by Ashly Graham
Divided as his day was into minutes and subdivisions thereof, Stace, in addition to eschewing use of the first person in his conversation, had been practising the art of speaking in metrical feet. He was pleased with the effect, especially with that of the iambic pentameter, or blank verse, use of which had already extended his working day by ten and a half minutes; and, by compressing his use of language, added still further emphasis to his forceful mode of expression.
Stace had rewarded the time-and-motion consultant who had recommended such verbal economy, and rehearsed him in its use, a substantial bonus for increasing his lordship’s temporal thrift.
There was another reason for adopting the habit: research done on Stace’s behalf had indicated that it was inadvisable to do anything in a syncopated manner: whether it were speaking, walking, or chewing food, one should do it on the downbeat so as to avoid going against the flow of nature, and interfering with the (carefully monitored) self-regulation of his metabolism.
That morning when Arbella woke up, without her customary hangover, she made a life-changing decision. It was not that she loved her father any the less; but she was no longer prepared to follow, as had been her compliant wont in the past, the script of “His Lordship’s Ante Meridiem Colloquy with his Daughter, Arbella”, defer to his inflexible schedule, and listen to the interminable explication of his nostrums.
Full well she knew how difficult this would be for him to understand, and impossible to adjust to.
But at the risk of offending her father greatly, Arbella was resolved to be, in her own way, as assertive as he was. So instead of answering his inquiry as to her condition this morning, she placed what was to be her last Turkish-and-Virginia cigarette between her lips, lit it with her gold Dunhill lighter, exhaled the smoke in a long luxurious stream at the ceiling, and regarded the day with interest as it gathered strength and momentum outside.
The pause that was supposed to be filled by her response to her father’s rhetorical question came and went, and Garforth the butler cleared his throat. Stace was unable to perform a similar action, a) because it irritated his perfectly strung vocal cords; and b) because he was holding his breath as the emergency fans of the air filtration system in the house self-activated to neutralize the carbon monoxide and dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, polonium, plutonium, arsenic, prussic acid, cyanide, cadmium, methane, ammonia, hydrogen sulphide, DDT, formaldehyde, benzene, toluene, butane, lead, and chloroform—et cetera—released from his daughter’s cigarette.
Detecting wasted seconds, Stace’s auditory nerves sent an urgent message to his brain, which put his system on Green, or Precautionary, alert. He repeated the question, which was an unprecedented thing for him to do, louder and in a strangulated tone.
‘How are you, his dear?, he wonders. A little beneath
‘The weather, perhaps; one does so fervently hope not.
‘Water in your ears from the shower, perhaps? Over.’
Still Arbella said nothing and drank her coffee, and the code went to Blue, or Guarded, level.
‘Over, he said, said da-da, said da-da, said da-da!’
Beads of sweat broke out on his lordship’s forehead as he had no choice but to gasp the tar- and nicotine-polluted air, reducing the effectiveness of his skin-rejuvenation cream by forty per cent, and causing panic amongst the cilia in his lungs.
In a moment of mental aberration the baffled baron shot his cuff to consult his watch; but of course there was no watch: he often gave them as presents but had no need of one himself, for timepieces were as sundials compared to the regulatory dependability of his constitution. His system went to Yellow, Elevated, status.
‘Hrrm hrrm hrrm. Arbella, Arbella...’
Stace rapped out a sequence of SOSs on the table, thereby incurring a mild inflammation to the knuckles that was bound to confuse his anti-arthritis drug.
‘Pop to Poppet—respond! Come in now, please!
‘It’s imperative you answer the question; acknowledge at once!’
When Arbella did not reply, her father’s eyes flashed like lights on a rogue computer, his feet stamped dully on the rug, his pulse went haywire, and he agitated his arms like an epileptic penguin.
The alert was raised to Orange, or High, alert, which permitted both the in extremis discontinuation of pedal metre, and the resumption of referring to oneself in the First Person Singular; which was something that Charles Stace had not done since...he had no idea when, because the memory had been erased under deep hypnosis, and hazarding a guess was too hazardous.
‘Dash it, girl,’ said Stace, appalled and frightened as scansion of speech went by the board, and he egotized himself: ‘you’re making...ME...ill. M-M-My...Blood Pressure has gone up by...’—he consulted the diamond-set digital monitor that served as his tie-pin—‘…oh my god, my Heart can’t take this sort of strain.
‘Your father begs…I beg you, Arbella: please say something…say anything, within reason. Hell, say something unreasonable, ludicrous even, if you want to. Take pity on your old man in ten words or less…splurge on twenty...blather, if you like!’
Garforth, whose outline had for once remained extant from the panelling, left the room. He needed to caucus with the staff and decide whether they should call his lordship’s deputy senior primary general physician; or even, depending on the consensus, the top man himself. He paged the chauffeur, Sprocket, on his beeper to summon him.
