Against the Day (44 page)

“Now, we have also Victoria’s
unbending refusals to consider the passage of Time, for example her insistence
for more than sixty years that the only postal image of her be that of the
young girl on the first adhesive stamps of 1840, the year of dim young Oxford’s
assassination attempt. Her image, whether on medallions, statuary, or
commemorative porcelain, is meant to be imperial as can possibly be, except
that the young lady depicted is far too young for those trappings of empire.
Add to this her inability to accept Alert’s death, continuing to have his room
kept as it was, fresh flowers every day, uniforms out to the cleaner’s, and so
forth. It is almost as if that fateful day on Constitution Hill, Oxford’s shots
had found their mark after all, and the Victoria we think we know and revere is
really a sort of ghostly standin, for another who is impervious to the passage
of Time in all its forms, especially the wellknown Aging and Death. Though she
may, technically speaking, have grown older like everybody else, grown into the
powerful mother, internationally admired Statesperson, and muchbeloved though
humorless dumpling of legend, suppose the ‘real’ Vic is elsewhere. Suppose the
flowering young woman herself is being kept captive, immune to Time, by some
ruler of some underworld, with periodic connubial visits from Albert allowed,
neither of them aging, in love as passionately as in the last terrible moment
ascending to the palace, the Princess Royal forever three and a half months in
her womb, the lovely springtide of early pregnancy rushing through mother and
child in a flow that Time will never touch. Suppose the whole runtogether known
now as ‘the Victorian Age’ has been nothing but a benevolent mask for the grim
realities of the ErnestAugustan Age we really live in. And that the
administrators of this allenveloping pantomime are precisely the twin
professors Renfrew and Werfner, acting somehow as poles of temporal flow
between England and Hannover.”

Lew was dismayed. “Cohen, man, that’s
horrible.”

The Grand Cohen shrugged. “Only a bit
of fun. You Yanks are so serious.”

“Those professors are no laughing
matter,” offered Madame Eskimoff, “and you are well advised, Mr. Basnight, to
take the Icosadyad every bit as seriously as you do. I was among them, once, as
the Fool—or ‘Unwise One,’ as

Éliphaz Levi preferred—perhaps
the most demanding of all the Trumps Major. Now I have a flock of suburban
punters believing, poor souls, that I possess intelligence they will find helpful.
Being unwise as ever, I cannot bring myself to disabuse them.”

“You switched sides?” said Lew.

She smiled, it seemed to him a little
condescendingly.
“ ‘
Sides.’ Well.
No, not exactly. It had become an impediment to my calling, so I resigned and
joined the T.W.I.T. instead, not without later occasion for regret. Hard enough
being a woman, you see, but a Pythagorean into the bargain—well.” It
seemed that each British mystical order claiming Pythagorean descent had its
own ideas about those taboos and bits of free advice known as
akousmata,
and
Madame Eskimoff’s favorite happened to be number twentyfour as listed by
Iamblichus—never look into a mirror when there’s a lamp next to you.
“Meaning one must rearrange one’s entire day, making sure one is finished
dressing well before nightfall—not to mention hair and
maquillage—all of which is sure to look different under gas or electric
light anyway.”

“Can’t believe it’d run you much more
than a minute or two,” Lew said.

And there was that gaze again. “Hours
can be consumed,” she pretended to lament, “by hatpin issues alone.”

s autumn deepened, Lew could be noticed hurrying from place
to place, as if increasingly claimed by a higher argument—tensely
vertical, favoring narrow black overcoats, slouch hats, and serviceable boots,
a trimmed black mustache settled in along his upper lip. Despite the growing
presence of electric street illumination, London in resolute municipal creep
out of the Realm of Gas, he had begun to discover a structure to the darkness,
dating from quite ancient times, perhaps well before there was any city here at
all—in place all along, and little more than ratified by the extreme and
unmerciful whiteness replacing the glarefree tones and composite shadows of the
old illumination, with its multiplied chances for error. Even venturing out in
the daylight, he found himself usually moving from one shadow to another, among
quotidian frights which would only become unbearably visible with the passing
of lamplightingtime into the lofty electric night.

This purposeful life did not keep
him, for some while in fact, from trying to locate somewhere in Great Britain a
source of Cyclomite, proceeding, desperately, from such opiated catarrh
preparations as Collis Brown’s Mixture on to cocainized brain tonics,
cigarettes soaked in absinthe, xylene in unventilated rooms, and so on, each
proving inadequate, often pathetically so, as a substitute for the
realitymodifying explosive he had enjoyed back in his former or Stateside
existence.

He had no shame about enlisting the
aid of Neville and Nigel, always these days, it seemed, down from University.
Each of them was reputed to have at least a thousand pounds a year, which it
seemed they spent mostly on drugs and hats. “Here,” Nigel greeted him, “do try
a spot of ‘pinky,’ it’s ever so much fun, really.”

“Condy’s fluid,” explained
Neville—“permanganate disinfectant, which one then mixes with methylated
spirits—”

“Got the recipe from an Aussie we met
whilst in the nick one Regatta weekend. Came to develop quite a taste for it
after a while, though health aspects naturally did occur to us, so we’re
careful only to allow ourselves one bottle per year.”

“Admire your restraint, boys.”

“Yes, and
tonight’s the night,
Lewis!”
Abruptly producing a rather large bottle filled with liquid of a queer purple
that Lew could swear was glowing.

“Oh, no, no, I—”

“What is it, the color you don’t
like? here, I’ll adjust the gas,” Neville helpfully, “there. Is that better?”

One morning they got Lew up early and
bustled him into a cab before he was completely awake.

“Where we going?”

“It’s a surprise. You’ll see.”

