Swiftly: A Novel (GollanczF.) Page 17

  Yes, she said. Yes, she said.

  A sweet and cidery smell. Her head swam a little, but she was in no danger of passing out.

  ‘—and that such a loan,’ the shadow-faced banker continued, ‘carries the very real prospect of the collateral being seized,’ and he coughed, corrected himself, ‘becoming due to the creditor, in lieu of payment? In these days, in particular. I must enquire, though the question be delicate, whether you have the means to repay the loan?’

  ‘I must have the money,’ said Eleanor, simply. And she knew that she must have it. To disassemble the whole house into bricks, and break open each brick in turn, and find a sovereign inside every single one. She wanted to explain to this man about the nature of imprisonment, and the impossibility of it - that any cost was acceptable to free a certain soul (she thought she meant Leloffel’s, but of course she wasn’t truly thinking of him) from its cage. And it even started to seem to her that the house itself was a kind of cage, a cage in which she was imprisoned, with her mother as the broken-down gaoler, her mother saying my darling guilt in place of my darling girl. But these thoughts were confused and broken about, and she did not give them voice. Instead she nodded, and listened to the banker, as the precise terms of repayment, and the precise terms of losing her house, were explained. Her attention drifted to the windows behind him, their intersection of clear glass with the red light of sunset.

  THREE

  THE DEAN

  [1]

  London was the city of birds, pigeons and pigeonhawks the true possessors, but poorly tolerating human cohabitation. London was Pigeonopolis. It was bluetopia and greytopia with those flashes of emerald in their necks, and the flurry of wings, and a vocalic cooing from all directions. The birds colonised every ledge, whitewashed every surface with their droppings, they bickered in the skies, they scratched at stone with their beaks. The chilly folded-over sounds of wings in motion, myriad brrs, occupying the air like a very blizzard. They rose in great drifts, as biblical locusts, from Covent Garden. And in their midst the hawks zipped diagonal up, diagonal down, like shuttles in a loom.

  Bates found his thoughts - his dreams, too - reverting to birds. How dual their quality. The mutual embodiment of beauty in ugliness, and ugliness in beauty - so foul they were, so very rattish, each with its shabby little beak underneath that revolting fold of pink flesh, its two ink-drop eyes, soulless. Pestilential. And their feet were all decaying and pestilential, stars of cankerous flesh. And yet - and yet! - Bates could not help staring at them, for the fragment of rainbow that was tangled in their breast feathers. The rainbow was the sky’s domain, it was air and flight, flight. In flight they were lovely as poetry, applauding the sunlight and the sky with their wings and soaring. Escape and revulsion and beauty, and all at once. The blur of their wings in flight folded together earth and spirit, the diabolic and heavenly.

  Although everybody knew that they spread disease. Surely they were a pollution.

  And now he sighed. Hhh.

  And now he was in the realms of Tartarus and the void. There was a voice in his head, and it said: ‘We’re going to get you, kill you, cut your parley-loving throat.’ As if those three things were three separate things. Get you. Kill you. Cut your throat. What was the point in slitting the throat of a corpse? And yet the threat made sense according to the logic of these people: outraged patriots, these hissers of words. He must not think of it.

  Now he was standing on Bury Street, looking across the open square of Covent Garden, watching the birds rise, watching them turn through the sky and settle again on the ground. The ribbon of AF, Ami de la France, was pinned to his lapel. The spring was palpable, on the very edge of dissolving itself into the clear fresh air. Everywhere one looked showed intimations of a new warmth, a fragrance even here in the centre of London. April showers were readying themselves in the parti-clouded sky: those clouds purely white and those stained purple upon their cream breasts eagerly shouldering one another afore the blue. People were coming and going, in and out of the row of houses to his right, a crowd as numerous, it seemed, as the pigeons themselves. Bates stood for a quarter of an hour, and every person who saw him, he knew, hated him on sight. None offered him greeting. They glanced at his ribbon and they scowled, hurrying on. The hawks circled his head. The hawks went through and through the sky above his head. The time would come, his dreams told him, when a hawk huge as the sun would descend upon him and blot out his life. We call this hawk death, and the name of his wings is oblivion.

