The Honours Page 16

  As they got close, Daddy yelled: ‘He won’t wake up! There’s water in his lungs and he won’t wake up!’

  ‘Move,’ said Lansley, making shooing gestures. He and Daddy locked eyes. Daddy stepped back. ‘You,’ Lansley pointed to Mrs Hagstrom, ‘roll up a towel and give it to me.’ He knelt down beside Mr Kung and popped open his medical bag. Delphine hung back, watching.

  Lansley took a small red torch from his bag. He grabbed Mr Kung’s face and shone the light in his mouth and eyes. He pushed an index finger deep into Mr Kung’s throat and moved it round. Mr Kung jerked and something thick like egg white came out. Lansley pulled at Mr Kung’s tongue. Mrs Hagstrom handed Lansley the rolled-up coat; he stuffed it underneath Mr Kung’s shoulder blades, then pulled Mr Kung’s head backwards.

  ‘Give me some bloody room.’ Lansley stood. He grasped Mr Kung’s arms by the elbows, lifting them over the head. He counted: ‘One, two.’ He lowered them to either side of the chest, pressing them against the rib cage. After two seconds, he lifted them again and repeated the procedure. He turned to Mrs Hagstrom. ‘Get the smelling salts from my bag.’ To Daddy: ‘Pour him a capful of brandy.’ Delphine braced for her instruction but Lansley went back to pumping the arms and counting.

  Mrs Hagstrom held a little bottle between thumb and forefinger. She scrutinised the label.

  ‘Is this it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lansley. ‘Go on then.’

  Mrs Hagstrom knelt with a grunt. She pulled out the stopper and wafted the bottle beneath Mr Kung’s bloody nose. Mr Kung’s chest was moving. Delphine heard his throat rasp wetly.

  For a minute or two, Mrs Hagstrom swayed the smelling salts while Dr Lansley lifted and lowered Mr Kung’s arms. Daddy stood on the periphery, his teeth chattering, capful of brandy quivering in his upturned hand.

  Daddy said: ‘Is it working?’

  Dr Lansley hissed through his teeth. To Mrs Hagstrom, he said: ‘Get a towel. Dry him as best you can and then get another one and cover him.’

  Mrs Hagstrom unfurled a towel and began rubbing at Mr Kung’s legs. As she worked upwards, Mr Kung’s trousers rode up, exposing pale, hairless ankles. Delphine winced. She wanted to call out, to shout to him to wake up.

  Lansley lifted the arms, and Mrs Hagstrom leant over and wiped Mr Kung’s face. Most of the blood came off, leaving an oily sheen. Mrs Hagstrom threw the towel aside. She laid the second one over Mr Kung’s belly and legs. Mr Kung’s feet poked out the bottom, big toe bulging mushroom-like through a hole in his black socks.

  Lansley went on pumping Mr Kung’s arms. After a while, Mrs Hagstrom stood back; with Daddy and Delphine, she watched and waited. Lansley shook his head.

  ‘It’s no good. This man needs a hospital.’

  Mrs Hagstrom rubbed her hands together. She glanced at Daddy.

  ‘Shall we, sir?’

  Daddy set the cap of brandy on the ground, twisting it into the sand. Lansley stepped back. Daddy grabbed Mr Kung under the armpits. Mrs Hagstrom and Lansley took a leg each.

  Mrs Hagstrom turned to Delphine. Sand crusted her upper lip.

  ‘Run ahead to the car. Open the doors.’

  Delphine took off across the beach. She spread her numb arms and sand rolled beneath her. She was running through no-man’s land at midnight; to the east and west, Vickers guns and MG08s cackled and spat. If she flagged for even an instant, thousands of rounds would shred her legs. The thought relaxed her. She had the queerest feeling that if she closed her eyes and went limp, she would fly.

  She leapt onto the slipway and scrambled to the car. The handles were freezing. She opened all four doors and slumped against the bonnet. Looking back across the beach, she saw the three adults with Mr Kung slung between them like a drunk. Dr Lansley had his heavy medical bag under one arm and Mr Kung’s bare foot under the other. Mrs Hagstrom marched hard and straight, leaving deep black footprints. Daddy had his eyes closed. Together they threw a crazy, gangling blue shadow, a giant landcrab rampaging beneath the glare of the full moon.

