by Xan Brooks
The tragedy is that it was a decent business, the Griffin, or he would never have said yes to the lease in the first place. The pub was well placed on a thoroughfare, providing for merchants, travellers and local tradesmen. There was a long stone trough where a man could water his horses, and a cobbled yard with stalls to board them. Upstairs were arranged six good guest rooms, and guess how many were occupied on a Friday night before market and then have a guess at the number filled on a Friday night now. The saloon bar used to take restaurant orders but there’s no call for that anymore; he laid the cook off last year and has the girl work the taps for whoever drops in. The passing trade has gone trading elsewhere. Were it not for the drunks he would have no custom at all.
A curse on the council and its so-called arterial road. Because what would you call Ermine Street if not an arterial road? It earned itself the title before the title existed. You can’t invent a new classification and say this one but not that. You don’t pin a map on a board and start redrawing London. These are the arguments she hears again and again. Sat at the table, he plays pat-a-cake with his hands, constructing a tower that never extends beyond two floors. He blames the council. He blames the brewery. He blames the licensing hours. He blames the war and the Spanish flu and never you mind that the war and the flu are now several years in the past. He says that when so many have died it rips the heart from a country. “If it weren’t for the drunks we’d have no custom at all.”
When she first arrived, clutching her brother’s hand, their worldly goods crushed inside two packing cases, the place had struck her as splendid. It no longer strikes her as anything much. The Griffin is too massive to manage on a skeleton staff. The cornices fill with cobwebs that cannot be reached without fetching the ladder. The linoleum is so greasy that the squares attach to the sole of a shoe. A plane of glass that was shattered has been replaced with plywood. The public toilets are so bad even the drunks will not use them.
The thought comes eventually that Ermine Street has been dammed. Not damned like a sinner but dammed like a stream. In diverting the traffic, the council dropped the gate and cut off the supply. See how swiftly the riverbed dries. Observe the mounting panic of its stranded inhabitants: the shoppers that hop here and there in a frantic search for cool puddles; the businesses gulping and flapping on either side of the road.
The small tradesmen might just endure if they can keep their overheads low. However hard the times, people still need bread and milk, or cheap cuts from the butcher, or even a second-hand dining set from Mick’s Bric-a-Brac. But the Griffin, that colossus, is too big to survive. It is smothered by rental demands and the recent hikes in excise duty. It requires a deep, steady flow to account for its bulk and its costs. It will be the first to go down. The butcher knows it and old Mick knows it and Grandad knows that they know, which makes his temper worse.
Poor Ermine Street. It does not feel very splendid. The place has grown sad. Weekday mornings at eight, a bent old man leads his blind shire horse past the pub, headed out of town. Late afternoons, the pair pass by the opposite way. Every morning she spies them, Lucy fears that the man is taking his horse to be slaughtered and rendered for glue and her breath hitches with relief when she sees it brought back.
It turns out her grandfather has also noticed this ritual. He says, “One day, mark my words, Dobbin’s not coming home.”
But listen. That sound outside the window is the world going by. It moves at speed, with a rattle and rumble. It spatters the hem of the pedestrian’s skirt. Away in the world it’s 1923, very nearly midsummer. At her scratched and stained school desk, the girl hears that the British Empire has never been greater. It grows by the day, it covers half the globe, and this is undeniably good news: it only goes to show that all things are possible. At large in the saloon bar, she thrills to newspaper reports of dance crazes and labour disputes and Bolshevik revolution and fabulous discoveries inside the tomb of a pharaoh. She reads about the angry, unwashed rabble that threw tomatoes at King George. His Majesty was not used to such treatment. He did not know where to turn, he looked completely aghast. She reads of a pilot who flew across the Irish Sea and of another, more incredibly still, who flew clear over the United States and did not put his wheels down until he could see the Pacific. And she concludes that her grandfather is wrong, that it is not true what he says; that the world is expanding. Everywhere you look, people are being asked to go further, to delve deeper and to plant British flags in far-flung fields. More than anything, she longs for adventures of her own. She hopes that one day she might visit the sky in a plane.
