The Underground Man (2 page)

His eyes were all red and rheumy, as if he had tried washing away his miseries with port wine, but his tail stood to attention like the handle on a water pump and the look of utter disgust with which he regarded my dinner guests enamoured him to me straight away. Being presented with a great ribbon around his neck, to the accompaniment of whoops and cheers, was, apparently, a humiliation almost too great for him to bear. It was his doleful expression, his deep disdain which first stole my heart away, whilst simultaneously, and so vividly, calling to mind my father's long-departed brother, Leonard.

(Uncle Leonard was some sort of military man. My one abiding memory is of him sitting alone in the Games Room, quaffing great quantities of Scotch whisky while his cigar smoke slowly filled the room. The little finger on his right hand was missing, which he once told me was from his having bitten his fingernails as a boy. He died at Balaclava in '54, kicked in the head by a horse.)

The likeness between dog and dead uncle was so startling that I wondered if there was not, after all, some grain of truth
in this notion of reincarnation – the upshot being that I named the dog Uncle on the spot, which seemed as acceptable to him as it did to me.

From that day forward we got along famously, were constant companions, and I don't doubt we made quite a spectacle as we took our daily constitutional: me in my brightly coloured waistcoats, which I favoured at the time, and proud Uncle in matching collar and coat, zigzagging beside me and scouring the ground with his plum of a nose.

I can only hope that he was happy, for he never lost that forlorn and put-upon look, but he was animated enough and most affectionate, which I took as signs of contentment, and when he slept he did not kick or twitch as many dogs do. On our cross-country walks his great flapping ears would gather up all kinds of rubbish, and I would like nothing more than to be picking them clean today. But one spring morning he spotted a rabbit in a nearby field, chased it into its burrow and got himself stuck. I ran back to the house like a madman, stood in the hall calling for servants and spades, but by the time we had returned and dug down to him the poor fellow had suffocated. I carried him home, with all the servants trailing behind and buried him in a quiet corner of the Italian gardens the following day.

Out strolling years later I would find myself idly talking to him, as if he were right there by my side and us still the best of friends. Even now, if I have grown sleepy in a fireside chair and decide I must go to bed, I might whisper, ‘Come, Uncle,' without thinking, as I rise.

Some essential part of him stays with me; persists down all the years. Somewhere deep inside me his tail still wags. He never seems to tire.

The last tunnel is all but completed – heady days indeed.

When Mr Bird entered the dining room this morning, a roll of papers tucked under his arm, he had about him his usual unassuming attitude but his features were all aglow. I noticed how he was a little …
nervy
… and how his eyes flashed about the place, which was enough to get me quite giddy with anticipation myself. Down the years Mr Bird and I have got to know each other very well and he is fully familiar with my love of maps and charts, but as he rolled out onto the table his latest set of plans I would be hard pushed to say which of us had more difficulty standing still. A mustard pot, a cup and a saucer were employed to hold down the curling corners of the map. Then Mr B. and I stepped back a foot or two to take the whole picture in.

In the very centre of the map stood the house in miniature (a good likeness, I have to say, done in pen and ink) accompanied by all the stables and outhouses – each clearly labelled in italic script. The whole estate was etched out around the house, with the woods and drives all carefully marked in. As we both stood there looking dumbly down at the map Mr Bird discreetly produced from his breast pocket a small pencil stub. He raised it to his mouth, gave the lead a little lick and, with a precision any surgeon would be proud of, marked out the first tunnel, as I looked anxiously on. The squat little pencil travelled east from the house, coolly dissected the lake, crept right up the Pudding Hill and came to rest in the outskirts of Worksop town.

Mr Bird pushed himself back on an elbow and looked up at me. I nodded back at him, encouragingly. A faint whiff of sweat hung in the air between us and it occurred to me how
our hushed exhilaration had somehow managed to evoke the rare stench of horse-heat in that large cool room.

In the minutes which followed Mr Bird proceeded to pencil in a further three tunnels, which left the house and headed north, south and west. At times they swung slightly to left or right but, on the whole, kept pretty much to the straight line. Mr Bird's pencil lead advanced through the forests and fields at quite a rate and when it reached the end of each tunnel I distinctly heard a sticky sound as it was plucked from the map. The mark it left was nothing more than a full stop at the close of a sentence, but in that tiny speck I saw quite clearly the tunnel entrance, as craggy as a cave.

A small gatehouse stood where each underground thoroughfare emerged, each with the word
Lodge
as a foundation. The map informed me how these lodges are currently occupied by Digby, Harris, Stoodle and Pyke, whose job it will be to lock and unlock the gates as necessary, to light the gaslights down their tunnel if word is received that they are to be used after dark and to ensure that no children get in.

The chart now consisted of four simple pencil-paths, of roughly equal length. A house with four roots sprouting from it, perhaps, or something vaguely akin to a compass face. But when Mr Bird had got his breath back and wet his pencil a fifth time the set of tunnels he brought into being caused the image to change most radically. Expertly, he fitted a second cross over the cross already on the map. The pie which had previously been quartered was now divided into eighths, so that when he had done with his pencilling the whole arrangement of tunnels was no longer compass-like and more like the spokes of a rimless wheel. For a second I had trouble swallowing and I felt myself come over quite faint. It had never previously occurred to me – a Wheel, with my house as its hub!

