Shadowplay

by Joseph O'Connor

  10.43 a.m.

  Arrived at the platform, she makes her way through the welcoming committee of scrawny pigeons, and takes the long spiral staircase down for the Underground to Knightsbridge. She doesn’t much care for the Underground but always feels one should use it when up in town, like climbing the Eiffel Tower in Paris or being seduced by a gondolier when in Venice. It’s nothing all that wonderful but the servants love hearing about it.

  In Knightsbridge, she has a strong coffee in the café on Carshalton Street. Statues of the Holy Virgin and St Christopher glare sternly from the shelves, guarding fat bags of rice, boxes of Italian flour, straw-wrapped flasks of wine. An icon of the Sacred Heart, his ripped-open chest, droplets of blood the size of golf balls.

  At a table behind the counter the owner is dozing, head down. His beautiful daughter, Elisabetta, is kneading dough. After a while, her father awakens and, noticing the café’s only current customer, comes forward in greeting, wiping his hands on his apron.

  ‘Ah, bellissima Signora Terry, benvenuto y buon giorno, come stai ?’

  ‘Sto bene, Signor Rusca, grazie tante, e tu ?’

  Thankfully, that is almost all the Italian she knows, apart from bits of Puccini arias like che gelida manina but who in her right mind would speak those in real life? Admittedly, there might arise occasions when one’s tiny hand was frozen but you wouldn’t want to be bloody sung at if so. Especially by a bohemian. Her few words of guidebook Italiano have served her well on her visits to Rusca’s down the years. We get on famously with people whose language we don’t speak. Unhelpful things like nuance and meaning are eliminated. Smiles and gestures of re-enactment are better forms of communication. Eating together is best of all.

  Delicious, Rusca’s coffee, a hint of bitter in the sweetness. Good coffee is not to be had in any establishment she knows about in Kent, and she can no longer bring herself to make the elderly cook grind it, the poor old girl resenting coffee for its foreignness. Tea leaves grown in Ceylon are somehow exempt from such disapproval, acquiring Englishness or acceptability on their voyage towards the motherland, in that respect like Irishmen. Nothing quite as English as a cup of tea, the cook often remarks. Well, yes. But also no.

  Miss Terry has good coffee and a Pall Mall cigarette. The taste of a Day Up in Town.

  Blessed relief to savour a bit of time-not-allotted. To feel the lived grit of the city, the splash of accents against one’s face, the exhilaration of shutters opening and closing like expectations. The plain stillness of the countryside can be so tiring when one isn’t in the mood. Like wanting Beethoven but being forced to endure Morris dancers.

  She watches the motor cars and tradesmen’s vans trundle by, the open top buses on their way towards Hyde Park or Kensington Gardens, upper decks loaded with trippers. One boy waves and doffs his cap as they pass. She waves back and blows him a kiss. Funny little flirt. He’ll be trouble.

  Dr Vasiliev’s waiting room is lined with hunting prints, framed old cartoons, theatre posters, like the lounge of a gentlemen’s club. Pampas grass in tall pots. A drinks tray with heavy crystal goblets. Shelves of exquisitely bound books, from which she chooses a volume of poetry. Overstuffed creaky armchairs, a thousand times more comfortable to sit in than you’d imagine. An ornate brass samovar squats mock-pompously on a sideboard. She is a little early, pours a sherry, settles down to read. Yeats takes her to Sligo, the call of the moorhens, the pale light, the bitterness of the people. The doctor’s girl enters and says he is ready.

  A kindly widower, scholarly, a bust of Montaigne on his desk, often a book of poems or a piano score on the chaise longue in his bay window, through which the tall cedars in the park across the Crescent can be seen. Cedars always make her think of his eyebrows.

  Serious, frown-filled, laconic Dr Vasiliev. Even his habit of sucking cloves, which in someone else would be disconcerting, is forgivable. He has lived in London forty years but there is still the music of Moscow in his voice, not the accent alone, but a velvet melancholy. She congratulates him – ‘mazel tov’ – on the birth of his most recent grandchild, a girl. (‘Ilyana,’ he says, ‘for my mother, may she rest.’) He offers chai, as he always does. She declines, as she always does.

  In the two decades they have known one another she has never taken chai with him but has almost always regretted it on the way home afterwards. Sometimes, thinking about him, she blushes.

  He asks with his eyes. She begins explaining the difficulty.

