Swiftly: A Novel (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  ‘So,’ said the Colonel, meditatively. ‘Therefore you cry?’

  ‘Therefore?’

  ‘You are - amoureux. The word in English is?’

  ‘Loving,’ said Bates, blushing.

  ‘And therefore you cry?’

  ‘Perhaps so,’ said Bates. He rubbed his face with the palms of his cold hands. ‘But I must return her dress to her. It is as clean as I can manage. I must re-dress her.’

  At this, Larroche looked puzzled. ‘Redress?’ he asked.

  Bates said: ‘Place her dress, her garment, upon her again,’ and reached out for the garment. But it was icy cold and still wet as seaweed. This would never do. To put such clothing upon Mrs Burton’s naked skin would surely chill her - certainly make her ill. Perhaps kill her. This would never do.

  Bates thought of her now, suddenly, as his future wife. To marry her, to marry her. This was fated. He saw that only by marrying, and devoting himself to her, would he be enabled to atone for what he had seen - for the indignities that pure woman had been compelled to endure. He would make her his wife.

  And it was as he was standing there, next to the placid Colonel, contemplating which of the deserted houses he should first explore with a view to obtaining clean and dry clothing for Eleanor, that the first of several screams sounded from inside the carriage.

  Mrs Burton was not to be mollified. She insisted her dress be brought to her, and nothing Bates could say - no matter how abjectly he apologised, or how much he explained how very wet and cold the cloth was - could dissuade her. She opened the carriage door just enough to permit the handing over of this bundle of water logged fabric, and then closed it again. A few moments later she opened the door again and emerged, fully dressed, crimson in face yet shivering vigorously all over her body. ‘I shall die,’ she said, through the impediment of chattering teeth, ‘but perhaps this is the only way to purge my shame.’

  Bates tried again to explain. ‘Mrs Burton please accept my most sincere ...’

  ‘An outrage, sir!’ she exclaimed noisily. ‘Colonel! Colonel! Might I oblige you to light a fire?’

  The Colonel bowed, without taking the pipe from his mouth.

  Bates, however, grovelled like a fawning courtier. ‘Mrs Burton, I am more sorry than I can say, I beg of you to hear me when I say I merely wished ...’

  ‘You will favour me,’ she snapped, imperiously, ‘with your silence sir. I have no wish to hear you sir. Or to see you sir.’ Her limbs trembled like a religious Shaker, as if a fit were upon her. ‘Colonel!’

  She disappeared behind the third carriage. Bates reflected with absolutely misery that she preferred the company of half a dozen common soldiers, of the lowest possible morals, to himself-a gentleman and Englishman.

  They were delayed for an hour or more, whilst the soldiers lit a fire, and whilst Eleanor dried herself beside it as best she could. Then, when Larroche insisted that they could tarry no longer, she remounted the second carriage wrapped in a horseblanket. When Bates stood at the door she closed the door in his face, and through the window instructed him that he might ride postillion - or stay where he was, for all she cared. Never in his life had Bates seen a woman possessed of so overwhelming and so barely contained a fury.

  ‘I shall ride postillion,’ he said, in a low and heartfelt voice, ‘and cast myself into the river as we pass it to rid the world of my abject person.’

  ‘Good,’ replied Eleanor.

  And that was that.

  Bates himself had no blanket as the carriage rode through the chill spring countryside, and eventually down the hill towards the sea. But he embraced discomfort. Down the hill to the sea. The Northern Sea, grey as fog and flattened under the hammer of Thor to a dimpled and arcing plate. The town of Scarborough lay down the valley towards the sea, and blocked out the north and south upon the seafront. And down they went.

  [7]

  Here was the seafront at Scarborough. Here he was.

  Bates felt as if they had passed halfway round the world, and through every manner of obstacle and hardship, only to arrive at this banal place. A ten-league sickle of sand and sea the colour of cabbage. A wind both chill and penetrating, blowing straight up from the lowest circle of Hell where the gigantic corpus of Satan himself is frozen in ice.

  Here was the seafront at Scarborough.

  There was at least, he acknowledged, something new in his experience of misery. His usual and familiar despair was contentless, causeless, the simple reflex of his existence. But now his despair possessed a kernel, the scorn of the woman he loved. The more she rebuked him with her eyes, with the turn of her shoulders away from him, with the arctic precision of her politeness towards him, the more hopelessly in love he fell. His usual despair, he reflected, had been an empty stomach compared with this powerful indigestive depression of spirits. This was not a fact that recommended the latter experience to him.

  How he loved her! If he could have sacrificed his life to win the merest word of forgiveness - the slightest smile - he would have done so.

  It was hopeless, hopeless. He was Young Werther. He bore a Brobdingnagian burden of sorrow within his human-sized breast.

  There were many rusty-looking crabs upon the beach, in amongst the shingles and the seaweed and the patches of dirty-looking sand. A seagull slid through the air towards Bates on a line to collide with his face, and Bates flinched. At the last minute the creature wagged its wings and soared up, away behind him.

