Against the Day (96 page)

It was a bit more
sinister
than that,
actually. Those whose job it was to keep track of any recent invention with any
weapons potential, however remote, and to find connections, if any, to military
and political events in Europe, observed the traffic in Silent Frocks, which
had picked up in recent days, with due alarm, drawing up lengthy reports,
bringing in everything from Balkan troop movements to the price of diamonds in
Belgium.

   
“Yes
very nice indeed, we’ll take a hundred of em.”

Pause. “That would require a sum in
advance. You gentlemen are
. . .
that
is . . .” His gaze arrested by the enormous sheaf of banknotes the emissary had
produced from a dark leather case embossed with an appropriate Seal.

   
“Will
this be all right?”

   
And
when the personages had quite left the premises,

“A hundred women on the move, all
silent? For how long? Allow me to register a certain skepticism. Green, white,
and mauve stripes, I expect.”

“No,
these aren’t suffragettes. They want black crepon and a lining of Italiancloth.
We’ve no idea, we’re only the agents in this.”

Nonetheless,
their voices did shake just perceptibly with gynecophobia, or the fear of
women, of silent women, in these absolutely silent black gowns, advancing along
corridors which seemed to recede behind them without limit, perhaps also fear
of these unechoing corridors themselves, especially under certain conditions of
low light. . . with no least fragment of music in the distance, without the
comforts of commentary, their hands unoccupied with parasols or fans, lamps or
weaponry
. . .
should one wait,
withdraw, turn in panic and run? What clandestine purpose? More unsettling, how
much official support?

Yashmeen,
Lorelei, Noellyn, and Faun
, down for a day’s truancy in London with the Snazzbury fittings for an
excuse, had been summoned to an atelier located in a dismal industrial
building, closer perhaps to Charing Cross Road than to Regent Street, around a
corner forever in the shadows of

taller structures surrounding it. The sign, in modern
lettering recalling the entrances to the Paris Métro, read
l’arimeaux et queurlis, tailleurs

pour dames
.

“Here are the basic models
. . . .
Mademoiselles? If you please.” Down
a kind of helical ramp—the exact geometry was difficult to read in the
artful framework of shadow it seemed to be part of—came gliding a line of
young women in black, so silently that even their careful breathing might be
heard, hatless, unrouged, hair swept up tightly and pinned so close to the head
that they could be ambiguous boys, eyes enormous and enigmatic, lips set in
what our University misses recognized as
cruel smiles
not without their
element of the erotic.

   
“I
say,” murmured Lorelei, shivering a little, “I rather fancy that one.”

   
“The
costume or the girl?” inquired Noellyn.

   
“Can’t
say much for any of them,” sniffed Faun.

“Oh
Faun you are such a judgmental person. And that one, there coming along just
behind, has been casting you ever such incendiary glances, hadn’t you noticed?”

Yes
and later in the fitting rooms—it turned out these haughty mannequins
were employed also as fitters for the establishment. Yashmeen, Faun, Noellyn,
and Lorelei, in their stays and stockings and underlinen, found themselves at
the mercy of the SilentFrocked corps, who crept up on them with measuring tapes
and strange oversize calipers and commenced without preamble to take the most
intimate sorts of measurements. Protests were useless. “Excuse me, I say I
do
know my measurements, and my hips are certainly not as enormous as what
you’re writing down there, even if it is in centimeters
. . . .
” “Oh please, why is it necessary to measure along the
insides of my limbs, when surely the outsides would do as well
. . .
and, and now you’re tickling, well
not tickling perhaps but. . . hmm . . .” But their tormentrices carried on in
determined silence, exchanging significant looks with one another and now and
then finding eyecontact with the girls, which often provoked blushes and
discomfiture, though it might be difficult for an accidental observer—or
say a clandestine one—to judge the level of innocence in the room.

It
seemed to Yashmeen that the secret of the Snazzbury frock lay
in the lining
,
the precise, as one would say,
microscopic finestructure of the twilling, which after inspection seemed far
from uniform in the way it skipped over threads, but rather varied, point to
point, over the given surface—an extended matrix, each of its entries a
coefficient describing what was being done upon the loom
. . .
these thoughts had come to preoccupy her so thoroughly
that it was with a bewilderment comparable to awakening from sleep

to find herself and her friends abruptly at the top of the
enormous Earl’s Court Wheel, three hundred feet above London, in a compartment
the size of a metropolitan bus, packed in with thirty or forty other
passengers, who appeared to be British holidaygoers, all busily eating sausage
rolls, whelks, and pork pies by the hamperful.

   
“We’re
not moving,” Faun muttered after a while.

“A full revolution takes twenty
minutes,” advised Yashmeen. “So that each car may have its pause at the top.”

   
“Yes,
but our car has already been here for five minutes at least—”

“It got stuck once for four hours,”
announced a person of distinctly suburban aspect. “For their inconvenience my
uncle and aunt, who were courting at the time, each got a fivepound note, just
like in the song—so, having between them a tidy fortune, they popped into
the first magistrate they could find, and did the deed. Put the money into
Chinese Turkestan railway shares and never looked back.”

