The Lime Twig: Novel Page 3

  Or to be brushed to death by a wing, caught beneath cold tons of the central fuselage, or surely sprayed by petrol and burned alive: tasting those hard white rubber roots I wondered whether the warden and his friend Charlie would hear the crash. And tightening, biting to the sour heart of the root, I saw the bomber in its first shapeless immensity and thought I could hold it off—monstrous, spread-winged, shadowy—hold it off with my outstretched arms eternally or at least until I should escape by Lily’s door.

  The warden must have heard the crash. His Charlie must have heard the crash.

  Something small and round struck suddenly against my side. When again I made out the sounds from the far corner—the steady firing of the guns—I breathed, rolled, sat with my back to the wall. My fingers found the painful missile, only a hard tuft of wool blown loose from inside a pilot’s boot or torn from the shaggy collar of his flying coat. The snow was falling, still the sky was pink from the bombing of Highland Green. But no whistles, no wardens running: a single window smashed on the other side of the court and a woman began shrieking for her husband. And again there was only silence and my belly trembling.

  I took one step, another. Then there were the high dark sides of the intact bomber and the snow was melting on the iron. I reached the first three-bladed propeller—the two bottom sweeps of steel were doubled beneath the cowling—and for a moment I leaned against it and it was like touching your red cheek to a stranded whale’s fluke when, in all your coastal graveyard, there was no witness, no one to see. I walked round the bubble of the nose—that small dome set on edge with a great crack down the middle—and stood beneath the artistry of Reggie’s Rose. Her leg was long, she sat on her parachute with one knee raised. In the knee cap was a half-moon hole for a man’s boot, above it another, and then a hand grip just under the pilot’s door. So I climbed up poor Rose, the airman’s dream and big as one of the cherubim, and snatched at the high door which, sealed in the flight’s vacuum, sucked against its fitting of rust and rubber and sprang open.

  I should have had a visored cap, leather coat, gauntlets. But, glancing once at the ground, poised in the snow over Rose’s hair, I tugged, entered head first the forward cabin.

  The cabin roof as well as the front gunner’s dome was cracked and a little snow fell steadily between the seats. In the dark I sat with my hands on the half wheel and slippers resting on the jammed pedals, my head turning to see the handles, rows of knobs, dials with needles all set at zero, boxes and buttons and toggle switches and loop of wire and insulated rings coming down from the roof. In this space I smelled resin and grease and lacquer and something fatty that made me groan.

  I tried to work the pedals, turn the wheel. I could not breathe. When suddenly from a hook between two cylinders next to my right hand I saw a palm-shaped cone of steel and took it up, held it before my face—a metal kidney trimmed round the edges with a strip of fur—I looked at it, then lowered my head and pressed my nose and mouth into its drawn cup. My breath came free. The inhalation was pure and deep and sweet. I smelled tobacco and a cheap wine, was breathing out of the pilot’s lungs.

  Cold up here. Cold up here. Give a kiss to Rose.

  Surely it was Reggie’s breath—the tobacco he had got in an Egyptian NAAFI, his cheap wine—frozen on the slanting translucent glass of the forward cabin’s windows. Layer overlapping icy layer of Reggie’s breath. And I clapped the mask back on its hook, turned a wheel on the cylinder. Leaning far over, sweating, I thrust my hands down and pushed them back along the aluminum trough of floor and found the bottle. Then I found something else, something cool and round to the skin, something that had rested there behind my heels all this while. I set the bottle on top of the wireless box—I heard the sounds of some strange brass anthem coming from the earphones—and reached for that black round shape, carefully and painfully lifted it and cradled it in my lap.

  The top of the flying helmet was a perfect dome. Hard, black, slippery. And the flaps were large. On the surface all the leather of that helmet was soft—if you rubbed it—and yet bone hard and firm beneath the hand’s polishing. There were holes for wire plugs, bands for the elastic of a pair of goggles, some sort of worn insignia on the front. A heavy wet leather helmet large enough for me. I ran my fingernail across the insignia, picked at a blemish, and suddenly I leaned forward, turned the helmet over, looked inside. Then I lifted the helmet, gripped it steadily at arm’s length—I was sitting upright now, upright and staring at the polished thing I held—and slowly raised it high and twisting it, hitching it down from side to side, settled the helmet securely on my own smooth head. I extended my hands again and took the wheel.