Outside it’s bright, it’s modern times. The war and the flu are several years in the past and good riddance to both, because the world has moved on. It is a time of fresh starts and clean slates and unblemished sheets of paper. Pin them on a wall and set about redrawing the nation. A man can map out the future using Indian ink.
The saloon door is heavy. The youth has to lean hard with his shoulder until it abruptly swings out and spills him unceremoniously inside.
“We’re not open yet and I can’t serve you anyway. So it doesn’t even matter that we’re not open.”
“Why not?”
“You know very well why not,” Lucy says. “Unless you’ve had a few extra birthdays you haven’t told me about.”
She knows Brinley Roberts from her classroom at St Stephen’s and allows that he ranks among the least objectionable boys there. He’s as lean as a greyhound, with an oversized Adam’s apple and a preternaturally deep voice which seems to startle him more than anyone. Ostensibly he visits the Griffin in the hope of obtaining ale and cigarettes, although Lucy has started to wonder whether this is merely a ruse. More likely, Brinley comes in search of human company. Specifically, she thinks, he wants to see her.
The boy arranges himself at a table and proceeds to excavate his fingernails. “Why weren’t you in school today?”
“Working, wasn’t I?”
He says, “Doesn’t look like much work. Staring out of the window.”
“Well, did I miss anything special? At school, I mean.”
“No,” Brinley sighs. “I can’t say you did.”
In a moment she will relent and let him purchase a stout or a Porter, and then this pale, gawky youth will feel impossibly accomplished and manly. But for the time being she remains at the window, vaguely engaged with wiping out ashtrays yet with her eyes constantly trained on the bright street beyond. She saw the shire horse set out, but it is late getting back from wherever it goes.
“The Magna Carta.”
“How’s that?”
“The Magna Carta,” says Brinley. “That’s what you’ve been missing when you steer clear of school.”
She stands at the glass and watches Ermine Street. She fears for the horse and she hopes it still lives. She knows she won’t settle until she sees it go by.
3
The spiritualist criss-crosses the country with his assistant, the imp. The spiritualist is elderly and imposing and must once have been handsome. He sits high aboard his two-wheel trap, like a garish figurehead at the prow of a ship or a primitive rendering of St Nicholas, before the illustrators were called in to add the fur-trimmed hat and bulging sack of presents. Hand-rolled cigarettes have stained his beard and teeth. His embroidered robe has worn through at the elbows. Around his neck is strung an oversized scarab amulet, which he refers to, in sonorous tones, as the Eye of Thoth-Amon. The amulet, he boasts, allows him to commune with the dead.
The spiritualist’s name is Uriah Smith. And as he rides forth, his liver-spotted paws on the reins, he cranes his neck to loudly school the imp in the particulars of his trade. He has not known the imp long and suspects the boy may be slow-witted. He is explaining that spiritualism is a noble vocation and not so different from detective work. This is why Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the famous author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, has become so drawn to the craf
t. Spiritualism, like sleuthing, depends on conducting solid research and on making enquiries, because the more you know about a client in advance, the better the service you are able to provide. So it pays to familiarise yourself with a person’s history and to ferret out their deepest, secret desires. Spiritualism works best when it is a collective endeavour. Do your homework properly and a little miracle takes place. The client steps forward and meets the spiritualist halfway. In this way you spin the tale that they wish to have spun. Every good story, he says, is about halfway factual. The real magic blooms in the space between the performer and his client, between the truth and the lie.
The imp asks, “Is there much money in it?”
“Pots of money. Buckets of money. Heed my words, boy, this time next year we will be living like kings.”
