Now We Shall Be Entirely Free Read online

  A girl came. She had a squint eye or she was blind in one eye. Lacroix asked for brandy but she returned with something else which, after tasting it and liking it, he decided was whisky. He looked round to see if anyone was eating. No one was. They were drinking and smoking and talking and sometimes they paused to look at the singer, a boy more than a man, who sang pleasantly, songs Lacroix imagined the others all knew.

  He held his empty glass up to the girl. When she filled it he asked her about food but she just looked at him blankly and when he repeated the question he could make no sense of her reply, though he thought he had heard it clearly enough. It amused him more than frustrated him. Perhaps he should try speaking to her in Spanish. He had learned a little while they were waiting to go out, the officers passing round a dog-eared copy of Mordente’s Spanish Grammar. Algo para comer, señorita? Tengo mucho hambre. Su pais es muy interesante. Anyway, the whisky seemed to be a type of food and later, at his lodgings, he would send out for something. Oats. A fish. More whisky.

  His neighbour, he realised, was speaking to him. He was, at least, leaning forward and working his mouth. Lacroix nodded, said the first things that came into his head. “A ship! From the south!”

  The man grinned. It was a pity, thought Lacroix, that no one was wearing a kilt, that there was not, in fact, any tartan to be seen at all. Even the singer was dressed as he might have been in Bath or Wincanton.

  He ordered a last glass of whisky. This time when she served him he asked about a room. Did she know a good place? Somewhere respectable? The questions seemed to irritate her.

  “There’s nae room here.”

  “Somewhere near?”

  “Wha?”

  “Near here?”

  “Aye,” she said. “Somewhere.”

  He paid her, wondering if she would take English coins, if there would be some trouble, but she swept them off the table with barely a glance and tucked them into a pocket beneath her apron.

  Outside, he breathed in the chill of the spring air; breathed in too the whiff of a nearby piss alley. Had he seen his way to open country he might have gone there, walked clear of the city and found some sheltered place to lie down under his cloak, sleep out like a hare in its form. But there was only the street, and beyond it the view of another. Nor could he quite remember the way he had arrived. Well, it hardly mattered. He did not know the city well enough to be lost in it. He set off, turned left, left again, traversed a square, walked past the black bulk of a church, past a statue of a warrior on horseback, sword to the sky. A knot of staggering men beckoned to him and he turned into a side street to leave them behind. He had hoped to come to the river again, had expected to. Now, he lost faith in his sense of direction and started to retrace his steps—if the river was not one way it must be the other—but what he began to pass did not seem to be what he had passed by earlier. Where was the statue? Where was the church? Where were the drunken men?

  From a narrow street he stepped into a broader one. This new street was lit along one side with a line of lamps, ten or so, their globe heads shedding a blue light like the blue of a spark . . .

  “But this is gas!” he said, out loud. In London, on leave, he had seen gas lamps in Pall Mall. Not many. Not many anywhere. None, to his knowledge, in Bath or Bristol. But here, in Glasgow, a little row of them, perhaps experimental!

  He went to them and walked beneath them. You could close your eyes and still the blue was there, seeping through the skin or caught under the skin in a blue dissolve. The future, he decided, would be well lit. Light would be a moral force. Gas would do more good in the world than Jesus Christ or Mohammed. Imagine if there had been lights like these that night in Spain . . .

  When he opened his eyes there was a woman standing in front of him holding out an orange. Even the orange was blue.

  “Do ye want it?” she said.

  “How much?”

  He did not hear her answer, or he heard it but didn’t understand. She had a small, neat face. Freckles. She wasn’t smiling but he liked her.

