Autumn Page 6

  One might imagine it’d be unpleasant, being sealed inside a tree. One might imagine, ah, pining. But the scent lightens despair. It’s perhaps a little like wearing a coat of armour except much nicer, because the armour is made of a substance through which the years themselves, formative, have run.

  Oh.

  A girl.

  Who’s she?

  She vaguely resembles all the pictures in the papers, back then, of,

  what’s her name,

  Keeler. Christine.

  Yes. It’s her.

  Probably nobody knows who she is any more. Probably what was history then is nothing but footnote now, and on that note, he notes she’s barefoot, alone in the summer night light of the hall of the great stately house where, by coincidence (history, footnote), he happens to know that the song Rule Britannia was first ever sung. She is standing next to a tapestried wall and she is slipping out of her summer dress.

  It falls to the floor. Up go all his pinecones. He groans. She doesn’t hear a thing.

  She unhooks the armour off its stand and sorts it into pieces on the parquet floor. She fits the breastplate over her (quite magnificent, it’s all true) chest. She puts her arms through the armholes. There’s no metal cover at all at the place where her, ah, lower underwear is. She puts her hands down to the space in the metal there as if she’s just realized how she’s likely to reveal herself, through this gap, when fully armoured.

  She wriggles herself out of what’s left of her underwear.

  It falls to the floor.

  He groans.

  She steps out of it, leaves it on the carpet runner. It lies there. It looks like a boned blackbird.

  She fits one leg-piece to a thigh, then the next. She yelps and swears – sharp edge maybe, inside the second of the leg-pieces? She straps the leg-pieces to the backs of her thighs and slips a bare foot inside the first huge boot. She slips her arms inside the metal arm-pieces, lifts the helmet and fits it over her hair. Through the slits in its front she looks around for the gauntlets. One on. Now the next.

  She pushes up the visor with her metal hand and her eyes look out.

  She goes and stands in front of a huge old mirror hung on the wall. Her laugh comes tinnily out through the helmet. She knocks the visor down again with the gauntlet edge. The only thing visible of her is her privates.

  Then she sets off, but delicately, so anything loosely strapped won’t fall off. She clinks her way down the corridor quite as if a suit of armour isn’t nearly as heavy as it looks.

  When she comes to a door she turns and pushes it. It opens. She disappears.

  The room she’s just entered explodes into raucous laughter.

  Can laughter be well-heeled?

  Is powerful laughter different from ordinary laughter?

  That type of laughter is always powerful.

  There’s a song in this, Daniel thinks.

  Ballad of Christine Keeler.

  Well-heel-er. Dealer. Feeler. Squealer. Conceal her. Steal her. Mrs Peel her.

  Ah, no. The fictional creation Mrs Peel came later, a couple of years after this creation.

  But probably the Peel of Mrs is based, partly at least, on the Keel of Keeler, a suggestive little gift to the ear of the beholder.

  Right now he’s pressed so close between all the people up in the public gallery that – where now?

  A courtroom.

  The Old Bailey.

  That summer.

  He only imagined Keeler trying on the armour. He dreamed it, though it’s rumoured to have happened.

  But this, this below, about to happen, he witnessed.

  First up, Keeler versus Ward, her friend, Stephen the osteopath, the portraitist. No suit of armour but nonetheless she’s armoured here, sheet-metal listless. Impervious. Masked. Perfectly made-up. Dead with a hint of exotic.

  She puts the place into a trance by speaking like someone in a trance might speak. Clever. Empty. Sexy automaton. Living doll. Sensational, the public gallery turns pubic gallery. No one can think of anything else, except her friend Stephen, down at the front, who every day picks up his pencil and sketches what he’s seeing.

  Meanwhile, days pass.

  Down in the witness box, someone else now, a woman, a different one, a Miss Ricardo, truth be told she’s even lower-class than poor Keeler, young, coiffed, roughed at the edges, her hair piled red and high on her head, a dancer, I earn money by visiting men and being paid by them.

  She has just announced to the courtroom that the statements that she first made to the police about this case were untrue.

  The crowd in the gallery presses forward even harder. Scandal and lies. What prostitutes do. But Daniel sees the woman, just a girl really, fighting to hold herself straight. He sees how her face, her whole demeanour, have gone something like pale green with the fear.

  Red hair.

  Green girl.

  I didn’t want my young sister to go to a remand home, the girl says. My baby taken away from me. The chief inspector told me they would take my sister and my baby if I didn’t make the statements. He also threatened to have my brother nicked. I believed him and so I made the statements. But I have decided I don’t want to give false evidence at the Old Bailey. I told The People newspaper. I want everyone to know why I lied.

  Oh dear God.

  She’s green all right.

  The prosecuting lawyer has an air of foxhound. He makes fun of her. He asks her why on earth she’d sign a statement in the first place if the statement she was signing wasn’t true.

  She tells him she wanted the police to leave her alone.

  The prosecuting lawyer worries at her. Why has she never complained about any of this before now?

  Who could I complain to? she says.

  A deliberate liar, then, is she?

