The Lime Twig: Novel Read online

  An engine was nearby suddenly, and despite the fog he knew that it was not Hencher’s lorry but was the river barge approaching on the lifting tide. And he was alone, shivering, helpless to give a signal. He had no torch, no packet of matches. No one trusted a man’s voice in a fog.

  All the bells and whistles in mid-river were going at once, and hearing the tones change, the strokes change, listening to the metallic or compressed-air sounds of sloops or ocean-going vessels protesting their identities and their vague shifting locations on the whole of this treacherous and fog-bound river’s surface—a horrible noise, a confused warning, a frightening celebration—he knew that only his own barge, of all this night’s drifting or anchored traffic, would come without lights and making no sound except for the soft and faltering sound of the engine itself. This he heard—surely someone was tinkering with it, nursing it, trying to stop the loss of oil with a bare hand—and each moment he waited for even these illicit sounds to go dead. But in the fog the barge engine was turning over and, all at once, a man out there cleared his throat.

  So he stood away from the packing crate and slowly went down to his hands and knees and discovered that he could see a little distance now, and began to crawl. He feared that the rats would get his hands; he ran his fingers round the crumbling edges of the holes; his creeping knee came down on fragments of a smashed bottle. There was an entire white sea-world Boating and swirling in that enormous open door, and he crawled out to it.

  “You couldn’t do nothing about the bleeding fog!”

  He had crossed the width of the quay, had got a grip on the iron joint of the boom and was trying to rise when the voice spoke up directly beneath him and he knew that if he fell it would not be into the greasy and squid-blackened water but onto the deck of the barge itself. He was unable to look down yet, but it was clear that the man who had spoken up at him had done so with a laugh, casually, without needing to cup his hands.

  Before the man had time to say it again—“You couldn’t do nothing about the bleeding fog, eh, Hencher? I wouldn’t ordinarily step out of the house on a night like this”—the quay had already shaken beneath the van’s tires and the headlamp had flicked on, suddenly, and hurt his eyes where he hung from the boom, one hand thrown out for balance and the other stuck like a dead man’s to the iron. Hencher, carrying two bright lanterns by wire loops, had come between himself and the lorry’s yellow headlamps—“Lively now, Mr. Banks,” he was saying without a smile—and had thrust one of the lanterns upon him in time to reach out his freed hand and catch the end of wet moving rope on the instant it came lashing up from the barge. So that the barge was docked, held safely by the rope turned twice round a piling, when he himself was finally able to look straight down and see it, the long and blunt-nosed barge riding high in a smooth bowl scooped out of the fog. Someone had shut off the engine.

  “Take a smoke now, Cowles—just a drag, mind you— and we’ll get on with it.”

  She ought to see her hubby now. She ought to see me now.

  He had got his arm through the fork of the boom and was holding the lantern properly, away from his body and down, and the glare from its reflector lighted the figure of the man Cowles below him and in cold wet rivulets drifted sternward down the length of the barge. Midships were three hatches, two battened permanently shut, the third covered by a sagging canvas. Beside this last hatch and on a bale of hay sat a boy naked from the waist up and wearing twill riding britches. In the stem was a small cabin. On its roof, short booted legs dangling over the edge, a jockey in full racing dress sat with a cigarette now between his lips and hands clasped round one of his tiny knees.

  “Cowles! I want off …I want off this bloody coop!” he shouted.

  The cigarette popped into his mouth then. It was a trick he had. The lips were pursed round the hidden cigarette and the little man was staring up not at Cowles or Hencher but at himself, and even while Cowles was ordering the two of them, boy and jockey, to get a hop on and drag the tarpaulin off the hold, the jockey kept looking up at him, toe of one little boot twitching left and right but the large bright eyes remaining fixed on his own— until the cigarette popped out again and the dwarfed man allowed himself to be helped from his seat on the cabin roof by the stableboy whose arms, in the lantern light, were upraised and spattered with oil to the elbows.

  “Get a hop on now, we want no coppers or watchman or dock inspectors catching us at this bit of game. …”

  The fog was breaking, drifting away, once more sinking into the river. Long shreds of it were wrapped like rotted sails or remnants of a wet wash round the buttresses and hand-railings of the bridges, and humped outpourings of fog came rolling from within the cargo shed as if all the fuels of this cold fire were at last consumed. The wind had started up again, and now the moon was low, just overhead.