  They reached the car and bundled Mr Kung into the back. Daddy bent over, wheezing. Mrs Hagstrom dropped into the driver’s seat. Dr Lansley got into the back, Mr Kung’s head in his lap.

  ‘Hospital. Now.’

  The engine growled throatily, then the car lurched and began accelerating up the slipway. Delphine watched it buck as it hit the first rut, headlamps making the trees dance and flash. The sound of the motor faded. She and Daddy were alone.

  The wind had died. The ocean was calm as a plate.

  Daddy staggered down the slipway. His shirt was open to his stomach. Delphine wanted to speak, but her mouth was dry. She walked in his deep footsteps.

  Daddy walked back to where Mr Kung had lain. He took the capful of brandy. He held it up. In the moonlight, his hair gleamed like chains. He drank the brandy, picked up the bottle and began walking towards the dunes.

  Delphine walked over and picked up her crab hook. Mr Kung had left three dents – his buttocks, back, and head. She hacked at the sand. Her skull ached. She thought she might cry, then the feeling passed, like a sneeze.

  She watched the sea for a while, glassy, replete. When she turned inland, Daddy was a way off, standing over Mr Kung’s shoes.

  He stooped, pushed the shoes aside and picked up the oblong of crumpled newspaper beneath them. He turned the paper over in his hands. He found a seam. He peeled away a layer and let it fall. The wind caught it, skimming it towards the sea. Daddy peeled a second layer, a third.

  When he rose, Daddy held a book: small, grey-brown. He looked at it from several angles, as if unsure how to make it work. He looked like he might drop it, then he lifted the brandy bottle to his mouth. Brandy spilled over his lips, running down his cheeks, his neck, following the line of his collarbone, soaking into the stiff dark hair around his heart. He poured until the bottle shone clear. He ran the back of his sleeve across his face, then tucked the book beneath his armpit.

  Delphine watched him trudge away. The beach was quiet. She felt hollow, papery. She remembered the sting of the brandy Miss DeGroot had given her and wished she could feel that burn now. She wished Mother was there, to fuss and brush sand off her clothes and lead her safely home.

  A piece of newspaper tickled her ankle. She looked down.

  As her eyes focused, she saw it was not newspaper after all, but a crumpled page of densely-scrawled notes and crude diagrams. She grabbed the corner. Numbers and English words stood out against a mass of squirly symbols – were they Chinese? She was so exhausted, she could barely read. The wind snatched at the paper. One word caught her eye, repeated again and again across the page:

  DELLAPESTE

  DELLAPESTE

  DELLAPESTE

  INTERLUDE 1

  June 1935

  The man known as Ivan Propp attached brass electrodes to a tiny, shivering, hairless creature, and prepared to transmit.

  A candle burnt in a tin holder on his desk. He poured himself a second glass of 1865 calvados and dragged the dust sheet off the rest of the apparatus. The little chubmouse, blind and pink, scratched at the walls of its glass prison with its antler nubs, mewling to its brothers and sisters in the cage on top of the cupboard. Ivan sipped his calvados and grimaced. Sending a cross-channel wire was une activité très désagréable.

  He found himself thinking in French more and more these days. Russian came to him only when he wrote, and the language of his homeland even less – only when he made a conscious effort, and sometimes on waking, and as he passed into sleep, as if that part of his life had already crossed the threshold and was waiting for him to join it.

  He lifted the black earpiece to the side of his head. His index finger hesitated over the Morse key. Inside the larger glass partition of the telegraph apparatus, the mother chubmouse scrunched her eyes shut. She was the size of a Christmas pudding. Two patches had been shaved into the sandy fur on her fat back. Electrodes winked in the candlelight. She chirruped – he thought it had started, w
aited for the beeps in his ear, but it was just pre-message anxiety. These fleshy, docile creatures were not so insensible. They knew what was coming.

  Just as he was reaching for his pocket watch, the mother chubmouse’s jaw began to tick. In his ear, the ready signal cycled: MESSAGE BEGINS . . . MESSAGE BEGINS . . .

  He took a pencil and transcribed. As the message continued, the mother chubmouse whined and bucked and stropped her antlers against the glass, overcome by a weird, disembodied torment. The electrodes read her discomfort as discrete units of current – a dot or a dash – and the equipment beside her compartment converted this into sound.

  He spent a moment translating.

