this thimble drill is beyond me. The alternative — to open the umbrella and rest its post casually against her shoulder — was a possibility that appeared equally remote. Her fingers were far off — her hands farther still and missing in action. Screws of newspaper and heather flowers shimmied across the pavement, starlings blew backwards overhead — Audrey could not assess the power of the wind, nor comprehend how it was that it managed to come first from this quarter, then from that, whistling through her unceasingly, fluting in her mouth, her nostrils, her ears, her vagina. — Waking that very morning, Audrey found the world was barred to me: she could hear Gracie already up and moving about, the rap! as she knocked the old leaves from the slops basin, the compelling raaaasp as she unscrewed the caddy. Audrey had felt a dreadful apprehension — something was about to happen, a momentous — no, calamitous event . .Two pimples on her top lip, big, beneath her tentative tongue. This was not the revolution — the two hundred thousand strikers rising up and following the Spartacus League’s example — but an oppressive alteration to the most fundamental terms of her being: the way she sees and breathes, moves and dreams. She clutched at the sidebars of the bedstead, iron smarting her twisting hands, she arched backwards into the watercolour from the bric-a-brac shop and stood there beneath the windmill’s sails and they. . turned. She moaned and Gracie came to her, her cool touch breaking the enchantment of Audrey’s febrile swoon. She held the cup to Audrey’s lips. . strong, sweet . .That’s good, she said. Gracie helped her to rise and dress. — Returned to Ince’s only three weeks since and already the tedium of the endeavour bore down on Audrey without mercy: Appleby’s sententiousness — which, before the war, if not exactly agreeable, could still be endured — was now insupportable. The lost boys were still rotting in the mud — their comrades, having chased Jerry back to his own corner, were a rash of khaki on the bare autumnal earth . .Appleby’s mean-spirited carping and his harping upon the traditions of the firm — the flitch of his neck with its piggish bristles. . why isn’t he dead? He had installed a capacious umbrella stand while she was at the Arsenal — his sole effort to be up to date, and he promoted this to her relentlessly — for the messenger boys had already addenuff — pulling out first one, then another model, opening an original Paragon so she might admire its sturdy yet resilient baleen ribs — disgusting, this whale’s mouth opening and closing again: a leviathan feeding on the rotten core of the City, thrashin’ about atop its stinking dust heap of high and low finance. Appleby took out a prototype lopsided umbrella, its post set obliquely so that when held at an angle it would still provide total coverage. As he did a crotchety turn about the attic, bowing beneath the trusses, Audrey stared very fixedly at the anciently adzed beam that ran above her brand-new Underwood — only her eyes could inch along, tapping in the small nicks and notches, then return and inch along again, remaking the small nicks and notches . .The rest of her was unbearably heavy, so heavy . .she knew not why the floor did not give way under her, sending her tumbling down to lie among the stacked boxes in the storeroom of the Treadwell Boot Company Makes Life’s Walk Easier . .Gracie had said to her, I fink you better stop ’ome, but Audrey was determined: We cannot afford it. Appleby withdrew more prototypes — an umbrella with a mica panel in its cover, through which a small square of the soused world might be glimpsed. The Paragon Optimus with its patented Automaton frame — pull a lever and the tightly wound silken bundle telescoped out. Compact, Appleby observed, untangling the ribs one by one, but sadly inefficient. He next erected the square umbrella and, setting it on the floor, expanded on its architectural qualities, its fittingness for the modern city, being as it was only a smaller and more portable example of the tiled roof. Then there were various umbrellas equipped with drip protectors — spongy guttering that edged the cover, and that connected to a drainpipe running down the post, capillary action drawing up, then squirting out, the water. . which EVERY LADY SHOULD KNOW, the compressed towels being only 2? inches long and available in tiny silver packets that could be slotted into Southall’s Protective Apron and then fired! Because it was blood, blood. . all about blood. — The previous week Audrey had languished, too lethargic to attend the memorial service held for the munitionettes at St Paul’s — and since then the malaise had come upon her relentlessly, in mounting heavy, earthy waves, until this morning she had feared she might never dig myself out from under it. Now, in Clapham High Street, her eyes scoot along the oriental roofline to a seraglio of bakers, where plump and eunuch loaves are squeezed and rubbed by houris in mob caps. In the midst of her accelerated cerebration Audrey catches hold of this: it is not the Ladies Walking Umbrella that cannot be furled, strapped and closed — it is me, I’ve got the wind up me. It is Audrey’s arms that, beyond her control, fly up and away, struts jerkily unfolding from ribs, then bending back on themselves, so that the riveted pivots bend and pop — her skirts blow up, and, caught by the strengthening wind, the canopy of cloth drags her backwards, her stockings are half unrolled on her stiff posts, her handles in their worn leather boots rattle across a cellar grating. Through the mica panel in her skirts she sees a jeweller’s with its display of NOTED LUCKY WEDDING RINGS — then, caught in her coat buttons, the cloth begins to rip — she thuds into the roadway and is wrenched this way and that across it, mercifully avoiding the bow of a tram, a gig, a grocer’s boy on a tricycle. . Audrey feels the jumbling of her skeletal limbs as she is blown over-rowley past the Temperance Fountain and towards the chestnuts screening the railings of Holy Trinity — through the eye of this whirligig, the woman-contrivance receives this reminiscence: comin’ up ’ere with Mary Jane one Christmas to see Gus Elen an’ ’is old woman ’anding out gifts from their spankin’ new motor car. Not that Audrey’s mother counted on getting one, it was the gaiety of it all she craved: the band playing marches on the bandstand dressed with holly and ivy, a paper cone of sweetly greasy hot nuts. Mary Jane, out on the grassy plain streaked with melting and dirtied snow, the ice wind parting