“Care for a nice bit of jellied eel?”
one of the funseekers now wobbling a portion of the openair snack favorite
quite close to Noellyn’s face.

“I think not,” she said, about to
add, “are you insane?” before recalling where they were, and how soon they were
likely to be back on terra firma.

   
“Look,
there’s West Ham!”

   
“There’s
the Park, and Upton Lane!”

   
“There’s
a number of lads all in claret and blue!”

   
“Kicking
something back and forth!”

The world, since the Chicago Fair of
1893, had undergone a sudden craze for vertical rotation on the grand scale.
The cycle, Yashmeen, speculated, might only seem reversible, for once to the
top and down again, one would be changed “forever.” Wouldn’t one. She drifted
thence into issues of modular arithmetic, and its relation to the Riemann
problem, and eventually to the beginnings of a roulette system which would
someday see her past landlords and sommeliers and other kinds of lupine
liminality, and become the wonder and despair of casino managers across the
Continent.

The group that
gathered
at Liverpool
Street Station to see her off included Cyprian, Lorelei, Noellyn, and Faun, a
group of smitten young men, none of whom anyone seemed to know, and the
toxically obtrusive Professor Renfrew, who presented her with a bouquet of
hydrangeas. There were telegrams, including one from Hardy, whimsical to the
point of unreadability, though when she was alone, she tucked it into a safe
place among her luggage. The hydrangeas she threw over the side.

She would take the 8:40 boattrain,
arriving at Parkeston Quay at Harwich around 10:10, and thence by steamer
across the black and turbulent German Sea, waking at each great wavethump,
intercepting in nameless oneiric crosstalk the fragmentary dreams of others,
losing her own, forgetting all of it in the first merciless, cold striations of
the dawn, as the boat raised the Hook of Holland.

   
“I
say Cyprian you’re looking a bit green!”

   
“Not
to mention a number
of
spots.
”

“I
believe I shall give him a squeeze just to see if he’s sound,” and a number of
similar vegetable jokes, Cyprian thus providing Lorelei, Noellyn, and Faun a
useful distraction from their own melancholy, otherwise likely, one gathered,
to be insupportable. But in the score of departure, as if in obedience to some
inflexible dynamic tradition, at some point a silence had to fall.

Cyprian
waited then for the terrible onset, the intestinal certainty that he would
never see her again. He would then hold off the woeful relapse long enough to
get back to his rooms and surrender to tears, and this would go on
indefinitely, if not forever, boring everyone within several miles’ radius,
squads of gyps wringing out mop after mop sort of thing—but though he
waited, through that night, then the day (as her train crossed canals, passing
wooded hillsides and the madhouse at Osnabrück, then at Hannover a change of
trains for Göttingen), then another night and day—waited long after she
had left Cambridge, in fact, but no such attack of sadness occurred, and
presently he understood that some perverse variety of Fate, already familiar to
him, which did not promise but rather withheld, was offering him the assurance
that none of “this”—whatever it was supposed to be—was quite done
with yet.

he tall black hull rose above them like a ~momument to the
perils of the sea, no obvious connection to the waves of gaiety washing beneath
it. Emptied hacks lined up four or five deep on the pier, the drivers in their
shiny black plug hats waiting for the crowd to finish waving bon voyage and to
turn one by one their faces inland once again, landward to the day they had
taken this brief hour from.

   
“Only
going on the road, Kate, back before you know it.”

   
“The
latest is that your old pal R. Wilshire Vibe was kind enough to set me up with
an audition, and I went, and now I just had a callback, so maybe—”

   
“Don’t
say it! What horrible news!”

   
Katie
flushed a little. “Well, that old R.W., he’s not so bad
. . . .
”

   
“Katie
McDivott. Shocking what’s happenin to our youth ain’t it—” But the ship’s
horn let loose with a bonedeep bellow that stopped all the predeparture chatter
on the pier.

Katie stayed
until the liner had backed, turned,
begun to dwindle into the complications of the harbor. She imagined hours among
giant manned buoys, official boats, midriver inspection stations. Her parents
had sailed out of Cobh like everybody else, but she’d been born later, and had
never been to sea. If they had been sailing into the future, toward some
unknowable form of the afterlife, what was this journey of Dally’s the other
way? A kind of release from death and judgment back into childhood? She twirled
her parasol in thought. A hack driver or two cast an appreciative eye her way.

·
    
·
    
·

It wasn’t really
till Erlys and Dally got well out
onto the ocean that either felt permitted, as if by the nonhuman vastness they
had entered, either to speak or to listen. They walked together slowly round
the promenade deck, arm in arm, nodding to passengers now and then whose plumed
hats were agitated in the ocean breeze, avoiding stewards with laden trays
. . . .
The smokestacks leaned upward into
the wind, the antenna wires sang
. . . .