  Very many crabs. The crabs on the beach were performing an elaborate crustacean dansa flamenco. Their attention was wholly on one another. The animals went into the ark seven each of cleanly ones and two-by-two of unclean ones. Bates’s blood seemed to have quickened, to be moving faster round his body, making him feel distantly drunk. There was an impetuous itch inside his heart.

  Little waves on the sea’s fringe, rising slowly on the long approach to the shore and then curling over at the last minute as if wincing at the touch of land.

  The white-painted wood of a railing, against which Bates leaned. Merely that white painted lattice of wood: but when the sun came from behind a cloud and the light strengthened so powerfully the fence seemed, somehow, naked and splendid. Bates’s eye was caught by the lodestone tug of the sky. Blue and white. He stared. Stared. Half an hour passed, or an hour, or more. The last clouds slid away from the sky, apologetic, and the heavens were cerulean blue.

  Here were voices, behind him. He turned, and touched his hat as a party of young men and women strolled past. Two men in linen suits and white hats; two women in more elaborate costumes, each carrying a coloured parasol, a green one, a purple one. As if the war were not happening. In their own country, within a few dozen miles of this very place. Bates ducked his head politely, and smiled. In that group they were talking amongst themselves. That group paid him no mind. Facing away from the sea, the sun’s warmth lay across Bates’s neck. The suddenness of the apparition, people crowding him momently, raised his heartbeat; but soon they were receding, walking further along the promenade. Bates thought to himself, I carry the misery of love inside me, like a baby in my stomach. It will soon come to term.

  He watched the woman carrying the green parasol as she strolled away.

  The scalloped edge of a green umbrella taking a bite out of the blue sky.

  Larroche had billeted his troops in a seafront hotel, a luxurious establishment that was, despite the war, crowded with English pleasure-seekers. A lean Yorkshireman had been ejected from a suite of rooms on the top storey, together with his woolsack-shaped wife and seven squealing piglet children. He had complained forcefully at this eventuality, declared that he would go to law for redress against these occupiers. But the Colonel had stood by impassive, smoking the whole time.

  Mrs Burton had been given a small room of her own-a maid’s room, the Colonel apologised, but had not the liberty to grant her a larger space. The eight men shared the remaining two rooms. The Dean had been carried and deposited in one of the beds, and there
he remained, snoring and feverous hot and never waking. He was fed on milk through a clyster-pipe. Bates slept in the floor beside him wrapped in a quilted blanket from the hotel’s store. Two French soldiers slept in the same space. The Colonel and his three remaining men took the other room.

  Nothing happened.

  Bates disposed of his days merely walking, walking about the town. It surprised him that a human heart could endure so much misery and yet not plain explode. Expire. He felt surprise, a dull surprise, on still being alive every morning he awoke. The cardiac muscle was a tougher fabric than he realised, but it was also much more completely provided with tender nervous tissue than he had ever had previous cause to note.

  He walked through the days. He watched the crabs tangling with one another on the shore, or inching their way through the seaweed.

  By the room’s window, tucked away to the left, was a wasp’s nest. A wasp’s nest. A wasp’s nest, a curiously confected habitation. He looked closely at it, where the beasts had chewed up and laid down myriad filigree curls of grey paper, each sheet wrapped with roseate complexity about its inner. The nest was the size of Bates’s head. The nest was full of huzzing and thorn-tailed insects, angry-sounding and beady. Bates’s own head was filled with wasps, and they gave him no rest, they woke him in the dark hours of the night with pain. O full of scorpions is my mind dear - Shakspeare, of course.

  He disposed of his days by walking about the town, up on the hill, down by the sea.

  He saw a party of four Johnny d’arms patrolling the promenade. Out in the bay a frigate floated at anchor; its sails rolled away into cloth cylinders tucked underneath the spars of its masts, water smacking noisily against its wooden flanks and against the paddles of its half-submerged steam-wheel. The French warship Sophrosyne.

  He disposed of his days by walking about the town, up on the hill, down by the sea.

  Should he destroy himself? Hurl himself into the sea, fashion his own quietus? Thereby to end the chronic sorrow in his heart? To live or not to live?

  Shakspeare, of course.

  He pondered, and found his only disincentive was fear, and he was fearful only of the wrath of God himself. What if drowning, or jabbing at his own throat with the whetted razor, or taking a pistol to his aching chest - what if this prolonged his agony eternally? Hellfire, and the bitterness of the privation of God’s grace. That must feel like this - feel like the privation of the love of Eleanor.

  He caught a glimpse of her one afternoon, coming into the hotel as she came out. He swung his steps swiftly to the left and buried his face against the wall, so that she could walk past without needing to avert her furious face from his.

  At night a polite commotion ran through the hotel. The comet was visible above, very distinct in the night sky. People hurried from the salon, from the restaurant, out from their rooms, crowding out at the hotel’s front, spilling down the wooden steps onto the street. All faces were angled upwards.

  Bates went with the throng. He was a little drunk. Bates went with the throng. He had been drinking port wine in the salon with the Colonel. He stumbled to his feet in the excitement at the commotion. ‘I have not yet seen the comet,’ he told the Colonel, his words blurry with drink. ‘Nor I neither,’ called the Colonel, separated from him already by several people. ‘Nor I neither!’