around her bombazine prow, an expression of the profoundest concentration on her face, the hint of steam an’ old cabbage water as she takes a stance . .Only now, spiralling to pieces, her own skirts lifted to show all I’ve got, does Audrey realise what her mother was doing, She never got inter the wayuv bloomers . .another privy thing vouchsafed to her daughter. — That is that: the umbrella is turned right inside out. It lies in the grass by the railings, a mess of buckled steel rods and shredded silk — a redundant thing no longer capable of any effort, war or otherwise. And so it remains there, a thing taken up only to be forgotten for a long while I have expected you to come and call on me. Adeline pauses on a half-landing — situation and pose, both, Audrey imagines, have been contrived for effect. She had been kept waiting by the mistress of Norr House — the housekeeper, treating her dismissively, had placed Audrey on an oakenly uncomfortable chair in the hall, the strong suggestion being that she should stay put. As soon as the woman had fussed off, Audrey got up and wandered about, chafing the piercing tingle of her chilblains and poking into a strangely sparse drawing room, where there was a lustre of polish — the smooth secretion of all those workers’ rubbings — that shone from wood, wood, more wood. There was a dying log fire, and above its mantelpiece a tapestry woven with the figure of a medieval damsel armed with a spindle — a child’s board game was set out on a large, low settle. Going forward, Audrey saw printed the legend Willie’s Walk to Grandmamma. Players’ coloured counters were scattered along the trail, winding across the linen-backed paper, and a teetotum lay keeled over beside a pictorial ravine. Audrey wondered: Was Adeline’s little boy called Willie? She had never asked Stan, and he — alive to his older sister’s disapproval — had never ventured anything concerning Missus Cameron’s domestic circumstances. It had been a long, cold tramp from Carshalton Station — Audrey thought about five miles. She did not mind, though — it would have been self-murder to have asked in her note to Adeline that she be met. Besides, Audrey needed all the fresh air she could get on her half-days away from the Danger Buildings — simply to be rid of the mustard smell, the burnt-garlic reek, the ground horseradishes . .Not that these were any more than approximations: the odour of the Buildings was indefinable, you had to be there — not here, where paper flowers tickle your nose and where Adeline is: raised up on the fresh white beech of her stair, her hemline high enough to show plenty of fresh white silk stocking, and her neckline low enough to reveal the whiteness of her bosom. Between these whitenesses there floats a Japanese kimono, its pattern of heavy blue and magenta lotus flowers nodding her head . .At least she has the decency not to affect mourning — the only black thing hung about Adeline is the velvet ribbon — dévoré? — criss-crossing into the beaver’s tail of dark hair that rests upon her too-wan neck. She resumes her descent and her speech: I–I was unsure about contacting you, Miss De’Ath. . In truth, I didn’t know precisely where to find you. . Audrey supposes another might locate in Adeline’s hesitancy the sincerity she has precisely placed there — however, Audrey is not to be seduced. Death, she says plainly, as Adeline is led across the hall by her own outstretched hand. Death, she says again, rising from the absurd chair. Free from personal vanity as she tries to be, Audrey cannot help seeing herself in the kohl-edged cameo of Adeline’s eyes, floating there. . Nobody’s dream, her grey alpaca skirt’s brush braid adjusted several times over, the dyed straw of her hat retouched with a sixpenny bottle from Woolworth’s, the faded raptures and plushette roses on her jacket collar crushed by the rain, her boots oft-mended on a Sunday — the only religious rite ever observed in the Death household. To forestall any pity, to compel this moneyed sensualist’s attention to the true nature of things, Audrey strips off her glove so that they meet skin to skin, chipped nails sliding past manicured ones. The back of Audrey’s hand is uppermost, a freckled and oleum-pitted garnet in the fine lady’s clasp. Adeline’s palm is passionately hot, and beneath the brittle pad of her thumb Audrey detects a strong and rapid pulse. Ah, yes, Death, says Adeline. I knew, of course, that Stanley had enlisted under that name. Audrey, wishing within the confines of manners to be without pity, says, It is our name — when I went for factory work it was the name I had to give. She requires that this coldness between them be retained — that the chatelaine of Norr’s class position be sharply defined. Adeline frustrates this by refusing to let go of Audrey’s hand, drawing her instead towards another door off the hall, then through this into a cosy chamber — the walls brightly papered, many-branched candelabras set either end of a mantelpiece, below which honeycombs incandesce . .Pine cones, Adeline says, a silly affectation, I daresay, but I collect them every year to burn — the candlelight is also perhaps an affectation, but I find it more aesthetical than the electric, besides, we think it incumbent on us to save fuel oil for. . she falters. . for the effort, and so do not have the generator except when people are down at the weekend. Adeline has manoeuvred them on to a small settee, where they are perfectly snug and still linked — she must have rung the bell because a very young girl enters, not in uniform but in a simple blue cotton frock gathered at her waist, and with her ash-blonde hair loose about her shoulders. Another affectation? Audrey says tartly once Adeline has given an order for tea, tea cakes and some of that fruit cake if Cook has any left? Yes, I suppose it is one, she replies easily, but I don’t see why they should have to be in black at all times. I give them an allowance — a generous one I believe — and they’re at liberty to get such clothes as are suitable. My own dressmaker will run them something up — like that, and almost at no profit to herself. Of course, Adeline sighs, at weekends it needs to be different — my husband takes the conventional view on staff. Audrey is unimpressed by Marie Antoinette playing with her domestics — more so by her casualness in speaking of the cuckold. She would like to look down on Adeline — her hostess has forestalled this by hanging on to me: they remain intimate in the complexity of their bones, the stretched coverings of their skins’ overlay.