  GIRL STILL MISSING STOP REQUEST MEETING TO DISCUSS STOP GUNS NEEDED URGENT STOP KIND REGARDS AS STOP

  He reread the message, then screwed it up. Glancing towards the empty fireplace, he briefly contemplated the journey. The calvados had dampened the knifing pain in the small of his back, but as he placed his palm on the desk and tried to rise several ancillary pains replaced it. He dropped the balled message in his ashtray and touched a match to the top.

  In its glass compartment, the baby chubmouse flinched at the sudden, flaring light. He waited till the message had burnt away to black flakes. He drained his glass, then placed a finger over the Morse key.

  Pardonnez-moi, mon enfant.

  He began to tap. With each stroke, the hairless chubmouse pup convulsed, as his finger completed the circuit and sent electricity through its plump and wrinkled body. In the box alongside, the mother chubmouse lay inert – it was not her child.

  But he could picture a creature, in a land so distant yet so dizzyingly close, writhing at each stab of the key.

  MESSAGE BEGINS . . . MESSAGE BEGINS . . .

  Ah, what agony to be a mother. To be so awake, to love so honestly. For what was love, if not feeling another’s suffering as your own?

  ACT TWO

  July–September

  Threescore years and ten the Lesser Threshold takes and holds in trust until the traveller’s return. The angel and the lower creature are exempt: the former because he inhabits an unchanging, supermundane vessel, the latter because it has no soul.

  – Transportation And Its Practice, A. Prentice

  CHAPTER 11

  IN BALANCE WITH THIS LIFE

  July 1935

  Rain fell into the gravemouth, dripping from the wings of black umbrellas. Hunched and shivering beside Mother, Delphine watched it drum the lid of Mr Kung’s coffin as men with ropes lowered him into the ground.

  Mr Propp began to sing. He stood at the foot of the grave, dressed in black, a fist to his heart. Alice stood beside him, holding a brolly over his shining head. Propp sung in a minor key, in a language Delphine did not recognise. The scale sounded Middle Eastern, full of strange intervals, ululating, mournful.

  The stench of grass and wildflowers and wet July earth was stifling. Delphine pushed her shoe against the sodden ground; brown water pooled around the toe. She glanced at Dr Lansley, on the opposite side of the hole. He had a leather glove pressed to his mouth. He regarded the pit with a look of disapproval. He seemed to despise Kung for giving up so easily.

  Propp finished his song. He stepped forward and tossed a handful of dirt onto the coffin. It landed in a clod and washed away. Dr Lansley stepped forward, soil balled in glove. A big wedge of earth broke loose beneath his foot. He wobbled. Dirt sloughed into the grave. Miss DeGroot, wrapped in black satin, grabbed his collar and pulled him back.

  Everyone took a step away. Dr Lansley stood in the rain, fruitlessly slapping his sopping sleeves, blowing a spritz of moisture out of his thin moustache. One leg of his trousers was painted in mud.

  ‘I’m going for a bloody drink.’

  Delphine spent the afternoon on the beach, watching the sea. Warm rain fell, fragrant with heather. It pelted her scalp and her ears and the nape of her neck, and she barely felt it. Spume washed over broken shells. She watched the waves, kept expecting Mr Kung to break the surface, kelp slopping from beneath his bowler hat, a boyish smile on his face as he strode shoreward, ready to reclaim his shoes.

  As the tide went out, she walked to the pits she had dug at the mouth of the marshes. She plunged her crab hook into syrupy silt, dragging it around till she felt the scrape of iron on chitin. Most of the time the crabs gripped it with their pincers, clung on even as she lifted them dripping into her bag. It was their tenacity that did for them.

  Why had Mr Kung killed himself? And why, if he really was a foreign spy, did she feel so sick and shaken by it?

  Her shadow began to lengthen. Chunks of petrified tree jutted from the mud like rotten teeth. She took her bag filled with the day’s catches and headed for the tunnel.

  Delphine followed the tunnel from the beach to the wine cellar. At the top of the cellar stairs, she pushed a long brass key into the lock and opened the door. Finding out which keys fitted which locks had been a long, risky process.

  She stuck her head out and looked both ways. The corridor was empty.

  She locked the door behind her and headed left, past the game larder, where woodcock, teal, partridge, goose and pheasant hung glumly. Next door was the gun room. She unlocked the door with a second, smaller key, stepped in and shut it behind her.

