In which Eugen Sandow performs in Marumaru and a seed is planted
Colton Kemp and Jolly Bannerman sat on the damp sand passing a bottle of peaty home-distilled whisky back and forth as the tide receded.
‘To the New Year,’ Bannerman said for the umpteenth time and held the bottle aloft. The two had spent the afternoon together. Jolly had asked after Louisa several times, but Kemp had not told him she was dead. More than a day had passed and he still had not told anyone. ‘She’s fine,’ was all he’d say.
‘And sweet wee Flossie?’
‘As sweet as ever.’
‘You’re a lucky man, Col.’
‘We shall see.’
He looked at the ironmonger, slouched forward over his knees, his slender height compressed like a heron about to take flight. Bannerman slapped his long, tobacco-stained fingers on the grey sand. ‘Tell me I’m not a good husband, Col? Tell me I don’t deserve a little respect?’
Kemp kept silent. Small round pebbles scattered across the beach shimmered in the soft light of late afternoon. The waves covered them with a thin film on the way up the beach but the receding water took the easier route, parting either side of each stone, creating hundreds of little arrow heads pointing back to town, back to his house. Arrows that flickered a few times and disappeared until the next wave came to his toes and pulled back.
‘The likes of which . . .’ Bannerman returned his head to his knees without finishing his thought.
Kemp took the bottle from his friend’s loose grip. ‘I’m not ready to be a father. I can’t do it.’ He took a swig.
The sloshing sound roused Bannerman once more. He held out his hand for the bottle. ‘Hey, are you going to the show tonight?’
‘What show?’
‘What show? Come on, Col. I know the opposition got one over you with the statue, but you can’t tell me you don’t have a ticket.’
‘When were you ever in a state to get a ticket?’
‘Milly got ’em. Just the two I’m afraid. You don’t have tickets? Col, my boy.’
‘Leave it be.’
‘They’ve got plenty besides Sandow. Singers, story-tellers. Louisa and Floss would love it. Perhaps there are still some tickets left.’
‘Louisa is in no state to go,’ he said, his lie almost colliding with the truth.
‘Right, the baby. Any day I suppose. She looked fit to burst when last I saw her.’
He dug his hand into the sand and squeezed.
‘Don’t be nervous, Col. You’ll be a halfway decent father.’ He handed him the near-empty bottle and stood. ‘I’m off home. Off to get cleaned up and take Milly to the show like a good husband. A good husband.’ He shook his head and patted Kemp on the shoulder. ‘Hope to see you there.’
Another wave petered out on the beach and pulled back. The landward arrows flickered. Kemp had not been home since the morning, since Flossie had woken him and sent him to run errands. He’d purchased the supplies she had requested from Mr Fricker and Sam Tong, the greengrocer, but he paid the Chase boy to deliver them. The muscles of his stomach clenched whenever he thought about crossing the threshold. He had decisions to make, so many decisions—funeral arrangements, someone to cover for him at Donaldson’s, names for the twins if they could survive on a diet of cow’s milk and Flossie’s attention—but out in the world he continued to preserve his awful secret.
He looked at the bruised sky, stood and walked up the violet dunes. As he emerged on Regent Street, he saw movement in the window above Bannerman’s workshop. He looked down the road: a spoil of dust had been hoofed up in the distance, perhaps at the corner of Victoria Street. Yes, he could see carriages coming from the wharf’s direction and turning up Victoria to reach the Theatre Royal. The show would soon be starting. He continued on, down the slight slope. He passed the hushed Criterion, crossed a vacant Albert Street and stood in front of the lawn of the Methodist Church. Unseen silvereyes sang tweeooh tweeooh in the black-leafed camellia. A fat thrush toddled a few steps across the sad lawn, stopped and cocked its head before skitting into the bushes.
The Carpenter’s window was next. If he had any gratitude for the show, it was that it had cleared the crowd from the front of Hercus & Barling so he could observe the window in solitude. The electric lights that usually ran until nine had been switched off, which meant that he had to press his head to the glass to see the details of the display. At the centre stood the plaster statue of Eugen Sandow, a white spectre clutching one fist close to his forehead and the other down by his hip at the end of a straightened arm. His curly hair and undulating torso were stippled with daylight. Kemp looked at the statue’s splayed feet, no doubt a pose struck by Sandow to show off the development of his thighs and calves, and wondered about the weight of the small, square pedestal that managed to keep the likeness from falling over.
Sandow was ringed by seven admirers, all female. Each mannequin was familiar to him: the three blonde nymphs, the dignified dame with the operatic build, the pig-tailed schoolgirl on the cusp of adulthood, the black-haired evil stepmother from a fairy story and the serene lady in the red moirette, though, like the other figures, most of her outfit had been changed to show off the season’s latest fashions. The Carpenter’s mannequins did not have articulated limbs—his creations were fixed in the one pose as Sandow was—but they were arranged carefully to disguise their odd gestures and give the impression of a crowd clustering around the town’s new arrival. To Kemp they were admiring a mere statue rather than a man. It was more than just the difference in materials, the full palette The Carpenter employed against the scuffed white of the Sandow replica. The breath of life granted to his figures had been withheld from the plaster Sandow. He considered the crescent of real onlookers that had occupied the footpath since the display was unveiled and saw how The Carpenter’s figures would close this circle. Had he intended this? Was he suggesting that for every person looking through the window there was a better dressed doppelgänger on the other side?
He looked again at Sandow and even in the dimness he could perceive rough edges where he would have made them smooth, blank patches where small but important details—the grain of the moustache, the slight protrusion of a nail beyond the toe, the point at which the earlobe meets the flesh of the face—had been glossed over. He had learnt the importance of such things in the course of his mannequin making, though his hands often muffed these master strokes.
It was clear that this Sandow was a second pressing. A plaster version of a bronze statue from a cast of a showman made to hold the same pose beyond the limits of boredom and pain: a copy of a copy of a charade.
Even now, he thought, I am losing Louisa. Her image is becoming fixed in my head. Those thousand memories, that ever-changing face. All is being sanded down to one, and that will be sanded further until there is no life left.
His forehead pressed against the glass of The Carpenter’s window, Colton Kemp felt his desire to see the real Sandow, the living Sandow, grow.
