Murmur by Will Eaves

Author:Will Eaves
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Published: 2019-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

*

Leaves skip ahead of us as we near Chapel Hill, the lane that falls past flint-clad cottages onto the Brighton road. Our bikes are where we left them at the entrance to an overgrown snicket of yew, ivy, and hart’s-tongue fern, through which a stream dribbles its way into the Ouse. The snicket leads to a graveyard. The cottages are battening down. Hard faces and forearms reach out from dark interiors to pull the half-doors shut. We’re strangers, here. June takes my arm: she understands the thrill of banishment. Even the rattling hedge applauds our solitude. The secrecy of everything we do makes us invisible. We are not welcome in the world of graft and privation, call-ups, rations, and refugees. We do not work in the same factories, making buttons, checking tool parts; or know—or ever will know—what it’s like to lie awake in crowded attics monitored by rats. We have plunged otherwise into reality. We are like spies upon ourselves, living behind the shopfront of appearances, manners and decency. We seem to do nothing but symbolize and calculate. Bletchley: a country-house party for intellectuals driven about Berkshire in smoky-glassed buses. But what we do forces the key that opens doors of consequence. With this one needle click of a rotor, in one machine, I thread a bridge across the Atlantic, escort a merchant vessel home. I do not fight. But I outwit. I conjure for the German sea-wolves nothing but a fret-filled oceanic vacancy.

June is astride her bike and ready to set off.

“There’s something else.” I point toward the woods. “In there. I haven’t got a ring for you. But I have—a dowry. Two, actually. I brought them here a while ago, when I was—visiting my friend.”

She listens with the effort of a teacher wishing to reserve judgment. She breathes in very carefully, and says, “You’re being most mysterious, Alec. I’m not sure if I should be pleased you planned all this. How did you know I’d accept you? It is the feminine prerogative to be mercurial, you know.”

“Oh, mercury. I wouldn’t be so proud of that. Makes good mirrors, if you can live with the toxicity. But you can do so much better! I like to coat my glass with pure silver, the most reflective metal and—a symbol of equality. The isotopes, you know—equal in abundance.”

June asks me what I’ve done. I tell her that I’ve laid in store a pessimist’s ransom. Some currency, in case the worst happens, which it well might. It’s hard to think of these old hills and ancient paths falling—of coming round a turn in the herringbone wall to find sentries, a BMW R75, its loud report. And hard to brook our country’s death, the death of a whole world. But even Trentham over in Hut 1 has started to hint at the need for “realistic” plans, contingencies. We can’t believe in our complete failure, although the evidence is everywhere about. We’re shut out from our own catastrophe.

I take June, softly protesting, past our recumbent Hercules into the ivied grove.

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