Beneath the Earth

by John Boyne

  Or – as they say in Germany – a schleinermetzenmann.

  Empire Tour

  The straining sound of a crane’s jib being extended. The thump of hammers, steel against steel. The shriek of the soldering irons. The insistent pounding of last night’s champagne behind her eyes. Agatha inched her foot back a little in the bed, hoping to make contact with Archie’s leg, but he wasn’t there and the sheets were cool to the touch. A terrible sinking feeling in her stomach. She sat up, turned and examined his pillow, her fingers moving lightly across the satin. It was slightly distressed but not terribly so. Had he come to bed at all? Had he come to bed here?

  She rose, naked, unsteady on her feet, and stepped over towards the window, parting the curtains slightly to look across the harbour. She longed to see the streets of London, the rain spooling in the gaps between the cobblestones, the filth choking the gutters. Instead, over there was the cool blue tide of Sydney Cove as it flowed towards Circular Quay and over here were hundreds of black-smeared workmen engaged on one interminable task: building their terrible bridge.

  It had not been her idea to travel so far from England, that was all down to Archie. She would have preferred to stay at home but everyone in their circle had undertaken an Empire Tour at some point in their lives and they’d never even travelled outside England together. It didn’t look good.

  ‘Isn’t it just for honeymooners?’ she asked him, reluctant to leave their child and her writing for so long. ‘Couldn’t we just take a week by the lakes instead?’

  ‘We couldn’t afford an Empire Tour when we got married,’ he told her. ‘Not on my salary alone. But now? Things are different, aren’t they? Your little books are selling. My business is growing. All that money just sitting in the bank, waiting for someone to do something frivolous with it.’

  ‘But does it really make sense to squander our savings when we’re both perfectly content here in England?’

  ‘You might be content,’ he said, settling down with a cigarette, a gin and tonic and a Dorothy L. Sayers, a novelist he read whenever he was in a passive-aggressive mood. ‘I need some fun.’

  There was nothing she could say to that. She knew that Archie had been bored ever since he left the air force and began working in business, that all-encompassing but ill-defined term. Occasionally she would ask him what it was that he actually did every day and he would reply, ‘Oh, a bit of this, a bit of that, it brings in the shekels, doesn’t it?’ And she had to admit that it did. He was doing quite well for himself now, far better than he ever had when he was a pilot. Although not as well as she. She was, to use a vulgarity that Archie adored, coining it in. And still he was bored. A distance had grown between them.

  She agreed that they might take six months abroad, a prospect she dreaded, and Rosalind was duly sent to stay with Clara, Agatha’s mother, with very little fuss on either of their parts. They sailed to Calais and took the Orient Express to Venice, where they argued for a week. Archie complained of how the Italians insisted on speaking Italian, while Agatha, forgetting a wide-brimmed hat one afternoon, suffered a sunburn on her shoulders and had her purse stolen in the Piazza San Marco. They were glad to move on, continuing east to Athens, then a ship to Egypt, a cruise along the Nile and a train journey across Mesopotamia. To her surprise, Agatha had liked all these places, with their welcoming people, unfamiliar languages and colourful bazaars. She bought a set of notebooks and started to write down the sights and sounds that she observed, thinking that one day she might be able to use some of them in a novel. Might her detective not find himself sailing down the Nile one day too? And if so, might a murder not take place for him to investigate? The boat that she and Archie sailed on held an eclectic group of people and she overheard many intriguing conversations. Characters were appearing in her head in search of a story, like guests arriving at a party where they only vaguely knew the host.

  She longed to be at home where she could concentrate.

  Asia did not prove quite so much of a success. Pakistan, India, Burma, Siam: these places excited Archie but frightened her. There were so many people. Animals on the streets, the pink-tongued dogs walking with their heads bowed low, copulating in public. Children with missing limbs, enormous eyes staring at her in pitiful desperation. Men and women emptying their bowels in narrow laneways. And the heat, the heat, the heat. Always the heat. At times she felt something approaching terror.