Dreamily through the window Arbella saw Sprocket look at his own, very real, chronometer as he got out of his lordship’s car. It had been issued as part of his uniform, and its accuracy was guaranteed by a radio signal, not directly from the Atomic Clock, but from Stace’s Atomic Clock monitoring station. The chauffeur’s contract required that he wear it at all times.
Inside the house there was the sound of pounding feet on the stairs from below and above as Mrs Skillet the cook, Miss Feather the housemaid, Garforth, and Sprocket converged in the hall and discussed what to do in urgent whispers.
At last Arbella came out of her trance. ‘Daddy,’ she drawled, ‘we need to talk; or rather I need to talk. It’s important, and there’s no time except the present, as you always say, so I hope you won’t mind being late for the office this morning. I’m sure all your executives can manage without you for a bit.’
Stace went Red, signalling the upgrade of the warning code to Severe, and hyperventilated at the thought of not being at his desk at the appointed time. Routine maintenance was being performed on the single-person helicopter—an updated version of 007’s autogyro “Little Nelly” in the film of Ian Fleming’s You Only Live Twice—that the baron kept on the roof terrace; and the latest-model turbocharged jet-pack was still on order, so there was no possibility of suiting and goggling up, having it strapped to his back and making up for the delay.
‘The fact is, Daddy, I’ve decided to make a new life for myself…starting with the delicious breakfast I just finished. I know you want me to be happy, so I hope what I have to say won’t come as too much of a blow. You see, effective today I’ve given up my job, and I’m moving out to share a flat in Hammersmith with my friend Jeanette Witherspoon. I’ll be gone by the time you get home tonight.’
Arbella poured herself more coffee, dribbled in full-fat milk from the creamer, stirred in a heaped teaspoonful of sugar, and took several sips before continuing to address her by-now incoherent father.
‘You see, Daddy, lying awake last night—I’ve not been sleeping very well for a long time now—I started making a mental list of all the stuff I’d like to do in my life, and realized that I’m going to have to get a move on or I’ll be thirty before I know it.
‘There’s another thing I want to mention. You may not be aware, in fact I know you’re not, which is why I’ve taken the thing in hand myself and sought independent professional advice—by which I mean not from any of your people—but it is my considered opinion that the strain of running a big corporation has taken a very serious toll on your health. You’re a compl
etely different person from the one you were when Mummy was alive, and you have developed some really weird habits, many of…most of…all of which, frankly, are really annoying.
‘I’ve not mentioned this before because I didn’t want to offend you, but obviously what with me decamping the premises the time has come.’
Come and gone, Stace registered, as the System Restore pill that he had choked down failed to find a point of sanity to revert to; his nerves went into hyperspace; and the coronary timpanist in his chest, cranking the tuning taps to tighten the skin on the kettledrum and raise the tone an octave, began an energetic unaccompanied solo.
‘Daddy, I’ve spoken to a couple of new-wave psychiatrists, Dr Looney and Mr Binns; who, although they aren’t on your consultant staff list, or even the reserve one, owing to some mix-up over their medical licences, have signed the necessary papers for you to be committed to their asylum.
‘It’s a very pleasant place, I’m told, as asylums go, and they’ll make you as comfortable as possible given the severity of your condition, in a nice padded room with a view of Bodmin Moor.
‘But you mustn’t expect any quick results, Daddy—it’s a five-year programme. Treatment involves the application of twenty-four-seven restraints, a lot of old-fashioned electrode therapy, and likely some, how did they describe it?, some “neurological restructuring and selective cell elimination”.
‘Although Dr Looney and Mr Binns don’t like to call it trepanning and lobotomy, they are great believers in tried and tested methods, and they recognized your condition—apparently they come across it all the time, albeit in a much, much, milder form—as soon as I played them a tape of a conversation we had last week, d’you remember?, never mind if you don’t, when you were telling me about the medicinal value of pickled salamander for the treatment of shingles.
‘Anyway, Daddy, the most important thing from now on is for you to concentrate on getting better. You mustn’t worry about me, or your companies, or anything at all. It’s not as if the businesses can’t do without you, and you certainly don’t need the money. My brothers have been aching to take control of everything for yonks, as you know, and I’m sure they won’t let you down.
‘There, I’ve said it. I apologize for not fitting what I had to say into ten words, or twenty, and I hope I didn’t blather too much, but it’s for your own good.’
‘Wahoop! Wahoop!’, emitted Stace, clutching his windpipe to quell the rattling and gurgling within. He collapsed with a thump on a chair, and his vermilion hue changed to shades of green, blue, and yellow, as he strangled himself, that were in no way related to those denoting the lowest to intermediate levels of personal crisis.
Arbella smiled at him. ‘As I say, Daddy, I’m sorry to dump all this on you in such a hurry over breakfast, but it’s the only opportunity I get to talk to you. And now I’ve a ton of packing to do, because Jeanette and I are catching the Eurostar tomorrow. After a week in Paris we’ll be touring Italy for a month, and then it’s on to...oh, so many places. I promise to send postcards from every one of them, and to come and see you the moment we’re back.’
