Against the Day (156 page)

Taking
care to look woeful, while secretly feeling like he’d just walked out the gates
of the pokey, Reef went back to touring the hydropathics, pretending different
sorts of neuræsthenia, most successfully Railway Brain, the idea being to claim
he’d been in a traumatic train accident in the recent past—and

preferably in some nearby country whose records of the event
would not be that easy to come by—with no immediate symptoms till the day
before he appeared at the gate to check himself in, whereupon he could choose
to suffer from a range of conditions, all carefully researched during his time
at other establishments in the company of other hydro cases. The beauty of
Railway Brain lay in its mental nature. The spa doctors knew that none of the
ailments presented were real, but pretended to go about curing whatever it
happened to be—the business office downstairs was happy, the croakers
thought they were putting one over, the obscenely rich cardplayers got to lose
enough money week by week to absolve them of their sins against the laboring
classes, not to mention allow Reef to afford imported Havanas and tip widely.

On the night of 30 June, all the
neuræsthenics of Europe, emerging from electric bathtubs and playingrooms out
onto what ought to’ve been dark terraces and pavement, glowing all over with
radioactive mudbath slime, electrodes dangling off their heads, syringes
forgetfully poised inches from veins, came out of their establishments to
marvel at what was going on in the sky. Reef, recently among them, happened to
be in Mentone in and out of the hazardous bed of one Magdika, the blonde wife
of a Hungarian cavalry officer noted as much for his readiness to take offense
as his skill with dueling weapons. Since his arrival Reef had become intimate
with the rooftiles and laundry chutes of the Splendide, and was indeed at the
moment stuck like a fly to the façade of that establishment, inching along a
perilous windowledge as the exercised voice of the unexpectedlyarrived husband
slowly faded, to be replaced by one more cosmically annoyed, and seeming to
proceed, how peculiar,
from the sky,
which now Reef
noticed—risking, at the most precarious step of his passage, a look
upward and freezing and breathless at what he saw—was an evening sky
which had refused the dusk, chosen a nacreous glow instead, an equivalent in
light of the invitation to attend that Reef was now receiving from the overhead
voice—“Really Traverse you know you must abandon this farcical existence,
rededicate yourself to realworld issues such as family vendetta, which though
frowned upon by the truly virtuous represents even so a more productive use of
your own precious time on Earth than the aimless quest to get one’s ashes
hauled, more likely in your case to result in death by irate Hungarian than
anything of more lasting value . . .” and so forth, by which time Reef was on
the ground, running in the queer illumination down the boulevard Carnolès, he
understood, for his life, or anyhow the resumption of it.

Yashmeen was in
Vienna
, working in a
dress shop in Mariahilf which had been gathering some celebrity for designs not
yet quite discovered by the midinettes of Paris and so not yet dispersed into
the greater market of the World. One day as she was writing up a request for
overdue payment, she became aware of a fragrant presence close by.

   
“Oh!
I didn’t hear you—”

“Hullo, Pinky.” Uttered in a note so
low and somehow austere that Yashmeen did not immediately recognize her old
Girton schoolmate Noellyn Fanshawe, grown less æthereal than the scholarly
beauty of old, still hatless, her hair now drastically cropped, brushed back
from her face, every bit of the charming little skull it had once been such
delightful play to go searching for among all those blonde curls now brutally
available, unequivocal as a blow or a gunshot. Her eyes, accordingly, enormous
and somehow smudged away from the declarative light of the shopgirl’s day in
which it was Yashmeen’s current fate to dwell.

   
“Noellyn!
I had no idea you were in town.”

   
“Here
on a whim.”

   
“You
came in so quietly
. . .
?”

   
“It’s
this Silent Frock I imagine.”

   
“You
know we’re even stocking them here now—it’s quite caught on.”

   
“And
you recalibrate them as well, I’m told.”

“Is it this one you’re wearing?”
Yashmeen cupped her hand behind one ear and leaned toward the dress. “Twirl
about.” The girl complied. “Can’t hear a thing.”

“It’s daytime. Traffic. But at night,
when I particularly need it, it’s been acting up.”

“I’ll just fetch the
Facharbeiter.
”
She took a flexible
brassandebonite speakingtube from its cradle. “Gabika, come out here.”

Noellyn allowed herself a brief grin.
“I’ve stopped saying ‘please’ to them, too.”

   
“You’ll
see.”

The technician who presented himself
from the back room was young and slender, with very long eyelashes. “A
housepet,” Noellyn said. “I wish I were interested enough, I’d borrow him for
the evening.”

   
“Let’s
go back to the fittingsalon. Gabika, we shall need this immediately.”

“He reminds me a bit of Cyprian
Latewood. Did you ever see that old vegetable again, by the way?”

But Yashmeen felt somehow willing to
share only the most general sort of news. She had grown, she supposed,
overcautious, yet the possibility remained that Noellyn was here at the behest
of the T.W.I.T. Or someone even more determined.

   
Yashmeen
helped her friend out of the ingenious garment, which Gabika bore away
respectfully to his worktable. She poured them coffee from an elaborate urn,
and they sat a moment appraising one another. “I can’t get used to that boy’s
crop on you. Lovely as it is.”