  “I’ll give you something,” he said. He put down his bags. He had never gone with a woman from the street before though he knew several from the regiment who had, or claimed they had. Wood, for example. Was it wrong? All he really wanted was a bed for the night. He decided he would let the change in his pockets decide. If it was only enough for an orange then the orange would be his supper. If it was more, enough for her, then the decision would be made for him. He was giddy, or suddenly overfull of a sort of vertiginous air. It was the whisky, of course, but also being at the edge of something, a thinning-out at the brink of what he understood or knew. And might it not be exactly what he needed? The breath and skin of another? That. Might there not be immense comfort in it? He reached into his pockets. As he did so he saw her glance over his shoulder and he started to turn, but too slowly. A kick to the back of his right knee and he was dragged down to the ground. The moment he was there he was kicked again, hard, this time in the ribs. He twisted about, he squirmed. He could see a man’s legs, his stockings, blue in the blue light, and was stretching for them with some idea of tackling him, getting him on to the ground too, when he was struck from the other side by an assailant he had not even been aware of . . .

  They must, while he was senseless, have dragged him away to the unlit side of the street. He had a short dream in which he was lying in the cot-bed on the Jenny, rising and falling with the movement of the sea, quite at ease. When he opened his eyes he was on his back with one of his legs in the air, a man tugging off his boot. He kicked out at the man and was immediately kicked himself, though the kicker’s aim was poor and rather than the toe of his foot connecting with Lacroix’s temple, the sole of the shoe rasped across the skin of his brow. Somehow—rage, fear—he got to his feet, rising up under a heavy rain of blows. He swung at the nearest shadow, connected with the man’s neck, saw him stagger backwards. Then the girl was there and he paused. Was she with them, or was she also under attack? He tried to speak to her but she ran at him and tripped him and the kicking began again, kicks from her too, lifting her petticoats to kick more freely, her feet as sharp as pins.

  Then they fled, in one movement, like birds.

  He stood again, set off in pursuit, running on stockinged feet until he came on them, all three, crouching behind railings. He knocked down the first man to rise and immediately straddled him. What he wanted above all was to hurt him; the whole night had narrowed itself to that, the desire to hurt, to repay the injustice of their actions by striking a face until it was pulp. The man writhed beneath him like a great fish but the others had not abandoned him and now the second man—it might even have been the woman—struck Lacroix with the fiddle case, crashed it into the back of his skull, and sent him reeling.

  Hard to know how long he was out for this time. When he came back to himself he was spread-eagled on the cobbles as if they had tumbled him out of an upstairs window. He lay like that a while, not daring to move, then reached for the railings, pulled himself closer and propped his back against them. His mouth was full of blood. He gagged, turned his head and spat it out. Ahead of him, pale ghosts, were his own bootless feet. His money had been in his boots, most of it. Notes from the bank in Bath. Two fives, a ten.

  He spat again. That last crack on the head with the fiddle was the one that really hurt. He touched the place gingerly, half afraid to put his fingers into the combs of his own brain. He tried to find it funny that he had survived the war but come to grief in Glasgow, cut down by an orange seller and her paramours. He tried.

  The street was deserted. Other than himself, the only visible living entity was a small dog that had settled nearby. He found its presence comforting, and though they were strangers to each other he knew (for he knew dogs) that it had settled there out of some instinct to serve him. He muttered to it, reached out a hand to it, then, troubled by its stillness, looked harder and saw t
hat it was one of his bags. He crawled to it. It was the smaller bag, and beyond it, a yard or two, lying on its lid, was the fiddle case. Had they been disturbed? A window thrust up on its sash, the approach of a carriage? He looked for the larger bag, looked hopefully, but there was no sign of it. So, goodbye to the boat cloak, his buckskin breeches, his shirts, his only pair of spare boots. He could not quite remember what was in the smaller bag—he had repacked everything on the Jenny—but he feared it was the less useful part of what he had carried.

  I am being punished, he thought. Then, after a dozen seconds during which he considered the wisdom of being sick, he thought, no, but this is how I learn.

  Learn what?