She got up, kissed her chameleonic father and went upstairs, on the way passing Garforth as he returned to the room with Mrs Skillet, Miss Feather, and Sprocket. The staff had decided that the aetiology of his lordship’s condition was grave enough to warrant scrambling a dozen of his most eminent physicians.
When Garforth speed-dialled and teleconferenced them all from the console in the pantry, and explained the situation, he received assurances that it was possible that they might shortly be able to be on their way; after they had dealt with some problems of their own, and delays, including an alarm clock that had failed to go off, a toaster that had caught fire, a child who would not come out of the bathroom, the lateness of a school bus, a leak in the roof, an overseas call from an aged relative, the misplacement of a favourite necktie, some lost glasses, a garage door that would not open, leaves on the railway line, a recalcitrant carburettor, and another urgent house-call to make...by which time perhaps the rush-hour traffic might have died down a little.
The servants were joined by Sanders the valet, who wandered up from his hermetically sealed dry-cleaning and fumigation station in the basement. The sound of heavy activity above had pierced the fog of chemicals in his head, and he wanted to find out what was going on.
Together they heaved his lordship back onto the seat from which he had fallen, propped him up as best they could so that his head leaned on the back instead of lolling, and pushed his tongue back in his mouth with a spoon.
Now that Lord Stace’s breathing seemed to have calmed right down, and there was nothing else that could be done, Garforth went to the drawing-room to get the brandy decanter from the sideboard for himself, Sprocket, and Sanders; Mrs Skillet returned to the kitchen to make herself a nice pot of tea; Miss Feather prepared a cooling compress to revive her for her domestic duties; Sprocket put the car back in the garage and brought in his Daily Mail, in which he had only half completed the crossword, and the Wordpuzzler awaited his attention; and Sanders fetched the football pools coupon that he filled out at the kitchen table once a week on behalf of the domestic household.
The group having reassembled in the breakfast-room, and agreed that there was nothing further to be done but wait, they availed themselves of the coffee, bread rolls, butter, and jam on the table, and the fresh tea that Mrs Skillet brought in, and argued over which football teams were most likely to score or no-score a draw, or to win their matches on Saturday.
As they drank and munched and disputed, they contemplated their employer, whose face, having exhausted the more colourful shades of the spectrum, was now ashen grey.
The valet remarked that the bloody quacks were taking their sweet time about it; and it was the opinion of the cook that if they didn’t get a move on it would be too late. Not that she put any faith in doctors, she added, and looking for a new job at her age was going to be a right royal pain in the A.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
That was not quite all. The following evening, when Arbella got home from making the arrangements for her father’s funeral—the continental trip with Jeanette had been postponed by twenty-four hours—there was an envelope waiting for her on the hall table.
She did not open it immediately, but took it up to her room that night. And then it was only after she got into bed, having spent a long time sitting on the window-seat looking out into the balmy night, and watching a nearly full moon riding high behind a veil of cloud, that she remembered it.
There was no letter inside, only a few sheets of old and yellowed foolscap paper, which had been pinned together with a size twelve Gold-Ribbed Hare’s Ear trout fly. The writing on the white pasteboard card that was also enclosed was spidery, but recent, and might have been inscribed with an italic-nibbed dip pen and Indian ink:
There is a lovers’ bond so strong that, irrespective of how long and distant their separation has been, and through however many incarnations they have been apart, the souls of those it unites are sure to be reconciled.
The faded brown, rather childish, script on the pages that Arbella read before she turned out the light was that of three poems. She read them aloud, slowly because she wanted to, and also because of the condition of the paper, which made the words difficult to decipher.
The pages were crumpled and possibly travel-stained, as if they had been carried in a pocket and exposed to the elements. As she did so, memories rose within her like the camphored contents of a storage chest, where they had long lain between layers of tissue paper.
This was the first of the verses:
De profundis
Can a thought meet a thought, purely in air?
Unwritten; unspoken, just understood
Between people who used to care about
Things in common, sharing what they could?
In downtime of the world, when we are blind,
When systems and formalities are dead,
Our tides flow not as tabled by the mind
But in uncharted currents of the head.
What stimulates a song to prompt a voice?
What quickens a pulse and fractures the dark
With light? How can two souls be ever at rest
Who lie nightly awake and await for Dawn’s
Alighting on the jewelled lawn, and tripping
Barefoot to the open window wherein
Love, never made, is reborn?
And the second:
Muse
At the furthest remove, without writing or speech,
An empathy can last forever;
In a vacuum, in some distant place beyond reach,
There are ties that no one can sever.
Please believe, my own self, wherever you are,
What cleanses my heart of regret
Is this truth I send winging to you from afar:
We were married the moment we met.
At the bottom of the page was inscribed, with self-conscious ornateness:
Wat Ralegh, San Thomé, Guiana, 1617
Sixteen seventeen was the year that Sir Walter’s son died. Which meant that, at the time the fateful expedition was conceived, he was the same age as Arbella was now.
The third and last poem was by contrast written in an elegant feminine hand, and entitled Penelope: