Umbrella

by Will Self

  Sprawling on the grassy bank, Willis’s workforce drinks its Batey’s ginger beer, then presses the cool earthenware to their burning cheeks. No matter what their egalitarian guv’nor said, it is difficult for them to escape the conclusion that this is serfdom – albeit of an unusual stamp. Willis was a nob of sorts, although a second son – and there was his manorial property at the top of the rise – of modest proportions, true, but a pretty enough flat-fronted little house in old honeycomb-coloured brick, with newer chimneypots just so, and a shining colophon of a knocker just so. The garden fell away so steeply to the High Street that the canes implanted to train runner beans, tomatoes and peas made a stockade lashed together with edible rope. Willis was a vegetarian: I graze my own garden, he said the day he took Stanley with him to the garden party at Norr — the day Stanley met Adeline and it all began under her husband’s complaisant wolf-yellow eyes. I drift, I float, I loop-the-loop – yet, like Pegoud performing the stunt at Brooklands, I feel as at ease as if I were sat on a settle poking a cosy fire. They were all hugely amused by his pash for the aeronauts and their machines – an old yokel coming past stopped and set down his trug simply to laugh with them. Stanley thought that, notwithstanding how the flying men soared up and up, still they remained far below these bluestockings and their foppish gentlemen friends. Willis had lent him a blazer, a boater and cut him a buttonhole with his own strange hands. There had been a fly waiting for them at Carshalton Station – only then, under the withering gaze of a gamekeeper’s boy in a suit of cheap broadcloth, did Stanley appreciate that he passed muster – true, the boy saw him for what he was, yet still I passed muster. The young ladies who gathered round him, screening out the downs with their pretty gowns, asked after his people, and, as naturally as h’s, r’s and t’s rose up from the close-cropped lawn to mesh with his careful elocutions, the lies fell from his lips: They stopped at Dulwich, his father was in the City. The young ladies laughed, and Stanley laughed with them, grasping in that moment the poisonous quicksilver of their prejudices: that for them this was far, far below, down with the aeronauts and still more sublunary creatures – people in trade and the like. Between raised and brick-lined beds of syringas, hydrangeas and hellebore, Turkish rugs and gold-embroidered cushions with tassels had been carefully arranged, while in garden pavilions he recognised as Ince’s the servants were setting out the buffet: big bloody bowls of rhubarb syllabub, meats quivering in aspic, a naked salmon laid out on its cucumber petticoats. He was offered champagne – but knew better than to accept. They gave him sarsaparilla flavoured with cloves instead, so he took pleasure in this and also the small woolly dogs that got under the ladies’ skirts, then were reborn, yelping. He loitered, listening to the hushed amazement with which the outrages in the West Country were being discussed – some of the young ladies expressed a muted sympathy, the martyrdom of Davison was invoked. Had he been honestly himself, Stanley might have had something to add – but he was not, so did not. He hung about, caught up in the crisp curves of the maids’ white caps and the neat pleats of their snowy aprons. – Later, when cunning panther padding he went in search of the conveniences, he found himself on an upper storey, stuck in beeswax and staring into a linen cupboard through a door half ajar at wicker trays of frilled and freshly laundered linen – pure white linen, underclothes threaded with white, white ribbon, petticoats, shifts, chemises, shirts and still flimsier things. Lavender wafted across these small white meadows, and the desire to romp on them, to bury his sunburned face in those sweetly flowery furrows, was . . . resisted. He found the WC and drained himself – a horsey splatter, the cistern squealed and clanked and gushed and groaned. Adeline asked him about his situation – Willis had introduced her as Missus Adeline Cameron, empee, and she had laughed, Not yet, Fey! which Stanley knew was short for Feydeau, Willis’s nonsensical nickname. Stanley said smiling: I have none. If he had but known it, it was this clumsily done approximation of charm that drew her in, her neck so long and white stretching up to him, with its tresses of dark, dark hair either side of a face . . . some men might’ve found too strong. Come, she said – not unkindly, although it was clear she meant business – let us be frank with one another. And so he was. She heard him out about his dismissal from Ince’s, and before that the Post Office. – My old man . . . he hesitated . . . was with the London General. She quizzed him: A doctor? while knowing full well what he meant. Stanley came clean: No, the ’bus company – but ’e’s left there now, leff London inall. My bruvver found ’em a place down in Devon, where me muvver’s lot’re from. Sincerity had chipped away at his imposture – she affected not to notice. They had somehow managed to set a course away from the other guests, and looking back he saw them all grouped on the stone-flagged terraces that sat below the spreading eaves of the new house. The guests – of whom there were not that many – had, by some application of the laws of motion, loosely arranged themselves into two orbits, one around an elderly body in a bath chair, the other intent on a small boy who was showing them the finer points of his model biplane. Willis touched a wing – Stanley turned back to his hostess, then went where she was looking: beyond the sudden falling away of the lawn to a melting chessboard, cows lying enamelled in the centre of a field-square lashed their tails at flies, clouds dappled the flanks of the downs and on top rain drew a discreet hatching between earth and sky. Boots stamped across Stanley’s recently filled grave – he shivered, also, there was some forcemeat and two cold, cooked potatoes in a deal box on the windowsill . . . off by now. His rent was far beyond being in arrears and they knew he had nothing left to pawn – they might sell the debt on to the boys . . . a second shiver, hair pricking thighs inside these flannel trousers, too hot – yet he was frigid. He dismissed the thought of Arnold Collins and the ways in which he would be beholden if he asked for a little leg-up. There were poppies nodding above the long grass and large dock leaves cast still deeper shadows in the hedges’ shadow, and for Stanley there was a great falling away of the substance from everything – a pair of linnets hung on a bramble that trailed from the hedge, the arms of oaks embraced . . . Then how do you sustain yourself? she asked. He mentioned a modest sum due to him for minuting the proceedings of the discussion group – of his sister and how she had obtained this position for him, as she had the last, he said nothing. Merely to say her name, Or-dree, was to evoke all her energy and so confirm his own moody fatigue. Stanley looked down at his shined brogans spreading on the lawn cow pats, and said: Also . . . I make things – fabricate them. She put her ebonised eyes on him and saw a well-made young man, who, despite the obvious unravelling of reduced circumstances – she could not bring herself to think poverty – nonetheless appeared clean, with a clear complexion and an expression perfectly manly, without slyness . . . Oh, she said, what sort of things? He recovered his other self and said: That would be difficult to explain, it’s easier for me to say what I make them out of – now it’s dowelling and rice paper or butcher’s paper, because these are easy to come by . . . When I was with the umbrella-makers there were always damaged frames and plenty of material offcuts – oiled cottons, art silks, that sort of thing – Oh, and fish glue, but that you can always get . . . None troubled to come across to them, some cried out as they turned towards her house. The maids and menservants hurried to gather up the cushions and roll up the rugs. Adeline remained scrutinising Stanley. Are they like gazeekas or billikens, Mister De’Ath? she asked, and so he realised that, for all her cleverness and aplomb, there were few years between them, for she too had desired these daft toys. He laughed. – No, much bigger than them – when kids see them they want to play with them. I won’t allow it. My models are delicate and airy things, their struts snap, their coverings tear . . . so . . . I won’t allow it . . . She was hatless, and, as the rain swept over them, his first instinct was to hand her his borrowed boater – before he could do so he became enthralled by the exaltation he saw there, her strong features dissolving in the warm droplets. No words were spoken as the car
efully arranged folds of white muslin at her neck greyed into transparency and her clavicle filled a loving cup. Over her drenched shoulder a cattle trough boiled with perfect bubbles – and still they stood. We have, she said amidst all this tumult, an apartment at the Albany. I go up to town from time to time – fairly often, in fact – not simply to visit Selfridge’s and the other bazaars, but also for lectures and committee meetings. You might consider all of this frivolous – a leisured woman’s profligacy with time –. Stanley mewled with the effort of finding the right register of dissent. She paid this no mind: I should be delighted if you would call on me there – say, this coming Tuesday . . . Her dress was saturated, the fabric clinging to her breasts, her belly . . . her thighs. Stanley could not forbear from noticing that there were no stays or lets or hindrances . . . at teatime, by which I mean four thirty. Only then did she put up her parasol. He offered her his arm and under this glossy shell they at last made for the house, slithering over the wet lawn. In Cameron the empee’s own dressing room, Stanley hid behind a screen in his dank shirt. When he peeked out he saw an entire costume had been provided for him: the jacket and trousers mounted on a sort of stand, while some of the snowy linen he had admired was arranged in the shape of a man on a chaise-longue. Stripping naked, he dried himself with a hand towel, thinking of how she must be doing the same between her legs and he spasmed picturing her cunny – there need be no bashfulness for them, not now: she was his own little sister, caught by the rain while playing out, then rubbed down an’ set before the range. Dressing, Stanley saw on top of the chest of drawers soft beige leather gloves, a carved wooden box full of gold and silver cufflinks, some golf tees and silver-backed brushes with their bristles in a clinch. Stanley eyed his own avaricious face warily in a pier glass, for circling the box, tilting the golf tees, lying in the palms of the gloves, were sovereigns and half-sovereigns – for a chap short o’ sugar nuff silverware to provide the wherewithal for a month or more’s diligent loafing – steak and kidney pie, cutlets, white seeded rolls. His mouth filled with his juices, he regretted the brute force of his other hunger: there had been trifle. From below there floated piano notes and the soft beating of the rain on artfully stained panes. The suit was of tweed, heavy and musty with moth-balling – yet it fitted him well enough, belonging as it did, he supposed, to a younger and more meagre empee. In the drawing room, where one of the young ladies continued to play without mercy while the gentlemen hubbubed over premature pegs and the Kaiser’s five million men-in-arms, Stanley was chagrined, despite understanding full well why Adeline was so changed in attitude as well as raiment – she wore an evening gown of vivid purple with an à la mode rounded collar, almost chaste, and she remained closeted in a corner with Willis and the old man in the bath chair, who had, he now saw, the shaking palsy, and who, he deduced – without any evidence – was her father. Stanley had not been introduced to anyone else – he was untutored in the craft of dovetailing into well-established joinery – and so he looked about the room at the Sussex corner chairs and the long refectory tables upon which sat a multitude of vases crowded with a multitude of flowers. Cheerfully, he despised what he saw: the three-quarter-ceiling-height wood-panelling with jut-jawed heroines and heroes buckled into shining armour painted on its individual squares, and above these roughened plaster decorated with still more bloomin’ flowers. So as not to appear Wallie, Wallie, Wall-flowers, Growing up so high – All these young ladies, Will all have to die, he went to stand by the window. They spoke of Bulgaria and certain alliances, and the Irish – it was always, he thought, the fucking Irish. — Land ironclads came rumbling on enormous wheels along the neat vee of a downland valley that cut through the escarpment opposite the house. The rifles poking out from their portholes traversed, dipped, traversed again, then fired. The Maxim at the prow puttered merrily and the bullets whizzed and struck jaunty. More mechanical cavalry came over the brow of the hills, the leading motor cars swivelling about on the muddy ground and hitting, from time to time, small craters in the chalk that sent them temporarily airborne. Beside the drivers in their bluebottle goggles sat the technical assistants all in white, the muzzles of their electrical guns fulminated and a lightning bolt bangcrackled over the lawn, the cypress avenue and the kitchen garden, before capturing the maid with the boil on her chin in its burning tentacles. She jack-knifed, then collapsed stone dead, her skirts up around her waist showin’ all she’s got –. — One day, Stan said to Willis as they mounted the waiting fly, there’ll be sorta air-car that’ll be as easy to drive as this horse – an’ as intelligent. The gamekeeper’s boy sniggered and Willis made a rare quip: Who’ll be in the shafts then, Pegasus? Down the wide flagged steps came the maid with the boil on her chin, resurrected, and with a parcel, dangling from its string, held out in front of her. Your things, sir, she said grudgingly. Stanley thanked her with still less grace, the boy cried nonsense: Heygeddleperway! and the fly swung off along the drive. Stanley swayed to the beat of his predictions: There will be man-made plagues . . . And voyaging to other planets – the scientists will unlock the power of the atom . . . The fly’s wheels slid, then