Mollified, the imp beams out at the retreating country lane. His soft heavy belly sits on his soft heavy lap. His short legs swing excitedly from the end of the trap. At intervals he will rub the pads of his fingers against his right thumb to produce guttering blue flames that generate feeble warmth. This is his one great gift, which he has picked up overseas – a war wound of sorts, although not as bad as some others. The spiritualist, of course, is a preposterous fraud. But his fat imp assistant may be possessed of true magic.
“Are you still back there, my boy?”
“Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“No reason; just checking. You are a most curious creature.”
“I’m still here, Uriah.”
“Good news. Sit tight. What with my amulet and your tinderbox fingers we are extremely well met. This time next year we will be performing at concert halls.”
“At what?”
“Concert halls! Concert halls!”
“Yes,” says the imp. “I should like that, I think.”
There are no concert halls in this part of Kent. Instead the road winds past hop gardens and oast houses, fording and re-fording a chocolate-brown river. Periodically they catch a glimpse of grand homes, either set back behind walls or proudly perched on the hillside. It is said that during the war a man could stand on these slopes and hear the thump of big guns from the other side of the Channel. Each thump made a widow and the widows now live in these homes. Uriah likes widows; he stalks them like game. The trick, he explains, is to approach with great caution. Kent is a rich region and that brings its own dangers. The downside with rich people is that they hate and fear poor people. They’re liable to recoil or turn violent if you run at them too freely. That’s why he is at pains to remain patient, discreet, altogether unthreatening. Tread lightly; research thoroughly. Sooner or later the money will follow.
“Softly softly, catch a monkey. You know the expression.”
“What expression?”
“The monkey,” sighs Uriah. “Ah well. Never mind.”
The imp is formally known as Arthur Elms, although this name was provided by his adoptive parents, so it follows that once, long ago, he was known as something else. He was a fat, ignored child and a fat, ignored soldier and now he lives rough and remains fat, no matter how little he eats. And yet Uriah is wrong; the boy is not slow-witted at all. His brain, if anything, is an engine on the verge of overheating. Faint, swarming voices crowd the bore of his skull. Sparks fly from his fingers when he rubs them together. Few people like him but he is minded not to care, for he is at heart a bright and merry fellow, forever in flight from some mischief or other. Sometimes this is a mischief he has seen others create. Sometimes it is a mischief he has put a hand in and stirred.
He says, “If we sold that horse and trap we might have lots of money. We could book into an inn and order up a roast dinner.”
Uriah, though, is having none of it. “Sell Queenie?” he says. “Oh dearie me, no.”
“How much do you reckon we’d get for her, though?”
“For Queenie?” He laughs and then coughs. “Our Queenie is priceless.”
“And what about the amulet. How much is that worth?”
“More than priceless,” he says flatly. “It is worth a price beyond rubies.”
The way Uriah tells it, he and the imp are a double-act, rather like a pair of vaudevillians. One day, he says, they will see their name up in lights. Arthur Elms can hardly wait; the very thought gives him goosebumps. But for the time being he is content to learn the ropes of the spiritualist trade and perform his role as best he can. So he takes a seat in the corner of over-furnished front rooms and watches as Uriah circles his prey and slowly reels them in. The old man runs his black stare across the pictures on the wall and the items on the mantelpiece, mining them all for whatever information they hold. His questions are perfectly calibrated, immaculately arranged. They are inviting empty vessels to be filled as directed.
Uriah’s clients, Elms has observed, are usually brittle, well-spoken women who carry the faint whiff of ill-health. These women have mislaid their husbands or their sons – or occasionally their daughters – and desire nothing more than to locate them again. So Uriah takes each woman by the hand and, lowering his voice, explains that the amulet he wears is nothing less than the fabled Eye of Thoth-Amon, plucked from the ruins of an Egyptian tomb and possessed of a power to bring comfort to the lonely. Then he scrunches his face and sends out the Eye and it seems that the Eye is able to find these lost souls every time. The Eye reports back that they are happy and whole and that all send their love and at this news, more often than not, the brittle women start weeping. Sat in his corner, the imp is entranced. Obviously he knows that the Eye is a fake. But it looks so impressive and Uriah handles it like a master.
