Warlight(9)

Before half-term, The Moth proposed that if I wished to earn a little money he probably could arrange a job during the coming holiday. I nodded cautiously.



“The Sinister Benevolence of the Lift Boy”

There were nine giant laundry tubs revolving endlessly in the basement of the Criterion. It was a grey universe, windowless, separate from any daylight. I was with Tim Cornford and a man named Tolroy, heaving in tablecloths, and when the machines stopped we dragged them across the room onto other machines that pounded them flat with steam. Whatever we wore was heavy with dampness, and before loading the ironed tablecloths onto trolleys to roll them down the hall, we stripped and ran our clothes through the wringers.

On my first day I thought that when I got home I would tell Rachel everything about what it had been like. But in the end I kept it all to myself—at first it was just the way I was embarrassed by the pains in my shoulders and legs, or the rush of pleasure I had had eating a stolen trifle I’d lifted off the coming evening’s dessert trolley. All I did when I got home was crawl into bed, leaving my still-wet clothes drying on the bannister. I’d been thrown into an exhausting pond life and now rarely saw my guardian, who was kept busy at the hub of a thousand spokes. At home he refused to listen to even an approach of a complaint by me. How I behaved or was treated at work did not concern him.

I was offered the chance of night work at pay and a half and leapt for it. I became a lift jockey, bored, invisible in my velvet-lined carriage, and another evening wore a white jacket and worked in the bathrooms, pretending to be essential to guests who really had no need of me at all. Tips were welcomed, but those evenings were tipless and I would not be home before midnight, then up again at six. No, I preferred the laundry. Once, past midnight, after some party had ended, I was told I was needed to help with the transportation of artworks out from the cellar. Significant sculptures and paintings had apparently been transported out of London during the war and hidden in Welsh slate mines. Lesser works were housed in the basements of large hotels and temporarily forgotten, but now they were being gradually lifted back into the light.

None of us really knew how far the tunnels under the Criterion stretched, they may even have travelled under Piccadilly Circus, but down there was unbearable heat and the night staff worked almost naked as they wrestled those similarly naked statues out from the dark. My job was to work the manual lift in order to deliver these men and women, some with missing limbs, some lying in state with dogs at their feet or wrestling a stag, from our labyrinth of tunnels up to the foyer, and for a while the main lobby would appear as it did during the busiest hours of guest arrivals, a queue of dust-covered saints, some with arrows in their armpits, courteously lined up, as if waiting to register. I stroked the midriff of a goddess as I reached past her to pivot the brass handle so we could travel up one floor, barely able to move in the limited space of that service lift. Then I pulled open the grille and they all drifted away on skids into the Great Hall. So many saints and heroes I never knew. By dawn they were travelling towards various museums and private collections in the city.

At the end of that short break I carefully studied my reflection in the school bathroom mirror to see if I had changed or learned anything, then returned to mathematics and the geography of Brazil.

—

Rachel and I often competed over who could best imitate The Darter. He had for instance a furtive walk, as if he were saving energy for a later moment. (Maybe he’s waiting for the “schwer,” Rachel said.) My sister, always the better performer, could make it look as if she were scurrying to evade a searchlight. Unlike The Moth, The Darter was dedicated to quickness. He appeared most at ease in a limited space. After all, he had found early success as The Pimlico Darter, crouching in the modest square of a boxing ring, and we believed, unfairly, that at some point he may have spent a few months of his life in the similarly restricted nine by six feet of a prison cell.

We were curious about prisons. A week or two before our mother’s departure, Rachel and I, imitating trackers in The Last of the Mohicans, had decided to follow her across London. We changed buses twice and then were appalled to see our mother talking to a very tall man who, holding her by the elbow, led her inside the prison walls of Wormwood Scrubs. The two of us retreated home, never expecting to see her again, and sat in our empty living room uncertain about what to do, then were even more confused when she returned in time to cook dinner. I would in fact half believe, after the discovery of the trunk, that my mother had never gone to the Far East at all but had dutifully returned to those prison gates to carry out her postponed sentence for some criminal act or other. In any case, if our mother could be incarcerated, then surely the more obviously anarchic Darter must at one time have ended up in such a place. We thought him the kind of man who would be most at ease escaping through a claustrophobic tunnel.

During the following holiday I caught another job at the Criterion, washing dishes. This time I was surrounded with company and most of all could listen to the numerous stories being told or invented. How one had entered the country smuggled among chickens in the hold of a Polish ship and then leapt covered in feathers into the sea at Southampton; how another was the illegitimate son of an English cricket player who had bedded his mother beyond a boundary in Antigua or Port of Spain—all these confessions were dramatically shouted out while surrounded by the 360-degree din of plates, forks, water rushing out from taps like time itself. I was fifteen years old now and I loved it.