And now Odeline performed a simple mime – one she had performed for her mother since childhood: trying to smell the rose, sticking her nose out for it, only for her hand to move it further away. She craned her neck forward, becoming almost horizontal, the rose still just out of reach. Eventually she swiped at it with her other hand, which stuck to the outstretched hand, and at the same time knocked the rose free to catch it with her teeth. She looked back at her mother with a showbusiness smile, the rose clenched in her mouth and her arms still stuck out in front. Her mother’s face cracked into a smile reflecting Odeline’s. She wheezed with silent laughter.
The other trick Odeline knew her mother loved was the glove mime and so she did this, slipping a white glove on to her right hand, collecting the bowler hat from her prop shelf and bringing a chair over from the corner of the room to sit on. At the point that Odeline mimed despair at having lost her left-hand glove, her mother would always gesture at her head – The glove is under the hat! But this time Odeline looked up and her mother’s face was a mask of sadness, her mouth pressed down at the edges and her eyes glassy wet. Odeline hurried on and found the glove. She mimed joy and celebration, pushed her left hand quickly into the glove, made both hands dance. Her mother’s face melted back into a smile – she clasped her hands together and gave a long blink of relief.
Her mother seemed tired now but when Odeline turned off the light she became agitated. So Odeline switched on the old television unit at the end of the bed and pushed a video in. And then sat in the chair next to the bed to watch. It was an old Marx Brothers film, turned to mute because her mother didn’t like the music. It was the one with Harpo as the Professor and Groucho as Captain Spaulding. They had seen it a hundred times before.
Her mother watched the beginning as absorbed as usual. When Groucho danced she moved her head in time. When Harpo came on she squeezed her fists with excitement. But the next time Odeline looked over, she was asleep with her hands across her stomach, her chest slowly moving up and down. So Odeline switched off the light and went out quietly, leaving the film running.
She had abandoned her rehearsal, having been forced out of her performing mindset, and decided to read instead. Half an hour later she was sitting up in bed with The World of Mime when she heard, quite clearly, a sound she knew well. It was the shutting of a plastic-bound accounting book, followed by the slap of the book being added to the pile of finished ones. It was a sound Odeline heard every day. She got up and crossed the corridor to her mother’s bedroom. The video was still running: the scene where Harpo is trying to box Mrs Rittenhouse and Chico is the referee. The room flickered with the screen’s white light and illuminated her mother’s face, which was caught in an expression of revelation, mouth and eyes gratefully open – she had just been told a wonderful answer to a long, puzzling question. Odeline had never seen this expression on her mother’s face, and was shocked by it. And by the stillness of her body. She went forward and tugged at the sleeve of her nightdress. The arm dropped back lifeless. She said, ‘Mother’, quite loudly, and there was no response. She stepped forward and listened, there was no breath.
She had gone out and shut the bedroom door behind her. After calling 999 from the telephone in the kitchen she sat on a stool at the kitchen table and didn’t go back up. When the ambulance arrived Odeline let them in and then went back to the kitchen while they did their business upstairs. Before driving her mother away they came into the kitchen and asked her questions she couldn’t answer. When they had gone she sat there for a little while longer and then went back up to her mother’s bedroom, where the light was on and the bed empty. The film was still running.
She flinches when the cabin door opens and her neighbour comes out on to the deck. He is wearing a fresh grey vest – tight over his torso and trim at the waist – baggy trousers and sandals. His head is wrapped in a turban of towel. He is carrying two metal tankards. ‘Try this,’ he says, and hands her one. Odeline does as she is told. It is a warm, creamy, liquor-and-coffee taste that runs down her throat. In response, a hot ache floods the back of her mouth and nose and suddenly she is crying, hotly and breathlessly, her shoulders out of control and twitching, working up the tears. She doesn’t know what is happening to her, but can’t stop it. She is disgusted by the sounds she is making: as if some grunting creature is trying to crawl up her gullet and escape. The drink has sloshed over her hands and on to the deck. It occurs to her that she has been drugged: the drink contains a weeping draught, designed to throw her out of control. She looks through bleary eyes and jerking breaths. Is this man a danger? He is still standing in the doorway of his cabin but looks so surprised in his turban that her worry subsides. The crying slows to a whimper. She hiccups once, and then her body is silent.