  “Here, use my bleeding knife, why don’t you?”

  The water was slimy with moonlight, the barge itself was slimy—all black and gold, dripping—and Cowles, having flung his own cigarette behind him and over the side, held the blade extended and moved down the slippery deck toward the boy and booted figure at the hatch with the slow embarrassed step of a man who at any moment expects to walk upon eel or starfish and trip, lose his footing, sprawl heavily on a deck as unknown to him as this.

  “Here it is now, Mr. Banks!” He felt one of Hencher’s putty hands quick and soft and excited on his arm. “Now you’ll see what there is to see. …”

  He looked down upon the naked back, the jockey’s nodding cap, the big man Cowles and the knife stabbing at the ropes, until Cowles grunted and the three of them pulled off the tarpaulin and he was staring down at all the barge carried in its hold: the black space, the echo of bilge and, without movement, snort, or pawing of hoof, the single white marble shape of the horse, whose neck (from where he leaned over, trembling, on the quay) was the fluted and tapering neck of some serpent, while the head was an elongated white skull with nostrils, eye sockets, uplifted gracefully in the barge’s hold —Draftsman by Emperor’s Hand out of Shallow Draft by Amulet, Castle Churl by Draftsman out of Likely Castle by Cold Masonry, Rock Castle by Castle Churl out of Words on Rock by Plebeian … until tonight when he’s ours, until tonight when he’s ours. …

  “Didn’t I tell you, Mr. Banks? Didn’t I? Good as his word, that’s Hencher.”

  The whistles died one by one on the river and it was not Wednesday at all, only a time slipped off its cycle with hours and darkness never to be accounted for. There was water viscous and warm that lapped the sides of the barge; a faint up and down motion of the barge which he could gauge against the purple rings of a piling; and below him the still crouched figures of the men and, in its moist alien pit, the silver horse with its ancient head, round which there buzzed a single fly as large as his own thumb and molded of shining blue wax.

  He stared down at the lantern-lit blue fly and at the animal whose two ears were delicate and unfeeling, as unlikely to twitch as two pointed fern leaves etched on glass, and whose silver coat gleamed with the colorless fluid of some ghostly libation and whose decorous drained head smelled of a violence that was his own.

  Even when he dropped the lantern—“No harm done, no harm done,” Hencher said quickly—the horse did not shy or throw itself against the ribs of the barge, but remained immobile, fixed in the same standing posture of rigorous sleep that they had found it in at the moment the tarpaulin was first torn away. Though Cowles made his awkward lunge to the rail, saw what it was—lantern with cracked glass half sunk, still burning on the water, then abruptly turning dark and sinking from sight—and laughed through his nose, looked up at them: “Bleeding lot of help he is. …”

  “No harm done,” said Hencher again, sweating and by light of the van’s dim headlamps swinging out the arm of the boom until the cable and hook were correctly positioned above the barge’s hold. “Just catch the hook, Cowles, guide it down.”

  Without a word, hand that had gripped the lantern still tremblin
g, he took his place with Hencher at the iron bar which, given the weight of Hencher and himself, would barely operate the cable drum. He got his fingers round the bar; he tried to think of himself straining at such a bar, but it was worse for Hencher, whose heart was sunk in fat. Yet Hencher too was ready—in tight shirtsleeves, his jacket removed and hanging from the tiny silver figure of a winged man that adorned the van’s radiator cap—so that he himself determined not to let go of the bar as he had dropped the lantern but, instead, to carry his share of the horse’s weight, to stay at the bar and drum until the horse could suffer this last transport. There was no talking on the barge. Only sounds of their working, plash of the boy’s feet in the bilge, the tinkle of buckles and strap ends as the webbed bands were slid round the animal’s belly and secured.

  Hencher was whispering: “Ever see them lift the bombs out of the craters? Two or three lads with a tripod, some lengths of chain, a few red flags and a rope to keep the children away … then cranking up the unexploded bomb that would have bits of debris and dirt sticking peacefully as you please to that filthy big cylinder … something to see, men at a job like that and fishing up a live bomb big enough to blow a cathedral to the ground.” Then, feeling a quiver: “But here now, lay into it gently, Mr. Banks, that’s the ticket.”