  In the East Indies, they stayed with Major Blenchley, an old school friend of Archie’s, in a tumbledown, sprawling shack that had pretensions to respectability. Archie and the Major spent most of their days big-game shooting, leaving Agatha and the Major’s wife, Norma, together on the porch, struggling to make small talk. Norma was a wisp of a thing, lacking any confidence whatsoever, living in fear of her bloated brute of a husband whose bulbous nose was capillaried with red veins. She confided in Agatha how she had suffered eight miscarriages over eight years and seemed overly interested in Rosalind, asking questions that all seemed to have one subtext: how could you leave her?

  There were other women there too, native women, and Agatha observed moments between the Major and several of their number that bordered on the scandalous. Seated alone with a book in their stifling lounge one afternoon she overheard him in the porch telling his man-servant that Archie had married an ugly woman with a fine body while he had married a beautiful woman with a terrible body and so they were both miserable with their lot. ‘Mrs Blenchley’s face with Mrs Christie’s body,’ he said laughing, ‘that’s what I want,’ and the manservant laughed along saying, ‘Yes, Sahib, quite right, Sahib, very funny, Sahib.’ She had been very happy to leave.

  And then it was on to Australia.

  They arrived in Perth and, although everyone knew that Australians were brutes, she almost felt as if she was among civilized people again. But the further she got from home, the more depressed she grew. Still, the people were friendly, too friendly she thought at times, and couldn’t suffer any class distinction, unlike the Indians, who resented their British overlords but seemed to venerate them at the same time.

  Archie had some connection with the brother of the Governor-General, who took them for a day trip around King’s Park, where they picnicked in sight of the Swan. The menthol scent of the eucalyptus trees in their nostrils led to an unsuccessful hunt for sleeping koalas. The brother, whose name was Greene, flirted with Agatha so much that she rather enjoyed it, particularly since this Greene fellow was young and handsome and some sort of local celebrity for his abilities on the tennis court. Throughout their back and forth, she glanced at Archie, wondering whether he was annoyed by her flirting, but he seemed scarcely to notice, so intent was he in talking to Greene’s sister, Charlotte, who had come along to make up a foursome and was of equally good stock as her beautiful brother.

  ‘Archie,’ said Agatha at one point. ‘Mr Greene says he should like to take me dancing some night. Can you bear a scandal?’ She smiled at him, uncertain what response she was hoping to elicit.

  ‘Sounds like a fine idea, my dear,’ he replied. ‘But only if Greene allows me to take the same liberty with his sister. What do you say, Miss Greene? Would you care to go dancing with a retired pilot some night?’

  ‘I don’t see what the fact that you used to be a pilot has to do with anything,’ said Agatha.

  ‘Don’t you fly any more then?’ asked Miss Greene who, in Agatha’s opinion, was a trollop. The manner in which she had painted her face and her fingernails and toenails testified to that; the woman was little more than a canvas with breasts.

  ‘Oh, I try to make it into the skies whenever I can,’ said Archie, leaning back on an elbow in an insouciant manner and saying this as if most people jumped into a cockpit and flew a few thousand feet in the air whenever they felt the slightest urge. ‘But it’s difficult, you know. Time presses terribly. My work commitments keep me awfully busy.’

  ‘What is it that you do exactly, Mr Christie?’

  ‘I’m in business
.’

  ‘Which means what?’

  ‘That’s what I’d like to know,’ said Agatha, interrupting her. ‘Men use the term “business” as a catch-all for everything, don’t you find? We women don’t know what they get up to.’

  ‘I don’t find that at all, actually,’ replied Miss Greene, picking a piece of tobacco from between her two front teeth and examining the flake before flicking it away. She smoked malodorous concoctions that she rolled between thin papers. The woman was vulgarity personified. ‘Most men of my acquaintance who engage in business have a very clear way of expressing what they do.’

  ‘I shouldn’t like to bore you,’ said Archie.

  ‘I’d walk away if you did.’

  ‘Look here, Agatha,’ said Greene, laughing and shaking his head. ‘You want to mind your house. My sister here has a habit of running off with married men.’

  ‘Only if they’ve got one foot out the door already,’ said Miss Greene, slapping him on the arm. ‘Don’t listen to a word he says, Agatha. Aren’t brothers awful? Do you have a brother?’

  ‘One,’ said Agatha. ‘Monty.’

  ‘He’s a drunk,’ added Archie in a distracted tone as he rooted in the picnic basket for another snack. Agatha stared at him, appalled that he would make such a remark in front of strangers.