  A leathery smell hung in the cool, still air. On three walls, shotguns and hunting rifles of various sizes stood vertically in racks. Two locked glass cabinets housed vintage guns: a double-barrelled French flintlock from 1760, a British Navy seven-barrelled Nock volley gun, a mahogany case containing a pair of silver-gilt blunderbuss carbines from the Caucasus. A punt gun with a two-inch barrel ran the length of the left-hand wall. She had read they could take down a flock of geese in a single shot.

  She took a shotgun from the rack: a Westley Richards hammerless ejector, barely two years old. She squinted down the sights, stepped and swung, tracking the trajectory of an imaginary bird. The flesh beneath her collarbone ached. Shooting still hurt like blazes, but she was getting stronger. She wiped a smudged thumbprint from the walnut stock, then slotted the gun back in place.

  She went over to a set of office drawers. They were supposed to be kept locked. The front of each drawer was labelled with an index card. She slid out the drawer marked ‘3’, opened a couple of cartons and slotted her leftover cartridges into the gaps.

  A cough from the hallway.

  She cast around for refuge. The gun room was all display cases and empty space. She flicked off the light and as the filament died she threw her back to the wall beside the door. The door opened inwards, hiding her.

  ‘Hello?’ A man’s voice, hushed, querulous. It was Professor Carmichael.

  She bit her lip.

  He took a step into the room, pushing the door wide as he entered. She dodged before it could bump her shoulder.

  ‘Hello?’ The floorboards creaked as he shifted his weight.

  She noticed her spoils bag lying in the middle of the floor. Amongst all the wood and steel and leather, the green canvas was obvious. The thump of a shoe. Another. The far wall filled with his shadow.

  ‘Can I help you?’ A woman’s voice from the corridor: loud, common. The Professor’s soles scraped as he turned. Pressed against the wall, Delphine exhaled thinly.

  ‘I, uh . . . ’

  ‘Mr Carmichael.’ It was Mrs Hagstrom. ‘How did you get in there?’

  ‘Uh, uh, it was open.’

  ‘“Open”, he says. So if it’s not barred and padlocked that’s an invitation for you to come and go as you please?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I – ’

  ‘“Sorry”, is it. That’s the song now.’ Delphine could hear a whap whap as of a blunt object striking an open palm.

  ‘It’s Mr Propp,’ said the Professor. ‘Pay, uh – Miss DeGroot is concerned as to his whereabouts. I was looking for him.’

  ‘In the gun room?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Mrs Hagstrom stomped forward and grabbed the door handle. Delphine
flinched. She could hear Mrs Hagstrom’s panting through the inch of pine.

  ‘And is he in here?’

  The Professor audibly sagged. ‘No.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Mrs Hagstrom, may I – ’

  ‘Mr Carmichael – ’

  ‘Actually, uh, it’s Profess – ’

  ‘Mr Carmichael.’ Mrs Hagstrom inhaled. ‘If Mr Propp needs a place to contemplate life’s great mysteries, you can rest assured it won’t be down here. If he wants to fritter away his days ogling his belly button that’s his lookout and his folly, but the moment he comes my side of the green baize I shall be after him with a carpet beater, inner peace or no. Some of us . . . ’ she swept him from the room and slammed the door, ‘have work to do.’

  Delphine heard her sorting through the big ring of keys like a gaoler. There was a reassuring clunk-clack as she relocked the door.

  ‘Now,’ said Mrs Hagstrom, her voice clear and strident, ‘off with you. Go on! Off! Off!’ Delphine listened to Mrs Hagstrom herding the Professor down the corridor. She allowed herself to exhale. So, Propp was off on his travels again.

  A blast of damp heat hit Delphine the instant she entered the kitchen. She had sneaked round to the north side, to make it look as if she had come into the house via the servants’ entrance, but the ruse was unnecessary; the room was such a commotion of clanking and yelling that she could have entered through the chimney and no one would have noticed. The shelves were heaped with apparatus like a wizard’s laboratory: copper pans, tureens, jelly moulds, weights and balances, whisks, ladles and heavy-bottomed pots. At the far end, several geese turned on a spit above the range, dribbling fat that hissed as it hit the flames, while behind them black kettles thrummed with water.

  Mrs Hagstrom stood a short distance from the fire. She had her sleeves rolled up. Sweat glued hair to her brow. She bellowed commands without looking up from her work, the thwack of her blade keeping time.