He sits down on the side of the boat opposite her, holding his tankard in the palm of his hand. As well as tattoos along both arms, he also has copper bangles and bits of rope around the wrists and biceps. He says quietly, ‘It’s okay, you know. The ambulance people said he’s going to be fine.’
All Odeline can do is nod, and sniff. Her mouth has gone to blubber. She keeps her eyes on the decking, which is painted with wiggling lines, one main artery running down from the left-hand corner, with small channels branching off it and then splitting into smaller forks in turn. Along the lines are lots of little crosses.
‘That’s where we are now,’ says her neighbour, leaning forward and pointing to a fork in the line near Odeline’s right brogue. ‘Here’s Little Venice –’ he circles a black triangle where three lines meet – ‘with the Regent’s Canal coming out the top.’ She is struck again by how deeply and easily he speaks, pronouncing every part of the word without trying too hard. It is how she imagines an aristocrat might speak. ‘The map helps me for navigating,’ he says. ‘I’m always losing the paper ones.’
‘Oh,’ says Odeline. Her voice sounds squeaky by contrast. Her lips feel loose and so she tightens them to cover her teeth.
‘I mainly stay on the Grand Union,’ he goes on, ‘just for the landscapes. It has so many changes from top to bottom.’ He points to a cross far beyond her left foot and asks, ‘Have you been up to Braunston and the Buckby locks?’
Odeline shakes her head.
‘The most incredible old architecture around there. And some lovely quiet parts of the canal. But then London has so much. I can never stay away for long.’ He smiles slightly. ‘I’ve got a bit of a thing about maps.’ He pulls his vest across to show his right breast, which is hairless, a mound of smooth flesh. She feels heat fill her face. There is a map inked on to his chest, with riverways and hill ranges. ‘Wiltshire,’ he says. ‘I used to live down there on the Kennet and Avon.’ He pulls his vest back over. ‘Why did you choose to come here?’ he asks, then checks himself. ‘Sorry, we haven’t even met properly. I’m Ridley.’ He touches his chest. ‘You’ve met Marlon, and this is our boat, Saltheart.’ He pats the boat’s side. ‘We three have been travelling together for a long time.’
‘Um, my name is Odeline,’ she starts, her eyes back on the decking. ‘I came here because my hometown was . . . very limiting.’
He nods and she carries on.
‘I couldn’t, I wasn’t, appreciated there. I wanted to bring my art to a new audience.’ She looks up, but then remembers tonight’s audience and lowers her head again. ‘Actually, it seems the audiences here are even more philistine than in Arundel.’
‘What art is it you do?’ he asks, taking the towel off his head. His dark hair falls down behind his shoulders.
‘I am a mime,’ she says, ‘although my training is as an illusionist.’
‘Oh like, you know,’ he says, thinking, then gets it: ‘Marcel Marceau!’
‘You know about Marcel Marceau?’
‘Yeah, I used to like him in those films. Beautiful, quite sad. And amazing movement.’
‘You don’t like him any more?’
‘Well, I can’t watch the films any more. I used to have a projector.�
� He takes an elastic band from his wrist and pulls his hair back into a knot at his neck. ‘But I sold it to buy a new fiddle. My old one got so beaten up. I went to an auction and bid for the best one there. Ex-orchestral.’
Odeline looks blank.
‘But,’ he goes on, ‘I’ve probably still got the Marceau films. You should have them. I’ll take a look.’
He gets up and goes into the cabin, leaving the door open. Odeline puts her head to the side to peer in. The boat is wider than hers and has bowed sides, so the walls of the cabin are rounded. This might be what her British Waterways Narrowboat Manual identifies as a Dutch barge: A curvaceous version of the traditional English narrowboats and more of a challenge to steer. She can hear him inside, opening drawers. The floor is wood-planked, and the walls are a rich dark red colour. In her view Odeline can see a leather armchair and, along the wall, what look like old maps in brass frames. It is how Odeline would imagine the interior of an old admiral’s cabin: smart, warm, nautical. She cranes her head further forward and sees the corner of a brown suede rug on the floor, and a small wooden dresser with kitchen utensils hanging from it. There is a sack of chopped wood next to an iron stove in the centre, with a pipe leading up to the chimney in the roof.
