Distance No Object

by Austin Osman Spare, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

The J had gone on three times and come off three times with the turps rag, and where it had been the board over Cordery's shop was a wet black, blacker than the rest.

Bert Hoskins sat back on the ladder and looked at his right hand. It looked like a hand. For nine years it had been the best writer's hand at Pellow's in the Walworth Road, the hand they sent up for the brewery boards and the gilt on chemists' windows, and old Pellow would stand under the ladder and say nothing, which from Pellow was praise. Now it held the sable as it always had, between the thumb and the first two fingers, the long hairs loaded with gold size, tinted with a touch of chrome so he could see where it went. He laid the wrist on the mahl stick. He drew breath. He started the stroke at the top of the J, firm, and came down the stem, and at the place where the stem turns, where the line has to swell and then thin as it goes round into the hook, the hand went. Not much. A twitch the width of one hair. Nobody on the pavement would have seen it. He saw it. It was there like a bad tooth.

He took it off with the rag.

It was October, a Tuesday, and the Lane was doing its business under him: sprouts at fourpence the pound, collar studs on a tray, a woman selling live eels out of a zinc bath, the eels going round and round in their own grey slime. The board was to read J. CORDERY & SON, and under that, smaller, FUNERAL FURNISHERS, and under that, by Mr Cordery's particular wish, DISTANCE NO OBJECT. The pattern was pounced on already. He had pricked the full-size paper along every line with the wheel, held it up to the board and dabbed it through with a muslin bag of whiting, so that the whole inscription stood on the black in faint white dots, like a thing seen through fog. All he had to do was join them. A child could join them.

Four pounds ten for the job, the gold found separately. The size wanted twelve hours before it would take the leaf, so the letters must be on by Friday morning and gilt by Friday night, because on Saturday Mr Albert Tuffnell, coal merchant, late of Penrose Street, would be carried out of Cordery's front room with two cars following, and Mr Cordery would not have him carried out under a bare board.

"How are we getting on, Mr Hoskins?"

Mr Cordery stood on the pavement in his black, his hat in his hand out of habit, looking up as he looked into coffins: kindly, and at a fixed distance.

"Getting on," Bert said.

"Only I see it's still the dots."

"It's the dots for now."

Mr Cordery considered the dots, and went in.

---

"You keep rubbing him out," said a voice over his head. "He'll take offence."

A woman's head was out of the window above the board. A small old head, the hair scraped into a knob, a pencil stuck through the knob like a pin. She had a sugar bag in one hand and the other hand was moving on it, he could see the elbow going, and all the time she was looking at him and not at the bag.

"Who will?"

"Him. That one." She pointed with her chin at the black where the J was not. "Tea at four. Knock twice, I'm deaf on the one side."

---

Her name was Mrs Ruddle and she lodged over the shop. Mr Cordery called her "the old lady upstairs" in a voice that meant she had been there before he had and would be there after. The room had a gas ring, a bed, a table, a window onto the Lane, and paper. Paper everywhere. Sugar bags opened out flat, the backs of funeral cards, flyleaves, the margins torn from the South London Press, a laundry book, a bus ticket, and on every one of them, in pencil, drawings. They lay in stacks on the table and under it, on the chair he was meant to sit in, on the bed, on the lid of the copper. Stacks a foot high, squared at the edges as neat as bricks.

He moved a stack off the chair and the top sheet was a woman whose hair went down into the ground as roots. The one under it was a cat sitting in a man's face, where the man's mouth should have been, and it was quite comfortable there. The one under that was a hand with a sixth finger, and in the sixth finger a very small eye.

"Put them back the way they were," she said, pouring. "They don't like being looked at all at once."

She sat down opposite with a sugar bag and the pencil from her hair, and while she talked her hand went on drawing, and she never once looked down at it. He watched. There was no care in it. The pencil went like a dog going over a field, nose down, quick, doubling back, not hunting anything. On the paper, upside down to him, a face came, and then it was two faces, and then the two faces had a horse's ears between them, and she was asking him how many sugars.

"Two."

"You've no sugar. You'll have one." She gave him one. "So what's the matter with it?"

"With what?"

"The hand."

He put it on the table between the cups. "Nothing. At home, nothing. I can do you a J on the back of an envelope you could print from. Up there it goes."

