by Robert Drewe
She tells him, ‘I know someone who can’t stand the feeling of oil on his skin.’
He grunts, face-down. ‘So?’
‘I use talcum powder instead.’
An old back was slicker, whiter, more liquid under her hands. Softer muscles, jellied flesh, pores stretching to the horizontal. But muscles and flesh nevertheless. A slippery expanse of experience, a moled and dimpled plateau of knowledge, a whole country of human perseverance at her fingertips. And, deliciously, a back strangely vulnerable, too; her pats setting off little puffs of talcum as its power ebbed from spine and shoulder blades and flowed into her.
Filling her up. She was strong and in charge. Knuckling each vertebra. Pressing harder, squeezing and kneading until it registered. It took a while. Her hands and shoulders were stiff; her own back ached with the effort. Even then it was hardly a moan of surrender.
His voice rose rich and yeasty from the mat. ‘I’m just dough in your hands.’
She brought her hands lower, found the hollow to the side of the centre of his right buttock, pressed her knuckle in it and twisted it, two, three, four, five times each way. Imagined she was bolting him to the floor.
At the fifth twist she heard a faint mutter and, without breaking contact, moved the point of her right elbow into the hollow and leaned with her weight, pressing and twisting so intensely she imagined for an instant she was blacking out.
She had massaged an even older back. Aged eighty-three: Mr Pitman’s. She had met him at the New Church of Emanuel Swedenborg in Bath. Mr Pitman was hurrying home to the other love of his life besides the New Church, an obsession since he was a young schoolmaster at Wotton-under-Edge. Phonetic writing. She was trying on Swedenborg’s philosophies for size, seeing if they fitted better than any of the others. She came down the steps of the New Church behind him and noticed him holding his neck crookedly, his fingers gingerly plucking the stringy tendons.
‘I could relieve that crick,’ she said.
Mr Pitman was actually Sir Isaac, knighted for services to stenographers, but she didn’t know this until after she had seen him in his saggy lemon drawers, bending to touch his toes, pressing his palms flat on the floor. He was in good condition, relatively speaking, owing to a lifetime abstinence from meat, alcohol, tobacco and cowpox vaccinations. Only the knotted muscles in his shoulders, from sixty years of being at his desk by half past six, six days a week, hinted at his age.
Mounds of phonetic literature, heaps of paper covered with little wavy scratchings, lay over his tables and floor. Clearing space to lay her mat, she asked, ‘Is this your study?’
‘No, it is my office,’ he answered, hitching up his drawers with inky fingers and lowering himself to the mat. ‘I do not study, I work.’
Sighing under her hands half an hour later, he said, ‘I know what your clients must find satisfying, but where is the intellectual stimulation for an actress in kneading flesh?’
‘Oh, I get pleasure from it,’ she said, and immediately cleared her throat. Waves of his musty odour rose from the mat. His breath smelled like pen nibs, and his skin like old first editions. Sir Isaac, face down, was unaware of her blush. ‘I want to travel. Most places have no need of actresses but a terrible shortage of masseuses and stenographers.’
He agreed. ‘Men always want someone to rub their necks and dictate to.’
They reached an arrangement: an hour’s massage a week for an hour’s instruction in stenographic sound-hand. He reasoned he could afford one hour off a week; he would more than make it up in increased flexibility. So at his Phonetic Institute she learned his radical system of phonetic symbols and abbreviations. At his home in Royal Crescent, after she had played his neck and spine like a piano, he gave her dietary tips and herbal nostrums.
Will finally noticed her notebooks, the strings of marks like choppy waves—some blowing back on themselves like spindrift—and asked, ‘What are those hieroglyphics, anyway?’
She said, ‘Old Mister Pitman is teaching me his method of shorthand writing.’
‘ “Old Mister Pitman?” Isn’t he famous and knighted for it?’
‘Well, I soothe his vertebrae and he teaches me grammalogues.’
‘You massage Sir Isaac?’
‘Just a little rub.’