‘Found them,’ says Ridley, appearing at the door, and hands a large brown paper bag to her with both hands. She takes it on to her lap. Inside are five film reels, actual reels of acetate wound around a grey plastic spool. Odeline takes one out and holds a tail of film reel up to the light from the cabin doorway. In the first square of black acetate is the pale figure of Marcel Marceau in his white suit, spotlit on the otherwise dark stage, head bent to his right palm, left toe en pointe in his ballet pumps. It is the beginning of Bip, the Bird Keeper. Odeline looks up at Ridley.
‘Its him!’ she says.
Odeline has nineteen books on Marcel Marceau, and four by him. These twenty-three are the most treasured books in her collection, even the ones written in French, a language she has yet to learn. Three of them her mother bought full price from a bookshop – she hadn’t been able to resist, despite the impact on the Arundel Magic accounts. But most were bought from the Arundel Hospice shop, or when the town library sold off books that people no longer wanted to borrow. Some of these were in poor condition but Odeline has done her best to preserve them, fixing torn jackets with Sellotape and sticking in loose pages. She has crossed out all the names of previous owners and borrowers and written her own in clear, unjoined-up letters, making her signature curl from the last letter of each word. Odeline Milk. Please Return to 61 Maltravers Street. It is an impressive collection, by any book collector’s standards. They filled a whole shelf of the tall metal bookcase in her room in Arundel.
Marcel Marceau’s story has been more of an inspiration to her than anything else. And it is the start of his story which resonates most powerfully. As a young boy growing up in the town of Strasbourg, Marceau saw City Lights in the cinema and became obsessed by Charlie Chaplin. He used to do an impression, wandering around his neighbourhood in an ill-fitting tailcoat and bowler hat like Chaplin’s Little Tramp. Odeline has always wondered if he was as bored and limited in his hometown as she in hers. Growing up in Arundel, she had felt the other lives she was not living as if they were ghosts haunting her own. They were more potent and colourful than her own beige existence. Alternate worlds in London, Paris, travelling circuses, bohemian salons . . .
In Odeline’s view Marcel Marceau is a point where all the influences of mime and illusion come together. He is her link with all the artists who came before. She imagines strands of light travelling over centuries to meet in him. He contains everything, from Japanese theatre to the slapstick of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Bip the Clown has the tragic mask of Greek theatre, the stylised gestures of Noh, the diamond eyes of Harlequin, the white face of Pierrot, the deftness of Houdini, the wild hair of Harpo Marx, the misfortunes of the Little Tramp: he is every mime that has ever been!
Odeline has always dreamed of seeing Marcel Marceau on stage. In Arundel this seemed as distant and impossible as a trip to the moon. But she lives in London now. Those three theatre tickets in her moneybelt are front-row seats for a matinee performance at the Royal Albert Hall in sixteen days’ time. Why three tickets? Because she plans to sit in the middle seat and not be constrained or bothered by people either side.
The tickets cost an enormous amount of money, more than all her Marceau books put together, including the full-price ones that were not from the hospice shop or the library sales. But the experience will be beyond value. Marcel Marceau! She would like to talk to him about her ideas – she has, after all, studied his work intimately, improvised variations of her own. Perhaps their paths will cross that day. Perhaps she will be the next strand of light beaming forward for the art of mime.
TEN
After the bomb, Chaplin and Company sat crookedly in the bottom of the canal for two days.
On the first evening, as the daylight went, its headlamp shone weakly at the opposite wall of the canal, reaching towards the cracked towpath and the open kitchen beyond. As the rest of the bank faded into darkness the kitchen stayed illuminated. It flickered and glowed in the lamp’s light. The old walls looked golden and were patched where things had already been removed by neighbours and relatives. The bath no longer hung down through the ceiling. The pipe from the stove had been taken and there was a brown vein leading up to the ceiling where it had touched the wall. Things looked tidier, cleaned up. The table and chairs were still there. They had been set back upright in the middle of the floor, expecting dinner.