  ‘I like a man who’s a drunk,’ said Miss Greene. ‘I knew a chap once, teetotal, and he was a frightful bore. The advantage of a drunk is that he’s always looking for fun. Not to mention the fact that he never gets out of bed until the middle of the afternoon, which is an advantage for me as I can’t bear to be spoken to before noon.’

  ‘And how would you know what time any man gets out of bed?’ asked Archie with a smile.

  ‘I have my ways.’

  ‘I’m sure you do.’

  ‘Isn’t it warm?’ asked Agatha.

  ‘Men are frightful sloths, of course. They’d spend all day in bed if they could. They’d only rise at cocktail hour to put on their evening wear and go out on a seduction.’

  ‘You have a low opinion of us, I think, Miss Greene,’ said Archie.

  ‘I do, it’s true,’ she replied, considering it. ‘I should be more like my friend Miss Jameson. She has cut men out of her life entirely and seems all the happier for it.’

  ‘Did she cut them out or did they never cut her in?’ he asked. ‘Miss Jameson sounds to me like an ugly girl with a crooked eye and a hump.’

  ‘Quite wrong there, old chap,’ said Greene, sitting up. ‘She’s a beauty. Everyone used to be mad about her. It seems that her tastes lie elsewhere though.’

  ‘Elsewhere? How do you mean?’

  ‘Think about it,’ replied Greene quietly, a smirk spreading across his face.

  ‘You don’t mean that she’s a deviant?’ asked Archie, his eyes opening wide.

  ‘Yes, I suppose I do.’

  ‘How intriguing. I’d love to meet her. We met a deviant at a party once in London, didn’t we, Agatha? Awful creature. Smelled like the dead. Wore trousers. I thought they were all like that but from the sounds of things I’ve got it wrong. Perhaps they’re different in Australia. What do you think, Agatha? Would you like to meet this Miss Jameson?’

  Agatha looked away and said nothing. She longed to be away from Greene and his horrible sister and this terrible park and their awful conversation. She wanted to be back in her hotel room; she wanted Archie to look at her in such a way that said that he wanted that too.

  ‘I’m growing tired,’ she said finally. ‘Shall we go back soon, Archie?’

  ‘Not quite yet,’ he replied.

  An argument ensued that night. The trip to Perth was cut short and they took an ocean liner across the Great Australian Bight, docking for a few days at Nullarbor National Park before moving on to Adelaide, where Agatha attended a recital alone, before agreeing to a week in Tasmania, where they stayed at a rather nice hotel in Hobart. There, a reconciliation of sorts took place over excellent fish suppers. But of course they knew no one in Hobart and there was no society whatsoever, so they could rub along as if it was old times. It was not a large city and every day they woke late before making their way to the harbour for lunch and a stroll around the parks, settling down in a quiet spot to read or snooze the afternoon away. They made love once in the shade of some trees, scandalous behaviour, but Archie had been in the mood and Agatha didn’t want to say no; she’d longed for his touch for so long but there, beneath the Mountain Ash of the Queen’s Domain, she felt only a self-conscious terror, certain that a park ranger might appear to arrest them. Still, there was a sense of the idyllic about the island and she began to wonder whether the problems in their marriage might not be disappearing.

  But then came New South Wales.

  They had been here a week already and, although Agatha had tried to keep the spirit of Tasmania alive, the distance between her and Archie had grown once again.

  He knew someone in Sydney too, of course, and it was at a party at the chap’s house that they had first encountered Mrs Crossley, a widowed neighbour. ‘Too young to have buried a husband,’ his friend remarked when he pointed her out across the room.

  ‘And too beautiful not to have found another,’ replied Archie, staring at her as if she was the only thing of value in the room, despite the fact that his own wife was standing next to him.

  Mrs Crossley was not a flirt, not in the same way that Miss Greene of Perth had been, but she clearly enjoyed the attentions of men and knew that she could reel them in and make them entirely hers before deciding whether she wanted to set them free again or keep a tight hold. Agatha watched as most of the men present attempted to make their way with her, and how she would allow it for a time, smiling, engaging in conversation, locking her eyes with theirs to imply that, yes, she just might, if the moment came along, before transferring her attentions to someone else.

