The Lime Twig: Novel Read online

  If you live long enough with your mother you will learn to cook. Your flesh will know the feel of cabbage leaves, your bare hands will hold everything she eats. Out of the evening paper you will prepare each night your small and tidy wad of cartilage, raw fat, cold and dusty peels and the mouthful—still warm—which she leaves on her plate. And each night as softly as you can, wiping a little blood off the edge of the apron, you will carry your paper bundle down the corridor and into the coldness and falling snow where you will deposit it, soft and square, just under the lid of the landlady’s great pail of slops. Mother wipes her lips with your handkerchief and you set the rest of the kidneys on the sooty and frozen window ledge. You cover the burner with its flowered cloth and put the paring knife, the spoon, the end of bread behind the little row of books. There is a place for the pot in the drawer beside the undervests.

  In one of the alleys off Pinky Road I remember a little boy who wore black stockings, a shirt ripped off the shoulder, a French sailor’s hat with a red pompom. The whipping marks were always fresh on his legs and one cheekbone was blue. A flying goose darkened the mornings in that alley off Pinky Road, the tar buildings were slick with gray goose slime. After the old men and apprentices had left for the high bridges and little shops the place was empty and wet and dead as a lonely dockyard. Then behind the water barrel you could see the boy and his dog.

  Each morning when the steam locomotives began shrieking out of Dreary Station the boy knelt on the stones in the leakage from the barrel and caught the puppy by its jowls and rolled its fur and rubbed its ears between his fingers. Alone with the tar doors dripping and the petrol and horse water drifting down the gutters, the boy would waggle the animal’s fat head, hide its slow shocked eyes in his hands, flop it upright and listen to its heart. His fingers were always feeling the black gums or the soft wormy little legs or quickly freeing and pulling open the eyes so that he, the thin boy, could stare into them. No fields, sunlight, larks—only the stoned alley like a footpath on a quay down which a black ship might come sailing if the wind held, and down beneath the mists coming off the dead steeple-cocks the boy with the poor dog in his arms and loving his close scrutiny of the nicks in its ears, tiny channels over the dog’s brain, pictures he could find on its purple tongue, pearls he could discover between the claws. Love is a long close scrutiny like that. I loved Mother in the same way.

  I see her: it is just before the end; she is old; I see her through the red light of my glass of port. See the yellow hair, the eyes drying up in the comers. She laughs and jerks her head but the mouth is open, and that is what I see through the glass of port: the laughing lips drawn round a stopper of darkness and under the little wax chin a great silver fork with a slice of bleeding meat that rises slowly, slowly, over the dead dimple in the wax, past the sweat under the first lip, up to the level of her eyes so she can take a look at it before she eats. And I wait for the old girl to choke it down.

  But there is a room waiting if you can find it, there is a joke somewhere if you can bring it to your lips. And my landlord, Mr. Banks, is not the sort to evict a man for saying a kind word to his wife or staying in the parlor past ten o’clock. His wife, Margaret, says I was a devoted son.

  Yes, devoted. I remember fifteen years of sleeping, fifteen years of smelling cold shoes in the middle of the night and waiting, wondering whether I smelled smoke down the hallway to the toilet or smelled smoke coming from the parlor that would bum like hay. I think of the whipped boy and his dog abed with him and that’s what devotion is: sleeping with a wet dog beneath your pillow or humming some childish time to your mother the whole night through while waiting for the plaster, the beams, the glass, the kidneys on the sill to catch fire. Margaret’s estimation of my character is correct. Heavy men are most often affectionate. And I, William Hencher, was a large man even then.

  “Don’t worry about it, Hencher,” the captain said. “We’ll carry you out if we have to.” On its cord the bulb was circling round his head, and across the taverns and walls and craters of Dreary Station came the sirens and engines of the night. Sometimes, at the height of it, the captain and his man—an ex-corporal with rotten legs who wore a red beret and was given to fainting in the hall—went out to walk in the streets, and I would watch them go and wait, watch the searchlights fix upon the wounded cherubim like giants caught naked in the sky, until I heard them swearing in the hall again and, from the top of the stair, an unfamiliar voice crying, “Shut the door. Oh, for the love of bleeding Hell, come shut the door.”

