Torsade Literary Space The Folly: fifth arc
The present mission of the Folly’s spiritualist circle is persuading Fiona Tattersby to forgive Simon, thus to allow his crossing. Tattersby family affairs are badly tangled, and the question of Simon’s elder brother Atherleigh, killed in a chemical explosion, leaving behind an unsettled estate, has not been broached. It is about to be, and through the medium of an unsuspected interloper, the German spy, Krug.
Perhaps a Pair of Eyes
Chiswick 1934
The Watchman
The Assassin Comes
A Chain
Only One
Lonely in Its Reckoning
Men (first)
Men (second)
Plain and Ugly Terms
Older in Their Wisdom
The German Spy
Perhaps a Pair of Eyes
(one)
Can a man in Tattersby’s estate
Plant his feet and lift the standard
Do we contemplate to name this tidal movement
(a little shaver chipped from the block of ancient manners)
The Modern Chivalry
Dames to entertain the dropping of a hankie
Even to allow the figure of a man
The launch
if not the following of a lance
When the host was packing, and had placed his bag
In carelessness a stone’s toss from the hearth
It was Roscoe took it on himself
to knock out Simon’s marble,
with an aviator’s savvy
for the arc
Simon’s pilgrimage may serve him thus
for a geste (Fiona grants it)
‘But even there…’
She interrupts herself to thrust a finger
At the guest
‘You’ve let Virginia start you on a habit…
All whimsy and romance…this wish to lend enchantment
To an unrepentant villain and a pest.’
Her late estranged’s quest sped with quixotic perseverance
O’er his lady’s threshold, London-ward
‘But, my dear,’ the host nods aside to their leader
‘you assign the soul a task too hard.’
‘I have promised Trout I will share in his guilt,
though I rather suspect him quite safe.’
Beetling off into the woods after supper
Tramping at sunrise home like a sleepwalker
Trailing a fluttering of cobweb
Stumbling indoors, eyes a-stare, hair on end
Pawing at the phone in a nervous tremour
‘Ahem. Is this…Llewellyn…? Oh…I see…the colonel isn’t…
No…I have no message…’
Passing the guest he’d murmured, ‘I shall be below…’
‘There is too much light,’ says the host.
‘I really don’t make it out…but just there, upper right
Perhaps a pair of eyes and a sort of mouth.’
Chiswick 1934
(two)
This area, where an up-and-comer rubs shoulders
With the fraying shawl of gentility
A lineage forged in lint
And where underground commuters spot oddity
Familiarly in circled eyes
And fierce vampiric lights
That pudding-skinned visages blanch
into a sinister loneliness
The chap whom no one knew
Fit in
And no one missed him
When he went
His room was in the attics
Or to speak of matters strictly, is
Even now he occupies his bed
It can’t entirely be said
Krug has vacated premises
A host of new arrivals even
Squats upon the lease
Puzzled, but largely still
Bearing above other stirrings pity for himself
A man falsified in grim disguise and shunned
(notwithstanding) he is further
Shackled in place by a bony ankle
Reaches for the writing table
Where in his native tongue he had
Inked logorrheic gusts
And when she comes…
Will she have the sense
To burn those first—at once
Or will she stand aghast?
The Watchman
(three)
She would, Agnes, the wife, or helpmeet
(this was possible) approach the embassy
Possible
unlikely
She would, on an island nation folded, in state laid cerebral
along the coast (the brain an aging cheese
encroached…by mites…active pissing virtue
upon the host) go when summoned
float at very sunrise
Krug had known it, time most wise
the sun so sharp, the watchman weary
When a countryman, a Greek or Pole
A bloody Czech
A Catalan contrarian, a Turk
(Her same photograph on four separate
Passports, her same autograph, with four separate
Surnames, once Tattersby, once Serna, once dos Santos;
Once Agnes, first name Jane)
She had the child with her, sending him away
She turned…if tears were in her eyes
Obscured by rain
She stared, and Krug knew failure
Again
She’d crossed to take his arm
And in a trance, becharmed, he’d gone
Now let his agonies be devoured
Let pellets of private speech stink from walls
their sour stink
But let her think to come and see
The Assassin Comes
(four)
It amounts to when
No sacrifice without advantage
(mein Herr) as to chessmen
But players on the scene bump in
In her room, Krug diligent and dozy
…not allowing sleep
Lies still and lets the streetlamp
Inform him of her corners
Jewellery chest three dressing table drawers
The fourth is simply missing for a jest
He stares tries to fathom a map of this
When she snores
He creeps, and naked pads to feel behind the glass
All her things found in the pages of a bible
Many photographs of many men and third class menus
A lock of hair
A thin, thin chain of brass
Envy he feels most
Welling through a crust of abandonment
and helpless anger
An embarrassment of other selves
This woman Agnes sheltered under
She has pretended nothing
She and Atherleigh laughing
Their bitter gay insouciance of modern thought
To die with a brilliant flash as the setting sun
Teeth like a stream of mackerel clouds
Bared in a nihilistic grin
A boy in boarding school stowed
who may reared empty thus become
Another such as the whistling falcon
Stooping on
Atherleigh dead for the second time
His body arranged as a warning sign
The assassin comes
A Chain
(five)
A woman who has done no wrong in life
Leaves her front door
Leaves it to decide, as objects can
To click or slam…in its own good time
Skulduggery in mind
Discounting nursery crimes…her guvie’s frog
…indeed, to a helpless thing she’d once been cruel
Fiona feels a genuine sorrow
I ought to have kept well away from the pond
Let nature breed and sing and die
Unmolested by a spoiled child
She is on the sneak today
With Simon’s marble in her pocket
And down the drain she means to drop it
But he is dead long since and by rights
Simon must go away
No, dear, she tells him, under breath
I don’t, and I shan’t, and it’s all no use
Why stick at an argument neither of us can win?