Mr Bird looked down at the map with evident satisfaction,
as if he had just conjured the tunnels into existence with a wave of his modest wand. He rested one hand on the table and pushed his spectacles back up his nose with the other. Out of the corner of my eye I felt him sneak a glance at me. Then for a minute or two we did nothing but gaze down and drink in every last detail, until all my pleasure and gratitude finally welled up inside me and overflowed.

‘Sterling work, Mr Bird,' I said.

I should say His Grace first made contact with me a good year and a half before the work was begun. He had me travel up to Welbeck for a meeting where he told me all about his tunnelling plans. In some shape or form he had already worked out in his head what he wanted – he always had quite firm ideas – though he never mentioned to me what purpose they were to serve. Well, to be honest, tunnels weren't what we were normally about and, when the opportunity arose, I told the Duke as much. Garden landscaping, the occasional lake or ha-ha was much more our line. The previous year we had done a little something at the back of His Grace's London residence which, I was informed at that first meeting, had pleased him very much. As I recall, he was greatly taken with the wrought-iron fancywork on the frame of a sunk glass walkway. And so, right from the start, he was eager to impress on me the notion that my company was right for the job.

I remember how he had with him a small wooden box full of sketches which he emptied out onto the table. All sorts of drawings and diagrams, all jumbled up together. Then there were the plans he had never got around to putting on paper, some of which took a long while coming back to him and even longer to explain. But the basic idea was that there was to be a whole series of tunnels leaving the house and going out under the estate in all directions. Most were to emerge by gatehouses; only two were unattended, as I recall. But it
would be fair to say that if you didn't know about these last two you would not easily trip over them.

Of the eight tunnels we eventually built on His Grace's estate – a good twelve miles of them in all – half were twenty foot wide, reaching fifteen foot in height and big enough for two carriages to pass without much difficulty, and the rest about half that size. I can't say that they were very elegant to look at: plain red brick in a horseshoe arch, with vaulted roofs where they met under the house and tiled passageways off to the stables. But they were sound and did the job they were built to do and I've no doubt they'll be standing a hundred years from now.

Once we were clear of the house and out into the gardens and surrounding fields most of the tunnel-laying was done by what is commonly called ‘cut and cover', which simply means digging a deep ditch directly into the ground and, when the brickwork is completed, putting the earth back over the roof. Consequently, most of the tunnels on the estate are no more than a couple of feet beneath ground level. They were lit in the daytime by skylights – two foot in diameter and four inches thick – at regular intervals of twenty feet or so and each one requiring its own ‘chimney', which is probably what slowed us down the most. Each tunnel had a line of gas jets plumbed in, both left and right, for use at night. I heard there were over five thousand such lamps put in place down there but am glad to say that particular task fell to someone else.

All in all, as you can imagine, this amounted to a great deal of work which took us some time to carry out. We employed, on average, a gang of about two hundred men – each on a shilling a day. The Duke insisted that every two men should have between them the use of a donkey for riding to and from the camp and that each man be given an umbrella. Well, you can picture the scene yourself, I'm sure. In the summer it was as gay as the seaside, but in the rain it was very grim.

On top of the tunnels we had stairwells and passages to put in, which went up into the house itself. He was very fond of trapdoors and suchlike, was the Duke. That was what got him going the most.

While I think about it, one thing does come back to me. On only the second or third meeting, I think it was, when we were still at a very early stage, His Grace came in looking highly vexed and asked me straight out, ‘What about tree roots, Mr Bird? What about damage to the roots?' When I was quite sure I had grasped what it was he was asking, I did my best to assure him how the roots of the trees on the estate would be in no danger and that if there were any chance of us coming up against the roots of a great oak, for example, then it was quite within our means to steer a course round the thing. This seemed to put his mind at rest.

Anyhow, I don't mind saying that I think we made a good job of it. It was the largest commission my company undertook. We were up there so long that by the time I left I felt like a proper Nottinghamshire man. I was sad to say goodbye.

There were stories, as you know, regarding the Duke's appearance – how he was said to be deformed and dreadful to look upon. But the people who go about saying such things are nothing but gossip-merchants. Anyone who ever met the man will tell you just the same. I saw him a hundred times if I saw him once and the worst I could say was that on a bad day he could look a little ashen. A touch under the weather is all.

I'm afraid our tunnel-building did nothing but encourage the wild stories. When a man starts acting eccentrically and hiding himself away, people feel at liberty to give their imaginations some slack. By the time they'd finished they'd made him into a right monster, but it was all in their own minds.

The whole time we worked on the tunnels – and we were
up there five years in all – I don't believe I ever asked His Grace directly just what the tunnels were for. It quickly ceased to matter. In the end I suspect I was just as wrapped up in the project as the old man himself. From time to time some of the lads would quiz me about it or make up a little gossip of their own. People like to let themselves get carried away. It comes, I think, from idleness, or envy, maybe. But then His Grace would come out to the site and have a look around and that would nip it in the bud, right there.