They rolled eastward and presently
pulled up in front of a nondescript draper’s shop in Cheapside that appeared
not to have been open for some time.

“What’s this?”

“The War Office!” cried Neville and
Nigel, grinning mischievously at each other.

“Quit fooling, I know they just moved
it, but not here.”

“Some of their facilities would never
dream of moving,” said Neville. “Come along.” Lew followed them through a
narrow passageway next to the shop, leading back to a mews entirely invisible
from the street, whose clamor back here had become abruptly inaudible, as if a
heavy door had closed. They made their way along a sort of roofed alleyway to a
short flight of steps, which took them on into regions somehow colder and
remote from the morning light. Lew thought he heard water dripping, and
utterances of wind, becoming gradually louder, until at last they stood before
an entry scarred and dented all over as if by decades of assault.

Owing to a stubborn belief in
Whitehall that the eccentric enjoy access to paranormal forces with nothing
better to do than whisper suggestions for evermoreimproved weapons design,
personnel offices throughout the Empire had been alert for at least a generation
to the genteel stammer, the ungovernably darting eyeball, the haircut that no
known pomade could subdue. Dr. Coombs De Bottle, actually, failed to meet these
criteria. Suave, cosmopolitan, wearing a snowwhite lab ensemble from Poole’s of
Savile Row in handloomed Russian duck, smoking black Egyptian cigarettes in an

amber holder, not a hair on his face
allowed anywhere it should not be, he seemed suited more to a calling of public
ingratiation, the international arms trade, perhaps, or the clergy. But something,
some actor’s polish to his style of address, hinted at a nebulous past, and a
grateful awareness of having, after all, found haven here. He greeted Neville
and Nigel with a familiarity that Lew might have found suspect had there been
less in the vast workshop they were now being ushered into to claim his
attention and eventually, he supposed, trouble his dreams.

Electrical arcs stabbed through the
violet dusk. Heated solutions groaned toward their boiling points. Bubbles rose
helically through luminous green liquids. Miniature explosions occurred in
distant corners of the facility, sending up showers of glass as nearby workers
cowered beneath seaside umbrellas set up for just such protection. Gauge
needles oscillated feverishly. Sensitive flames sang at different pitches. Amid
a gleaming clutter of burners and spectroscopes, funnels and flasks,
centrifugal and Soxhlet extractors, and distillation columns in both the
Glynsky and Le BelHenninger formats, serious girls with their hair in snoods
entered numbers into logbooks, and pale gnomes, patient as lockpickers,
squinted through loupes, adjusting tremblers and timers with tiny screwdrivers
and forceps. Best of all, somebody in here somewhere was making coffee.

Dr. De Bottle had led them back into
a distant bay, where technicians were working at tables covered with homemade
bombs in different stages of disassembly. “Our theory was to begin with devices
confiscated from various failed bomb attempts and then kindly passed along to
us, and, by careful analysis of each device, to return, step by step, to its
original act of construction. Which proved usually to’ve been carried out in
such appallingly primitive conditions that one began actually to feel sympathy
for these wretches. They blow themselves up at a quite alarming rate you know,
ignorance of proper solvent procedure alone accounting for dozens of Anarchist
lives each year, just here in London. One must indeed suppress the missionary
urge to go out among them
. . .
perhaps
distributing inexpensive pamphlets, outlining for them even the simplest
principles of lab safety
. . .
it
would do ever so much good, don’t you think?”

Lew, suppressing a reflexive lift of
the brows, would have welcomed here any sort of smart remark from Neville or
Nigel, but both had gone off apparently to inhale fumes of various sorts. “I’m
not sure I follow the logic,” Lew said—“saving bombers’ lives, if each
one you save could mean hundreds of innocent ones lost later down the line.”

The Doc chuckled and inspected his
shirt cuffs. “Innocent bourgeois lives. Well. . . ‘innocent.
’ ”

An assistant arrived with a wheeled
cart bearing coffee in an Erlenmeyer flask, cups, and a plate of strange
muffins. “You might not as an American appreciate this, but among the last
surviving bits of evidence that a civilization once existed on this island is
the game of cricket. For many of us, a cricket match is a sort of religious
observance. Breathless hush in the close tonight sort of thing. ‘Innocent’ as
it gets. And yet even here we have—” He gingerly held up a cricket ball,
which all but glowed beneath the electric lighting. “For some time now, county
pitches throughout England and Wales have been visited by a mysterious figure
in white flannels, known around this shop as the Gentleman Bomber of Headingly,
after the only known photograph of him with the usual cricketer’s bag slung
from one shoulder, inside which he carries a number of spherical handbombs
disguised as cricket balls. This is one that we’ve managed to recover intact.
Rubbing it against one’s trousers will activate the arming device inside.
You’ll notice, perhaps, that it’s far shinier and rather more tightly stitched
than a British ball, rather like the Australian ball, or ‘kookaburra.’ And as
the Ashes is currently in progress, and passions apt to be running high,
Australians, with whom we are somewhat overrun at the moment, may be serving as
an unwitting species of cover for the old G.B. of H., as well as easy targets
of blame.”

“He
throws bombs
during
cricket games?”

“We try not to say ‘bomb,’ actually,
it’s more of a poisongas grenade. And he does usually wait for tea.”

“ ‘
Poison gas’?” A new one on Lew. But
Dr. De Bottle had taken on a somber look.

“Phosgene.” Something about the way
he pronounced it. “More of a French term.
Phosgène.
We prefer to call it
carbonyl chloride. Less
. . .
disquieting
somehow. The trouble for the police is that, depending on the dispersal cloud,
too often the victims aren’t aware at all of having been gassed. And then
suddenly, mysteriously as the newspapers say, fortyeight hours later, they’re
dead. Why are you looking at that muffin that way?”