She bends
A bobby bustles up. “Ah, madam. You are the one, I see. Lost this.”
He fists across a thin, thin chain of brass
On which a tiny pendant swings
One of those foolish things, a mustard seed, encased in glass
“Why,” she begins, and absent, then, “How kind…yes…thank you.”
Fiona Tattersby has faced down ghosts
And pitied them and mollified their torments
To say she dreads a thing, feels horror
She must be speaking of the tedious unbeliever
One query more from a sceptical reporter
But her eyes, darting in embarrassment
Had seen an invitation to the duel
Only One
(six)
The genius Falco has put his eye on a newish house of brick
Newish house with newish tile-capped wall, fatly hipped
Just under this, on the garden side, roses, that predictable
Middle-class person’s garish choice
A treacly morbid pink
Insistently like the vomitus of a suicide by poison
Bloody froth surrounded by a jaundiced glaze
He is near twitching with this restive scorn
Can it be…? The falcon doubts it much
And finds it plausible high places have sent down
A delaying order
He longs for them to find her
Perhaps the mistake had been the counterpane
The water low the weather sultry
The boatman poling past the culvert mouth
Well…does one report a dosser, sleeping rough?
He would not himself, this bird of prey
No reward
Worse when they find she’s dead
But he has done for Krug…unbidden
Old-fashioned service, if you like
He might do for this lot here
Most astonishing…so many accidents to cover up
The sting of ingratitude, he feels it
There is only one Falco, only one
Stop him if you can
Lonely in Its Reckoning
(seven)
Agnes justified on the day of her promotion
The old women to her sister’s marriage filing
The church gained down pitched channels
Mostly arid, stepped by feast and famine
Fiery sky…and flood
Fiery sky
And flood again neighbours dressed in veils
Veils cindered hues of ash flow
Dressed in veils themselves neighbours
Side-footing under eaves marked with the eye of fate
Wool-clad, clad in sombre wool, for the hills here made no yield
The hills here
Everywhere this island bone-rock splits at drives of deluge
Autumn rains
And the dear olive, the patient olive grows here
The patient olive tender cultivated grapes
Unmarried girls stole glances bending drawing water
Hand not stopping play over ropes so cautious
Of vanity and of the Watchful
And wondered…never voicing syllables in hearts
There, even, envy had its ears
Wondered if that face had beauty
Why sparrow, her mother said
Why you are not so ugly
Her spirit was the spark of a live coal
Porous grey and near to dying
On the day of her promotion
She’d at last been shown the game
but
These were not the days of the old women
Agnes had crossed the century
to the continent and the city
And the face, as the mundane Mr. Serna said
Became her passport
And the flesh, in a place of verdancy
Wants its own
There is a kind born to this
But the flesh, lonely in its reckoning
Lies not where Agnes is
Men (first)
(eight)
He said, ‘Smile, Agnes. Always smile.’
Serna the milliner dispassionately surgical
Limning his foundling’s looks
She’d felt safe, so ill-prepared in going out
Wounded and angry and oddly at home
In Marseille he was mother to her, telling her
‘Your brows are too low, you will pluck them.
I tell you how girls are.’ He bent at the vanity
Ushered her to the glass
Used a word to call, so he saw, the most of them
Meaning pretty-plain
‘A face with no nose, no eyes…’
She laughed. ‘There, now!’ He made her up.
‘But see what a hard little harpy you are!’
She’d bared her teeth, they’d laughed together
At customs sheds, beaming at guards
Agnes folds wings
And becomes a colt, told to stand aside somehow
Frisking in the way again
Playful snagging the hat from the box and cocking it
On the crown of her own
Gives a bob and turn to the man, waiting his
‘Do you model them, is that it?’ his wife asks. ‘Is it fun?’
‘Have you seen the new brim?’ Finger to her lips…
Serna laughs, and laughingly he says, ‘Agnes, I forbid you!’
She opens another box.