  Lately she has been forgetful, prone to stumbles, wrong turnings. Misplacing the odd key or pair of spectacles. There was a minor embarrassment a fortnight ago at the post office in Tenterden when she couldn’t remember how many stamps she had set out to buy or in which denominations. She put a letter from her broker in the airing cupboard, a playscript in the sideboard. She neglected to bring a bag of shot when she went out shooting the other day. She has forgotten how many trees are in the apple orchard. There is something else she can’t remember but she remembers she has forgotten it. Really, Dr Vasiliev, it is a bother.

  Being a man, he takes a long time explaining what she already knows, that this sort of little nuisance is not unusual at the age they have both reached, that every chapter of life presents the body with surprises which, even if we have read of them or heard them whispered about by confidantes, we somehow never believe will happen to us. She loves to listen to him talk, the marvellous Russian intonation. (‘I am khepi to see you, my old fryend’) Often, she tries to arrange an appointment on a Wednesday afternoon, for the sheer joy of the number of syllables he puts into ‘Vednyesdei’.

  He is a good man, moves with pleasing slowness, takes her blood pressure, examines her tongue and ears, listens to her heart, asks many questions about her body. It has never ceased to strike her as odd, when one stands away and looks at it, the permission we grant doctors to make enquiries of such intimacy, a licence few would grant even a spouse. There is nothing wrong, he says, as though weighing the word on a scale made of air, but perhaps a blood-tonic might be wise, he could administer a vitamin injection now if she would like. She might make a habit of eating a little more of fresh eggs and red meat. Keep up the daily walking.

  ‘And sleep with weendow open. And exercise your lyeft lyeg. Also a glass of good red wine is now and again not a bad thing at our age, not at all. A good beeg burgundy. For the stomach.’

  As he re-washes his hands and looks in his desk drawer for the syringe, she realises she has forgotten his name.

  Passing the consulting rooms of Nikolai Vasiliev MD, they cross the street to the warmer side and continue towards Chelsea.

  Spring has charged London’s air, tinctured it with that particular fervent sweetness of very old cities in sunlight, but, since his last stroke he feels the cold like a mortal enemy. Even the hottest days have him blanketed and gloved. There are times when he cannot remember what warmth feels like any more, like trying to recollect the eye colour of a first sweetheart and realising you never knew it.

  ‘All right, Pops?’ his son asks.

  ‘In the pink, my Nolly.’

  ‘Want to stop for a wizz or anything?’

  ‘No, lad, push on.’

  He watches the motor cars and tradesmen’s vans trundle by, the open top buses on their way towards Hyde Park or Kensington Gardens, upper decks loaded with trippers. One boy waves and doffs his cap as they pass. Funny little fellow. He’ll be something.

  In Harrods, which is oddly empty, she takes the walking-escalator up to Jewellery, where she has made an appointment to leave in a bracelet for remaking. A gold bangle inset with forty small diamonds and thirty emeralds, it spent ten years in a velvet bag on the floor of a broken wardrobe in the lumber room, under a pile of old programmes and cuttings. Forgot about it, in truth. Cook happened across it last Christmastime, searching for place mats.

  Felt heavy, astonishingly cold to the touch.

  ‘A most fine early Georgian piece,’ says the chief jeweller, admiring it through
his loupe. ‘Might be a pity to dismember it. Madam? The detail is exquisite, one doesn’t see this minuscule craftsmanship any more I’m afraid, one hasn’t in years. In all duty, I must apprise Madam that the value should be significantly lessened by alteration.’

  ‘Oh the style is too old fashioned and, anyway, I never truly liked it. Great bauble of a thing. Like something a pantomime dame would wear.’

  ‘One wouldn’t wish to be impertinent but might Madam perhaps be interested in selling? I could offer four thousand guineas? Or it would fetch a pretty sum at auction?’

  ‘You’re a darling but no, I’d simply like it remade. Could you do it along the lines of this little sketch I’ve brought along for you? It would be a gift for my daughter, Edy.’

  Pleasant, standing beside him while they look over the sketch. He smells faintly of a cathedral in summertime. His cufflinks are tiny portcullises, his tiepin an opal. He rests the tip of his rather splendid pen between his rather splendid teeth. His cow-brown eyes are – there is no other word – dishy when he turns to ask his questions. Manicured fingernails. Good firm knuckles. Touch of brilliantine in the ever-so-slightly greying hair. High-polished shoes. Trouser crease that would cut you.