  He pushed—Hencher was pushing also—until after a moment the drum stopped and the cable that stretched from the tip of the boom’s arm down to the ring swiveling above the animal’s webbed harness was taut.

  “O.K.” It was Cowles kneeling at the hold’s edge, speaking softly and clearly on the late night air, “O.K. now … up he goes.”

  The barge, which could support ten tons of coal or gravel on the river’s oily and slop-sullied tide, was hardly lightened when the horse’s hoofs swung a few inches free of that planking hidden and awash. But drum, boom, cable and arms could lift not a pound more than this, and lifted this—the weight of the horse—only with strain and heat, pressure and rusted rigidity. Though his eyes were closed he knew when the boom swayed, could feel the horse beginning to sway off plumb. He heard the drum rasping round, heard the loops of rusted cable wrapping about the hot drum one after another, slowly.

  “Steady now, steady … he’s bloody well high enough.”

  Then, as Hencher with burned hands grasped the wheel that would turn the boom its quarter circle and position the horse over quay, not over barge, he felt a fresh wind on his cheek and tilted his head, opened his eyes, and saw his second vision of the horse: up near the very tip of the iron arm, rigid and captive in the sling of two webbed bands, legs stiff beneath it, tail blown out straight on the wind and head lifted—they had wrapped a towel round the eyes—so that high in the air it became the moonlit spectacle of some giant weather vane. And seeing one of the front legs begin to move, to lift, and the hoof—that destructive hoof—rising up and dipping beneath the slick shoulder, seeing this slow gesture of the horse preparing to paw suddenly at the empty air, and feeling the tremor through his fingers still lightly on the bar: “Let him down, Hencher, let him down!” he cried, and waved both hands at the blinded and hanging horse even as it began to descend.

  Until the boom regained its spring and balance like a tree spared from a gale; until the drum, released, clattered and in its rusty mechanism grew still; until the four sharp hoofs touched wood of the quay. Cowles— first up the ladder and followed by Jimmy Needles the jockey and Lovely the stableboy—reached high and loosed the fluttering towel from round its eyes. The boy approached and snapped a lead-rope to the halter and the jockey, never glancing at the others or at the horse, stepped up behind him, whispering: “Got a fag for Needles, mister? Got a fag for Needles?” Not until this moment when he shouted, “Hencher, don’t leave me, Hencher …” and saw the fat naked arm draw back and the second lantern sail in an arc over the water, and in a distance also saw the white hindquarters on the van’s ramp and dark shapes running—not until this moment was he grateful for the little hard cleft of fingers round his arm and the touch of the bow-legged figure still begging for his fag but pulling and guiding him at last in the direction of the cab’s half-open door. Cowles had turned the petcocks and behind them the barge was sinking.

  These five rode crowded together on the broad seat, five white faces behind a rattling windscreen. Five men with elbows gnawing at elbows, hands and pairs of boots confused, men breathing hard and remaining silent except for Hencher who complained he hadn’t room to drive. In labored first gear and with headlights off, they in the black van traveled the slow bumping distance down the length of the cargo shed, from plank to rotted plank moved slowly in the van burdened with their own weight and the weight of the horse until at the corner of the deserted building—straight ahead lay darkness that was water and all five, smelling sweat and river fumes and petrol, leaned forward together against the dim glass— they turned and drove through an old gate topped with a strand of barbed wire and felt at last hard rounded cobblestones beneath the tires.

  “No one’s the wiser now, lads,” said Hencher, and laughed, shook the sweat from his eyes, took a hand off the wheel and slapped Cowles’ knee. “We’re just on a job if anyone wants to know,” smiling, both fat hands once more white on the wheel. “So we’ve only to sit tight until we make Highland Green … eh, Cowles … eh, Needles … eh, Mr. Banks?”

  But Michael himself, beneath the jockey and pressed between Cowles’ thick flank and the unupholstered door, was tasting lime: smells of the men, smells of oil, lingering smells of the river and now, faint yet definite, seeping through the panel at his back, smells of the horse—all these mixed odors filled his mouth, his stomach, and some hard edge of heel or brake lever or metal that thrust down from the dash was cutting into his ankle, hurting the bone. Under his buttocks he felt the crooked shape of a spanner; from a shelf behind the thin cushions straw kept falling; already the motor was overheated and they were driving too fast in the darkness of empty shopping districts and areas of cheap lodgings with doorways and windows black except for one window, seven or eight streets ahead of them, in which a single light would be burning. And each time this unidentified black shabby van went round a corner he felt the horse—his horse—thump against one metal side or the other. Each time the faint sound and feel of the thumping made him sick.