  We were so close to the old malevolent station that I could hear the shifting of the sandbags piled round it and could hear the locomotives shattering into bits of iron. And one night wouldn’t a cherubim’s hand or arm or curly head come flying down through our roof? Some dislodged ball of saintly brass palm or muscle or jagged neck find its target in Lily Eastchip’s house? But I wasn’t destined to die with a fat brass finger in my belly.

  To think that Mr. and Mrs. Banks—Michael and Margaret—were only children then, as small and crouching and black-eyed as the boy with the French sailor’s hat and the dog. It is a pity I did not know them then: somehow I would have cared for them.

  Such things don’t want forgetting. When they anchored a barrage balloon over number twenty-eight—how long it was since we had been evicted from that room—and when the loft in Highland Green had burned Ash Wednesday, and during those days when the water would curl a horse’s lip and somebody’s copy of The Vicar of Wakefield was run over by a fire truck outside my door, why then there was plenty of soot and scum the memory could not let go of.

  There was Lily Eastchip with bird feathers round her throat and a dusty rag up the tiny pearl lacing of her sleeve; there was the captain dishonorably mustered from the forces; there was the front of our narrow lodging which the firemen kept hosing down for luck; there was the pink slipper left caught by its heel in the stairway rungs and hanging toe first into the dark of that dry plaster hall. And there were our boxes with broken strings, piled in the hallway and rising toward the slipper, all the cartons I had not the heart to drag to Mother’s room. So I see the pasty corporal—Sparrow was his name—rubbing together the handles of his canes, I see Miss Eastchip serving soup, I see Mother’s dead livid face. And I shall always see the bomber with its bulbous front gunner’s nest flattened over the cistern in the laundry court.

  Margaret remembers none of it and Mr. Banks, her husband, is not a talker. But Miss Eastchip’s brother went down in his spotter’s steeple, tin hat packed red with embers and both feet in the enormous boots burning with a gas-blue flame. Lily got word of it the eve he fell and with the duster hanging down her wrist and the tears on her cheek she looked as if someone had touched a candle to her nightdress in the dark of our teatime. She stood behind the captain’s chair whispering, “That’s the end for me, the end for me,” while the bearer of the news merely sat for a moment, teacup rattling in the saucer and helmet gripped between his knees.

  “Well, sorry to bring distressing information,” the warden had said. “You’d better keep the curtains on good tonight. We’re in for it. I’m afraid.”

  A pale snow was coming down when he passed my window—a black square-shouldered man—and I saw the dark shape of him and the gleam off the silvery whistle caught in his teeth. Somebody laid the cold table, and far-off we heard the first dull boom and breath, as if they had blown out a candle as tall as St. George’s spire.

  “Good night, Hencher. …”

  “Good night, Captain. Mother gave you the salts for Lily, did she?”

  “She did. And—Hencher—if anything uncommon occurs in the night, you can always give me a signal on the pipes.”

  “I’ll just do that, Captain. It’s good of you.”

  Mother got the covers to her chin and, lights off, blackout drawn aside, I sat watching to see the aircraft shoot out the eyes of the cherubim who, beyond sifting snow, and triangulated, now and then, by flooding white shafts of light, hugged each ot
her atop the Dreary Station dome. I held my cheeks. I listened to the old girl’s chamber pot—she had stuffed it with jewelry and glass buttons and an ostrich plume—that rolled about beneath the bed. Missing one front wheel, a tiny tar-painted lorry passed in dreadful crawl and the bare hub of its broken axle screeched and sent off sparks against the stones. And all through that blistering snowy night my hands were drenching the angora white yarn of a tasseled shawl, twisting it like a young girl’s lock of hair.

  When engines shook the night beyond the nymphs and apple leaves in the filigreed shutters of my window, I began suddenly to smell it: not the stench of rafters burning, not the vaporized rubber stench that stayed about the street for days after the hit on the garage of Autorank, Limited, but only a faint live smell of worn carpet or paper or tissue being singed within the lodging house itself. And I fancied it was coming round the edges of my door—the odor of smoke—and I held to the arms of my chair and slowly breathed into my lungs that smoke.

  “Are you awake?” I said.

  She sat up with the nightdress slanting down her flesh.

  “You’d better put your wrapper on, old girl.”