  Always had a little weakness for a properly turned out chap. Not that there are many of that species in the theatre, God knows. Most of them look as though they slept in a hedge.

  ‘As to the initials engraved on the clasp, Madam? ‘To E from H with love.’ Madam is quite certain she wishes them to be erased?’

  ‘My daughter is also an E, so perhaps you can leave that one. Could you alter the H to an M for Mummie?’

  ‘It would add to the cost.’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘Madam knows what Madam likes. If one might make so bold.’

  Oh, if only you knew, she doesn’t say.

  Afterwards, she wanders a while through the glinting wonderland of Kitchenware and China, buys a silver egg-whisk for Cook and a pretty cotton apron, a pewter tankard for John the groomsman in the shape of a horse’s head. Their birthdays are coming soon; something from Harrods will please and surprise them.

  I note that you didn’t buy anything for me.

  She ignores his gentle teasing. But he persists, like a shadow, following her out of China, past Hosiery, through Gentlemen’s Outfitters and Hunting, scurrying in her wake down the walking-elevator, his laughter somehow ringing from the tills.

  Don’t I deserve a gift, too? You ungenerous old bag.

  ‘I am hardly going to buy a bloody saucepan for a fellow who’s dead.’

  A chauffeur is staring at her. He nods and touches his cap. She realises, alas, that her last remark was spoken aloud.

  The silvered doors are opened to her by a pair of liveried pages and she finds herself in the magical cave that is the Ladies’ Hall of Harrods.

  A trio of harpists strum Strauss to a flock of paper doves. Ceiling-high pyramids of scented soaps, seashell pink, apricot yellow, night-starry blue. An army of lipsticks, standing to attention, scarlets to indigos to mauves to cerise, silver all the way over to black. Jars of rouge and French talc, bath salts and blush. Glass cases of black waxen hands, on which the almond-shaped fingernails have been reddened, or purpled, or greened or gilded, or encrusted with diamanté starbursts. Oils, kohl, henna, lip-glitter, eau de toilette, myrtle leaves, eyeshadow, lip gloss the colour of champagne. Bottles of crème, tubes of unguents, carved urns of shampoo. Powders and puffballs, compacts and lash-combs, brushes of painterly fineness. The chandeliers are Montgolfier, the vast carpet is Persian. They say the wrapping paper is imported from Milan. And the girl-assistants like living sculptures, dark-eyed, all knowing, tight-clothed, metallic, of lionly allure, as the spritzes of parfum incense the air around them and the secrets of pulchritude they guard. If such a thing were possible, it’s like inhaling Tchaikovsky.

  Now the shock of the window shattering, women scream.

  One of the assistants lurches backwards, into a pyramid of beautiful soaps. The shocked girl tries to gather them but it’s impossible, there are too many, they roll from her grasp and bounce off the alabaster staircase, felling a rank of lipsticks and splattering the fine shampoos.

  The assistants hide beneath counters, others run, white with fear. As though pulled by magnetism, she walks to the star-shaped shatter, looks out at the furious street.

  Two policemen dragging a young woman towards a van. She is shouting ‘votes for all!’ They clamp leather-gloved hands over her mouth. Passers-by yell ‘shame’ or ‘prison’s too good’; one elderly Chelsea Pensioner goes to strike her and must be restrained by the constables, who hold him hard by the shoulders while he bawls himself purple. ‘Suffragette scum. It’s a caning you want. And I’ll be the one to give it you! You dirty little Suff. A caning do you hear me, a caning …’

  Miss Terry hurries out. The girl’s nose is bleeding, her dress has been torn. She is trying to look defiant but is weeping with fear, holding closed her tattered dress, trembling like a foal with the staggers. She cannot be more than sixteen.

  Three older women arrive, try to pull her away with them, remonstrating with the policemen and shouting at the girl, as the crowd in the ragged circle grows larger and angrier and the male store-assistants in their elegant suits hurry out looking stunned and a chef on his way to work stops to gape at the drama, a clutch of glinting knives in his belt.

  ‘Constable,’ Miss Terry says. ‘You have made a mistake.’

  ‘I’ll thank you to mind your business, Madam. Go along if you please.’

  ‘I saw the entire incident from first to last. That is not the girl who broke the window.’