"Goes where?"

"It shakes. At the turn."

She reached over without stopping the drawing hand and took his wrist in her free one, and shook it, hard, like a woman shaking out a duster, so that his fingers flapped.

"Nothing wrong with that," she said, and let it go. "What is it you want?"

"I want my hand back."

She laughed. It was a short high laugh with no breath behind it, like a hen's. "Then you'll be wanting it a long time."

"That's a help."

"No it isn't. Here." She pushed the laundry book across, and her pencil after it, and took another pencil from somewhere in her cardigan for herself, so that the drawing hand had not stopped. "Write down what you want. Not that. What you'd want if nobody could read it. Turn round, I'm not looking."

He turned his chair to the wall, where there was a calendar from a firm of corn chandlers, two years out of date. He sat with the pencil. Then he wrote it. It was not long. It was not my hand back.

"Done? Now cross out every letter that's in there twice. Leave one of each."

He did. It took longer than the writing, and what was left was a row of letters that meant nothing, like a word in Welsh.

"Now make them one thing. Like the monogram on a hearse door. Run them into each other till you can't read them."

He knew this. This was trade. He put the M down and let the A ride up its middle, and the legs of the M stood apart like a pair of steps, and the S came through between them and went round on itself in a loop, and the last letter, whatever it had been, he pulled out long to the right and turned up at the end like a hook. It took no time at all. His hand did not shake, but he was sitting at a table and that proved nothing.

She held out her palm without turning round, and he put the laundry book in it. She tore the page out. She gave it one look, as short as a blink, and then she lifted the top half of the nearest stack, slid the page into the middle, put the top half back, and squared the stack between her two palms, pat, pat.

"There," she said. "That's lost now. You'll not find it and I shan't look."

"What do I do?"

"Drink your tea."

---

He could not forget it. That was the first thing.

On Wednesday he did FUNERAL FURNISHERS, because the small letters he could manage if he went slow, stiff, joined up like a clerk's hand. On Thursday at eight he laid the leaf on them, and they looked like what they were, a clerk's hand in gold. He went up and down the ladder both mornings and all the while he was thinking of that sheet of paper in the middle of the stack. He tried to remember the shape. The steps, yes. The loop. Was the loop above the steps or through them? Did the hook turn up or down? Every time he had it, it moved. It was like trying to see the face of a man you have passed in the street by thinking hard about him; the harder you think the more he looks like your uncle.

And every time he came to a capital he looked at the hand to see whether it had come back, and it had not. He would watch it come down the stem and he would feel it get to the turn and he would think now, and there it went, the twitch, the hair's width. He thought about the twitch going home on the tram, he thought about it in the night. At three in the morning his wife said, "You're doing it again," and he found he was making the stroke of a J on the pillowcase with his finger.

On Thursday morning Mrs Ruddle's window was shut. He went up anyway at eleven, when he had taken that morning's J off, and knocked twice, and the door was on the latch and she was out. He stood in the room. The stacks stood round him like the houses of a small town. He thought: it is in the third stack from the window, about the middle. He did not know that. He thought it.

He lifted the top sheet off the third stack. It was a man on a ladder, done in about ten lines, and the man's head was the head of a bird, a sparrow or a starling, looking down very anxiously at its own claw.

He put it back. He went down the stairs fast, the way you leave a room where you have been reading a letter that is not yours.

---

At half past two Mr Cordery came out again, and this time he had his son with him, and the son was sixty if he was a day, bald, in a frock coat the moth had been at, and the image of his father, only more so.

"I've been thinking, Mr Hoskins," Mr Cordery said. "The bottom line."

Bert looked at the bottom line. DISTANCE NO OBJECT, still in dots.

"I wonder if it oughtn't to be larger. People should know."

"Know what, Mr Cordery?"

"That distance," said Mr Cordery, "is no object."

The son nodded slowly. "We did one to Margate in August," he said. "He'd wanted to go back to Margate."

Bert looked down at the two of them, the old crow and the older-looking crow, standing on the pavement among the sprouts with their hats against their chests, and he saw Mr Tuffnell the coal merchant laid out in the front room behind them, and he saw some other man in August going down to Margate in the back of a hearse with his hands crossed, past the hop gardens, to sit on the front with an ice and look at the sea.