  “How’s the fit, old girl?” I whispered. “A pretty good fit, old girl?” And I turned my head as far to the right as I was able, so that she might see how I—William Hencher—looked with my bloody coronet in place at last.

  Give a kiss to Rose.

  Between 3 and 4 A.M. on the night she died—so many years ago—that’s when I set out walking with my great black coat that made the small children laugh, walking alone or sometimes joining the crowds and waiting under the echoes of the dome and amid the girders and shattered skylight of Dreary Station to see another trainload of our troops return. So many years ago. And I had my dreams; I had my years of walking to the cathedral in the moonlight.

  “My old girl died on these premises, Mr. Banks.”

  And then all the years were gone and I recognized that house, that hall, despite the paint and plaster and the cheap red carpet they had tacked on the parlor floor. I paid him in advance, I did, and he put the money in his trouser pocket while Margaret went to lift their awkward sign out of the window. Fresh paint, fresh window glass, new floorboards here and there: to think of the place not gutted after all but still standing, the house lived in now by those with hardly a recollection of the nightly fires. Cheery, new, her dresses in one of the closets and his hat by the door. But one of his four rooms was mine, surely mine, and I knew I’d smell the old dead odor of smoke if only I pushed my face close enough to those shabby walls.

  Here’s home, old girl, here’s home.

  So I spent my first long night in the renovated room, and I dared not spend that night in the lavatory but smoked my cigars in bed. Sitting up in bed, smoking, thinking of my mother all night long. And then there was the second night and I ventured into the hallway. There was the third night and in the darkened cubicle I listened to the far bells counting two, three, four o’clock in the morning and all that time—thinking now of comfort, tranquillity, and thinking also of their two clasped hands—I wondered what I might do for them. The bells were slow in counting, the water dripped. And suddenly it was quite clear what I could do for them, for Michael and his wife.

  I hooked the lavatory door. Then I filled the porcelain sink, and in darkness smelling of lavender and greasy razor blades I immersed my hands up to the wrists, soaked them silently. I dried them on a stiff towel, pushing the towel between my fingers again and again. I wiped the top of my head until it burned. Then I used his talc, showed my teeth in the glass, straightened the robe. I took up the pink-shelled hair brush for a moment but replaced it. And off to the kitchen and then on boards that made tiny sounds, walking with a heavy man’s sore steps, noticing a single lighted window across the court.

  It grew cold and before dawn I left the kitchen once: only to pull the comforter off my bed. Again in the kitchen and on Margaret’s wooden stool I sat with the comforter hooded round my head and shoulders, sat waiting for the dawn to come fishing up across the chimney pots and across that dirty gable in the apex of which a weathered muse’s face was carved. When I heard the dog barking in the flat upstairs, when water started running in the pipes behind the wall, and a few river gulls with icy feathers hovered outside the window, and light from a sun the color of some guardsman’s breast warmed my hooded head and arms and knees—why then I got off the stool, began to move about. Wine for the eggs, two pieces of buttered toast, two fried strip
s of mackerel, a teapot small as an infant’s head and made of iron and boiling—it was a tasteful tray, in one comer decorated with a few pinched violet buds I tore from the plant that has always grown on Margaret’s window shelf. I looked round, made certain the jets were off, thought to include a saucer of red jam, covered the hot salted portions with folded table napkins. Then I listened. I heard nothing but the iron clock beating next to the stove and a boot landing near the dog upstairs.

  The door was off the latch and they were sleeping. I turned and touched it with my hip, my elbow, touched it with only a murmur. And it swung away on smooth hinges while I watched and listened until it came up sharply against the corner of a little cane chair. They lay beneath a single sheet and a single sand-colored blanket, and I saw that on his thin icy cheeks Banks had grown a beard in the night and that Margaret—the eyelids defined the eyes, her lips were dry and brown and puffy—had been dreaming of a nice picnic in narrow St. George’s Park behind the station. Behind each silent face was the dream that would collect slack shadows and tissues and muscles into some first mood for the day. Could I not blow smiles onto their nameless lips, could I not force apart those lips with kissing? One of the gulls came round from the kitchen and started beating the glass.