Two years, a river of banknotes flowing
The scorn of armed frontiers verboten
Agnes one night leaves a cab
Fog on a street in Naples a hand
Weights the clasp of her bag
And draws her elbow slack
With a single guard in her compartment
She rides to meet a ferry
Moves at gunpoint down a pier
His nudging hand at her back and the
Clock, clock of his heels
Are lost to mist and she feels herself retracing the path of Orpheus
Descending blind into Hades and no hope
Of dodging His thin, welcoming smile
Men (second)
(nine)
Some speak her language
She hears them on tiptoes
Speak the other side of glass and mesh
A harsh sea agate blue squints and growls at the sun
Of other sights to see none
She wishes they would speak of Agnes
These guardians
Share their gossip, marvel
If there is anything marvellous in her imprisonment
She came to Serna not strongly literate
Knowledge was to her the world away from home
Whatever might be in it
Perhaps in this the moral to the myth
Would you now not trade the world for a map?
Would you learn to speak English…can you do it?
To dos Santos she had frankly said, I barely read and write
He scratched his chin…no? Well, you may be trained
A man and woman came to force the daily drill
One American one British
Don’t sit there stupid, listen
Hours in the locked room
I go, I shall go, I have gone, I went
Why so? Why not?
I learn, I am learning, I will learn, I have learnt
Odd then, to know a foreign alphabet
And not her own
Odd to be free, and a wife (which she has never been)
A lecturer’s wife, young parvenue
Modelling a baroness’s parure
At a charitable afternoon
Charming little thing
Do you mind, dear…where are you from?
Then Lord Atherleigh
She has aimed at him the swirl of her skirt
The nape of her neck
A glance and a pinkening of cheeks
She can manage even that
I pity her, she hears one say
That man
He might be her grandfather
She makes her eyes wide and clear
Do you wonder I’ve been staring at you
So rude, I’m very sorry, but…
Plain and Ugly Terms
(ten)
Now I never smile
That, Fiona, brings the flicker of one your own
(I saw)
Ah—
But in plain and ugly terms…in simplicity, of course, why lie?
We are measuring ourselves as we are
Those mortal remains of mine stretch wide
Flesh devoured or dried, my allegory’s grin…
I apologize
I must tell you where they are, these bones
Half mummified
Among the favours I will ask…
No.
You remember when Atherleigh surprised you
and me
Just there in the hall, letting it slip
You’d been fighting with Simon
Wennie was six, you hadn’t met him,
and you’d asked if the salmon was all right
With, as he said (afterwards) admirable aplomb
You spoke to me more kindly, I think, than you felt
Because you would not speak to him
What did we talk about?
Oh, my dear…I likely harped on the theme
of Tattersby failings, bred in the bone.
I said so. Nasty cat. I doubt it’s ever really true.
No, the cold mechanics
of decomposition won’t trouble me, to hear of
Very little does.
You want to know how he managed it.
Some chemical they kept that could explode
If touched by water
He had rigged a balloon inside another
And timed the acid’s work without the horrid third
Fifteen minutes, he’d gathered all the papers
To not be seen as Atherleigh leaving, dressed
in a groundsman’s gear
And the shock that they had found a body
I can now account for
The men who’d brought on Falco
Merely falsified the story
Older in Their Wisdom
(eleven)
Hearing, Falco would have said, or if insightful, so might say, a million other Falcos… Would have said, he means to say, it’s odd…more than you’d think. More odd, good sirs, more altogether. Yes, point of fact, done and said, there were plenty went deaf…lucky ones, lucky in their way. Most of us were not. But yet, you and the cannon could come to terms. Same as you and your nerves. They might well be married to each other, like that, the roar, and after, the ache. You had to get to where you could ignore that shrew, either road. Lovely old mums at home, doing without their butter, donating the family silver, knitting socks for Tommy. And we, drinking corpse water, creeping lower than poor Yorick…no joke about that. No, three nights left lonely, in a shell pit with a severed head, likely your last confessor, waiting death. And a thing your boots had come to rest on, saving you from suffocation, feeling like a pair of legs.
These were my brothers, older in their wisdom.
Speak, at least, as my Livingstone.
Tell me what I may presume.
I am not a weak man, I doubt the trump of doom could shake me now.
I think of my son unhappy
I hadn’t made him understand
He sits on the foot of his school bed, without a friend.
Bearing along. His Mum will keep her promise.
By God, she will.
You are not a blood relative.
But go to see him, tell him, he’s to live with you
He is, Fiona?
We’d doubted Atherleigh. While allowances were made. Scientists are gifted men; it has been necessary all along, to work with the Germans. And the Germans are given to maintaining ties. Wherever you’ve got a Bavarian clockmaker, there’s an American uncle, a cousin on the rue Saint-Gilles. Britain, one does not really suspect otherwise, is riddled as an old tub. Too many resident foreigners of every type. That woman Agnes, brought in as another man’s wife. Dos Santos vanished…all planned for, of course. Calling himself Pelfrey, last photographed in Budapest. They’d set up housekeeping, produced a child. Having her under watch, nine years under watch, we’d marked his little ruse at once, almost infantile.
See Folly page for full series
The story begins: Calmacott’s Brother