  “Hencher. I think you had better leave me off at the flat.”

  Then trying to breathe, trying to explain, trying to argue with Hencher in the speeding overheated cab and twisting, seeing the fluted dark nostril at a little hole behind the driver’s head. Until Hencher smiled his broad worried smile and in a loud voice said: “Oh well, Mr. Banks is a married man,” speaking to Cowles, the jockey, the stableboy, nudging Cowles in the ribs. “And you must always make allowance for a married man. …”

  Cowles yawned, and, as best he could, rubbed his great coatsleeves still wet from the spray. “Leave him off, Hencher, if he gives us a gander at the wife.”

  The flat door is open and the cat sleeps. Just inside the door, posted on a straight chair, market bag at her feet and the cat at her feet, sitting with the coat wrapped round her shoulders and the felt hat still on her head: there she waits, waits up for him. The neighbor on the chair next to her is sleeping—like the cat—and the mouth is half-open with the breath hissing through, and the eyes are buried under curls. But her own eyes are level, the lids red, the face smooth and white and soft as soap. Waiting up for him.

  Without moving, without taking her eyes from the door: “Where’s Michael off to? Where’s my Michael gone?” she asks the cat. Then down the outer hall, in the dark of the one lamp burning, she hears the click of the house key, the sound of the loose floor board, and she thinks to raise a hand and dry her cheek. With the same hand she touches her neighbor’s arm.

  “It’s all right, Mrs. Stickley,” she whispers, “he’s home now.”

  The engine is boiling over when the van reaches Highland Green. Water flows down the dented black hood, the grille, and a jet of steam bursting
up from the radiator scalds the wings of the tiny silver figure of the man which, in attitude of pursuit, flies from the silver cap. Directly before the machine and in the light of the headlamps Hencher stands shielding his face from the steam. Then moves quickly, throws his belly against the hot grille, catches the winged figure in a rag and gives it a twist.

  “Come along, cock, we haven’t got all the bleeding night,” says Cowles.

  It is dark in Highland Green, dark in this public stable which lies so close to the tanks and towers of the gasworks that a man, if he wished, might call out to the old watchman there. Dark at 3 A.M. and quiet; no one tends the stables at night and only a few spiritless horses for hire are drowsing in a few of the endless stalls. Hardly used now, dead at night, with stray dogs and little starved birds making use of the stalls, and weeds choking the yard. Refuse fills the well, there is a dry petrol pump near a loft building intended for hay.

  Hencher steps out of the headlamp’s beam, drops the radiator cap, throws the rag to the ground, soothes his hand with his lips. “You needn’t tell me to hurry, Cowles,” he says, and kicks the tiny winged man away from him into the dead potash and weeds.

  Hencher hears the whistles then—two long, a short— and all at once straightens his cap, gives a last word to Cowles: “Leave the animal in the van until I return. And no noise now, mind you. …” From beneath the musty seat in the cab he takes a long torch and walks quickly across the rutted yard. Behind him the jockey is puffing on a fresh cigarette, the stableboy—thinking of a girl he once saw bare to the flesh—is resting his head against a side of the van, and Cowles in the dark is frowning and moving his stubby fingers across the watch chain that is a dull gold weight on his vest.

  Once in the loft building Hencher lights the torch. Presses the switch with his thumb but keeps the torch down, is careful not to shine the beam toward the exact spot where he knows the man is standing. Rather lights himself with the torch and walks ahead into the dark. He is smiling though he feels sweat on his cheeks and in the folds of his neck. The loft building smells of creosote, the dead pollen of straw, and petrol. He cannot see it, but he knows that to his left there is a double door, closed, and beside it, hidden and waiting within the darkness, a passenger car stately with black lacquer and a radiator cap identical to that on the van. If he swings the torch, flashes it suddenly and recklessly to the left, he knows the light will be dashed back in his face from the car’s thick squares of polished window glass. But he keeps the beam at his heel, walks more and more slowly until at last he stops.