  “Here’s breakfast,” I said, and pushed my knees against the footboard.

  For a moment the vague restless dreams merely went faster beneath those two faces. Then stopped suddenly, quite fixed in pain. Then both at once they opened their eyes and Banks’ were opalescent, quick, the eyes of a boy, and Margaret’s eyes were brown.

  “It’s five and twenty past six,” I said. “Take the tray now, one of you. Tea’s getting cold. …”

  Banks sat up and smiled. He was wearing an undervest, his arms were naked and he stretched them toward me. “You’re not a bad sort, Hencher,” he said. “Give us the tray!”

  “Oh, Mr. Hencher,” I heard the warm voice, the slow sounds in her mouth, “you shouldn’t have gone to the trouble. …”

  It was a small trouble. And not long after—a month or a fortnight perhaps—I urged them to take a picnic, not to the sooty park behind the station but farther away, farther away to Landingfield Battery, where they could sit under a dead tree and hold their poor hands. And while they were gone I prowled through the flat, softened my heart of introspection: I found her small tube of cosmetic for the lips and, in the lavatory, drew a red circle with it round each of my eyes. I had their bed to myself while they were gone. They came home laughing and brought a postal card of an old pocked cannon for me.

  It was the devil getting the lipstick off.

  But red circles, giving your landlord’s bed a try, keeping his flat to yourself for a day—a man must take possession of a place if it is to be a home for the waiting out of dreams. So we lead our lives, keep our privacy in Dreary Station, spend our days grubbing at the rubber roots, pausing at each other’s doors. I still fix them breakfast now and again and the cherubim are still my monument. I have my billet, my memories. How permanent some transients are at last. In a stall in Dreary Station there is a fellow with vocal cords damaged during the fire who sells me chocolates, and I like to talk to him; sometimes I come across a gagger lying out cold in the snow, and for him I have a word; I like to talk to all the unanswering children of Dreary Station. But home is best.

  I hear Michael in the bath, I whet Margaret’s knives. Or it is 3 or 4 A.M. and I turn the key, turn the knob, avoid the empty goldfish bowl that catches the glitter off the street, feel the skin of my shoes going down the hallway to their door. I stand whispering our history before that door and slowly, so slowly, I step behind the screen in my own dark room and then, on the edge of the bed and sighing, start peeling the elastic sleeves off my thighs. I hold my head awhile and then I rub my thighs until the sleep goes out of them and the blood returns. In my own dark room I hear a little bird trying to sing on the ledge where the kidneys used to freeze.

  Smooth the pillow, pull down the sheets for me. Thinking of Reggie and the rest of them, can I help but smile?

  I can get along without you, Mother.

  1

  SIDNEY SLYTER SAYS

  Happy Throngs Arrive at Aldington for Golden Bowl …

  Mystery Horse to Run in Classic Race …

  Rock Castle: Dark Horse or Foul Play?

  Gray toppers, gray gloves and polished walking sticks; elegant ladies and smart young girls; fellows in fedoras, and mothers, and wives—all your Cheapside crowd along with your own Sidney Slyter, naturally. Pure life is the only phrase that will do, life’s pure anticipation. … So you won’t want to show up here without a flower in your buttonhole, I can tell you that. … The horses are lovely. Sidney Slyter’s choice? Marlowe’s Pippet without a doubt—to win (I took a few pints last night with a young woman, a delightful Mrs. Sybilline Laval, who said that Candy Stripe looked very good. But you’ll agree with Slyter. He knows his horses, eh?) … A puzzling late entry is Rock Castle, owned by one Mr. Michael Banks. But more of this …

  It is Wednesday dawn. Margaret’s day, once every fortnight, for shopping and looking in the windows. She is off already with mints in her pocket and a great empty crocheted bag on her arm, jacket pulled down nicely on her hips and a fresh tape on her injured finger. She smells of rose water and the dust that is always gathering in the four rooms. In one of the shops she will hold a plain dress against the length of her body, then return it to the racks; at a stand near the bridge she will buy him—Michael Banks—a tin of fifty, and for Hencher she will buy three cigars. She will ride the double-decker, look at dolls behind a glass, have a sandwich. And come home at last with a packet of cold fish in the bag.