splashed, into the ruts, they held on to it with one hand, to their hats with the other . . . a canal joins Europe to Asia, why not a tunnel linking England with France? The three ducked as one to escape the drenched under-storey of the oaks that tilted in – the sun was out, still puissant enough to raise will-o’-the wisps from the flowery meadows they clopped beside. Willis kept his counsel and Stanley saw human manufactories like the one for motor cars in Philadelphia: a vulcanised belt stretched to a great length, to either side dronish workers taking parts from great zinc buckets, a leg, an arm, another leg and a breast, and another breast and a cunny, as they put together one Adeline, then the next, the female portions twitching in their hardened touch. Stanley had a thru’pence in his borrowed trouser pocket together with? How will it come to pass, he said turning to Willis and finding it difficult to impose any harmony on the top notes of his anger, that that sort’ll be content with so much less? That they’ll give it up, voluntary like, their land, their ’ouses . . . their servants too? The gamekeeper’s boy flicked the horse’s withers with the snake-tongue of leather on the end of his crop and the fly clambered, one wheel after the other, up on to the high road. Willis, who had been fiddling with the end of his tie – neckwear that was irksome to him, favouring as he mostly did a workmanlike neckerchief – turned his beady little eyes on his protégé and took a time to answer. The fly clopped up behind a wagon being pulled by a traction engine, and until it turned aside into a field they were all lost in its chuntering din and bothered by spears of straw flung back in their faces. Presently, Willis said, This business with the Lords and all the reforms of this administration and his previous one – lamentable as it is that they went no further, they are nevertheless a part of a general tendency – another phase of development, if you will. It may not be a, uh, well . . . a flagrant form of expropriation, still, a graduated tax on capital accumulation is precisely that all the same – slowly, one might almost say stealthily, it will carry off their Burne-Joneses and their Japanese fire screens, leaving them, in, uh, vacant possession of their architect-designed houses. You’ve made hnf’-h’ – You’ve made hmn-h’ – Willis whinnied up the scale so-fa-la as he neared an unprecedented second witticism, and Stanley wondered if he was tight – You’ve made a start by re-distrib-utin’ that suit of tweed about your own proletarian person! Hotly, Stanley retorted: I will be returnin’ it at the earliest hopportunity! How could Willis say such things in front of the blabber-boy? All right, all right, Willis said, patting Stanley’s hand, simmer down young man, it’s merely my jest. The best thing about Willis, Stanley reflected as the fly rattled up the cobbled slope towards the station, was that there was no malice or humbug in him – his convictions might be childlike, but he believed in them with a child’s sincere fervour. Their appointed train was already at the platform, hooting to them through its steamy beard. Seated in the secon
d-class compartment, Willis withdrew some long sheets from the portfolio that accompanied him everywhere and explained, It cannot be helped, I must correct these infernal galleys . . . The somniferous compartment could not be helped either – no one got in and there was no connecting corridor. They were as alone as they’d ever been. It wasn’t until they were jolting along the long straight from East Croydon to Balham that Stanley’s hands came to their senses lying in his itchy lap, Jack the Ripper stole a kipper, Jack the Ripper stole a kipper . . . and trembled about there for a while typewriting the cadence of the bogies ch-k’ ch-kunk ch-k’ ch-kunk ch-k’ before one crawled away to a side pocket of his borrowed trousers, where it felt the precise oblong of a visiting card. A crust of dead bugs rimmed the inside of the lampshade above Willis’s nodding head and Stanley applied the methods of a consulting detective to the smudges on the antimacassars – these were cranial impressions, each one instancing a unique pattern of hair tonic or pomade. If only they could be deciphered they would lead him, snuffling, to the culprit: Rothschild! his arm Bill Sikes upraised to another dog – or a dog spliced with a child that howls, then coughs, the Coniston’s catching in its throat, before loping off along an alleyway past a stinking shambles where there are staved-in casks, a shed-on-stilts, and beneath this a pyramid made from horse’s skulls, some flayed entirely except for their twitching ears. The dog-child gives a last despairing hooooooooooooooooowl and is gone into the August-evening quiet of the city that lies splayed there under the dirty orange of its senescent sky.