  She sat there startled by the light of a flare that was plainly going to land in old John’s chimney across the way. I could see her game face and I squeezed on the slippers and squeezed the shawl.

  “Don’t you smell the smoke? The house is going up,” I said. “Do you want to bum?”

  “It’s only the kettle, William. …” And she was grinning, one foot was trying to escape the sheet. They were running with buckets across the way at John’s.

  “You look, William, you tell me what it is. …”

  “Out of that bed now, and we’ll just have a look together.”

  Then I pulled open the door and there was the hallway dry and dark as ever, the slipper still hooked on the stair, the one faint bulb swinging round and round on its cord. But our boxes were burning. The bottom of the pile was sunk in flame, hot crabbing flame orange and pale blue in the draft from the door and the sleeve of a coat of mine was crumbling and smoking out of a black pasty hole.

  Mother began to cough and pull at my hand—the smoke was mostly hers and thick, and there is no smudge as black as that from burning velveteen and stays and packets of cheap face powder—and then she cried, “Oh, William, William.” I saw the pile lean and dislodge a clump of cinders while at the same moment I heard a warden tapping on the outside door with his torch and heard him call through the door: “All right in there?”

  I could taste my portion of the smoke; the banging on the door grew louder. Now they were flinging water on old John’s roof, but mother and I were in an empty hall with only our own fire to care about.

  “Can’t you leave off tugging on me, can’t you?” But before I could close my robe she was gone, three or four steps straight into the pile to snatch the stays and an old tortoise-shell fan from out of the fire.

  “Mum!”

  But she pulled, the boxes toppled about her, the flames shot high as the ceiling. While a pink flask of ammonia she had saved for years exploded and hissed with the rest of it.

  From under the pall I heard her voice: “Look here, it’s hardly singed at all, see now? Hardly singed …” Outside footfalls, and then the warden: “Charlie, you’d better give us a hand here, Charlie. …”

  On hands and knees she was trying to crawl back to me, hot sparks from the fire kept settling on her arms and on the thin silk of her gown. One strap was burned through suddenly, fell away, and then a handful of tissue in the bosom caught and, secured by the edging of charred lace, puffed at its luminous peak as if a small forced fire, stoked inside her flesh, had burst a hole through the tender dry surface of my mother’s breast.

  “Give us your shoulder here, Charlie … lend a heave!”

  And even while I grunted and went at her with robe outspread, she tried with one hand to pluck away her bosom’s fire. “Mother,” I shouted, “hold on now, Mother,” and knelt and got the robe round her—mother and son in a single robe—and was slapping the embers and lifting her back toward the bed when I saw the warden’s boot in the door and heard the tooting of his whistle. Then only the sound of dumping sand, water falling, and every few minutes the hurried crash of an ax head into our smothered pile.

  At dawn I returned to the charcoal of the hall and met the captain in corduroy jacket and wearing a gun and holster next his ribs. For a moment we stood looking at the scorch marks on the lath and the high black reach of extinguished flames. The captain ran his toe through the ashes.

  “How is your mother, Hencher? A bit hard on her, wasn’t it?”

  “She won’t say, of course, though the pain must be considerable. …”

  “Well, Hencher,” rattling tin and glass in his pocket, “give me a call on the pipes if it gets worse. I happen to have a needle and a few drops in an ampule can relieve all that.”

  “Oh, she’ll do quite nicely, I’m sure. …”

  But the blisters did not go down. They were small, translucent, membranous and tough all over her body, and no matter how often I dressed them with marge from Lily’s kitchen they retained their bulbous density. And even today I smell them: smell the skin, smell the damp sheets I wrapped her in, smell that room turned infirmary. I smell that house.

  For after a decade it is the same house, a different landlord—Michael Banks now, not poor grieving Lily—but the same house, the one in the middle of Corking Street not five minutes east of the station. Refurbished, an electric buzzer at the door, three flats instead of beds for lodgers, and a spirit shop where John’s house stood—from the peaked garret to the electric buzzer it is the exact same place. I know it well. A lodger is forever going back to the pictures in black bead frames, back to the lost slipper, or forever coming round to pay respects when you think you’ve seen the last of him, or to tell you—stranger as far as you know—that his was the cheek that left the bloody impression in your looking glass. “My old girl died on these premises, Mr. Banks,” looking over his shoulder, feeling the wall, and he had to take me in. And then it was home again for William when I found the comforter with hearts on it across my bed. Now there are orange deck chairs in the laundry court, and sitting out with a sack of beans on my stomach and hearing the sounds of the wireless from Annie’s window, still through half-shut eyes I see the shadow of the bomber that once filled the court.