  Most Wednesdays—let her stay, let her walk out— Michael does not care, does not hold his breath, never listens for the soft voice that calls good-by. But this is no usual Wednesday dawn and he slips from room to room until she is finally gone. In front of the glass fixes his coat and hat, and smiles. For he intends not to be home when she returns.

  Now he is standing next to their bed—the bed of ordinary down and ticking and body scent, with the course of dreams mapped on the coverlet—and not beside the door and not in the hall. Ready for street, departure, for some prearranged activity, he nonetheless is immobile this moment and stares at the bed. His gold tooth is warm in the sun, his rotting tooth begins to pain. From out the window the darting of a black tiny bird makes him wish for its sound. He would like to hear it or would like to hear sounds of a wireless through the open door or sounds of tugs and double-deckers and boys crying the news. Perhaps the smashing of a piece of furniture. Anything. Because he too has his day to discover and it is more than pretty dresses and gandering at a shiny steam iron and taking a quick cup of tea.

  He can tell the world.

  But in the silence of the flat’s close and ordinary little bedroom he hears again all the soft timid sounds she made before setting off to market: the fall of the slippery soap bar into the empty tub, the limpid sound of her running bath, the slough of three fingers in the cream pot, the cry of bristles against her teeth, the fuzzy sound of straps drawing up on the skin of her shoulders; poor sounds of her counting out the change, click of the pocket-book. Then sounds of a safety pin closing beneath the lifted skirt and of the comb setting up last-minute static in the single wave of her hair.

  He pulls at the clothes-closet door. He steps inside and embraces two hanging and scratchy dresses and her winter coat pinned over with bits of tissue. Something on a hook knocks his hat awry. Behind him, in the room, the sunlight has burned past the chimes in St. George’s belfry and is now more than a searching shaft in that room: it comes diffused and hot through the window glass, it lights the dry putty-colored walls and ceiling, draws a steam from the damp lath behind the plaster, warms the small unpainted tin clock which she always leaves secreted and ticking under the pillow on her side of the bed. A good early-morning sun, good for the cat or for the humming housewife. But the cat is in the other room and his
wife is out.

  Inside the closet he is rummaging overhead to a shelf —reaching and pushing among the dresses now, invading anew and for himself this hiding place which he expects to keep from her. He stands on tiptoe, an arm is angular at the crook, his unused hand is dragging one of the dresses off its hanger by the shoulder; but the other set of high fingers is pushing, working a way through the dusty folds toward what he knows is resting behind the duster and pail near the wall. His hipbone strikes the thin paneling of the door so that it squeaks and swings outward, casting a perfect black shadow across the foot of the bed. And after a moment he steps out into the room, turns sideways, uncorks the bottle, tilts it up, and puts the hot mouth of the bottle to his lips. He drinks— until the queer mechanism of his throat can pass no more and his lips stop sucking and a little of it spills down his chin. Upstairs a breakfast kettle begins to shriek. He takes a step, holds the bottle against his breast, suddenly turns his face straight to the sun.

  She’ll wonder about me. She’ll wonder where her hubby’s at, rightly enough.

  He left the flat door open. Throughout the day, whenever anyone moved inside the building, slammed a window or shouted a few words down the unlighted stair— “Why don’t you leave off it? Why don’t you just leave off it, you with your bloody kissing round the gas works”—the open door swung a hand’s length to and fro, drifted its desolate and careless small arc in a house of shadow and brief argument. But no one took notice of the door, no one entered the four empty rooms beyond it, and only the abandoned cat followed with its turning head each swing of the door. Until at the end of the day Margaret came in smiling, walked the length of the hall with a felt hat over one ear, feet hot, market sack pulling from the straps in her hand and, stopping short, discovered the waiting animal in the door’s crack. Stopped, backed off, went for help from a second-floor neighbor who had a heart large with comfort and all the cheer in the world, went for help as he knew she would.