  Yes, she says.

  Daniel in the gallery sees one of her hands, the one on the rail of the witness box, cover itself in little shoots and buds. The buds split open. There are leaves coming out of her fingers.

  The Judge advises her to take the time overnight very carefully to consider the version of things she’s choosing to tell to the court today.

  Blink of an eye.

  Next day.

  The girl’s in the box again. Today she is almost all young tree. Now only her face and her hair are unleafy. Overnight, like a girl in a myth being hunted by a god who’s determined to have his way with her, she has altered herself, remade herself so she can’t be had by anyone.

  The same men shout at her again. They’re angry with her for not lying about lying. The prosecutor asks her why she told her story about lying to a newspaper reporter, not to the police. He suggests this was improper, an improper thing to do, the sort of thing an improper woman like this woman would do.

  What would be the point, she says, in me going to tell the truth to the very people who’ve told me to lie?

  The Judge sighs. He turns to the jury.

  Dismiss this evidence from your minds, he says. I instruct you to disregard it altogether.

  There’s a song in this too, Daniel thinks as he watches the white bark rise up and cover her mouth, her nose, her eyes.

  Ballad of the Silver Birch.

  High church. Lurch. Besmirch. Soul search.

  Himself, he goes straight from that courtroom to the house of the girl he’s in love with.

  (He’s in love with her. He can hardly say her name to himself. He’s in love with her so much.

  She isn’t in love with him. Only a few weeks back she married someone else. He can say her husband’s name all right. His name’s Clive.

  But he’s just seen a miraculous thing, hasn’t he?

  He’s seen something that changes the nature of things.)

  He stands in the rain in the back yard. It’s dark now. He is looking up at the windows of the house. His hands and forearms, his face, his good shirt and suit are smeared from the dustbins and climbing the fence, as if he’s still young enough to.


  There is a famous short story, The Dead, by James Joyce, in which a young man stands at the back of a house and sings a song on a freezing night to a woman he loves. Then this young man, pining for the woman, dies. He catches a chill in the snow, he dies young. Height of romanticism! That woman in that story, for the rest of her life, has that young man’s song always riddling through her like woodworm.

  Well, Daniel himself’s not a young man. That’s partly the problem. The woman he’s pretty much sure he loves more than anyone he’s ever, the woman he will pine away to nothing without the love of, is twenty years younger than him, and, yes, not that long ago, there is that, married Clive.

  And then there’s the extra other matter, the matter of not being able to sing. Well, not in tune.

  But he can shout a song. He can shout the words. And they’re his words, not just any old words.

  And she only knew him for ten days before she married him, Clive, that is. There’s always hope, with this particular girl.

  The Ballad of the Girl Who Keeps Telling Me No.

  Fast little number, witty, to meet her wit.

  Throaty. Gloaty. Wild oat(y). Grace-note(y). Misquote(y). Anecdote(y). Casting vote(y). Furcoat(y). Petticoat(y). Torpedo boat(y).

  (Terrible.)

  I’m billy goaty.

  Don’t be haughty.

  But no light comes on in any of the windows. It takes about half an hour of standing in the rain for him to admit there’s nobody in, that he’s been standing in a yard shouting bad rhymes at a house where nobody’s home.

  That fashionable swing-seat they’ve got in there hanging from the ceiling in the living room will be slowly turning this way and that by itself in the dark.

  Ironic. He’s a sap. She’ll never even know he was here, will she?

  (True enough. She never knew.

  And then what happened next, well, it happened next, and history, that other word for irony, went its own foul witty way, sang its own foul witty ditty, and the girl was the one who died young in this story.

  Riddled. Woodworm. All through him.)

  Then the old man confined in the bed in the tree, Daniel, is a boy on a train that’s passing through deep spruce woods. He is thin and small, sixteen summers old but he thinks he’s a man. It’s summer again, he is on the continent, they are all on the continent, things are a little uneasy on the continent. Something’s going to happen. It is already happening. Everybody knows. But everybody is pretending it’s not happening.

  All the people on the train can see from his clothes that he’s not from here. But he can speak the language, though none of the strangers round him on the train knows he can, because they don’t know who he is, or who she is, his sister next to him, they don’t know the first thing about them.

  The people round them are talking about the necessity of developing a scientific and legal means of gauging exactly who’s what.

  There is a professor at the institute, the man sitting across from him says to a woman. And this professor is engaged in inventing a modern tool to record, quite scientifically, certain physical statistics.

  Oh? the woman says.

  She nods.

  Noses, ears, the spaces between, the man across from Daniel says.

  He is flirting with that woman.

  The measurement of parts of the body, most especially of the features of the head area, can tell you quite succinctly everything you need to know. Eye colour, hair colour, the sizing of foreheads. It’s been done before, but never so expertly, never so exactly. It’s a case in the first place of measuring and collating. But a slightly more complex case, in the long run, of the sifting of the collected statistics.

  The boy smiles at his little sister.

  She lives here all the time.

  She is assiduously reading her book. He nudges her. She looks up from it. He winks.