  He could delay no longer. He had delayed too long.

  On the Strand he tried to call down a cab, but no carriage stopped for him. Though small, yet was his lapel-badge noticed. True Britons despised him. He thought again, as he often did, of simply removing the ribbon. But, you see, it would have been a foolish gesture. The London Johnny d’arms knew him by sight. Oh, it would reflect but poorly upon him if he were seen abroad without the badge. He professed pride in his association. He had sworn loyalty to the French people. The consequences would be terrible if he were discovered forsworn. He would lose his position with the new administration; and without that, amid the undying animosity of English-born Londoners, he would surely starve.

  He loved his country. Nevertheless his continuing existence depended upon the success of the domination by a foreign power. How complicit his circonstances.

  He fetched up his stride and walked down past Charing Cross and into Pall Mall. The steeple clock at St Martin-in-the-Fields began its ponderous tolling of ten, dropping each of the chimes into profound and stilly depths of sound to sink, sink. A flying machine, brass and greasepaper, flew past him and after it scampered a young boy, leaping up to snatch at the toy. As it banked to fly up Glovers Lane the boy’s fingers caught its tail fan, and with a yawp he hauled it out of the sky. The propeller snapped on the ground and the motor whiningly spun and unwound. Bates stopped. The machine bore no French colours, but it was indeed likely that it was on official business. If a Johnny d’arm had seen the lad, who was to say he would not have rifle-shot him - killed him dead? Such risk! And for what? The boy was wrenching open the device’s chamber and pulling out its burden: papers, nothing but papers, not money, no valuables. He hurled this useless litter to the ground and ran as fast as he could up past Charing Cross.

  The final bell tolled. It had all happened within the tell of the chimes.

  Ten was the hour of his appointment. Yet still Bates held back. In St James’s Square, outside the very building that the French authorities had requisitioned as the base for their governance, he loitered, pulling his hat down about his brow and watching the military men and the dark-suited civilians come and go.

  Three flags: the French national banner here, military colours there, and on the far side a Saint George’s Cross. Each pennant wriggled on its pole, like the wind shaking crumbs out of a tablecloth. Bates had not before noticed how the arrangement of blue and white and red on the French flag make it look as though the extremity of the cloth had been dipped in blood.

  D’Ivoi was standing beside him, as if appearing from nowhere, as if he were a genie raised suddenly by stage-machinery through some trapdoor in the earth itself. ‘You are thinking, my friend,’ he said, beaming, ‘of the fellow they caught last night?’

  ‘I have not heard of the circumstance,’ said Bates.

  ‘You have not? He was attempting to climb the pole and deface the flag. He has been executed, to encourage others to obey the laws. We must all obey the laws, after all. But there is bad feeling, I understand, on some streets of this city that the punishment was too harsh.’ D’Ivoi turned, smilingly, and Bates had a foreflash of the hawk, the hawk - descending upon him and destroying his life - and then, in the instant the vision was gone and it was only a Frenchman, gesturing towards the doorway with his hand to show Bates the way.

  ‘Was he a rebel in arms?’ asked Bates, his heart trembling. ‘Or was he some other form of vandal?’

  ‘He claimed to be a revolutionary,
’ said D’Ivoi. ‘But perhaps he said so only to win our sympathies.’

  And the flag on its flagpole in front of him wagged from side to side like the shaking of a gaily-coloured head.

  Bates walked in the direction D’Ivoi had indicated.

  ‘In what manner would declaring oneself a revolutionary,’ asked Bates, ‘win the sympathies of the authorities?’

  D’Ivoi widened his smile. ‘To you English the prospect of revolution appals, perhaps. But we French have sympathy in our hearts. We had our revolution after all, we - would you say? - revolved.’