“Oh Madame, he loves you,” Uriah is saying and by this point the spiritualist, too, appears to have worked himself to the brink of tears. “I’m getting that very strongly. The Eye of Thoth-Amon is most insistent. It tells me that true love never dies. It is an eternal flame.”
The widow nods her head and swabs at her face.
“But I am sensing doubt, Madame. I sense that you do not believe what the Eye has told us today.”
And now the widow is alarmed. She has spent the past few minutes weeping and moaning and calling out her husband’s name. What would make the spiritualist think that she remained somehow a sceptic? “No!” she says. “That’s not true at all.”
Uriah appears still to have his doubts. He scratches hard at his yellowing beard. Almost rhetorically he asks, “What further proof can we offer? What further marvels can the Eye perform? Good heavens, I suppose Madame requires some physical manifestation of what we have been discussing. This idea that love outlives death and that true love that never dies.”
“No! No, not at all.”
“The love that is an eternal flame,” Uriah says – and this is the imp’s cue to bring his thumb and fingertips together – to produce the brief friction that causes the flames to jump out. Time and again he obliges and time and again the result is the same. His final act brings the house down. The widows go to pieces.
“I do wonder, however, whether you ought not to act shocked by the thing,” Uriah tells him when they are back out on the road. “It seems to me that you would be very shocked. You might elect to cry out or rise up from the chair. You might say, ‘Goodness gracious, my fingers are alight’.”
Legs swinging from the back of the trap, the imp makes a Herculean effort to take Uriah’s advice on board. “I could start screaming and crying, like an infant that’s been burned.”
“You could,” says Uriah.
“I could shout, ‘Oh fucking hell. My fucking hands are aflame’.”
“All I am requesting,” Uriah says sharply. “All I am requesting is some outward acknowledgment of what a remarkable thing is taking place. Because when all’s said and done, that is what it is. There’s no denying it’s a remarkable thing.”
“I could fall over, perhaps. I could . . .”
“How
do you do it?” Uriah asks, interrupting the imp’s flow. “Out with it, boy. Tell me how it is done.” But he might as well ask a salmon to explain its reasons for swimming upstream or a hummingbird to demonstrate how it is able to suspend itself in thin air, because Elms’s skill is a mystery and he is minded not to question it. Fate singled him out, it was as simple as that. One moment he was minding his own business – standing by the sea out at Cape Helles, the flies buzzing against the sandy walls all around. The next, hey presto, along came his gift. The voices. The flames. They startled him as much as anyone.
“It happened, that’s all,” he mutters. “Some things just happen.”
“And does it hurt very much? It must sting dreadfully.”
“Not very much. It only feels a bit warm.”
“Fabulous, fabulous. What a stroke of good fortune.” A moment later, he adds, “This time next year we shall be living like kings.”
In the meantime, however, they are living like tramps. Pickings are scarce. The nation’s in the doldrums. Nights, the pair bed down in hay barns, or between the ivied colonnades of a cemetery tomb, or under a sheet of tarpaulin in the back of the trap, where Uriah keeps the imp awake, first with his talk of the spiritualist trade and then later with his snoring. Daytimes they feast on the animals that the motor vehicles have left them. Some of these animals have been smeared beyond all recognition. Others are perfectly preserved, as though lulled to slumber. But you need to get to them fast; once the flies have begun settling it is already too late. With a skill borne out of long years of experience, Uriah finesses his penknife to fillet squirrel and grouse. He strips the skin off a rabbit as though peeling a banana; uses the point of the blade to hook out the intestines and kidneys. One evening they find themselves a sleek piebald faun, its body still steaming, only a few minutes dead.
Uriah eyes his friend fondly across the campfire. “Now tell me the last time you ate as heartily as this.”