She comes clattering down the bare stairs — the runner in the hall has yet to reach them, it trails behind the Death’s measured tread as they mount from floor to floor of No. 18 Waldemar Avenue. When they had arrived, the house — barely twenty years old — had just suffered its first demotion: sold on by the family who had bought it from its spec’ builder to one Emmanuel Silver, who had sliced it into three residences. The Deaths — Samuel, Mary Jane and the three older children, who were then very small — had the ground floor, a proper kitchen range and a spankin’ new geyser, although they and the other families still had to share the old bucket privy in the backyard. The Poultneys had the rooms on the first floor for a while, until Abraham Poultney was laid off from his job as a fitter with Ellis Tramways, a happenstance that coincided — or may have been caused by — the death of their younger daughter, Rose, from diphtheria. She wuz not the right sort, Mary Jane said of Missus Poultney. Not that she wuzzn respectable — but she ’ad no backbone, poor soul. I didn’t see little Rose for, ooh, on toppuv a week — you remarked onnit, Ordree — so I goes up there and finds they’d put her on toppuv the wardrobe in the back bedroom. The whiffuvit — terrible, it wuz. The merciful Deaths had paid for the funeral — including the toy casket, knocked up from deal, cheap but decent. At about the same time, Samuel had secured his own position as Deputy General Manager of the London General’s Fulham garage — this, after long service as a driver, and latterly a conductor. ’E was a blackleg in the strikes, said Stanley, years later, so they give iz nibs iz dibs. Audrey never thought this the whole story — she had seen how her father was with horses bussing and petting ’em . . She had been with him one time when he stooped down in the road after another hearse had passed by and said, See ’ere, girl, ’ere’s shit an’ straw both. What they eats an’ what they lets fall at the far end. Straw’s ’ere to muffle it up when they carts us away. When they’ve planted us in the ground, we’ll turn inter ’urf — which is only by wayuv sayin’ another sorta droppin’. It was an uncharacteristically lengthy speech for her father to have made — at least, in the presence of a member of his own family. — Parked outside the Cock & Magpie with a jujube to suck — or not, Audrey heard not Father, Samuel or Sam, but Rothschild Death holding forth in the public bar: on the follies of the turf, the moonstruck fancies of the new women and the socialistic madness of the Progressives. An occasional late hansom or growler might bowl along King Street — straw bristles plaited in its horses’ tails, followed by a ’bus rattle-chinking towards her father’s garage. A swell got up in Ulster and homburg might elbow a tinker woman away from the pub door, bloody jade, giving a keyhole warbler the chance to slide in to the goldensmoky mirrored cacophony on his coat-tails. Once ensconced she might yowl out, Well if you fink my dress is a littulbit, juss a littulbit — not too muchuvit! While hiking up her petticoats, such as they were, until overwhelmed by cries of outrage: Flip ’er a tinker, Rothschild! Gerriduv ve drab! Her father’s face hanging mottled from the shiny platter of his topper’s brim, the hiss of the jets in the outsized glass lamp that hung above the double doors. Up there, in the elemental radiance, floated a softly moulded figure in a dainty print gown. Up there, where speechless Thought abides, Still her sweet spirit dwells, That knew no world besides . .
Audrey had seen her father with horses — and she had seen him with men, a stallion among them, his commerce easy enough — yet fraught with sufficient danger to give him authority, Gentlemen, I have dived into Romano’s, and now . . his sausage seegar sizzles innis face. . my tissues are refreshed! He’s a study, Rothschild, a quick turn, who hooks his thick neck in the crook of his bamboo cane and hoiks himself offstage. He had so they said once thrashed a navvy to wivvinaninch, not that you would divine these fistic manoeuvres from the way he plotted his course home down the Fulham Palace Road, his flame-haired slippuv a dorter clipping along in front of him, lighting the way through the particular to anuvver meat tea . .
Albert and Stanley sit, both with books held open by the lips of their plates, both with collars unbuttoned, their tea cups cradled in their hands for warmth as much as refreshment. Vi and Olive gawp, pasty faces pinched by pointed shoulders, each with a slice of bread and dripping in their hand as they behold this virile spectacle: the man and the boys taking turns to hack at the leg of mutton, then put meat in their too-similar faces. Albert’s glassy paperweight eyes, Welsh-slate blue, scan up and then down the narrow columns of Rous’s Trigonometric Tables — not consigning cosines, sines and tangents to memory, only confirming the tight joins of the granite setts already laid out along the rule-straight roadways of his metropolitan mind. And Stanley — his complexion cooler, his brows finer than those of his older brother — he sighs, ahuh, shuffling fingertips from one page to the next of a Free Library book. His eyelids flicker and his fringe bobs, the whirring mechanism of Bakelite and crystal rods, propelled by scores of flywheels, squeezes his very atoms into the kinetomic beam in a number of abrupt spasms that, while they bend him back so far his just-stropped neck touches his rear, are not in the slightest discomforting — and all the essence of Stanley is then discharged from the elevated muzzle of the contraption, shooting a streak of light between the spokes of the Great Wheel at Earls Court. Up and up above the city it goes — dolorous hoots from the steamers anchored at Tilbury, gas-mantle-ssssh! in the upper atmosphere — and higher still, the clouds flickering far below. In one aperture pickelhaube-helmeted Junkers slash each other’s cheeks to ribbons, in another the Tsarina kisses an egg set with rubies and garnets. The beam is so high now that Stanley’s atoms sweep into orbit, girdling the earth once, twice, thrice! Before tending down and down into the viridian heart of Africa, where, in a jungle clearing, awaits Fortescue, my mechanic, cranking the handle of an apparatus that sucks the beam into its celluloid funnel. Stanley is an apparition that swiftly solidifies, panting in a patented woollen Jaeger bicycling suit. He and Fortescue shake hands vigorously. Capital shot, old bean! the mechanic says, as a nigger chief steps forward from the trees, his honour guard of naked warriors dropping their tribute of tusks at the feet of the scientific adventurer . .
.. Olive, Olive! Oh, I dunno, there’s summat wrong wiv you, girlie, carncher see yer father’s wantin’ izale? Olive turns back to the scullery, limping on the toes of her too-tight boots — she almost lays a hand on the ruddy range to steady herself. Audrey agrees there’s summat wrong wiv that girlie, and moreover: They’re in cahoots, they want her to be like this, lost, confused, a top spinnin’ round ’em. Sam plucks the beaded cloth from the jug and pours a draught into his moustache cup, and there are beads of sweat on Mary Jane Death’s forehead. Above her in the cabbage-steam-fug hangs a sampler Audrey sewed at school. — One, two, three, four, girrrls. One: needle in the right hand. Two: thread in the left. Three: Through the eye. Then four: loop and knot. Now, thimble drill . . Audrey’s hands, not suited to this fine work, twitched and shook in an ague that she felt incapable of mastering, or even to be a part of her at all, but something that snowed down poisonously from the arsenical-green ceiling. . Thimbles on yer thumbs, one-two, thim-thumbs, thimthums, tee-to-tum . . — Out of the eater, she says, came forth meat and out of the strong came forth — Burrrurp! Really, Samuel, Mary Jane says, laughing, mussyer? They’re in cahoots, together they’ve made five now an’ loss none. Stanley laughs at his father’s eructation and says, Judges, Chapter 14, Verse 14 — thass evens, guv’nor. Albert, without looking up, grimaces and Audrey can hear what he hears: the echo of one brother inside the other’s bony cave. I’m inbertween ’em — I’m a prism or a lens. Beams of Stanley, beams of Albert, playing, each on the other brother’s blank face . .