  She speaks it as her first language. She knows the flirting is the thinnest layer. She knows exactly what they’re saying. She turns the page in her book, glances at him then at the people opposite over the top of it.

  I hear them. But am I going to let it stop me reading?

  She says this in English to her brother. She makes a face at him. Then she glances her whole self back down into the book.

  Out in the train corridor, when the boy Daniel goes to relieve himself, there’s a capped and booted man blocking the way. His front is all pockets and straps. His arms are stretched in a leisurely way from one side to the other of the passage through to the toilet and the other carriages. He is swaying with the movement of this train as it moves through the spruce woods and farmland almost as if he’s a working part of its mechanical structure.

  Can the sheer breadth of someone’s chest be insidious?

  Oh yes it can.

  Lazy, sure, he smiles at the boy, the smile of a soldier in repose. He lifts one arm higher so the boy can pass under. As Daniel does, the soldier’s arm comes down just far enough to brush, with the material of his shirt, the hair on the top of his head.

  Hopla, the soldier says.

  Boy on a train.

  Blink of an eye.

  Old man in a bed.

  The old man in the bed is confined.

  Wooden overcoat

  (y).

  Cut this tree I’m living in down. Hollow its trunk out.

  Make me all over again, with what you scooped out of its insides.

  Slide the new me back inside the old trunk.

  Burn me. Burn the tree. Spread the ashes, for luck, where you want next year’s crops to grow.

  Birth me all over again

  Burn me and the tree

  Next summer’s sun

  Midwinter guarantee

  It is still July. Elisabeth goes to her mother’s medical practice in the middle of town. She waits in the queue of people. When she gets to the front she tells the receptionist that the GP her mother is registered with is at this practice, that she herself isn’t registered with a GP here but that she’s been feeling unwell so she’d like to talk to a doctor, probably not urgent, but something does feel wrong.

  The receptionist looks Elisabeth’s mother up on the computer. She tells Elisabeth that her mother isn’t listed at this surgery.

  Yes she is, Elisabeth says. She definitely is.

  The receptionist clicks on another file and then goes to the back of the room and opens a drawer in a filing cabinet. She takes out a piece of paper, reads it, then puts it back in and shuts the drawer. She comes back and sits down.

  She tells Elisabeth she’s afraid that her mother is no longer listed on the patient list.

  My mother definitely doesn’t know that, Elisabeth says. She thinks she’s a patient here. Why would you take her off the list?

  The receptionist says that this is confidential information and that she’s not permitted to tell Elisabeth anything about any patient other than Elisabeth herself.

  Well, can I register and see someone anyway? Elisabeth says. I feel pretty rough. I’d really like to talk to someone.

  The receptionist asks her if she has any ID.

  Elisabeth shows the receptionist her library card for the university.

  Valid until my job goes, at least, she says, now the universities are all going to lose 16 per cent of our funding.

  The receptionist smiles a patient smile. (A smile especially for patients.)

  I’m afraid we need something with a current address and preferably also with a photograph, she says.

  Elisabeth shows her her passport.

  This passport is expired, the receptionist says.

  I know, Elisabeth says. I’m in the middle of renewing it.

  I’m afraid we can’t accept an expired ID, the receptionist says. Have you got a driving licence?

  Elisabeth tells the receptionist she doesn’t drive.

  What about a utility bill? the receptionist says.

  What, on me? Elisabeth says. Right now?

  The receptionist says that it’s a good idea a
lways to carry a utility bill around with you in case someone needs to be able to verify your ID.

  What about all the people who pay their bills online and don’t get paper bills any more? Elisabeth says.

  The receptionist looks longingly at a ringing phone on the left of her desk. Still with her eyes on the ringing phone she tells Elisabeth it’s perfectly easy to print a bill out on a standard inkjet.

  Elisabeth says she’s staying at her mother’s, that it’s sixty miles away, and that her mother doesn’t have a printer.

  The receptionist actually looks angry that Elisabeth’s mother might not have a printer. She talks about catchment areas and registration of patients. Elisabeth realizes she’s suggesting that now that her mother lives outside the catchment area Elisabeth has no business being here in this building.

  It’s also perfectly easy to mock up a bill and print it out. To pretend to be a person, Elisabeth says. And what about all the people doing scams? How does having your name on a piece of printed-out paper make you who you are?

  She tells the receptionist about the scammer calling him or her self Anna Pavlova, for whom NatWest bank statements have been regularly arriving for the past three years at her own flat, even though she’s notified NatWest about it repeatedly and knows for sure no one called Anna Pavlova has lived there for at least a decade, having lived there herself that long.

  So what does a piece of paper prove, exactly, in the end? Elisabeth says.

  The receptionist looks at her and her face is stony. She asks if Elisabeth will excuse her for a moment. She answers the phone.

  She gestures to Elisabeth to step back away from the desk while she takes this call. Then to make it even clearer she puts her hand over the receiver and says, if I could just ask you to let me accord this caller the requisite privacy.

  There is a small queue of people forming behind Elisabeth all waiting to check in with this receptionist.