A little rub. More like entering a special room until now locked away: a room whose existence and secrets were known only to a few. And, God knows, this few were too many.
‘I’m looking to the future. I’m not the world’s best actress.’
‘Don’t think like that.’
He told her these shorthand signs reminded him of the individual signs and messages the gypsies made from river rushes. Each family had its own symbol. A rush twisted lightly with a sprig of heather, a certain bird’s feather or a head of wheat would say who the maker was, where he had been, what he had done.
Non-gypsies could not decipher these silent, surreptitious messages. A simple river rush, faded and fallen beside the dry road, would be noticed only by a searcher looking for it. Then its position—right or left and pointing up or down—could tell a gypsy where his friends were camping, or on which side of the river the police were in wait.
She shook her head. ‘There is no subterfuge about shorthand. It’s not a secret.’
He gave her soothing strokes, his own personal movements. His touch was becoming much more thoughtful.
‘One day I’ll show you another of their symbols,’ he said.
He talked to her of male and female country. To do with hardness and subsidence, dryness and wetness. Pagan ideas. He didn’t mention the vulgar terms engineers used, but he gave personal examples.
As a boy lying on the downs above Hartbridge with the hard chalk under his back, and the water in the dewponds and water meadows, even in the tea kettle, clotted by the chalk and limestone that had dissolved in them, he would feel himself forced up from the earth by the rising chalk, pushed vertical by its straining solidity.
‘Like a horse was under me.’
But the pulpy moors of the Somerset Levels where he had spent much of his apprenticeship were the feminine, the negative, of Wiltshire’s downs. He talked of lying dozing after a pub ploughman’s lunch on Southland Moor and dreaming of being absorbed. Jellied and spongey substances lolling and quivering under him. Thighs and arms folding around him in a soft, sucking embrace.
‘I had to pull myself out of it.’
‘Of course an engineer would prefer a nice dry clod of gravelly male dirt?’
‘Not if he enjoyed a challenge.’
This water-ground made a noise, he said, like a gossip of flesh. Like eels in a drum. Wetland fishermen left a length of drainpipe in a sack in an eel pond so the eels made their job easy for them, crowding into the pipe, slipping in as neat and tight as intestines coiling inside a stomach. A tactile, black, slick mass.
‘The eels cling together so … readily that when you tip up the pipe they slide out in one single eel-clot.’
He’d almost said lovingly. He cleared his throat. He didn’t say he recognised this sensual sound, the friction of moist kissing, as the liquid slide of their bodies on a warm afternoon.
It was the Somerset Levels, where men and eels defied the laws of physics, holding up their houses with their chests, or finding no resistance when one body encountered another in moving over it, that had taught Will his occupation, sharpened his skills.
When he’d arrived in Bristol aged seventeen to begin his articles, flickering with nervous energy and fingering a shadowy beard, he had been lucky to find an amiable and encouraging master anxious to recognise ability when he found it. David Faulkner Oates, resident engineer to the Wiltshire and Somerset Railway, had just entered into partnership with John Brindle, an ironmaster, to build railways in Wessex and waterworks in Wales. Helping carry out these contracts from his first year had tested his skills in surveying, in coping with the problems of drainage and ballast, in planning, draughtsmanship and costing, in directing constructio
n and in the management of men.
The wetland was his constant torment, and maybe the making of him. He was just days out of his articles when Ivan Sidebottom, the engineer-in-charge of building the section of railway between Langport and North Curry, fell victim to the wetness with double pneumonia. (Half the local people seemed to suffer from tuberculosis or ague, or rheumatism at least.) Oates was building a suspension bridge in Cornwall and the task of completing the section fell to Will.
He finished the job according to contract and to Oates’s satisfaction. He was aware, however, that the chief contracts of Oates, Brindle and Company would be coming to an end within a year. Even if his job were secure, his horizons stretched far beyond the situations on offer. He felt uncomfortable, too, working under the eye of unknown overseers. Lately he felt watched, under steady professional surveillance.