  He made himself as comfortable as he could against the railings. It was hard to tell how much damage they had done, what might be broken. It was hard to attend to anything at all other than the ringing in the air, a sound like a wetted finger around the rim of a glass. And he was drifting into a type of sleep, into blankness, when a voice spoke from a column of night somewhere above and to the right of him. A measured voice. A voice you might imagine belonging not so much to the Good Samaritan as to the Good Samaritan’s lawyer.

  “Is the man muntered, or is he hurt?”

  Lacroix raised his head, looked up. Silhouetted against the line of gas lamps (they burned more feebly now; the pressure was dropping), two men were standing over him. He tensed himself for more kicks but they did not come. Instead, one of the men leaned down with a dark lantern. When he opened the shutter the light shoved at Lacroix’s eyes and he turned his head away.

  “Can you stand?” asked the man.

  “What?”

  “Can you stand?”

  But before he could answer, before he could make the attempt, he felt hands slide under his shoulders and he was raised up.

  “Are you the watch?” asked Lacroix.

  “We’re the new police,” said the man who had lifted him. “We patrol about the place. We help if we can.”

  “I have been . . . attacked,” said Lacroix. His voice was thick and to his own ears not entirely familiar. “They took my boots. And my bag.”

  “You had another bag?”

  “My money was in my boots.”

  “People do that,” said the one with the lantern. “It’s why they take the boots.”

  “Also,” said the other, “they want the boots.”

  “There was a woman,” said Lacroix. He could not get past the knowledge he had been kicked on the ground by a woman.

  “Small one or a big one?”

  “She had freckles, I think.”

  “Well, we will look for her. You never know.”

  They stood a while in silence, as if they had forgotten whose turn it was to speak. “I need to lie down,” said Lacroix. “I am hurt.”

  “Are you a visitor?”

  “A what?”

  “A visitor?”

  “Yes.”

  “You won’t think much of the place now.”

  “Can you take me somewhere?” asked Lacroix. “Please. I need to lie down.”

  “It would be best to go somewhere close,” said the man who had lifted him, and who now picked up the bag and the fiddle. “For the sake of your feet.”

  It did not feel close. They walked the length of the street, then the length of the next. They turned down an alley, came out on to a third street, and finally up a dozen stone steps to a door. Beyond the door was a passage. It was lit at the end by a single cruisie lamp on a table.

  They sat Lacroix on a stool. After much calling a woman appeared. She was, thought Lacroix, what the police must call a big woman. Between her and the men—who Lacroix now saw were dressed neatly in blue coats to their knees—there was a conversation he did not try to follow, though at some point he became aware they were asking him his name.

  “My name?”

  “For our records.”

  “You keep records?”

  “Oh yes. The records are very important. Everything in writing. Now then . . . ” His pen, dipped, was poised over the paper.

  “Lovall,” said Lacroix.

  “Once more?”

  “Lovall. Lov-all.”

  The policeman wrote it carefully. He had a kind face, a little like the choirmaster’s at Wells. When he had finished he showed it to Lacroix. “Have I got it?”

  Lacroix nodded.

  The woman led him up the stairs. He was carrying his own things now. He lagged behind her. It was clear she did not want him there, that she had only agreed because the police had asked her. She let him into a room. There was a candle stub on the wooden bed-head, fixed there in its own wax. She lit it for him and left him. He sat on the bed feeling his skull. He started to shake and gripped his own arms, willing it to stop. When it did, or when it was less, he put the fiddle case on the blanket beside him and opened it. The instrument appeared whole, though he would need daylight to tell if the wood was cracked. He opened his bag, rummaged. The writing case was there, and the pistol, though the gunsmith’s parcel was not. He closed it, pushed it under the bed. He thought he should take off his boots, then remembered. He got beneath the blanket. The room was cold, as if the building had a season all its own, untouched by May.

