An impression of the bashed boiled-egg face of the big clock, and of the gentlemen petrified on their plinths — Audrey sees the pipe organ of Parliament, hearkens to its maddening fugue. . She looks down at her freckled hands, lying once more in the lap of her shabby dress, ’ow they shake with palsy. Her father tenderly places a bag between them, the rumpled paper, cloth-soft. She withdraws a bonbon reeking of acetone and presses it to her bloodless lips — then tastes the pear essence as it bashes her teeth. — You ’ad a little turn there, m’dear. His solicitude is more troubling than his contempt. They are on a motor ’bus that shudders up Whitehall — a leather hanging strap tap-taps against his bowler, he pats her hands, the action as involuntary as hers. He speaks of the ’bus and its route from Victoria to the Bank, but Audrey cannot hear him that well for her hands have twisted into claws that scrabble on the mounds of her thighs, back and forth, over and over, in a pattern that cannot really be a pattern — since it is never repeated. The unstoppable movement towards the city’s central lodestone is affecting, Audrey notices, her father’s elocution: aligning the wayward consonants, repelling the colloquialisms. — As I was saying before, Audrey, Mister Phillips is now making a fuller commitment to Albert — he’s to board at Woodford. Mister Phillips has arranged it all with the Drapers, while he himself will pay for his books. . his sporting equipment and suchlike. Well —? This is not, she realises, a question — it’s more akin to a chairman’s patter between turns, and so begs the question,
What’s coming next? She sees Albert as Mister Phillips must have, spottin’ ’im in Anderson’s, the tall youth’s bulging grey eyes running down the column of figures scrawled on a bill — tu’pence for this, ha’pence for that, thru’pence for the Eccles cake — his severe mouth pronouncing the total instantly. His family are, of necessity, familiar with Albert’s prodigious calculating ability, his pals too: they call him Datas, after the music-hall mental prestidigitator. Just as his father has his moniker shouted after him in the street, so Datas Death has his own salute, Am I right, sir? Although unlike the genial Datas on stage, there’s no jocularity to Albert’s correctitude. He is rigid in all things, disdaining brawling, yet looks fit to kill if he’s accused of having funked it by failing to answer a question or complete a computation. Now the days are balmier he strips to the waist in the hugger-mugger of the backyard — having obtained a copy of Sandow’s Magazine, he performs the exercises it describes using Indian clubs he has made by sawing up old railway sleepers. — Datas is not Stanley’s hero, but Enigmarelle, the Man of Steel — he desires to be a mechanical man with an engine hammerin’ in his belly and smoke spurtin’ from ’is mouf an’ nose . .I’ve never been up on a motor before! is Audrey’s answer, shouted over the rattle-bash that reverberates through the saloon. Her eyes skitter to the back platform, fall from it to the pattern of crushed droppings-on-tarmac that unrolls there. Try as she might, she cannot will the grunting ’bus aloft, up from the congeries of cabs that mesh into a millipede inching its way from Whitehall into Trafalgar Square. Audrey cannot — yet Stan flies whenever he wants: he positions her beside him in front of their mother’s new cheval glass and tips it back to fling them suddenly, silver, skywards . .Stan says: In twenty years’ time everyone will be an aeronaut, Colonel Cody will perfect his war kite and there’ll be gazetted aeroplane services connectin’ all the cities of the Empire. Airships’ll carry the heavy freight that goes now by sea: pig iron, coal, Canadian wheat. They’ll anchor up above the Pool of London and the air will be fick with their hawsers — the stevedores’ll operate movin’ beltways high as cranes. See! Up we go, Aud! And again he tips the glass so the flame-haired girl and the bat-eared boy lift off, suddenly, silver, skywards . .