  ‘You seemed to get along very well with Mrs Crossley tonight,’ Agatha remarked as they changed for bed later that evening.

  ‘Mrs Crossley?’ asked Archie, furrowing his brow as if he was trying to remember exactly who she was, a display of such amateur theatricality that Agatha felt embarrassed for him. ‘Yes, she seemed pleasant enough. Handsome woman, isn’t she?’

  ‘If you like that sort of thing,’ said Agatha.

  ‘I imagine that most men would like that sort of thing,’ said Archie. ‘Most unmarried men, that is,’ he added, correcting himself and looking across at his wife with a smile. She smiled back, for that was all it took to restore him to her good graces. The truth was that she loved him in a way that she had never thought possible. And it never subsided, never diminished, never scarred. Despite the way he treated her.

  They stayed in Sydney longer than originally planned, taking a small apartment at Milson’s Point where Mrs Crossley became a regular visitor. At first, she came on the pretext of seeing Agatha but gradually it became clear that she was hoping to run into Archie, and Archie would remain at home waiting to see her too. And so they would sit, the three of them on their balcony, drinking freshly made lemonade and watching the workers on the ground below building their bridge.

  ‘What do you think of it anyway?’ asked Archie, nodding in the direction of the plot of land that had been cleared to take the foundations.

  ‘It’s much needed,’ said Mrs Crossley. ‘For any of us living on this side of the water, the crossing is a nightmare. The ferries are always overcrowded and of course they’ll let absolutely anybody on. No, I shall be very happy when it’s finished. Although it will take years, no doubt, and I will be in my dotage by the time I can cross it for the first time.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Archie, laughing and shaking his head. ‘A woman like you should never grow old.’

  ‘What on earth does that mean?’ asked Agatha irritably. ‘How could she not grow old? And what type of woman should grow old, since you are deciding upon this re-order of nature?’

  ‘Steady on, old girl,’ said Archie, blushing slightly.
‘It was only a joke.’

  Shortly after this, Mrs Crossley had stopped coming to visit. There had been no argument, no falling-out, no incident that merited a cooling of the air; she had simply stopped calling. And despite the fact that Agatha had no desire whatsoever to spend time with her, she continued to send invitations but these came back with polite refusals.

  Agatha liked to wander the streets of the Rocks in the afternoons, enjoying the narrow laneways with their ramshackle shops and tightly packed workers’ houses. One afternoon, a burst of heat and a near-fainting spell led her through the open frontage of a public house, self-conscious but desperate for something that might cool her down. The sign said ‘Fortune of War’ and inside, away from the sun, her confidence grew and she stood at the bar, looked the man in the eye and ordered a schooner of pale Australian beer. Taking it into the half-empty backroom, she engaged in some people-watching: a young couple, sitting close together and whispering confidences; a middle-aged man, unshaven and wearing a distressed expression, seated beneath the ANZAC sign; a woman going through the local newspaper and circling a page bearing the headline ‘Honest Girls Wanted’.

  A noise from the bar made her glance outside and she saw a group of six young men, Aborigines, laughing loudly with the barman as he placed beers on the counter before them all. They were bridge workers; Agatha could tell from the way they were dressed. She watched them carefully, the ease they took in each other’s company, the way they threw their heads back and laughed. Her eyes settled on a young man of about twenty whose shirt was open halfway down his chest. She could see the curve of his musculature and felt a desire to touch that dark skin, to feel the smooth tautness of it. Her eyelids fluttered a little as an image came to her mind – her lips against the boy’s bare brown breast – and she swallowed as he turned to look at her, his eyes a fierce blue, his nose fleshy at the nostrils, his tongue pink as it emerged from his mouth and gathered the beer suds from his upper lip in a slow sensual gesture. Unsteady on her feet, she rose, leaving her drink unfinished, and walked towards him; in the narrow space between the front and back bar he stepped aside to let her pass. Her shoes slipped on a spillage and she almost collided with him, their bodies close together for a moment as she looked in his face. He smelled awful and wonderful. The man beneath the ANZAC sign watched them, ready to pounce. ‘Steady, missus,’ said the young Aborigine, and she felt a shiver run through her body as she moved forward, back out on to the street, where the heat overtook her again. She thought she might tear her clothes off and run naked down George Street, screaming in delight. But, of course, she didn’t.