Other things had changed as well. The economic, agricultural and industrial upheaval, the new modes of travel and communication. His imagination had been captured by engineering (in its hydraulic potential maybe just an extension of drowning!), but for him the Levels had exhausted the possibilities of landscape.
The Levels were an engineer’s bad dream: of slovenly wandering rivers forever seeping and shifting in the confusion of no gradient. A black joke of perfectly level ground covered with un-level constructions lurching sideways into the ooze. Everything broke the laws and threw out the angles. Entering any cottage, you stepped down a foot or two. Lines of wet on the wallpaper were grubby graphs of the seasons—dampness edging towards the ceiling throughout the spring and early summer, rising above the mantelpiece at Easter, reaching the window tops by June. Along the cottage walls sloped the ghosts of old doorways that had tipped on the diagonal, been cemented in and replaced with verticals. Pencils and apples rolled off the table.
A farmer building a house would jam wagonloads of tree trunks into the ground, pressing them down ten yards at a time with a horse-driven pile-driver. But ordinary cottages had no proper foundations. When they had to knock down a derelict and oblique shanty to build the railway, they found layers of triangular sections fanning up from the twelfth century. Matted with ancient fishbones, charcoal and oyster shells. Each floor had slipped back into the limitless wet, and been built up again with rubble back to the horizontal.
For three months Will’s lodgings were in Bow Street, the main street of Langport, where the buildings ran along each side of a twelfth-century causeway across the valley of the Parrett. The street was built with a solemn market-town solidity, its Lloyds and Bank of England branches jostling sturdy municipal chambers and libraries and institutes.
Strolling home down Bow Street after a hard day of stresses and angles, he would shudder at those rows of buildings leaning drunkenly away from the street. Their lines akimbo. Buildings yawning and stretching and widening their eaves to the sky. Their foundations settling languidly into the comfort of the moor.
Out of true. And always the eyes on him.
The soft terrain meant constant displacement of the rails—and constant work to correct their shape. The rails were laid longitudinally on single balks and packed up with wooden planks. There was a six-man gang positioned every two and a half miles along the line. The gangers carried heavy wooden and iron levers to raise the balk and rail. Four men prised it up and held it while the others packed it with ballast.
Every day he watched this operation. Even though it was standard practice in these parts, every day it seemed more haphazard, defeatist and old-fashioned. It made him feel a failure.
For ballast they used pebbles from the seaside: pebbles so perfectly ground and rounded by the tides the local children began to use them for marbles. Attracted by the marbles, reckless boys soon began playing games of Dare where they lay down on the tracks between the rails while the express trains flew over them.
He had expected professional satisfaction but not sour fear, the daily anticipation of tragedy. He found it hard to travel to and from Bristol knowing the engine, that very carriage, was speeding over children. Young boys squirming between his undulating rails on the constantly shifting ground.
His nightmares were filled with buckled tracks, screaming brakes, flying pieces of children.
David Faulkner Oates wouldn’t stand in his way. When he heard of his plans he said, ‘You’ll need introductions,’ and wrote off letters of recommendation to colleagues, commissioners of public works building railways in New World places—Buenos Aires, Ottawa, Auckland, Cape Town.
He could also, it occurred to him, introduce him to an engineer friend of his visiting England from the colony of Western Australia.
‘Thank you,’ Will said. ‘Now my position is clearer, can you tell me who has been overseeing me for the past month?’
‘No one,’ said Oates.
‘No one following me? I put it down to the regular procedure for new engineers. A professional check on my work standards and behaviour.’
‘Don’t be daft. This is engineering, not espionage.’
STATEMENT FOR THE BATH CORONER:
Marion Hubble, wardrobe mistress at the Theatre Royal, Beaufort Square, states she had known Kate Cowan for several years and had seen her every night for the five weeks of the Royal’s season of Hamlet just ended. She states Miss Cowan had understudied the part of Ophelia, but had not been required to take over the role.