  ‘And bloody it was,’ replied Bates. They were in the hallway now, feet clucking on the marble like pigeons’ voices. Two guards stood at attention besides the stairway.

  ‘Ah,’ said D’Ivoi, refusing to relinquish his good humour. ‘But blood is a needful part of the revolution. You had a revolution too, you in England, did you not? And was it not bloody? Besides, your revolution brought forth a tyrant - your Cromwell.’

  ‘And in France also?’ reorted Bates. ‘Did not your revolution result in the tyranny of—’ But his memory wasn’t sharp enough to recall the name. ‘The Generalissimo, he who, during the civil war . . .’

  ‘He was himself called Buonoparte,’ said D’Ivoi. ‘But he was no tyrant; merely a general too small to fulfil his ambition. Even had he lived, he could never have subdued a nation as vivid, as passionate as France. Do you know why? I ask it of you.’

  ‘I could not hazard an answer.’

  They were mounting the stairs. Windows of plain glass, filled with sunlight, stood severely before them, like two luminous and blank and unfillable pages from the book of life.

  ‘Because he lacked the support of the Church. Your Cromwell, he made his own Church, I believe. This was good policy. Truly, without such support, without the Church on his side no ruler can last. Church,’ D’Ivoi concluded, sententiously, ‘is bigger than nation.’

  ‘Bigger?’ said Bates. ‘Do you mean bigger, or greater?’

  ‘It is not,’ said D’Ivoi, puzzled, ‘the same word?’

  They were at the top of the stairway now, and D’Ivoi led him through to a high-ceilinged room, glorious with twenty-foot-tall mirrors and gold wainscoting at top and bottom of every wall. D’Ivoi’s desk looked petty indeed in the midst of such splendour.

  He settled himself behind it. ‘I should of course have commenced the conversation with the pleasantries,’ he said. ‘We know how important it is for you English that the proper forms are observed. I should say, How do you do?’

  ‘It is not necessary,’ said Bates.

  ‘I should say, Please be seated,’ D’Ivoi said, a feline smile on his face.

  Bates sat.

  ‘In Combray,’ said D’Ivoi, stretching back in his chair, ‘there is an astronomical observatory, with a grand telescope, and they report that a comet has been seen in the sky; bright in the night sky, with its tail flowing out behind it like a white feather. It portends disaster, do you think?’

  ‘Disaster,’ Bates said, disdainfully.

  ‘It is always so? Before the last French invasion of these islands, with your King Harold, was there not a comet that portended disaster for the English?’

  ‘Superstition,’ said Bates.

  D’Ivoi sat forward. ‘Ah, but you have no stomach for small-conversation. Small-talk, I should say. I have heard, my dear friend, that you have become considerably more attentive in your religious observance. Is it so?’

  ‘I attend church,’ said Bates, shortly. ‘This is no crime, I trust.’

  ‘Not at all. Even to attend a Protestant church.’

  The smile on the Frenchman’s face seemed to Bates to be growing more insolent. A spurt of boldness in his English chest: ‘I have heard talk,’ he said, ‘that the forces of French occupation will shortly set about unmaking English Protestantism. I have heard such a rumour ... that you will enforce capitulation to the Roman faith. It is not so, I trust?’

  ‘Rumours,’ said D’Ivoi, with a dismissive shrug. But the smile did not go away.

  ‘You can understand the anxiety of the population,’ Bates pressed. ‘Your own history - to return to the question - has an unfortunate aspect, when viewed by a follower of the Protestant faith. I refer, naturally, to the fate of your Huguenots.’ He pronounced the word Huge-enoughs.

  At this D’Ivoi laughed a clanging laugh. ‘Les assez-grands!’ he said. ‘Oh c’est très bien, ça. Nous sommes assez comme ça, nous n’avons pas besoin de ces Huge-enoughs. My dear Bates,’ he said, leaning forward. ‘This is to worry about matters about which you have no cause to worry.’ Had he placed a slight emphasis upon the you? Was he implying that, however dismal the fate of the Anglican communion, Bates himself need not worry?