There are times when I wonder if he did not simply suffer from shyness. Shyness in the extreme. But then it's not my place to say. Most of us, at some time, have peculiar ideas we'd like to carry out but have not the money to put them in place. That was not the case with the old Duke.

Yes, I was sorry to see the back of him. He was a most gentle man.

Woke with a decidedly sour stomach, after a third consecutive disturbed night's sleep. Had intended, this morning, to pay a visit on my old gardener, Mr Snow, who, I hear, has been very ill, but when I peered out at the day from my window the wind was stripping the leaves right off the trees and the barometer tower on the West wing promised more unsettled stuff to come. Resolved to stay indoors, at least until the rain had cleared. Dug out a clean nainsook handkerchief and dipped it in lavender oil. Blew down the pipe for some news on my Balbriggan socks but got no response from any quarter so, like some slippered nomad, trekked down the stairs to see what was going on.

Finally located Mrs Pledger in a steaming laundry-room, her sleeves rolled up to her elbows as she set about a mound of wet washing. She nodded in my direction but continued to pummel away. Today, it transpired, is the day allocated for the washing of bedsheets and it was a moment or two before I was able to fully take in the industrious scene before me. Stone sinks overflowed with hot water, soapsuds slid and drifted everywhere. The piercing aroma of cleaning agent made a powerful impression on the eyes and nose. Damp sheets hung down from wooden slats which were suspended from the ceiling on a web of pulleys and ropes, and this huge
expanse of wet linen and the frantic activity beneath encouraged in me the notion that I had stumbled aboard some many-masted cutter as it weathered some terrible storm.

Four girls helped Mrs Pledger with her laundry and as I am in the habit of constantly forgetting the names of those in her employ (they are always coming and going, it seems, or turning into women overnight) I had her introduce me to them. Thus, I learned that the house staff currently includes at least ‘two Annies, an Anne and a Sarah' and while they persevered with their scrubbing and rinsing I leaned against one of the vast sinks and repeated their names under my breath, finding the phrase to have a strangely calming quality to it.

With everyone so thoroughly immersed in their business I was left very much to myself, so to pass the time I stared into some temporarily abandoned sink, where I observed on the water's cooling surface the quiet collapse of soapy-suds. Very interesting indeed. What began life as a gently frying pancake of lather gradually changed its appearance as its tiny bubbles gave out, one by one. By exercising my mind on it I found that, with a little effort, the suds took on a shape not unlike the British Isles (a very frothy fellow he was, as if recently covered by a fall of snow). He wore an angular hat for Scotland, stretched his toes out at Penzance, had Wales for a belly and the Home Counties for a sit-upon. This little discovery rather pleased me, although, in all honesty, I could not say for certain how much was in the beholder's eye and how much was in the suds.

Well, those abandoned bubbles continued popping and my suddy Briton duly stretched and shrank, until I saw that he was, in fact, metamorphosing into – yes! – Italy's high-heeled boot. Britain turning into Italy – what confusion that would cause! What kind of weather would we have, I wonder? And
what language? We should all have to speak in Latin. (
Amo,
amas, amat
…) Excellent!

I was still happily ruminating in this manner when Italy's centre suddenly came apart and what had just now appeared to be solid land split into four or five smaller isles. Well, this came as quite a shock, and I had to fairly pump my imagination to come up with another port of call (my geography has always been very poor). Japan, perhaps, or the Philippines. I had to hurry … the islands were shrinking like ice-floes in the sun. I just about managed to bring into focus one final archipelago of froth but it was the briefest vision and in a second it had shimmered and gone, leaving nothing behind but a flat pool of dirty water, as if some aquatic apocalypse had run its course.

The whole process, I found, had quite tired me out. All the same, I offered to roll up my sleeves and lend a hand, thinking I would quite like to stir up some suds of my own. Mrs Pledger, however, was adamant that she and the girls were best left to do the work themselves so I loitered quietly in the corner and did my best to keep myself occupied.

Seeing all the sheets having the dirt drubbed out of them reminded me of a theory I have recently been entertaining. One which, on reflection, I was perhaps rather foolish in presenting to Mrs Pledger. Namely, might it not be possible for a bad night's sleep to somehow leave a trace of itself on one's sheets? A remnant of melancholy, perhaps, which the linen could in some way absorb. Is it not in any way plausible, I continued, that my recent disturbed sleep might be the result of some ill feeling, previously sweated out, which, when rewarmed by my body, is made potent once again?

I could tell straight away that my seeds had been cast on the stoniest of grounds. It is, I admit, an unusual theory and still somewhat underdone. But Mrs Pledger has never had
much time for progressive thinking. Her long thin lips became even longer and thinner – became, in fact, little more than a crinkly line. She filled her great chest, emptied it in a single great sigh then went back to wrestling with her heap of washing.

All the same, as I left, I asked her to be sure and have one of the girls strip the linen from my bed and give it an especially ruthless scrub.