  He looks at her measuringly.

  ‘The woman who threw the brick was older,’ she says, ‘by twenty years at least, of paler complexion and with long auburn hair. She was accompanied by another, who was keeping careful watch. They ran away in separate directions. I saw the whole scene from first to last, I tell you. The girl you have seized was passing and is entirely innocent. She may have been shouting slogans but she did not do the damage. I insist you let her go.’

  ‘You’re not … who I think you are?’

  ‘I doubt anyone is that.’

  ‘But I mean to say … Is it … Miss Terry?’

  ‘You are observant, but don’t make a galloptious fuss about it will you, I am going about privately today.’

  ‘You’re quite certain we’re in the wrong?’

  ‘Quite positive. So much so that I am willing to pay for the damage myself. I shall go to the manager and explain to him what happened. I shall of course commend you and your colleagues for your remarkable expeditiousness in the face of such egregious yahooism.’

  One thing poor Bram used to say when talking of the Chief. Confronting authority, one has only two choices: Surrender, or try to confuse it.

  The policeman tugs at his cuffs. ‘Let her go, lads. There’s been a mistake.’

  ‘Thank you, dear constable,’ says Miss Terry.

  As the young woman who threw the brick is hauled away by her raging aunts, her eyes meet those of her protectress. The Chelsea Pensioner is still screaming, being held back by the constables. Cane her. Strip her. Beat her.

  When the woman dies, in a hotel fire, in February 1971, she will remember that morning outside Harrods, when enough became enough, and the underground rivers of flame and defiance bubbled out, and a woman she did not know stepped out of a lynch mob.

  The stern face of mercy.

  The face of solidarity.

  A starburst of broken glass on the pavement.

  It will seem that life was not nothing, that we were not a race of apes and rippers; that there was a reason for remaining in the world.

  J. DOWLING’S CINEMATOGRAPHIC HALL, CALE STREET, CHELSEA

  12.01 p.m.

  ‘Called The Tempest,’ the counter-girl says. ‘Dunno who’s in it.’

  His son pays at the makeshift booth – a couple of halfpennies – and the b
ored-looking Maltese doorman indicates the shoddy curtain at the back of the foyer.

  Once through, they are in a low-ceilinged, airless room that might once have been a rehearsal theatre or the Examinations Hall of a school. Long benches have been fetched in, the windows hung with heavy black drapes, a bedsheet pinned to the wall.

  There is no one else here. A draught raises dust.

  As he waits, he looks around. Never been to this one before.

  He wonders if it will be like the others, if he’ll be able to contain himself before his son.

  The gaslight is extinguished. Two more punters drift in, tramps getting out of the rain.

  As he watches from the darkness, he feels his eyes moisten.

  There is nothing more miraculous. Everything conquerable has been conquered. The stuff of alchemy, of wizardry. Photographs that move.

  A piece of newsreel is shown first. The vast ship, indestructible, terrible, like some dream-vessel from a legend of sea-rulers. The docks of Belfast Harbour. Tiny people waving Union Jacks. She glides with haughty slowness, three of her four funnels smoking but even the smoke looks polished.

  This is the age. Our photographs shall move. Our ships shall not sink. Our hopes have no limits. As the principal film commences, he is touched by the simple elegance of the stage direction that flickeringly appears on the makeshift screen, words written by a man of the London theatre 250 years ago: ‘A tempestuous noise/of thunder and lightning heard.’

  At one time, he would have found himself pondering how best to interpret, to mimic, to blast that noise from the wings. Now, in a silence broken only by the racking coughs of the tramps, he hears it, clear as a gasp.

  Across the wall hurry the drenched captain and his terrified boatswain. You can taste the filth of the waves, feel pitch vomiting from the sky. Wondrous. Impossible. He feels his tears start to spill.

  All the savagery of man, the foolish cruelty of sect, the hypocrisy, the disingenuousness, the turning away from hunger – all of it seems somehow atoned for in this innocence and astonishment. That a beast could make such a wonder. That he would bother to try. That, having made it, he would not keep it for some high Emperor alone, for some sultan of illimitable wealth, with a city made of rubies, but would open his tent of marvels for a halfpenny a time so that even the lowest pauper may be made to grasp that he is not alone, that his planet is not a cold rock spinning heartlessly through nothingness, that a healing is possible, it is only a matter of opening one’s eyes.