  Outside the sky was a dark purple colour, and seemed to Bates’s drink-affected sensibilities almost to throb. A few clouds were laid upon the horizon, dark-grey against the black-purple sky behind. But overhead there was nothing but pure night sky, and four hundred thousand stars like scintillations, and there, in the zenith, the comet itself. People cooed and people gasped as if they were at a display of fireworks, although the comet of course did nothing but lie there, motionless. How cold it looked.

  ‘Was there not,’ Larroche asked him, his lips patting on the stem of his pipe, ‘such an omen before the invasion of Guilliam of Normandy, and the death of your King Hastings?’

  ‘King Harold,’ said Bates, without paying attention.

  The comet was preternaturally clear, vivid, a sharp white colour. Its head was tiny, no bigger than any other bright star, but its tail stretched back an impressive distance, a narrow-apexed triangle of misty white. It looked, to Bates’s eyes, like an icicle hanging horizontally in the sky.

  ‘Magnificent!’ cooed the Colonel. ‘Magnifique!’

  But it was hardly that.

  The comet, the colour of a blanched summer’s-day cloud amongst all that dark, looked stuck. It looked frozen in place. Bates took a step back, his face still up, reeled as his heel struck the stair, and nearly fell. ‘Just to sit,’ he muttered, to nobody in particular. ‘Just sit down for a brief space, you know.’ He lowered himself unsteadily into the wooden step. Stuck.

  The Colonel walked over to him, comradely, and sat beside him. ‘Is it superb?’ he said. ‘I think it is.’ He was extracting his pipe from his tunic pocket.

  At the far side of the crowd somebody squealed. Bates watched the Vitus-dance twitching of somebody, their arms up. Who is that? Are they having a fit? The figure jerked, and danced closer. ‘A bat!’ came a woman’s voice. ‘Ugh - ugh - ugh!’

  ‘A moth, my dear,’ came a gentleman’s voice, basso profundo.

  ‘A bat!’

  ‘No!’

  ‘No!’

  ‘No!’

  ‘No,’ echoed Bates, so quietly that only he could hear.

  ‘It was a bat,’ insisted the woman, hurrying now for the stairs as fast as her skirts allowed her. Her shoes hit the wooden boards with a manly clatter. ‘There are bats everywhere.’

  Bates looked around, half-expecting to see the night air filled with the creatures, but there was nothing to see. The woman hurried up the stairs and into the hotel, directly past Bates, causing the stair on which he sat to shudder. A moment later the man stomped up the stair, calling after her: ‘Miss Laney! Miss Laney!’

  Boorish, really. Boorish behaviour.

  The crowd, its attention half-distracted, watched the little drama.

  ‘It amazes me,’ said Bates, not for the first time, ‘that so many holidaygoers could devote their energies to leisure at a time such as this! Wartime, my dear Colonel.’ The port wine encouraged him to intimacy.

  Larroche shrugged. ‘Mr Bates,’ he said. ‘I fear I am unhealthy. Is this the way?’

  ‘The way?’

  ‘The way of saying it?’

  ‘I do not agree sir, as to your unhealthiness. You are a military man in full command of his physical faculties.’

  There was a papery quality to the Colonel’s skin. But perhaps that was merely an effect of the lighting. Gas lamps inside the hotel. Papery. The head carefully, the head delicately (we might say) fashioned from the busy-bee chewing and chewing of the chewing wasps. If Bates reached up with his fat forefinger, he could push it right through the right cheek, just there: it would collapse, hollow, and with loud dry buzzing out would pour a stream of angry wasps. No, no, no.

  ‘No,’ said Bates.

  ‘I do not mean this,’ said Larroche. The sweat beads were so tiny on his forehead as to look like the very tips of silver bristles.

  ‘You mean to say you are unwell?’

  ‘I mean to say.’

  ‘That you are unwell?’

  ‘That I am unwell.’

  ‘I am sorry to hear it,’ said Bates. ‘Is it the flux in the bowels? Perhaps you have caught this from—’ He trailed off.

  ‘Unwell,’ said Larroche, fixing the word in his vocabulary. ‘Unwell, unwell. Unwell.’

  ‘You should go to bed,’ said Bates, firmly.

  ‘Unwell, unwell, unwell,’ said the Colonel, getting slowly to his feet. ‘Unwell, unwell, unwell.’

  They awaited orders, or so the Colonel told them. Those orders might be to evacuate the town aboard the Sophrosyne if the attacking forces came too close, and if it seemed that the calculating machine might fall into enemy hands. But equally those orders might be to p
ress on to York, and deliver the device, and the Dean, to the ordnance located there. The machine was all-in-all important, too important to risk falling into enemy hands. So they were awaiting.

  The dilemma was what to do on those few occasions when Bates encountered Mrs Burton. This was a delicate matter. Given the circumstances it was inevitable that, from time to time, they would encounter one another. The first three or four times this happened Bates bowed his unhatted head and looked at the floor to give the lady time to float past without having to acknowledge his existence. How he loved her! Love without hope.