He laughed.

He did not mean to. It came up out of him in a bark and he caught it and it came up again. He clung to the ladder. Mr Cordery waited, hat at his chest, in the patience of his trade, and that was worse. Overhead the window went up with a bang and Mrs Ruddle put her head out and began to laugh too, high, the hen's laugh, though she could not have heard a word of it from up there. The eel woman laughed. A boy with a barrow of firewood laughed and did not know why. Bert hung on to the ladder with one arm round it and his face against the rung, with water running out of his eyes and his ribs hurting, and every time he thought he had stopped he thought of the man at Margate with his ice, and off he went again.

When he could see, he wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist and looked at the board.

The J was on it.

It stood there in yellow size on the black, wet, entire. The stem came down clean and full and at the turn it swelled, just so, and thinned as it went round, thin as a hair, and finished in a small round ball like a full stop that had decided to stay. He looked at the brush in his hand. It was loaded and wet to the ferrule. He had no memory of it. He must have done it while he was laughing; the hand must have gone on with the work, the way a man goes on walking when he is told a joke in the street, and comes to his own front door without having seen the road.

"That's more like it," said Mr Cordery. "Larger, mind, the bottom line." And he went in, and the son went in after him.

Bert did not look at his hand. He looked at the dots. He did the C, and the O, and the R, and he found he was humming, which he never did, a hymn tune, "Abide with Me," of all things, out of respect for the premises. He did not look at his hand once. He looked at where the line was to go and the line went there. The ampersand, which is the devil of every board, went round on itself as easy as a piece of string dropped on a table. By five the gas lamps were coming up in the Lane and the top line and the bottom were sized, the bottom line larger as instructed and done freehand, there being no dots for it now, and he came down the ladder and his knees were shaking, but that was the ladder.

---

On Friday morning the size had come to the tack, like the back of a postage stamp just licked, and he gilded.

He did it from the book, transfer leaf, twenty-five leaves to the book, each leaf of gold on its square of tissue so thin you could see the light through it greenish when you held it up. He laid each tissue face down on the letter and rubbed the back of it with a pad of cotton wool, and lifted it away, and the gold stayed where the size was and nowhere else. The wind came down the Lane in little shoves. Where the leaf overlapped the edge of a letter the loose gold broke off in flakes and skewings and went sailing out over the pavement, and the children had come out of the buildings to catch them, the way they caught the seeds off a dandelion, jumping, with their hands cupped. A flake of gold landed in the eel woman's bath and lay on the water.

He burnished the letters down with clean cotton wool and the board came up out of the black, J. CORDERY & SON over the clerk's line, gold, and the gold took the grey October light and gave it back yellow, as though there were a little sun inside the board.

It was only when he got down to the bottom line that he saw the scroll.

Under DISTANCE NO OBJECT there was a flourish. It was in size, the same yellow, so he must have put it there himself on Thursday, at dusk, after the laughing; it was not on the pounced pattern and he had not drawn it on the paper at home. It was the kind of ornament a writer puts under a line to finish it, a bit of swash, but it was not quite any of the usual ones. It went up in two strokes standing apart, like a pair of steps, and a line came through between them and went round on itself in a loop, and then it ran out long to the right and turned up at the end like a hook.

He gilded it. There was no question of not gilding it; the size was there and would take the leaf.

Mr Cordery came out at four and stood back to the kerb, where the barrows were, and looked up for a long time.

"That's a nice touch, Mr Hoskins," he said. "Underneath there. I don't recall paying for that."

"No charge."

Bert went and stood beside him and looked up at it too. The scroll hung under the gold letters and something in the shape of it reminded him of something. It was on the tip of his mind. He stood with his tin of gold books in one hand and his brushes in the other and waited for it to come, and a coster's pony went between him and the board with a load of cabbages, very slowly, and when the pony had gone past he could not think what it was. He could not think at all what it had been.

He packed the leaf away in the tin. Up at the window Mrs Ruddle was drawing, her elbow going, looking at the street. On the pavement a girl from the eel stall had caught a skewing of gold on the end of her finger, and was holding it down over the zinc bath, showing it to the eels.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (17 October 2026), ab Austinō Osmanō Sparō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Austin Osman Spare, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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