The lamp weakened over the next few hours until it cast just a faint glow towards the kitchen. As if the room was very slowly receding. At some time past nine the light spluttered and died. Then the boat and the house spent the night in darkness, while other parts of London occasionally flared into life. Explosions, fires, swinging torchlight.
The next morning the children of the canalside houses leant over the bank and tried to hook things out of the mud. They looked across at the boat and longed to get on to it, see what was behind the cabin doors, climb on to the roof. But it would mean dropping down into the canal bed and they were afraid. They’d heard the mud was a mile deep and would swallow you up. They’d heard that the woman’s body had looked pale as a statue when they found her under the rubble, covered in brick dust. They peered into the crack in the concrete and the crater in the garden. The canal company men arrived for the repairs and sent them away.
For the rest of the day these men filled the cracked concrete and fenced off the woman’s garden without looking into the house more than they had to. They knew what had happened to her. They went down by ladders into the basin of the canal and managed to haul the launch upright. The canal had been dammed in both directions and they began to let water in from the Paddington end. The Chaplin and Company was not too damaged to float; it creaked upright as the water level rose. The water didn’t wash the mud and black grit from its side, and the brass-handled tiller, broken, wasn’t fixed. Eventually the boat was towed to an empty warehouse at the back of Wormwood Scrubs, where it was hoisted out of the canal on to a trolley and wheeled inside. When the way was passable again, it would be sent back to Bull’s Bridge for full repair. But a week later an explosive dropped on the Glaxo wharf at Greenford, killing – along with several others – the canal company manager overseeing the repair operation, and with that Chaplin and Company was forgotten.
So she sat. The empty warehouse had belonged to a small carrying company that went under before the war. Its entrance faced the water and the houses behind looked away from it, uninterested. Its corrugated roof was rusty and holed, pigeons scratched around on it by day and built their nests in its eaves. A few other discarded vehicles lived inside: a bust bicycle frame, a rusted pulley that lay on the ground near the front entrance and a cart with metal wheels whose planks sagged and were split in the middle. The boat sat in the centre of these, tilted to one side
on her trolley, her upfacing side covered in canal mud.
So she sat. The roof leaked in bad weather and water hit the boat, running through the glassless portholes into the cabin and engine room. It ran between planks and collected in pools – the wood on the tipped side of the boat went dark and soft with water. The heat of that summer made the water fetid. The freeze of the following winter turned it to ice, and the boards of the boat blew up and bumped. The ice cracked the varnish and the colours of that upturned side began to fade. The white lettering of Chaplin and Company discoloured to brown, its red border became pink.
The boat was a shelter for some that winter. Water voles whose burrows were frozen found their way up and into the boat, and bit into the drawstring bag which lay beneath the fold-down bunk in the engine room. Inside were two vests, a pair of shorts, a cotton shirt and a boy’s evacuation papers. These things gave warmth and so the water voles survived winter. Birds built their nests in the dry corners of the decks and under the edges of the cabin roof. The warehouse floor and the top of the boat became thick with pigeon droppings. Old feathers curled on the ground. The tin sound of hail or heavy raindrops on the warehouse roof sent the birds up in fluttering panic around the building, like rocks thrown up by a bomb.
For the rest of London, the tin sounds of gunfire ended suddenly one Tuesday and the city came out in flag colours to celebrate. And, for those who had not yet, to mourn.
ELEVEN
Since childhood, Odeline has never moved in her sleep. Her sleeping position has been as much an expression of her willpower and design as the rehearsal schedules or each day’s outfit. She has woken to the world every morning just as she left it the night before, on her back and poker straight, diagram straight. Her eyes blink open on the chime of seven, her hands clasped in the same position on her chest. On waking she shifts them to her sides and pushes down in a full body stretch before flipping back the quilt and swivelling up to a sitting position on the side of her bed, ready to start her movement exercises.
Chaplin & Company Page 10