulled into slight concavity at the mouth and then puffed out as the old man breathed. He had seen nothing either. Bates’s seed was already clammy against his skin, inside his trowser. Foul. Foulness. He washed and wrung out the handkerchief with jittery hands, the water now quite brown, the cloth irremediably stained. There was nothing for it. He wore no undergarments himself, and he did not want any stain to seep through from the inside. Furtively he unbuttoned the top of his breeches and pushed the kerchief inside to mop up the gluey stuff. How perfectly revolting. How perfectly so. He rebuttoned himself, and washed the handkerchief once more. For some reason his thoughts shrank themselves down wholly to that metal bowl filled with dirty water. Eleanor’s wastage, the foul badge of her sickness. Dark. Dark and ill-smelling. His own seminal emission, pale and odourless; the two together mingling in this bowl.
He needed to take control of himself. It was for impulses such as this that medieval ascetics had mortified their own flesh. He understood the impulse to thrash oneself with nettles, or exile oneself to the top of a tall pillar in the desert for decades. But he must get on. He wanted the whole job completed now; he wanted it behind him. He felt nothing but revulsion for the whole process - immerded as he was becoming, with specks and streaks of her filth upon his hands, his sleeves. He wished he had never started. Why could he not have left her to sort herself out? What business had it been of his? Post emissionem omne animal triste.
He mopped up the remainder of her right leg as best he could; and then, somewhat roughly, repositioned her, sitting her up and then leaning her against the wall to make her left leg accessible to the handkerchief. Then he decided he had finished. Much of the filth had been cleared away, although he had not been able to remove the sepia-wash of yellow-brown that stained her legs. But he had done as much as he could. That would have to do.
He climbed down from the carriage one final time and carried the bundled dress to the trough. In it went, its upper side seeming to resist the water until Bates pushed it down, held it firmly below the water-level as if he were drowning it. He inverted the dress under the water, and saw granules and flakes of brown detach themselves from the weave. Oh, foul. He shuddered at the thought of his hands touching that disgusting matter. He could never again converse with Mrs Burton. How could he? How could he look at her face without immediately recalling this shameful scene, this knowledge? He resolved, as soon as he had finished, to beg a place in the forward coach: to swap, if necessary, his inside seat with one of the outdoor places.
When he had finished as far as he judged possible he pulled the massy weight of cloth out from the trough, trailing its splashing tendrils of water. He did his best to wring this onerous mass by hand, but it was hard. Eventually he opened it up and draped it from one of the stone windowsills at the front of the deserted inn. He stood back as another problem presented itself. The air was cool, the spring sun bright but distant. It seemed unlikely that the dress would dry. How long to leave it? If he squeezed Mrs Burton back inside a wet dress, cold and clammy, might she not catch a chill? Added to her current fever this could be a fatal development. Yet she could not be left as she was - nude from the waist down, and with only the flimsiest undergarment protecting her torso.
He stalked off to find the soldiers and Colonel Larroche, to demand that they light a fire at which the dress might more efficiently be dried. Or perhaps they had already kindled a fire for their own purposes? But there was no fire: the soldats were behind the third carriage, some asleep on the ground wrapped in their blankets, others sitting and playing cards. Larroche looked up as the Englishman came into view, but Bates could think of no way of explaining his dilemma.
He came back to the dress. His mood was a compound of dark fury, self loathing and a grapeshot hatred of everything - of humanity, especially the female half; of the cosmos; of war and Lilliputians and everything. He fingered the cloth of the dress. It was soaked through and through.
He compared, in his mind, the picture of what he had hoped to achieve with the reality of his present situation. He had thought of Mrs Burton awaking from her fever, as a girl might do from an afternoon nap, to find herself in clean dry clothes, with no knowledge and no need to know of her disgrace. The reality was merely a stained and inadequately cleaned dress, the material filled like a sponge with ice-water. The reality was a gentlewoman stripped and left naked in the carriage. Bates sniffed. Oh he had meant well, but, oh, circumstance had conspired against him.
Suddenly, without warning or comprehension, Bates began to sob.
The Colonel found him. ‘Monsieur,’ he said. ‘Weep not. You must not weep. For what is the cause?’
‘I do not know, Colonel,’ Bates said, struggling with his sobs. ‘I feel I have been upon the road these seven years at least. It is a Purgatory. I climb the map of England as a mountain-climber clambers up an endless mountain. It is as though north were truly up into the sky.’ He drew a deep breath and pinned back his tears to their internal source. ‘I apologise, sir,’ he said.
‘Ah,’ replied the Colonel, with a twinkle in his eye. ‘But who may climb into the sky?’
‘I do not know,’ said Bates.
‘Tomorrow, Monsieur Bates,’ said Larroche, pronouncing the name beets. ‘We shall arrive at Scarborough, where the Sophrosyne is anchored. The Sophrosyne is a handsome frigate, my sir, with a steam wheel and also with sails. There are many soldiers there, and a barricade across two main roads, in-road, out-road. There is a gun that fires, boumboum, one hundred blows in a minute.’ He grinned.
Bates, as he listened to this, was aware chiefly of the sensation of foolishness for having wept in front of this man.
‘Monsieur,’ said Bates, his heart suddenly thumping in his chest like a colt’s kicking hind leg. ‘I discover within myself ... a tender passion for Mrs Burton.’ He surprised himself as he spoke these words, for he had not realised how true they were - or even that they were true at all - until they emerged from his mouth. But once spoken, before a witness, a gentleman and military officer (though French), Bates knew that he had in effect given voice to a contract. He had promised himself; committed his heart.