  ‘I am merely,’ Bates replied, stiffly, ‘reporting to you, as is my obligation as Ami de France.’

  But D’Ivoi was still chucking over the humour. ‘Les “huge-enoughs”,’ he repeated. ‘This is very good. These of Brobdingnagia, they are huge enough, I hope? Your Royal Navy attempted a Saint-Bartholomew-Eve massacre upon those huge-enoughs, did they not? Like the Holy League of the Guises, you were.’ He laughed a second time.

  ‘Mister D’Ivoi,’ said Bates, feeling desperately uncomfortable to be the butt of the Frenchman’s joke. ‘I have come to report to you, as is my duty. I hope I do not deserve mockery for merely fulfilling my duty.’

  D’Ivoi stifled his smile. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘Yes, your job. Yes, you are not content, I think, in your job. Yes.’

  ‘I do my duty,’ replied Bates, stuffily.

  ‘But to be a spy . . .’ D’Ivoi shook his head. ‘It is but a poor occupation for a gentleman.’

  Bates said nothing.

  ‘You will be pleased, I think,’ D’Ivoi continued, ‘with my news. We no longer require your services as a ... spy I was going to say, but perhaps I should use the more formal title.’

  ‘You are not happy with my work?’ Bates demanded. He spoke sharply. A shudder and wraith of shadow passed the window, perhaps pigeons flying. A blue devil was gripping in his guts. The sensation was dismally familiar. Of course he was despised by his countrymen, and how could it be any other way, for he was despicable. But he had at least possessed the melancholy satisfaction of thinking his French employers were happy with his reportage. Perhaps they were not. Perhaps he was quite without worth.

  ‘Your ... I am not sure of the word in English. Your personnalité - is it the same word in English?’

  Bates nodded. He felt sick inside himself.

  ‘You have a sort of sickness of the personnalité, I think. Your moods are variable. Even now, my friend, you chew at your lower lip. It is a caprice, like a child’s caprice, I think. And another time you will be happy, very happy. But this is not a problem for us. On the contrary, we are extremely content with your work.’

  ‘But nonetheless you wish me to cease?’

  ‘You have worked as an Ami de la France for, it is how long? For six months? Not so many; five months. And before the occupation, you were an ally of the French cause. We have reason to be very content with you, my friend. The French people are grateful.’

  ‘But nonetheless,’ Bates repeated, doggedly, ‘you wish me to cease?’

  ‘What I wish, is,’ said D’Ivoi. ‘I wish for you to go to York.’

  A darkness hovered beyond the window. Bates sat in silence, but D’Ivoi was smilingly patient. The comet, coming to earth, was God’s pigeonhawk, coming to prey upon the sinners. ‘To York?’ he said, eventually.

  ‘That is so. You will leave tomorrow. A party of military men will accompany you. They are travelling to the north, so perhaps I should say you will be accompanying them. They carry with them a calculation device, you understand?’

  ‘Indeed I do,’ said Bates. And suddenly, and without warning, like flame applied to alcohol, the lower mood had evaporated all away. This was an adventure; he was admired, prized even, by his French masters. He would accompany a Ca
lculator!

  ‘You will travel fairly slowly, but this is of necessity a military consideration. We must take every precaution that the Calculator not fall into enemy hands.’

  ‘But surely the land is wholly under French control now,’ said Bates. ‘As far north as Derby. The newspapers report it. Is it not true that the army controls the roads all the way to Preston?’

  ‘Our generals,’ said D’Ivoi, his expression sphinx-like, ‘have enjoyed formidable victories. But nonetheless, there is much hostility, especially in the north. Alembert took Scarborough’ - D’Ivoi sounded every letter in the name - ‘a fortnight past, but the countryside in Yorkshire is adversarial towards him still. Les ennemis de la France.’