  He put the candle out with the flat of his palm. The room folded around him, darkness like the heaping of cinders, grey ash. He started to whisper the Lord’s Prayer but broke off at “forgive us our trespasses” to listen to the sounds from the room next door. A rhythmic tapping against the partition wall, a woman’s sighs, a man’s sighs, a woman’s cries, a man’s goading. The rhythm built, became a crazy drumming on the wall. The wet slap of flesh on flesh. The woman’s cries were delirious, comical, a kind of false singing. In the dark, he filled his chest with air, swelled his lungs, ignoring the pain, and let out a roar, a sound bigger than himself: “ENOUGH!”

  After a moment of utter silence the house roared back at him.

  * * *

  When he woke it was raining. The sound of it, arriving in gusts against the window glass, was like a cool hand on a wound. He listened to it, closely, then he slept again, woke definitively and tried to sit up. He couldn’t—certainly not in a single movement. He shifted, tested, negotiated with those parts of himself that were most raw, most intolerant of any disturbance. Eventually he got his legs out of the bed. That was something. He wiped the gum from his eyes, peered at the room, its collection of facts. The night before began to reassemble itself. The girl with the freckles, the blue orange, the feel of his fist against a man’s neck, the new police. He looked round for some water. There was none. He looked for a mirror but there was no mirror either. He looked for his boots and cursed himself.

  To begin with he needed to get out of the house. Once he was out of the house he could think of what came next. There would be momentum. He pulled the fiddle case from under the bed, picked up his remaining bag, made it to the door. It would not have amazed him to find it was locked and that he was a prisoner. There had, in the night, been some miraculous communication with his colonel, with others too, news from Spain. But the door was open, there was no one outside it, and he shuffled towards the top of the stairs, went down them like a man of eighty crippled with the ague.

  The hall at the bottom had shallows of silvery light on bare grey stone. He had no idea whether or not he had paid for his room.

  “Hello?” he said.

  There was a door hidden behind a piece of faded tapestry. A woman pushed past it, stared at Lacroix, disappeared, then came back with a cloth in her hand.

  “You need to wipe yiself,” she said.

  The cloth was damp. He pressed it against his face then worked it around the back of his head, his neck.

  He gave her back the cloth. She frowned at it. He asked for a drink.

  “Wha?”

  He mimed drinking. She no
dded, returned behind the tapestry, and reappeared with a tumbler. He assumed she would bring him water but it was whisky, and after struggling to get down the first sip, the liquor finding out all the broken places of his mouth, he was grateful for it and showed with a slow blink, a tilt of his head, that he was.

  It was the same woman as the night before, he recognised her now, but her displeasure at him, his existence, seemed to have passed.

  “You’ve nae boots,” she said. She pointed. He grimaced. It was a moment when either one of them might have laughed but neither did. She fetched her shawl, a thing like a fishing net, black and loosely knotted. “Follow me,” she said.

  They went out into the morning. The rain was over but it was hard to avoid puddles and after a while he gave up trying. Several times people stopped the woman to ask what she was doing and who he was, this poor wee man with his swollen face and wet feet. And each time (arms crossed over her bosom) the woman patiently explained while the strangers observed him, shaking their heads, as if sudden misfortune, the mad descent of the wheel, was a truth they understood perfectly well. Then he was off again, the captain of hussars in trust to a woman who led him as she might a child or a dancing bear. Had the circumstances been described to him twenty-four hours earlier they would have sounded absurd, insupportable, yet they turned out to be not quite either.

  They came to a shop. In a niche above the door was a plaster head, mouth open, eyes screwed shut. A silent howl. They went in. It was an apothecary’s, a druggist’s. Strange stinks, glass-fronted cupboards, big brass scales, small brass scales. The woman began a conversation with a much smaller woman whose shop it was or who was minding it. After a few minutes, Lacroix was waved forward.

  “You can understand me if I speak English?” asked the small woman. She had an accent. German, Dutch.

  He nodded. She sat him on a chair under a window and probed his head. She had him open his mouth and pull up his shirt. She was very thorough.

  “You will heal,” she said, when she had finished.