On Saturday night last after the cast party Miss Cowan was sitting alone in the dressing room at the Royal and invited her to drink with her. Miss Cowan drank two glasses of champagne and two glasses of port and said certain things.
Miss Cowan then asked her to walk home with her. It was the time of the annual visit of Wombwell’s Menagerie to the open space by the Old Bridge, and lions and tigers held great novelty there. A man from the menagerie was rumoured to stalk the alleyways at night with a sack, looking for stray cats and dogs to feed Wombwell’s big cats, and Miss Cowan said she was scared of meeting him. She laughed bitterly and said, ‘He might put me in his sack.’
As they were walking along the Quay, Miss Cowan complained that an old friend had behaved badly to her. As they passed over the Old Bridge, at the main entrance to the city, she had pointed out Suicide Row, the spot where the desperate took their leave of the city and life.
They went to Miss Cowan’s room at the White Hart, where Miss Cowan sat on the bed crying and drinking port. She was attempting to leave when Miss Cowan said that if she didn’t stay she would do away with herself. She had stayed another half hour but had to return home to her mother who was a chronic invalid. She went downstairs and Miss Cowan followed her. She was very much in liquor. They went down the street together, and at the bottom of Avon Street as she reached her home at the Ship and Nelson, she wished her goodnight and they parted. It was about 1 o’clock. She heard next day that Miss Cowan had drowned in the River Avon.
Hammond Lloyd spoke at the funeral, addressing the small group of mourners, mostly theatre folk, in the alcove behind the altar at the small church of St Martin’s.
His family had a long and deep affection for Kate Cowan, he began. Layer by layer, stroke by stroke, his voice painted a lyrical picture of her. First as a sprite, then a gamin, a sensitive flower and, finally, the eternal feminine.
His voice thickening, he said he could not avoid mentioning the sad psychological connection, given the effect of the Bard on beautiful, talented, impressionable young souls, of Kate understudying Ophelia.
‘Oh, my friends,’ he said. ‘Water is the element of young and beautiful death, of flowery death, the element of death without pride or revenge, of tender, masochistic suicide. Water is the profound organic symbol of Woman, of Ophelia who can only weep about her pain.’
He cleared his throat. She was willing him not to quote from Hamlet. At the same time she knew it was as inevitable as night. After all, how often did he get to play Gertrude?
‘An envious sliver broke …’ he began, and a tremor went through the mourners. She heard a clogged s
ound come from the back of her own throat.
‘When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up …
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.’
A wave of emotion swept up from the rear of the alcove and lapped at the narrow front pew. As Ham paused and ran his fingers through his hair, it slowly ebbed away. When the sobbing had quietened, he looked searchingly down at the mourners, flung open his arms and began quoting now from Richard III:
‘O Lord! methought what pain it was to drown! What dreadful noise of water in mine ears! What ugly sights of death within mine eyes!’
Men gasped, women began to moan and a jobbing actor named Ambrose Menzies cried out, ‘Oh, I say!’ By then Ham was lowering his hands, placating them, patting the musty, disapproving air, soothing the choppy currents. He could have been a famous preacher the way they hung on the words now trickling down on them like syrup.
‘A life with its twists and turns of fortune is very like the River Avon we see glimmering out that window,’ he told them.
More deep breaths at the mention of the very source and site of death.
‘Of course water is the spring of being, of motherhood,’ he went on. ‘Water flows like a life, its constant movement responding to its surroundings and to possibility. But, alas, death is also in water. Earth dissolves into dust, fire into smoke. And water dissolves even more completely. It’s not for us to judge that for some beloved but tortured souls, water is also the matter of despair, a substantial nothingness, the desired end.’
His voice snagged and caught on end. But then swelled again. As he surged on, Angelica noticed how pink and controlled his hands were on the lectern. Blood flowed to his cheeks, filled the capillaries in his nose, swelled his body. She could smell his familiar smell even in the second row, feel the warmth of his breath. In his sombre lapel a tiny ruby stickpin caught the sunlight.