“I had no choice. You don’t know her,
we met last year in London, before I knew it, there I was all bewitched. She
took me late one night to a hairdresser’s in Maida Vale, I didn’t notice the
little straps and buckles on the chair till too late, and in less than a minute
they had me quite sorted out. There were all these horrible machines in the
place, and at first I thought I was in for one of those new ‘permanent wave’
things, but my friend had a different idea. ‘You are to be my captive boy for a
while, perhaps I shall let you grow it back in, depending how quickly I grow
bored with the look.’ The woman with the shears was charming but merciless,
quite took her time about it, while my friend sat there with her skirts up,
tossing herself off shamelessly through the whole thing. After a while I wished
for the freedom of my hands so I could do the same.”

   
“But
she didn’t let you.”

   
“And
I did beg ever so sweetly.”

“Poor Noellyn.” She took the other
girl’s chin lightly between thumb and finger. “Cross those pretty wrists behind
your back for just a moment, there’s a good girl.”

   
“Oh
but Yashmeen, I didn’t come here to—”

   
“Do
it.”

   
“Yes,
Yashmeen.”

Gabika returned with the recalibrated
Silent Frock to find them flushed and murmuring, with their clothing in some
disarray and a decided musk note in the room, mingling with the background
atmosphere of brewing coffee. He was used to these tableaux by now, had in fact
quite come to look forward to them, perhaps explaining why he’d been on the job
now for nearly two years without asking for a raise in salary.

Finding that perhaps against
expectation they were actually delighted to see one another again, the two
young women passed a pleasant evening together, going to early dinner at
Hopfner’s and then returning to Yashmeen’s rooms in Mariahilf. By the time it
had occurred to either to look out the window, it was, or should have been,
well after dark. “What time is it, Yashmeen, it can’t be this early still.”

“Perhaps time has slowed down, as
they say in Zürich. This watch reads eleven.”

“But look at the sky.” It was
certainly odd. The stars had not appeared, the sky was queerly luminescent,
with the occluded light of a stormy day.

·
    
·
    
·

It went on
for a month. Those who had taken it
for a cosmic sign cringed beneath the sky each nightfall, imagining ever more
extravagant disasters. Others, for whom orange did not seem an appropriately
apocalyptic shade, sat outdoors on public benches, reading calmly, growing used
to the curious pallor. As nights went on and nothing happened and the
phenomenon slowly faded to the accustomed deeper violets again, most had
difficulty remembering the earlier rise of heart, the sense of overture and
possibility, and went back once again to seeking only orgasm, hallucination,
stupor, sleep, to fetch them through the night and prepare them against the
day.

oward the end of October, all hell broke loose over the
Austrian announcement that they were intending to annex Bosnia. Theign looked
in, more haggard than usual.

“We need someone on the spot,” he
told Cyprian. “We may have to pull some people out.”

   
“And
you thought of me straightaway.”

“Not
my first choice, but there’s really no one else. You can have young Moistleigh
along if you feel you need a bodyguard.”

Bevis
was happy enough to be out of the subterranean funk of his crypto facility.
“Yes do me good to get out of the old coconutshy for a bit.”

There
was an open bottle of sljivovica on Theign’s desk, but he didn’t offer either
of them any.

   
“What’s
this?” Cyprian said.

   
“Map
of AustriaHungary.”

   
“Oh.
Do I get a magnifying lens with it?”

   
“What’s
the scale here?” muttered Bevis.

Theign
squinted at the legend. “Seems to be one to fifty million, if I’ve counted the
naughts correctly.”

   
“A
bit too naughty for me,” Cyprian muttered.

“Not at all, perfect for the
traveler, last thing one would want I’d imagine, to be out in the open
somewhere struggling in a fierce mountain wind with some gigantic volume of
miletotheinch sheets.”

   
“But
this thing is too small to be of any use to anyone. It’s a toy.”

“Well.
I mean it’s good enough for the F.O., isn’t it. This happens to be the very map
they use. Decisions of the utmost gravity, fates of empires including

our own, all on the basis of this edition before you, Major
B. F. Vumb, Royal Engineers, 1901.”

“It would certainly explain a good
deal about the F.O.,” Cyprian staring at the map bleakly. “Look at Vienna and
Sarajevo, they’re not even half an inch apart, there isn’t even room here to
spell out their names, all it says is ‘V’ and ‘S.
’ ”

“Exactly. Puts the whole thing
literally in a
different perspective
,
doesn’t it. . . almost godlike as you’d say.”

   
The
tone of voice, the expression on Theign’s face, made Bevis anxious.

   
“Usual
Theign,” Cyprian assured him later.

“No, no, he doesn’t care, can’t you
see that, none of the details matter to him, not only the map, he knows we
won’t live long enough to use it
. . . .
”

Yashmeen arrived
one morning
at the shop
in the Mariahilfe Straße to find the door locked, in fact chained shut, a
municipal notice of confiscation plastered across those windows that weren’t
broken. Back at her flat, the landlady, whose eyes would not meet hers, asked
for her identity papers, claiming not to know who she was.