  Sometimes I wake in the night, very late in the still night, and go sit in the lavatory and run the water and smoke half a thin cigar until there is nothing to feel, nothing to hear except Margaret turning over or the cat pacing my step in the parlor. I see the cherubim safely lit, I wipe my hands, I sleep.

  I waited three weeks before signaling the captain on the pipes, and then I beat at them with my slipper until I threw it across the room and found the warden’s torch in the covers and, after the blow that smashed the glass, fetched the captain with loud strokes on first the hot water pipe and then the cold. Together they came, captain and corporal, while the pipes still shivered up the wall. I looked away when I saw the captain pulling out the plunger.

  “You ain’t going to give my stuff to her?” said Sparrow. “Not to the old woman, are you? I’d sooner you give a jab to this fat man here. …”

  I trembled then.

  “No use giving my stuff to her,” said Sparrow, the corporal.

  And then in the dark: “She’ll do now, Hencher. I’d get a little sleep if I were you.”

  But it was not sleep I wanted. I fastened the robe, tied the white shawl round my throat. “Good night, old girl,” I whispered and went out of the door, flinging an end of the shawl aside flier fashion. It was cold; I walked beneath the black supports and timbers of a burned city, and how often I had made passage through the length of Lily Eastchip’s corridor, carried my neat square of dinner garbage past the parlor when Mother and I first joined that household and ate alone. No garbage now. Only the parlor with pinholes in the curtain across the window and a pil
e of clothing and several candles in the fireplace; only the hallway growing more and more narrow at the end; only the thought that, behind the screen, I had left Mother comfortable and that tonight, this night, I was going to stand bareheaded in the laundry court and breathe, watch the sky, hear what I could of the cries coming from Violet Lane, from the oil-company docks, the Mall. When I found the bolt and pulled it, squeezed out of that black entrance with a hand to my throat, I expected to see the boy dancing with his dog.

  The light snow fell, tracers went straight up from behind the garret that faced me across the court, I noticed a pink reflection in the sky west of the station. The airplanes were bombing Highland Green. I saw the humps of dead geraniums and a wooden case of old stout bottles black and glistening against a shed. I had not moved, I felt the snow wet on my shoulders and on the rims of my ears.

  Large, brown, a lifeless airplane returning, it was one of our own and I saw it suddenly approach out of the snow perhaps a hundred feet above the garret and slow as a child’s kite. Big and blackish-brown with streaks of ice across the nose, which was beginning to rise while the tail sank behind in the snow, it was simply there, enormous and without a trace of smoke, the engines dead and one aileron flapping in the wind. And ceasing to climb, ceasing to move, a vast and ugly shape stalled against the snow up there, the nose dropped and beneath the pilot’s window I saw the figure of a naked woman painted against the bomber’s pebbly surface. Her face was snow, something back of her thigh had sprung a leak and the thigh was sunk in oil. But her hair, her long white head of hair was shrieking in the wind as if the inboard engine was sucking the strands of it.

  Her name was Reggie’s Rose and she was sitting on the black pack of a parachute.

  Dipped, shuddered, banged up and down for a moment—I could see the lifted rudder then, swinging to and fro above the tubular narrowing of its fuselage—and during that slapping glide the thick wings did not fall, no frenzied hand wiped the pilot’s icy windscreen, no tiny torch switched on to prove this final and outrageous landfall. It made no sound, but steepened its glide, then slowed again with a kind of gigantic deranged and stubborn confidence and pushed on, shedding the snow, as if after the tedium of journey there would be a mere settling, rolling to silence, with a drink and hot sandwiches for her crew. And I myself fell down next to Lily Eastchip’s garbage tin, in darkness drove my cheek among the roots of her dead bushes. Through the dressing robe and bedroom silks the heat of my body dissolved the snow. I was wet and waited for the blow of a flying gyroscopic compass or propeller blade.